as another aside, the fact that climate scientists use averages at all is kind of...it's not mathematically sound.
averages are good when there's a fixed variable of some sort. you can take an individual's average over a fixed task (exam scores, track times, etc), or you can take a fixed task like exam scores and then average it out over various individuals (joe, sally, etc). what you're really doing with an average is repeating trials over and over, and trying to get a guess on a "test statistic" that exists in some platonic reality - the idea is that the average exists in some cloud somewhere, and if you repeat the trial often enough then you'll reveal it. i'm actually not a platonist at all, but you'd be surprised by the things you hear from grown men with math degrees, behind closed doors.
what the hell are you even trying to do by averaging out temperatures over the entire earth, in the first place? there's no test statistic to arrive at. you're not finding some ideal concept of earthly temperature readings. once you get a sequence of ratios in place, you can find the test statistic for the average of that sequence, but what does that mean if the "average temperature of the earth" is a wonky concept in the first place? it's not devoid of meaning at all, but it's more of a contrived ratio to determine policy (like the cpi, or the unemployment rate) than it is any kind of reflection of anything meaningful. it only make any sense in the context of itself.
consider the following ten data points...
toronto: -25
moscow: -20
stockholm: -15
london: -10
paris: -8
riyadh: 45
singapore: 46
calcultta: 47
cairo: 51
tehran: 52
my understanding of things suggests that that could very well be a typical january, mid-century.
average temperature: 16.3 degrees. of course, this is a crappy data set, i'm just making a point. but, that's completely fucking worthless as any descriptive measure - it's only useful in comparison to the next data point.
now, suppose that the readings for these cities in 1975 was as follows:
toronto: -13
moscow: -8
stockholm: -5
london: -2
paris: 0
riyadh: 35
singapore: 36
calcultta: 37
cairo: 41
tehran:42
that's reasonable for 1975, huh? i'm not looking it up, i'm making a point; i should have looked this one up. and bullshitted the other. whatever. the average temperature of this data set is also 16.3 degrees
therefore, there was no climate change over these years? eh...
i should be offering a mathematical solution right now, but i'm not entirely convinced that the idea of modelling the earth in this way makes sense at all.
you hear this push-back: weather is not the same as climate, weather is not the same as climate. i end up doing it myself sometimes. it's an easy way to explain away the fluctuations.
i'm not really convinced that you can talk about a planet's climate at all. i mean, the ratio has a purpose, but it doesn't actually physically mean anything. there is no "earth's climate", there is a collection of overlapping systems, and really several different climates that develop where these systems intersect.
and, right now, it looks like the north and south are moving in opposite directions, as a consequence of opposite causes.
Thursday, January 11, 2018
i'm not at all interested in a red team / blue team approach to climate change; i won't support a political movement that i think is being dishonest in order to generate a narrative, i will call you out and tear you down with as much vehement scorn as the next liar.
in science, truth is not an abstraction, it's fact. scientists cannot tolerate this sort of post-modern, pragmatic bullshit. and, it won't work; there is no actual end point to this approach besides greed.
sorry.
there's two approaches to this: honestly convince enough people to make it a political issue and then push hard for it (it's the second part that failed under obama), or get lucky in stumbling upon a despot that understands the urgency of the situation and doesn't fucking care what the masses think, anyways.
in science, truth is not an abstraction, it's fact. scientists cannot tolerate this sort of post-modern, pragmatic bullshit. and, it won't work; there is no actual end point to this approach besides greed.
sorry.
there's two approaches to this: honestly convince enough people to make it a political issue and then push hard for it (it's the second part that failed under obama), or get lucky in stumbling upon a despot that understands the urgency of the situation and doesn't fucking care what the masses think, anyways.
so, why do we have winter, anyways?
no, if you don't know look it up. if you think you know, prove yourself right. do this. this isn't phd-level stuff; you should have learned about it in grade school. maybe you did, and just forgot.
