Climate Change - The Scientific Debate
Discussion
Sadly, no matter how valid anything he releases may be, it'll be immediately attacked on the basis that he's "not a climate scientist". Never mind how much work he's done within the climate community, or how appropriate his actual skill set is, if he's not on the list he doesn't count unless he's agreeing with that community. Not only that, he's had the temerity to shun the pal review system!
That's how science works if you want a 97% consensus
That's how science works if you want a 97% consensus
I wondered when contrails would hit the mainstream.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-2790...
Ugly things of course but what am I missing in the science of modelling water vapour?
You have water vapour that is, broadly, somewhat invisible to the naked human eye. But it is water vapour and it is there and so would be doing to the atmosphere and heat movements within it whatever water vapour does.
Now you fly a jet through the high vapour areas and the water content, somewhat modified by heating and particulates from the jet fuel, becomes visible and, being what we call "white" now becomes reflective in a way that it was not before. So a form of cloud.
But in reality is it that much different just because we can see it?
Hmm.
I do like this line from the piece though ...
""The key things you need to know are the temperature of the air and how moist it is, these are things we forecast at the moment, so the information is already in there," said Dr Irvine.
"Whether the forecasts are accurate enough to do this is another question.""
Indeed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-2790...
Ugly things of course but what am I missing in the science of modelling water vapour?
You have water vapour that is, broadly, somewhat invisible to the naked human eye. But it is water vapour and it is there and so would be doing to the atmosphere and heat movements within it whatever water vapour does.
Now you fly a jet through the high vapour areas and the water content, somewhat modified by heating and particulates from the jet fuel, becomes visible and, being what we call "white" now becomes reflective in a way that it was not before. So a form of cloud.
But in reality is it that much different just because we can see it?
Hmm.
I do like this line from the piece though ...
""The key things you need to know are the temperature of the air and how moist it is, these are things we forecast at the moment, so the information is already in there," said Dr Irvine.
"Whether the forecasts are accurate enough to do this is another question.""
Indeed.
Edited by LongQ on Thursday 19th June 13:01
LongQ said:
You have water vapour that is, broadly, somewhat invisible to the naked human eye. But it is water vapour and it is there and so would be doing to the atmosphere and heat movements within it whatever water vapour does.
Now you fly a jet through the high vapour areas and the water content, somewhat modified by heating and particulates from the jet fuel, becomes visible and, being what we call "white" now becomes reflective in a way that it was not before. So a form of cloud.
But in reality is it that much different just because we can see it?
Water vapour is invisible, contrails or clouds are micro droplets of water suspended in air and are visible.Now you fly a jet through the high vapour areas and the water content, somewhat modified by heating and particulates from the jet fuel, becomes visible and, being what we call "white" now becomes reflective in a way that it was not before. So a form of cloud.
But in reality is it that much different just because we can see it?
mybrainhurts said:
This is a prime example of what continuously bugs me about this debate. We have lots of people on Pistonheads (not so much elsewhere I must say) saying, "oh, those climate scientists, you shouldn't listen to them... scam, global conspiracy, just in it for the money, it's not real science etc."
And then those same people ask me to place my trust in somebody who doesn't study the climate, doesn't submit their work for peer review and appears to make a living selling books on the topic. Constantly coming across this sort of stuff when trying to find evidence against the IPCC is exactly why I started thinking the IPCC might be worth listening to after all.
So the big news here is that somebody has written a climate model in Microsoft Excel. Hm. Excel is a pretty shoddy bit of software so forgive me for being cautious about the quality of these outcomes. And, as a programmer, 15,000 lines of code seems a remarkably small figure for modelling something as incomprehensibly complex as the climate.
Don't get me wrong, the more people studying this the better and I'm not qualified to dismiss it or otherwise, I'm just pointing out that there seems to be a worrying lack of objectivity when deciding who to trust on this issue.
Variomatic said:
Sadly, no matter how valid anything he releases may be, it'll be immediately attacked on the basis that he's "not a climate scientist" [...] Not only that, he's had the temerity to shun the pal review system!
durbster said:
This is a prime example of what continuously bugs me about this debate.
[...]
