Anthropogenic Global Warming 101

Heretic · Aug 24, 2009

Or...

Why It's Not a Massive International Government Conspiracy

or...

How to Not Look Like an Idiot in an Online AGW Debate

Let's begin.

The infamous IPCC, the largest peer reviewed study ever done:
Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis
Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Climate Change 2007: Mitigation of Climate Change

The "Conspirators"
NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
the National Academy of Sciences
the Environmental Protection Agency
the American Geophysical Union
the American Institute of Physics
the National Center for Atmospheric Research
the American Meteorological Society
the National Research Council
the US Geological Survey
the US Dept of Agriculture
the vast majority of peer review
as well as independent research
the Pentagon (even still)
Bush's White House
Scientific American
Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M
the American Physical Society
the Center for Naval Analyses
the Met Office

Which only scratches the surface. A far more comprehensive and exhaustive list can be found here (and here).

Debunking Skeptic Arguments
IPCC FAQ
How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic
Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed
Climate scepticism: The top 10
Greenfyre
Climate Denial Crock of the Week
Skeptical science

Scientific skepticism is a healthy thing. Scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge, improve their understanding and refine their theories. Yet this isn't what happens in global warming skepticism. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports anthropogenic global warming and yet eagerly, even blindly embrace any argument, op-ed piece, blog or study that refutes global warming.
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General Info
The EPA's Climate Change Kids Site
The Discovery of Global Warming
A Tutorial on the Basic Physics of Climate Change
Instant Expert: Climate Change
The Physical Science behind Climate Change
Special Report: Climate Change
Climate Change Verdict: Science Debate Ends, Solution Debate Begins
Fiddling While the Planet Burns
The Climate of Man
The Sixth Extinction
RealClimate
University of California, Berkeley: LS 70B Physical Science - Global Warming
University of Arizona: Global Climate Change: A Series of 7 Lectures Exploring Our World and Ourselves
The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know Weâ€™re Not Wrong?
What is peer review?
The Falsifiability Question

So attacks on climate change as if it were a "theory" make very little sense. Greenhouse gas accumulation is a fact. Radiative properties of greenhouse gases are factual. The climate is not going to stay the same. It can't stay the same. Staying the same would violate physics; specifically it would violate the law of energy conservation. Something has to change.

The simplest consequence is that the surface will warm up. That this is indeed most of what happens is validated pretty much in observations, in paleodata, in theory and in simulation. Further, all those lines of evidence converge pretty much about how much warming: about 2.5 C to 3C for each doubling of CO2. (It's logarithmic in total CO2, not in emitted CO2, guys, by the way.) There's no single line of reasoning for this. There are multiple lines of evidence.
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Science and Consensus

Sometimes people are right about a statement and then draw the wrong conclusion about it. Noting that science doesn't 'do' consensus is such a case. By the time you've progressed to the point of general agreement -- and all a consensus is is general agreement, not universal agreement -- the point has dropped out of being live science.

The science is in the parts we don't understand well. That's effectively part of the definition for doing science. Dropping two rocks of different mass off the side of a building and seeing which one hits the ground first is no longer science. We reached consensus on that some time back. Now if you have a new experiment which tests something interesting (i.e., we haven't tested that one to death already), have at it and do that science.

I didn't appreciate it properly at the time, but a sign on the chemistry department door in my college put it best: "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be science." The live part of science involves learning new things. If you already know what will happen, you're not learning new things so aren't doing science. After you've learned something new, and others have tested it and confirmed your learning, then we have a piece of scientific knowledge. It isn't live science any more, but it's a contribution to the world and can be used for other things. A consequence of this is that you wind up knowing a lot if you stay active in doing science. But it isn't the knowing that motivates scientists (certainly not me) it is the finding out new things about the world.

So we have two sides to science -- the live science, where you don't have consensus -- and the consensus, the body of scientific knowledge that can be used for other things (engineering, decision making, ...). The error made by the people who try to deny, for example, the conclusions of the IPCC reports because 'science doesn't do consensus' is that they're confusing the two sides. The live science, which is summarized in the IPCC reports, doesn't have consensus. That's why it's live and why folks have science to do in the area. The body of scientific knowledge, which is also summarized in the reports, does have a consensus, which is being described in detail as to what the consensus is about and how strong it is.