but, it's because the amount of sunlight hitting the earth fluctuates, causing changes in the upper atmosphere that allow cold air to move from the polar regions into the habitable regions. this 'polar vortex' is called winter.
so, realizing that, what would you predict is the result of the sun hitting historical lows in output? more winter, right? and, the correlation is there, if you go to look for it - as it was from antiquity until 1980, when it split due to increased carbon concentrations.
you won't find a scientist that contradicts the obvious. this isn't specialist knowledge, it's grade school science. what you'll find instead is a lot of talking around the basic point, because it's been so obfuscated by deniers. what you're doing to these scientists when you bring up the sun in a non-academic context is triggering them into bad memories that they've had of dumb arguments with scientific illiterates trying to pass themselves off as educated. you're forcing them to relive traumatic experiences, and not getting good answers out of them, because of it. they're more focused on not letting bad ideas perpetuate (and there are a lot of them...) than actually getting the right ideas out. so, when you actually bring up good points about the sun's effect on the climate, it gets ignored because they just don't want to talk about it. and, that's a failure that the talking heads need to address, because the sun is actually going through a phase right now where it's output is low enough that it will (regionally) offset the effects of global warming, at least for a while. if legitimate climate scientists don't take steps to address the point clearly and honestly, climate change is going to be seen as a theory that fails to make accurate predictions, and we're going to lose the argument - only to get roasted when or if the sun turns itself up. science cannot operate at a propaganda level if it wants to win public support. it has to be honest, and it has to win people over due to it's honest attempts to understand things as they actually are.
here's the thing: this is not as dire as people are likely to intuitively think. it's a modelling issue. it doesn't require a rethink to solve, it requires a tweak. the reality is that we don't understand the sun all that well, so we mostly model it as constant. we even have a term called the solar constant. but, the sun's output is not constant, and nobody is going to argue that it is.
what legitimate climate scientists need to do is put more effort into modelling the sun and then work those fluctuations into the models. remember: small changes in solar output can make big differences in the upper atmosphere. think of the way the sun hits the earth as a lightning strike on a lake - it ripples. and, that's where the "amplification" actually happens. in this case, what we're talking about is a decrease in total energy entering the system - and we understand how this works fairly well, with the oscillations taking repetitive shapes that are predictable functions of the solar output.
unlike the deniers, i would not expect that a better modelling of the sun would create a substantially different understanding of climate change. it's theoretically plausible, i suppose - only way to find out is to do it - but we understand the greenhouse effect, too, and the solar output would probably have to decrease by a larger proportion than is being contemplated in order to offset the effect. the point is that we don't have this model. because we don't understand the sun. the deniers, however, insist that the models can be improved - and that is tautological. they should be met halfway on this point, to prove them wrong, and to better understand the thing, as a whole. what better models - and this is a complexity issue, not a computing issue - would really help us with is in understanding the weather quite a bit better.
this article is an example of how to misunderstand the point:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/09/the-imminent-mini-ice-age-myth-is-back-and-its-still-wrong
i don't really have any corrections to make on the article. but, the scientific claim here, and mike lockwood, who is cited here in an equally poor but oppositely poor context than he is in the right-wing media, has volunteered to be spokesperson for it, is not that the decrease in solar activity will offset global warming but that it will lead to the kind of regional variations that were seen in seventeenth century england. the article is really an elaborate strawman fallacy, rushing to debunk a claim that no scientist has ever made.
it's all very nice and everything to point out that a regional decrease in northern temperatures is likely to be offset by an accompanying increase in southern ones. why do we have winter, again? but, tell it to the guy that's playing hockey on the thames in april, as india suffers through 55 degree heat.
it balances out, so there's nothing to worry about, right? eh....
no, if you don't know look it up. if you think you know, prove yourself right. do this. this isn't phd-level stuff; you should have learned about it in grade school. maybe you did, and just forgot.
but, it's because the amount of sunlight hitting the earth fluctuates, causing changes in the upper atmosphere that allow cold air to move from the polar regions into the habitable regions. this 'polar vortex' is called winter.