And then those same people ask me to place my trust in somebody who doesn't study the climate, doesn't submit their work for peer review and appears to make a living selling books on the topic.
I also do horoscopes.[...]
And then those same people ask me to place my trust in somebody who doesn't study the climate, doesn't submit their work for peer review and appears to make a living selling books on the topic.
Variomatic said:
I also do horoscopes.
But isn't it entirely reasonable to be wary of trusting the opinion of somebody on a topic they're not expert in, regardless how qualified they are elsewhere. Would you trust a brain surgeon's opinion on your toothache over a dentist's?
I read an interesting article about this recently which made the point that if Stephen Hawking had been the one to present the IPCC findings, it'd probably have been accepted without question even though it's not his area of expertise. And it also made the point that the biggest failure of the whole subject was that it was presented as a political case (Kyoto) rather than a scientific one, so the waters were forever muddied from that point on.
durbster said:
This is a prime example of what continuously bugs me about this debate.
And then those same people ask me to place my trust in somebody who doesn't study the climate, doesn't submit their work for peer review and appears to make a living selling books on the topic. Constantly coming across this sort of stuff when trying to find evidence against the IPCC is exactly why I started thinking the IPCC might be worth listening to after all.
I agree with some of your points above, but he has ultimately given it the greatest peer review, he has made it available, to the entire world. He has not hidden his methods, as some infamous climate scientists standard operating procedure is, Evans has made it all available to everyone to scrutinise.And then those same people ask me to place my trust in somebody who doesn't study the climate, doesn't submit their work for peer review and appears to make a living selling books on the topic. Constantly coming across this sort of stuff when trying to find evidence against the IPCC is exactly why I started thinking the IPCC might be worth listening to after all.
He does not need to be an expert on Climate, his expertise is DSP, as Rheimann was not an expert in space time relativity theory, but his constructs and mathematical creations in differential geometry provided the means in which Einstein's expressed his theory.
A statistician does not need to be an expert in the area the statistical values describe, he needs to be an expert in Stats. It is a long running criticism of the Climate science that many of the Scientists have a very poor understanding of the Statistics involved.
Dr David Evan is providing a different and innovative mechanism to evaluate climate data, whether wrong or right, it should be encouraged. I am still trying to get my head around his Fourier work, which is heavy going.
Excel has it problems, and lots of them, but it is ubiquitous and easy to use.
If you are looking for the human signal in global warming, who better than an expert in signal processing ?
Edited by QuantumTokoloshi on Thursday 19th June 17:20
durbster said:
And it also made the point that the biggest failure of the whole subject was that it was presented as a political case (Kyoto) rather than a scientific one, so the waters were forever muddied from that point on.
No, the problem is it is a political cause rather than a scientific one. Thus e.g. talk of consensus as if it was important, the sacking of anyone expressing other opinions etc. And the (reasonably successful) separation of the two threads.
durbster said:
But isn't it entirely reasonable to be wary of trusting the opinion of somebody on a topic they're not expert in, regardless how qualified they are elsewhere. Would you trust a brain surgeon's opinion on your toothache over a dentist's?
But a climate scientist is more like a GP than a brain surgeon. "Climate science" involves a little bit of phyics, a little bit of biology, a little bit of computer modelling and a little bit of statistics (probably with some other disciplines thrown in for good measure).
When your GP suspects you might have a brain tumor he sends you to see a brain surgeon, he doesn't get the scalpels out in his office. When a climate scientist wants to do something very advanced with, say, statistics, he just goes ahead and does it.
Then when (as very often happens) a specialist statistician or two try to suggest that what he's doing is mistaken, inappropriate, or just plain wrong, he claims it's special climate statistics and the specialist isn't qualified to comment on it.
So your analogy would be more accurate if you'd suggested a GP opening your skull to look at your headache and, when a brain surgeon suggests that he stops, publicly attacking the surgeon as incompetent. And getting away with it time after time!!!
Has this chap got an actual paper I can look at? As in a shortish document outlining the theory for an audience assumed to to be scientifically/mathematically literate.