It is possible that the consensus is wrong in its conclusions. But the folks denying it need not only for it to be wrong, but to be wrong in a very specific way. If they wanted to make scientific arguments, which is what, say, Wegener did in advancing continental drift in the 1920s, they can do so. But it is their responsibility to make the arguments scientifically and back them with strong scientific evidence, as Wegener himself noted. They don't do that.
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Global Warming Denial

Why do I accept global warming science as being true? Well, itâ€™s partly because I followed the many claims of the global warming â€œskeptics,â€ and although their arguments had been debunked numerous times by experts (for example, read RealClimateâ€™s Responses to common contrarian arguments), the so-called skeptics kept repeating the already debunked arguments. After a while you just start thinking, â€œbut thatâ€™s been explained already,â€ and stop taking those people seriously. So that would be my initial reason. But the other main reason would have been the thousands of articles published every year in peer reviewed scientific journals, virtually all of them supporting the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis.

. . .

What we have here is trust in the scientific method. And we trust it because we have reason to believe it works â€“ just look around you. (Youâ€™re reading this on a computer arenâ€™t you?) And on a blog that promotes science and the scientific method, Iâ€™d have to be pretty perverse, or have a very good reason, to oppose thousands of peer reviewed scientific papers.

Note that what we should have is trust in science. This is not the same as faith, which is what Nova claimed I have. Faith is belief without evidence, while trust is acceptance of something based on what we have experienced before â€“ ie what has worked and what has been right. In other words, trust of the scientific method is based on evidence that it works. Claiming that trust and faith are the same thing is the fallacy of equivocation that I have written about before. The fallacy is to use the same word in different meanings in an argument, implying that the word means the same each time. Implying that trust is the same as faith is actually the classic example I gave two years ago to explain the fallacy. Hilariously, Nova responded to this point with dictionary definitions of trust, that I think were supposed to show that trust can be defined in the same way as faith. But duh, thatâ€™s the point. They can be defined in the same way. But they can also be defined differently. And employing these ambiguous definitions s how they can be used to make a fallacious argument. Just because a dictionary gives definitions of the two words, and some of the definitions are similar, that doesnâ€™t mean that trust in the scientific method is the same as faith. Nova even debunked her own point by writing â€œPlanes don't fly on "trust". They fly on physics.â€ Yes. But I donâ€™t need to understand the physics to get on a plane. I get on a plane because I trust that planes fly â€“ and that trust is based on what we see in the real world (all those planes in the sky) not on faith.
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MIT Courseware
Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry
Global Climate Change: Economics, Science, and Policy

National Geographic Magazine
What Is Global Warming?
Global Warming: How Hot? How Soon?
Global Warming Fast Facts
Effects of Global Warming

The â€œSkepticsâ€
Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science
Unravelling the skeptics
Who are the denialists?
ExxonSecrets | Greenpeace USA
Climate science: Sceptical about bias

Dimming the Sun: The Producerâ€™s Story

In fact, only three factors determine the planet's energy balance: the sun's output, the Earth's reflectivity, or albedo, and the thermal properties of the atmosphere, which are affected by the level of certain trace gases like carbon dioxide and water vapor. Reduced to its essentials, the greenhouse effect is a problem in 19th-century classical physics, and the basic theory was worked out with pencil and paper in the 1890s. To say that increasing CO2 levels leads to more heat trapped in the atmosphere is really no more scientifically controversial than saying you'll feel warmer if you put on a sweater.
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Convincing the skeptics

First, they have not come up with any plausible alternative culprit for the disruption of global climate that is being observed, for example, a culprit other than the greenhouse-gas buildups in the atmosphere that have been measured and tied beyond doubt to human activities. (The argument that variations in the sun's output might be responsible fails a number of elementary scientific tests.)

Second, having not succeeded in finding an alternative, they haven't even tried to do what would be logically necessary if they had one, which is to explain how it can be that everything modern science tells us about the interactions of greenhouse gases with energy flow in the atmosphere is wrong.
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Climate-Change Skeptics Revisited

As my original reference to â€œthe venerable tradition of skepticismâ€ indicates, I am in fact well aware of its valuable and indeed fundamental role in the practice of science. Skeptical views, clearly stated and soundly based, tend to promote healthy re-examination of premises, additional ways to test hypotheses and theories, and refinement of explanations and arguments. And it does happen from time to time â€“ although less often than most casual observers suppose â€“ that views initially held only by skeptics end up overturning and replacing what had been the â€œmainstreamâ€ view.