so, realizing that, what would you predict is the result of the sun hitting historical lows in output? more winter, right? and, the correlation is there, if you go to look for it - as it was from antiquity until 1980, when it split due to increased carbon concentrations.
you won't find a scientist that contradicts the obvious. this isn't specialist knowledge, it's grade school science. what you'll find instead is a lot of talking around the basic point, because it's been so obfuscated by deniers. what you're doing to these scientists when you bring up the sun in a non-academic context is triggering them into bad memories that they've had of dumb arguments with scientific illiterates trying to pass themselves off as educated. you're forcing them to relive traumatic experiences, and not getting good answers out of them, because of it. they're more focused on not letting bad ideas perpetuate (and there are a lot of them...) than actually getting the right ideas out. so, when you actually bring up good points about the sun's effect on the climate, it gets ignored because they just don't want to talk about it. and, that's a failure that the talking heads need to address, because the sun is actually going through a phase right now where it's output is low enough that it will (regionally) offset the effects of global warming, at least for a while. if legitimate climate scientists don't take steps to address the point clearly and honestly, climate change is going to be seen as a theory that fails to make accurate predictions, and we're going to lose the argument - only to get roasted when or if the sun turns itself up. science cannot operate at a propaganda level if it wants to win public support. it has to be honest, and it has to win people over due to it's honest attempts to understand things as they actually are.
here's the thing: this is not as dire as people are likely to intuitively think. it's a modelling issue. it doesn't require a rethink to solve, it requires a tweak. the reality is that we don't understand the sun all that well, so we mostly model it as constant. we even have a term called the solar constant. but, the sun's output is not constant, and nobody is going to argue that it is.
what legitimate climate scientists need to do is put more effort into modelling the sun and then work those fluctuations into the models. remember: small changes in solar output can make big differences in the upper atmosphere. think of the way the sun hits the earth as a lightning strike on a lake - it ripples. and, that's where the "amplification" actually happens. in this case, what we're talking about is a decrease in total energy entering the system - and we understand how this works fairly well, with the oscillations taking repetitive shapes that are predictable functions of the solar output.
unlike the deniers, i would not expect that a better modelling of the sun would create a substantially different understanding of climate change. it's theoretically plausible, i suppose - only way to find out is to do it - but we understand the greenhouse effect, too, and the solar output would probably have to decrease by a larger proportion than is being contemplated in order to offset the effect. the point is that we don't have this model. because we don't understand the sun. the deniers, however, insist that the models can be improved - and that is tautological. they should be met halfway on this point, to prove them wrong, and to better understand the thing, as a whole. what better models - and this is a complexity issue, not a computing issue - would really help us with is in understanding the weather quite a bit better.
this article is an example of how to misunderstand the point:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/09/the-imminent-mini-ice-age-myth-is-back-and-its-still-wrong
i don't really have any corrections to make on the article. but, the scientific claim here, and mike lockwood, who is cited here in an equally poor but oppositely poor context than he is in the right-wing media, has volunteered to be spokesperson for it, is not that the decrease in solar activity will offset global warming but that it will lead to the kind of regional variations that were seen in seventeenth century england. the article is really an elaborate strawman fallacy, rushing to debunk a claim that no scientist has ever made.
it's all very nice and everything to point out that a regional decrease in northern temperatures is likely to be offset by an accompanying increase in southern ones. why do we have winter, again? but, tell it to the guy that's playing hockey on the thames in april, as india suffers through 55 degree heat.
it balances out, so there's nothing to worry about, right? eh....
deathtokoalas
this research was trendy in the mainstream media a few years ago, but it's actually been thoroughly debunked. and, this insistence that all weather is created by the same factors is actually conspiratorial thinking; what's presented here isn't a counter to denial type thinking, but it's parallel and analogue on the left.
carbon concentrations are not the cause of all weather.
and, the polar vortex is quite well understood as a function of sunlight.
