Uncertainty

Well said... feeling comfortable leads to complacency. We see this in today's christians.

What is the "level"? How is that determined? Are we not already doing enough? Sorry, you probably wanted answers.

 

Hi Doug,

I've been pretty sure we're already committed to some pretty high CO{2} levels for at least 4-10 more generations, 80-200 years. The reason is the current inventory of CO{2}, the climate changes occur, and no evidence of substantial reduction in the increase of fossil fuel. Add the effects of warmer temperature on methane release, nope, I'm pretty sure our species will see the effects before our species gets serious.

Bob Wilson

 

Werner Heisenberg? or Lucretius, maybe?

 

The CAGW cry used to be "OMG its worse than we thought!"
Now that temps have paused and the climate model predictions have proven to be worthless,
its "OMG its worse than we DIDNT think!"

 

So you are saying that not all systems are being studied with the same amount of enthusiasm and thus reflect a certain amount of uncertainty?

 

Says who ????
No reputable scientist in even a remotely related field........anywhere in the world......believes any of that.
The temps have not "paused" and most of the model were close if not 100% right.

You are listening to the wrong people........who have only their own selfish short term interests in mind.

 

As I have stated before, awaiting certainty before doing something might be wise. But that isn't the situation we are in, we ARE doing things. Things we KNOW will make things worse. And we are doing MORE of them all the time.

This is the difference between not getting in a car because you aren't certain if there is a cliff ahead, and accelerating faster because you aren't certain there is a cliff ahead.

 

You really have 3 questions here masquerading as one.

The first is are errors ok in scientific literature. The answer is of course yes! We are human beings and make mistakes. The rules are information should be made available for peer review. No committee owns science. When the church owned science it squashed and slowed it down fearing mistakes, or worse correct science would reduce its power.

The second question is then do the mistakes in the IPCC harm its integrety. The answer for this is ofcourse yes. The IPCC, or rather its chairman, and chapter heads went out of their way to ignore peer critism, and put out grey literature as facts. It can reform, but its not likely it will when the people paying the saleries of the heads don't really care. It is a lot like the church, but we are in the age of the internet, and these mistakes get out. There is no reason to have chapter heads treat grey literature as facts, and go on tv castigating the critics, when the science is bad.

The third question is whether the corruption in the IPCC indites climate science. The answer to that one is no. Most of the work published did go through peer review and is solid. I'm sure many would like to just politically claim well then no harm from the IPCC work on extreme weather, or sea level, or glacier melt, but it does hurt science when the chair is kept on, and we pretend that all criticism is invalid.

I would say NOAA is a much better source, and the sort of self policing scientific communtity as bad as it is with the political blogs. It is very sad that the IPCC acts like a political organization full of graft and corruption and not like a scientific organization.

The world is still carbonizing, not decarbonizing. I think carbon is the wrong question to begin with. The first question should be how is the climate changing. The second, which goes to feeding the world, is how do we mitigate and thrive in that changing climate.

After that we can get to how do china and india industrialize while producing less pollution and using less fuel. If we can figure that out, perhaps europe and america can reduce our fuel levels to that we want china to stay under. The world is doing some very stupid things given the uncertainty. Politically I don't think I could get through a good plan, but you definitely don't help the politics by faking the science. Both the IPCC and many of its critics have faked the science.

 

I'm a little confused by this:

Note, I changed the "." to "?" and a couple of typo . . . esthetics.

Going from "errors OK" -> "mistakes", no problems. But jumping to "corruption" embedded in a question is a leap along the lines of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" It is easy to ascribe malice to simple ignorance. Malice has other characteristics and needs more heavy lifting.

For what it is worth, I don't follow the IPCC but prefer to read source documents and not because those papers are always accurate. For example, I have paid for a few dubious SAE papers like one claiming the Toyota Prius transmission is incredibly inefficient, not supported by my benchmarks. Then there was a paper claiming that "pulse and glide" had what I found to be unreproducible mileage benefits. In spite of paying greenback Yankee dollars, I don't ask if the SAE is "corrupt." The IPCC is like any other set of editors, an index to source data papers, and any editorial statements are a summary that needs to be weighted against the source data.

If instead of "corruption" the word "errors" or "mistakes" were used in the third question, we'd be on the same page. I deal with a lot of bright people and though subtle, there are 'tells' that separate the goats from the clumsy.