Appreciation for this positive role of scientific skepticism, however, should not lead to uncritical embrace of the deplorable practices characterizing what much of has been masquerading as appropriate skepticism in the climate-science domain. These practices include refusal to acknowledge the existence of large bodies of relevant evidence (such as the proposition that there is no basis for implicating carbon dioxide in the global-average temperature increases observed over the past century); the relentless recycling of arguments in public forums that have long since been persuasively discredited in the scientific literature (such as the attribution of the observed global temperature trends to urban-heat island effects or artifacts of statistical method); the pernicious suggestion that not knowing everything about a phenomenon (such as the role of cloudiness in a warming world) is the same as knowing nothing about it; and the attribution of the views of thousands of members of the mainstream climate-science community to â€œmass hysteriaâ€ or deliberate propagation of a â€œhoaxâ€.
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Words' worth?

Lastly, my all-time least favorite word: Believe.

Everywhere I look, I see statements like "Scientists believe that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago," and it drives me up the wall. Scientists infer that the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, based on their reliance on data and logic. We have physical evidence (lead isotope ratios from three different radiogenic systems, measured in Earth rocks and in meteorites) that all suggest the solar system's solid-state clock started counting 4.5 billion years ago. Because we've never observed anything other than the steady, statistical decline of radioactive parent isotopes to produce daughter isotopes, we assume that the past worked in the same way as today (actualism/"uniformitarianism") and that these empirical measurements have meaning. We logically deduce that the Earth is the implied age, but we don't "believe" it.

Similarly, I get apoplectic when students ask me "Do you believe in global warming?" No, I don't believe it; I'm convinced of it on the basis of (a) physical evidence (data) and (b) logical inference from that data. To spell it out:

1. CO2 absorbs infrared radiation.
2. Infrared radiation is reflected upwards from the surface of the Earth.
3. CO2 is produced by the burning of coal, oil, natural gas, wood, ethanol, and biodiesel.
4. We burn a lot of these carbon-rich fuels by oxidizing them.
5. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are measurably increasing.
6. Oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere are measurably decreasing.
7. Globally, average temperatures are observed to be increasing.
8. Therefore, based on #1-7, the increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is causing the increase in temperature.

There's nothing there to believe in. It just is. Fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, and a logical inference that stems from those facts.

Ditto for the theory of evolution by natural selection. It's not something I believe in; it's something I'm convinced of because it's logically coherent and supported by reams of data gathered over 150 years of hypothesis-testing.

If there is one thing that scientists believe in, it's that the universe makes sense. Our starting assumption is that the physical world operates according to unchanging laws which may be deduced if we're clever enough. On the other hand, if the universe is mercurial in its physical laws, then science doesn't have a chance of figuring things out because the laws that apply on Tuesday will be different from the laws that apply on Wednesday. It should go without saying that, as far as we can tell, this is not the case. The universe does behave in a consistent and predictable manner, insofar as we can tell. Ergo, science is an appropriate way to go about elucidating its structure and properties. No belief necessary.
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Videos:

No, Al Gore didn't invent AGW.
A Hyperlinked History of Climate Change Science
Growing Blanket of Carbon Dioxide Raises Earthâ€™s Temperature Popular Mechanics. August, 1953.
Invisible Blanket. Time Magazine. May, 1953.
The JASON Defense Advisory Group

Since the early 1990s there has been a furious debate about global warming. So-called climate change â€œscepticsâ€ have spent years disputing almost every aspect of the scientific consensus on the subject. Their arguments have successfully delayed significant political action to deal with greenhouse gas emissions. Recent research reveals how the roots of this argument stretch back to two hugely influential reports written almost 30 years ago.

These reports involve a secret organisation of American scientists reporting to the US Department of Defense. At the highest levels of the American government, officials pondered whether global warming was a significant new threat to civilisation. They turned for advice to the elite special forces of the scientific world â€“ a shadowy organisation known as Jason. Even today few people have heard of Jason. It was established in 1960 at the height of the cold war when a group of physicists who had helped to develop the atomic bomb proposed a new organisation that would â€“ to quote one of its founders â€“ â€œinject new ideas into national defenceâ€.