deathtokoalas
the very quick response is this: we don't need to cite carbon concentrations to explain the cold we're seeing. we already have a standard, widely understood model. it's the same model that we use to understand seasons. so, this is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. and, it happens to be that it isn't consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.
i think maybe the conceptual problem people are having is that they conceive of the earth like the ancient greeks did: as though it's in a glass ball, free from the influence of outside forces. the universe is newtonian - predictable - and only gets chaotic when humans alter the natural equilibrium. in fact, the reality is that we're a jagged lump of molten rock, not spherical but only even roughly elliptical, and we're hurdling towards nowhere through an orbit full of bumps. we go through ice ages when we hit very rough patches - that is the theory of ice ages, converted into an analogy about bad roads. and, it's the basic theory of weather, too.
the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun. if the weather we were experiencing was caused mostly or solely by the sun, it should have been getting colder, not warmer. yet, it was getting warmer. contradiction. so, the weather could not have been caused solely by the sun....
as it stands, the recent exaggerated expansion of the polar vortex - which most people call winter - is happening in perfect correlation with the sun, which is entering a minimum during one of it's weakest cycles on record. if our science of seasons and ice ages is correct, our recent observations of the sun are predictive; the actual predictive science here is that this should, in fact, make things colder - regionally. and temporarily. and, this is exactly what is happening. there's no reason for what she's doing.
what jennifer francis is doing is really something along the lines of throwing an apple into the air, and trying to explain why it falls using magnetism. it's a nice story, jenn. but we already understand gravity pretty well - or, at least, we do observationally.
mike lockwood. look him up. he did the studies.
jessman9000
Deleting peoples comments only destroyed your own narrative.
deathtokoalas
i'm not interested in acting as a medium for the dissemination of false information, or outright stupidity; your comment is not correct. what deleting stupid comments does is sharpen the narrative, by eliminating the irrelevant, the superfluous and/or the incorrect. it removes misleading or useless information from the discourse.
i don't want to get into a huxley v. orwell debate, but that's where i'm going with this. when we're bombarded with false information, it's much harder to find the actual truth.
that said, i wish i still had the ability to remove stupid comments, but google has removed this under apparent pressure from right-wing extremists.
pk
FYI: BBC Horizon 2005 Global Dimming
deathtokoalas
it is consistent with what i'm saying to suggest that coal particulates - and other pollutants - should be a measurable aspect of climate modelling. but, this isn't the same kind of long term problem, because the particles don't build up in the same way. it's more of a localized short term thing. but, if i was more interested in southern china than i am in the great lakes, i'd be arguing the point for a short term effect, absolutely.
grindupBaker
Earth surface is smooth, not a jagged lump. You referred to yourself and one or more unspecified persons as "a jagged lump". This seems quite likely but we are not sufficiently familiar with you to have high certainty of your similarity to a jagged lump.
deathtokoalas
apparently, this person is from saskatchewan, because they've clearly never seen a mountain before.
grindupBaker
you say "the reason we needed a theory of global warming in the first place was that the movement of temperatures decoupled from the sun". Correct but also note that the hypothesis of "global warming" was derived by Fourier more than a century before the experiment with coal had been conducted for long enough and measurements had been sufficient for long enough to confirm the hypothesis and make it a theory.
deathtokoalas
google is very bad at notifications. but, fwiw, i believe that what fourier demonstrated was merely the mechanism of the greenhouse effect, rather than any specific warming trends.
charles
Just another Russian troll calling him/herself Jessica. Yawn!
deathtokoalas
well, i'm not a russian troll. but, you sure sound like a democratic party stooge.
my arguments do not challenge the climate consensus; francis' theory is not in it, and never will be.
charles
"democratic party stooge" LOL, Jess. I'm not from the US and A, not even from that continent.
deathtokoalas
i have no reason to believe you when you say that, stooge.
charles
I couldn't care less, Jessica. Nice name BTW. You transgender?
deathtokoalas
see, this is when the democratic party stooge reflexively retreats to identity politics to attempt to prove their faux liberalism.
charles
At least we know now what you're after
deathtokoalas
you'll have to fill me in on the conspiracy, stooge.