Bob Wilson

 

IMHO there was quite a bit of heavy lifting. The justification for the heavy lifting has been that "we need to convince people to act", so throwing scientific method under the bus because if people knew the truth then they wouldn't give A to B. Using the wrong figures from a PR piece for glacier melt is a a mistake. When we leaned that the chapter head had no background in glaciology, the mistake seemed simple incompetence, but what happened next showed the premeditation. Those with knowledge that brought up problems were rejected. The head of the IPCC went so far to perpetuate the fraud as to go on Indian TV smearing those that criticised the false report. What investigation did the IPCC do when alagations came up? They told the public they didn't need to investigate they were the IPCC. Reporters asked the scientist responsable for the quote, something the IPCC could have done easily. He said he was misquoted, that the information was simply wrong, and it had no business in a report.

Months of politics to silents decent doesn't seem innocent. There are at least a dozen similar incidents, including an author telling others he will destroy his raw data if the IPCC says his information needs to be peer reviewed. He was afraid M&M would find errors that he must have know were present.

+1

Sure so when people confronted the source data the IPCC should have provided it, instead of claiming a good reason to keep it private.

I absolutely agree that the great majority of the papers used are good, but after these incidents, the fact that Pachurri was not forced to step down, I have no confidence in the IPCCs summeries.

Sure in the case of the glaciers, we simply have the case of a misquote in a fund raising pamphlet. Is something simple enough to correct, you ask the author for the name of the scientist he interviewed, if that is not what he meant, and when he says no you either correct it with good information. In this case they didn't even do the minimum. It was not incompetance as it had reached news outlets that were printing disaster stories, and people in the know were rejecting them. The fact that this helped Pachuris organizations raise money is the final link for us to find corruption.

In the chapter about hurricanes that hopefully the next report corrects, there were also allegations of a chapter head putting grey literature above science. We had a scientist resign from the chapter in protest. Pachuri said in that case he respected his chapter heads (above and beyond the science of it all). In this case there was not a easily found factual problem, but conjecture with no evidence was being put forth as facts, with no alternative explanations. Landsea, the author that quit in protest, now has done the work, and there is a consensus that his ideas, the ones not allowed in the report, are the correct ones pertaining to hurricanes.

 

Read yes. Understand, dubious. <GRINS>

Bob Wilson

 

We seem to have a blogasphere and 24 hour news networks try to speculate to a great deal of certainty, but they are most certainly wrong in many things.

Now this is approach of trying to provide low cost low C power to people without basic power seems to be a great humanitarian idea.

I did not know about the power Africa program, so thank you for pointing that out to me.

The grey literature I am concerned with specifically is that nasty stuff, raw uneducated speculation, that when it finds itself in an "official publication" supported on tv by the true believers and officials as science.
The Curious Case of Flight 370 - The Daily Show - Video Clip | Comedy Central

When CNN starts speculating on space aliens taking an aircraft, well we know its been a long time since it moved from news to infotainment. I can learn on fox that obama care is ruining america, and on msnbc that obama care is saving america. Its all so shrill.

We learn from some blogs that every storm and every hot or cold day is proof that not signing kyoto has doomed the world. Then other blogs say every cold day is proof that man has nothing to do with climate change. The answer is not to read these blogs other than for sources of real research.

I don't see you posting up much of that type of grey.

 

I am sure I am missing something here. The article you pointed to was not a scientific one. It was more in the line of a humanitarian and economic proposal. The lowest C approach is that you take a colonial approach and keep energy production down to the UN levels, a couple of light bulbs a home. The US is now complicit in a higher C Africa, helping provide medical aid, which with drive up the population, and thus demand for more energy, and I am glad the US finally has been helping in this humanitarian way.


The highest C approach is the one that China embarked on, building infrastructure on the cheapest fossil Energy and ignoring pollution. Europe and America helped ofcourse by making it easy to shift manafature over to china. Now that China is richer they are starting to consider lower C and more importantly less air, water, and land pollution.

That is quite different than say a scientific article, based on a work of fiction like water world. That is a different kind of grey. The grey you presented was about how to make people better off without too much additional damage to the planet. Of course there are many that want to reduce population, and keep energy out of the hands of the have nots. This week we had all 4 presidents in town talking about civil rights at the civil rights museum. I think all now would rather help africa, than keep ghg low by keeping energy production down, but we can grow energy production while reducing coal use.

Risks of shortage of Fossil energy, along with pollution matters, have the industrialized world reducing carbon per unit energy. Part of this is the fracking revolution which has dropped the cost of natural gas and repatriated some energy intense US companies that now produce their products with less CO2.