[Coral-List] Climate Change

Mon Jun 22 20:24:07 EDT 2015

Gene,
    I find the Michaels short essay on the Watts website that you point to
quite interesting.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/29/when-will-climate-scientists-say-they-were-wrong/

    First, the statement that "The longer that they wait to admit their
overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of
science."  Really??  So if they don't admit their forecasts were wrong,
that will harm scientists who study cane toads, or pi mesons, or organic
chemistry, or anything else?  How?  Seems pretty over blown claim to me.
Doesn't seem like the author is working hard to make sure what he says is
actually true.

     Second, what is the evidence that climate scientists have ever said
that there was no gap between model predictions and how the climate has
changed during the "hiatus"??  I thought that was widely acknowledged by
scientists.  I thought that was puzzling for them.  Does the author have a
better model?  My understanding is that everybody knows that there are a
few important parts of the climate system that are particularly hard to
model.  One is clouds.  They move around, and are very ephemeral, yet water
vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas.  The motion of fluids is particularly
hard to capture in a simple equation, I thought.  That also applies to
ocean currents.  Water has the highest heat capacity of any known material,
I once read.  The oceans average, what, about 3 miles deep?  Any heat
adsorbed at the surface may not stay there, currents could take it down
into deeper water, just as has been reported for the North Atlantic and the
Pacific.  Vast amounts of energy have been sucked down from the ocean
surface into the depths.  That can remove huge amounts of energy.  The heat
capacity of the oceans is vastly larger than the air.  The models surely
don't have a way of accounting for that.  The basic physics as little as I
understand it, is that the increase in greenhouse gases means that there is
a net increase of energy captured.  Where it goes and how much temperature
increase that energy causes, depends on convection and heat capacity and
volumes of things like oceans and the atmosphere.  The larger the volume
and the higher the heat capacity, the less the temperature rises from the
same amount of energy added.  Greenhouse gases trap energy, not temperature..
     He uses an interesting selection of temperature data from 4 balloon
data sets and 2 satellite data sets.  How do I know he isn't cherry picking
as so many of his denier colleagues do routinely?  The temperature curves
he presents don't look like the ones I've seen, including the one I pointed
to the other day.  The ones I've seen show much stronger temperature
increases.
     His final sentence: "It’s impossible, as a scientist, to look at this
graph and not rage at the destruction of science that is being wreaked by
the inability of climatologists to look us in the eye and say perhaps the
three most important words in life: we were wrong." is so hugely ironic.
Look who's talking!  The climate deniers have proposed over the years a
huge long list of different arguments which have been proven wrong.  Check
out the "Skeptical Science" website:  http://www.skepticalscience.com/
 They have a laundry list of all the things the deniers have tried
claiming:  http://skepticalscience.com/argument.php  There 176 arguments
there, all refuted.  Ulf just used the first on the list, "Climate's
changed before."  Gene used the second one "It's the sun" a few years ago,
noting that the sunspot cycle had not begun on time, so maybe something is
wrong with the sun.  But then the sunspots started as usual, and Gene
didn't bring that up again.  Ulf just used the third one, "It's not bad."
 The Michaels essay on the Watts web page uses number 6, "the models are
unreliable."  The fossil-fuel industry funded deniers supply an unending
stream of excuses for all their friends to use, put them on websites (where
you can say anything, true or not, unlike in newspapers which are in
trouble if they print outright lies) and update them regularly to keep
their opponents busy trying to find out how they massage the data to
mislead people.  It works really well to spread doubt, but then some of
them are well practiced at it.  You see, some of them were paid by the
tobacco companies to spread doubt that cigarettes are addictive and cause
cancer.  They were very good at spreading doubt, and delayed legal action
against the tobacco companies for decades, during which those companies
made billions of dollars and millions of smokers died.  But someone in the
tobacco companies leaked documents that proved that the companies knew that
the cigarettes were addictive and caused cancer, and then they started
loosing lawsuits and settling for many billions of dollars to pay to states
to compensate them for health care the states had to provide for smoker
ailments.  Those people have deep ethical values?
      So, yes, this web page looks really bad for climate scientists, just
as it was intended by the author who receives money from the fossil fuel
industry.  But the deniers have never admitted that they were wrong about
any of the 176 arguments that they put out about why the climate science is
wrong.
     So, have the climate scientists refused to admit that their models
don't fit the recent temperature data?  Or have the deniers refused to
admit that their 176 arguments are wrong???  You be the judge.
     Cheers,  Doug

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Eugene Shinn <eugeneshinn at mail.usf.edu>
wrote:

> Below list readers can find data relating to the contentious 18 year
> warming pause. The data from the University of Alabama obtained by
> satellites that to my knowledge has not been "adjusted" to remove the
> pause. As near as I can tell there is no Washington politics involved in
> this data. Nevertheless I suspect die hard warmest will find some reason
> to reject the data.
> The second website is a discussion of the Alabama data by a well known
> climate blogger.Gene
>
> http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
>
>
> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/29/when-will-climate-scientists-say-they-were-wrong/
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> No Rocks, No Water, No Ecosystem (EAS)
> ------------------------------------ -----------------------------------
> E. A. Shinn, Courtesy Professor
> University of South Florida
> College of Marine Science Room 221A
> 140 Seventh Avenue South
> St. Petersburg, FL 33701
> <eugeneshinn at mail.usf.edu>
> Tel 727 553-1158
> ---------------------------------- -----------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
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>

-- 
Douglas Fenner
Contractor with Ocean Associates, Inc.
PO Box 7390
Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799  USA

phone 1 684 622-7084

"belief in climate change is optional, participation is not."

Much-touted global warming pause never happened.

http://news.sciencemag.org/climate/2015/06/much-touted-global-warming-pause-never-happened

Has global warming taken a rest?  Not so fast, study suggests.  (check out
the graph)

http://www.livescience.com/51094-no-global-warming-hiatus-found.html

Climate change deniers love to talk about a recent "pause" in global
warming.  A new study says it didn't happen.

http://theweek.com/speedreads/558971/climate-change-deniers-love-talk-about-recent-pause-global-warming-new-study-says-didnt-happen

website:  http://independent.academia.edu/DouglasFenner

blog: http://ocean.si.edu/blog/reefs-american-samoa-story-hope