=====
wonderpope
This professor couldn't have explained the physics of how AGW affects the jet streams, and by that causes the local weather anomalies we are experiencing, any easier and clearer. She's not talking about carbon tax or one world government. She's basically saying "we're fucked" even if we would restore the carbon cycle to pre-industrial, because the surplus of CO2 we've been putting into the cycle in the past, let's say, 100 years will continue affecting the climate for 100 years more. And yet I read some cringe worthy comments on here, that show that some people have not listened to this video and aren't even attempting to dispute the data presented, but want to present the expert as a shill for some government entity. Don't get me wrong, skepticism is a good thing. But there's a reason why experts in a field understand things better than the average person...it's because they've spent all their life studying it.
We're driving this car called "human civilization" towards a wall at 200 mph...and instead of facing the problem and finding a way to reduce the speed, people seem to just try to turn their seats in the opposite direction to not see the wall coming towards them at a rapid speed.
deathtokoalas
in fact, this particular scientist's research is not accepted by mainstream academics.
you should look that up, rather than rely on youtube videos for information.
wonderpope
Please tell me exactly how mainstream contradict her claims. What, in your opinion, does mainstream science claim? what is the counter claim I need to look for? I can´t just google "debunking Jennifer A. Francis" and hope to find easily what you claim.
deathtokoalas
you have to realize, wonderpope, that most ideas that are not well accepted do not generate a large amount of literature debunking them. they're just ignored and forgotten. with francis' theory, because it was picked up by the msm without vetting it, what you're going to find is a lot of debunking of various validity from what are mostly very poor sources. actual scientists working in the field have largely just ignored it. i mean, these people don't have time for it.
as a consequence, it's easier to direct you to the actual mainstream theory.
you can easily find articles discussing lockwood's work on mainstream sites, like the bbc. he's actually received scientific awards for his work, along with promotions and the kind of titles that scientists covet, like a place in the royal society. this is the existing consensus: while climate is complicated, weather (and the jet stream is weather.) is caused almost entirely by fluctuations in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth. and, he's rather convincingly demonstrated the point that the existing slow down in solar activity will cause the kind of fluctuations we're seeing in the jet stream - thereby producing a predictive theory of more cold winters in the northern hemisphere, around the jet stream, during the existing minimum.
as mentioned, the most obvious problem with francis' theory is that it has heat and cold moving in directions that are not consistent with the theory of thermodynamics.
---
i googled a bit more. i'm kind of bed-ridden by choice, right now.
jennifer francis has, herself, done her opponents the courtesy of compiling a list of studies that contradict her own research (i do not know how many of them addressed her research directly, but probably very few did.), and then attempts to hand wave it away by claiming bad methodology - which is what scientists do when they can't admit they're wrong.
dan
I watched a video called "Jet Streams, more Jet Streams, and even more Jet Streams: AGU Science" In that clip he talks about a paper by Mann. When I heard that my BS detector turned up its sensitivity because Mann is the infamous author of the fake hockey stick graph.
To be honest what he says is mostly beyond me even though I understand standing wave theory and resonance quite well. God help those that are completely ignorant of such theory. He appears to be talking about how modeling of the jet stream works. But the models don't actually emulate reality well and have demonstrated zero predictive capability.
No one argues that the jet streams play an important part in weather events and more study as to how they operate is welcomed.
But the jet stream performs much more like a meandering river than a simple wave function. It is a chaotic structure, not a pure sine wave function. Its path change is caused by minor and chaotic deviations to its flow path restrictions, its width, and its inertia all interacting simultaneously.
So its apparent "frequency" and "amplitude" can never be more than a very rough approximation. Applying "quasi resonant effects". resonance, amplitude, Q, and R etc. apply only to sine functions. So I conclude wave theory models that use such simulations will never be able to adequately explain or predict chaotic jet stream behavior.