Looking at his first 'discovering the notch' post hasn't really done a great deal for me. What I gather (feel free to correct) is that he constructs an empirical transfer function by dividing the noisy amplitude-frequency dataset by the noisy TSI amplitude-frequency dataset and the result is a notch at 1/(frequency of TSI peak). What confuses me is that he seems to think this is significant? All this means is that there's a peak in the TSI amplitude-frequency data...and I think we already knew that?
Anyone who's read all of his posts and/or understands better than me please provide enlightenment.
Looking at his first 'discovering the notch' post hasn't really done a great deal for me. What I gather (feel free to correct) is that he constructs an empirical transfer function by dividing the noisy amplitude-frequency dataset by the noisy TSI amplitude-frequency dataset and the result is a notch at 1/(frequency of TSI peak). What confuses me is that he seems to think this is significant? All this means is that there's a peak in the TSI amplitude-frequency data...and I think we already knew that?
Anyone who's read all of his posts and/or understands better than me please provide enlightenment.
QuantumTokoloshi said:
I am still trying to get my head around his Fourier work, which is heavy going.
My old man is a Prof in cardiology, he was doing research into arterial wall sheer stress analysis, and whilst he will easily shame me on my math knowledge, he admitted he had to go talk to the other Math Professors in the University when it came to applying Fourier treatments, so I feel your pain.(Mind you I can wipe the floor with him when it comes to CDMA
)durbster said:
But isn't it entirely reasonable to be wary of trusting the opinion of somebody on a topic they're not expert in, regardless how qualified they are elsewhere. Would you trust a brain surgeon's opinion on your toothache over a dentist's?
In addition one might consider whether the Dentist and Doctor were funded in the same way.
In general both Dentists and Doctors have their own areas of special interest (and some, perhaps many, hang on to some general interest as well) and may tend to see you ache as somehow related to their specialism(s) which in recent times seem to have become VERY specialised. Doing so may be helpful to you - or it may not.
durbster said:
I read an interesting article about this recently which made the point that if Stephen Hawking had been the one to present the IPCC findings, it'd probably have been accepted without question even though it's not his area of expertise. And it also made the point that the biggest failure of the whole subject was that it was presented as a political case (Kyoto) rather than a scientific one, so the waters were forever muddied from that point on.
Interesting that the aura of celebrity reaches us through such suggestions.As I recall Hawking not that long ago completely changed his mind about one of his most notable theories which had been a key to his reputation for a couple of decades. Fortunately with the subject matter being extremely theoretical and non-planet-affecting this change of mind did not matter at all.
Clearly, however, he would be an unreliable spokesperson for anything taxable if only because he might suddenly change his mind. Could you see, say, Dr. Mann or any of his colleagues coming to the same conclusion about AGW theory and going public with his revised and opposite belief?
More to the point would those with vested interests allow him to go public anyway?
Mr2Mike said:
LongQ said:
Invisible to radiation energy? Doesn't stop any incoming or outgoing energy flows?
Why would you assume that rather than the dictionary definition? Invisible: not visible; not perceptible by the eye
As the responding poster does not seem to have further responded (unless such a response is invisible to me ;-) ) are you able to enlighten me?
Water vapour, in any form, is not really invisible but may not be very obvious to a human observer in all situations. After all, our eyesight, measured by the standards of nature and the measurements achievable in Physics, is not really that great.
Contrails are an amplification effect. Nothing to do with original creation.
Tell me I'm totally wrong?
The only thing that can prove climate change science wrong is ..... more science 
If it's not peer reviewed, it's probably not worth reading.
Peer review isn't the end all. It just means it's passed the first stage of proper scrutiny.
If someone sees an error with a peer reviewed paper, they're welcome to explain and demonstrate the problems with said theory, then submit their hypothesis for peer review also.
If it can't pass peer review, then it can't pass the one of the first stages of scientific scrutiny
If it's not peer reviewed, it's probably not worth reading.
Peer review isn't the end all. It just means it's passed the first stage of proper scrutiny.
If someone sees an error with a peer reviewed paper, they're welcome to explain and demonstrate the problems with said theory, then submit their hypothesis for peer review also.
If it can't pass peer review, then it can't pass the one of the first stages of scientific scrutiny
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