. . .

In 1979 they produced their report: coded JSR-78-07 and entitled The Long Term Impact of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide on Climate. Now, with the benefit of hind-sight, it is remarkable how prescient it was.

Right on the first page, the Jasons predicted that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would double from their preindustrial levels by about 2035. Today itâ€™s expected this will happen by about 2050. They suggested that this doubling of carbon dioxide would lead to an average warming across the planet of 2-3C. Again, thatâ€™s smack in the middle of todayâ€™s predictions. They warned that polar regions would warm by much more than the average, perhaps by as much as 10C or 12C. That prediction is already coming true â€“ last year the Arctic sea ice melted to a new record low. This year may well set another record.

Nor were the Jasons frightened of drawing the obvious conclusions for civilisation: the cause for concern was clear when one noted â€œthe fragility of the worldâ€™s crop-producing capacity, particularly in those marginal areas where small alterations in temperature and precipitation can bring about major changes in total productivityâ€.
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Extra Credit
Australian journalist Tony Jones interviews producer Martin Durkin as part of a panel discussion examining the biased and deliberately misleading documentary, the Great Global Warming Swindle, that is being heralded by skeptics as valid science. The first two parts are the actual interview followed by a panel discussion.

And for the followup:

The great global warming swindle?

The film argues that the earth's climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. Well yes, the climate changes, what is unusual about this one is the rapidity and likely future size. There have been rapid changes before, but those were before human civilisation, so its not clear they were relevant. What next: The earths crust was once molten, so clearly anything less that 3000K is quite safe?

The film features an impressive roll-call of experts. Aha! Argument from authority. Excellent: then IPCC clearly wins, as it has far more than the 9 experts these people claim.
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Swindled!

On Thursday the 8th, the UK TV Channel 4 aired a programme titled "The Great Global Warming Swindle". We were hoping for important revelations and final proof that we have all been hornswoggled by the climate Illuminati, but it just repeated the usual specious claims we hear all the time. We feel swindled. Indeed we are not the only ones: Carl Wunsch (who was a surprise addition to the cast) was apparently misled into thinking this was going to be a balanced look at the issues (the producers have a history of doing this), but who found himself put into a very different context indeed.
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Carl Wunsch, one of the scientists in the documentary:

What we now have is an out-and-out propaganda piece, in which there is not even a gesture toward balance or explanation of why many of the extended inferences drawn in the film are not widely accepted by the scientific community. There are so many examples, it's hard to know where to begin, so I will cite only one: a speaker asserts, as is true, that carbon dioxide is only a small fraction of the atmospheric mass. The viewer is left to infer that means it couldn't really matter. But even a beginning meteorology student could tell you that the relative masses of gases are irrelevant to their effects on radiative balance. A director not intending to produce pure propaganda would have tried to eliminate that piece of disinformation.

An example where my own discussion was grossly distorted by context: I am shown explaining that a warming ocean could expel more carbon dioxide than it absorbs -- thus exacerbating the greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere and hence worrisome. It was used in the film, through its context, to imply that CO2 is all natural, coming from the ocean, and that therefore the human element is irrelevant. This use of my remarks, which are literally what I said, comes close to fraud.

...

I have some experience in dealing with TV and print reporters and do understand something of the ways in which one can be misquoted, quoted out of context, or otherwise misinterpreted. Some of that is inevitable in the press of time or space or in discussions of complicated issues. Never before, however, have I had an experience like this one. My appearance in the "Global Warming Swindle" is deeply embarrasing, and my professional reputation has been damaged. I was duped---an uncomfortable position in which to be.
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Insert â€œswindleâ€ joke here.

On Thursday night, Channel 4 broadcast what it described as a â€œcontroversial documentaryâ€. It was essentially the same rather elderly climate denialist arguments that have been seen many times before - and assessed, and refuted - but packaged up with a bit of drama, as if they were new and unheard of.

That wasnâ€™t the only problem with it.
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That's it for now. Let me know if any links are broken. This has been an ever evolving collection of links documenting "the conspiracy". *giggle*

Class dismissed.

Anthropogenic Global Warming 101

Heretic New Member

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Anthropogenic Global Warming 101

Heretic New Member