He goes on to claim that aerosols contribute "hugely" to radiative forcing. If you look at IPCC reports you will see that a) the supposed effects due to aerosols have large error bars and b) as the reports become more refined their effects are being reduced. This fact has introduced a conundrum for alarmists because large aerosol effects have been used to tune models (to provide cooling to force them to agree with observed data) that contain high climate sensitivity values (predict more warming than happened). i.e. they appear to be incorrectly tuned to cancel predicted warming. Even at that, the models all quickly diverge from observed climate, predicting warming that does not occur. That would indicate that their sensitivity values are too high. Yet the IPCC averages 102 knowingly incorrect models and runs with a 3C sensitivity value!
He then goes on to talk about the paleo record reconstruction of the jet stream from ice cores. At best this is a poor proxy of snowfall location that eludes to a possible jet stream waveform. But the observation concludes that warmer periods had larger stream amplitude so he runs with it. To his credit, he admits "it's very difficult to determine what configuration jet streams had based on (these records)".
The rest of the video sites other possible inferences and he points out that we need more research. I agree.
deathtokoalas
you might want to check your understanding of waves, dan.
there is a basic theory in algebra that says that all continuous functions, no matter how complicated, can be decomposed into a series of sine waves, called a fourier series. and, the fourier transform (not the same as the series) has widespread applications across the sciences. there is also a fourier theory, but that is pure math stuff. the question isn't really whether the math is reasonable, it's whether the theory is predictive, and the answer is that it only works when you cherry pick the data. this shouldn't actually be particularly surprising, though, because it's quite physically counter-intuitive.
the empirical question is really whether these waves remain in tact or not, that is the physics being challenged, and the evidence appears to be that they don't. the model then collapses as a result of bad physics, not bad math.
further, we don't try to understand the jet stream in terms of ocean currents, anyways. we try and understand the jet stream in terms of factors in the upper atmosphere. i mean, this is the theory: that the energy from the oceans is elevating itself into the atmosphere, and then wreaking havoc - which is a difficult idea on it's face and requires this clumsy mechanism to take seriously.
the biggest factor in the upper atmosphere, and especially around the earth's tilt, is the way the sun hits it. and, there is actually good science that makes predictive theories about jet streams based on solar fluctuations.
======
deathtokoalas
somebody ought to tell paul that if he wants to focus on climate change, he should hire a science journalist. i can't blame greg for this. and i don't claim anything malicious. it's just that it's wrong.
sertaki
Are you saying that a climate journalist would bring more credible facts to the table than an actual climate scientist who has worked on important studies herself?
deathtokoalas
what i'm saying is that a broader science journalist should have pointed out that this particular scientist is actually not well regarded in her field, and that her ideas are really distorting the narrative. not in those terms, exactly, perhaps, but through a probing analysis. see, aaron is a actually a good example, in the sense that he challenges people, albeit not when it comes to science, because he's not a science journalist, even when he plays devil's advocate. an interview with a very controversial researcher like jennifer francis should be presented as what it is, and should ultimately be about challenging the mechanism she's providing. this is rather presented as a science lesson, but what it's "teaching" is something that is at best extremely obscure - and probably just flat out wrong.
what you're doing is appealing to authority. and, she might be an authority on her own research. but, she's not a good authority on the broader topic.
you could throw a dart in a climate conference and find somebody who both accepts the climate consensus and is willing to challenge this theory on air.
and, it's kind of pernicious. because the reason this theory is getting more attention than it deserve is that it was run by the corporate left media. the guardian. the atlantic. now, the so-called independent media is running with it, because it appeared in the mainstream press, not because of it's actual value. that's not how this ought to work.
grindupBaker
I made an effort and spent some time with searches like "controversial research jennifer francis" and I've come up with nothing after reading NAS & all sorts of sites. So give a couple of links, just so we can confirm that you aren't just a coal/oil shill-fuckwit wasting our time. Just a couple of relevant links.
deathtokoalas
the reason i'm being obscure is that the arguments are technical.
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