Weather and Climate change

[JustWinBaby]

(05-30-2019, 08:29 AM)oncemoreuntothejimbreech Wrote: I've asked you repeatedly to share one of those articles you read so I could educate myself and you refused every time. Not one single article.

I've shared several in my last few posts.  You've always been capable of using google. The last few times this came up, most on the board appeared not to be even remotely knowledgeable on the subject. So I'm going to give you another long post about what I have come to learn and why I believe what I believe. I challenged people to post good science behind the "crisis alarmism" and got crickets.   The burden of proof is on the alarmism side - you'll not find much in the way of dispositive research.  Non-findings tend not to be published.  But you have to show strong scientific basis for assumptions behind the global warming cause, and it just doesn't exist.

Every doubling of CO2 contributes one degree of warming.  This is, to my knowledge, about the only actual testable and demonstrable fact related to climate change for which there is a real consensus.  That's hyperbole, but it makes the point.

·       The million dollar question is ECS.  Go look it up and then come back with some science telling me what that number is.  Spoiler alert – IPCC has estimated it to be between 1.5 and 4.5 for 30+ years (they may have recently changed it to 2.0-4.5, with a median of 3.8 or something like that).  Problem is, for low sensitivity there is no crisis…which seems to be the main driver between high values.

·       A number of recent studies have estimated TCR (that's the short-run effect, 10 years or so....ECS is long-run after hundreds of years and is about 20-30% higher than TCR) between 1.5-2.0.  Now, there’s enough proven fossil fuel reserves (including coal) to a little more than double CO2 in the air.  If we assume there’s plenty of unproven reserves to be found, we might be able to double CO2 twice….that would suggest an upper limit on warming of between 3-4 degrees.  And it won’t happen overnight, so hardly a crisis.

·       If we assume all warming estimated the past 100 years is from CO2 (it’s not), that would suggest an ECS of about 1.7.  If we look at satellite readings from the troposphere (where CO2 would have the strongest warming signal), it’s even less.  In fact, Roy Spencer (who maintains one of the satellite temp records) believes ECS is less than 1 because he isn’t seeing enough warming in the troposphere.

·       ECS <1 is a very minority opinion.  But such a value is common among stable systems.  Large values and “tipping points” are not something you see in stable systems.  We’ve had much higher values of CO2 in the past, and the world didn’t fry and temperatures came back down.  So I have no idea why people aren’t naturally skeptical of claims about a tipping point and existential crisis.  There’s nothing inherently magical or special about man-made CO2 emissions.

·       Higher estimates for ECS are based in no small part on correlations.  Any Stat 101 student can tell you correlation =/= causation.  Sure, the planet was much hotter with high C02 levels, and probably much lower during ice ages.  But in every case temperatures have come back – strong evidence AGAINST a tipping point, and frankly against high ECS values which would suggest an unstable system.  Long-run temperature stability simply doesn’t indicate high sensitivity to CO2.

·       So the burden of proof is really to demonstrate that ECS would be high, because the default assumption should clearly be somewhere between 1-1.5.  But it’s a nearly impossible thing to model and test.  All but one of the predictive models run warm, among other issues, use high values for ECS (it’s the only way to get alarming predictions).  The best and most accurate model, a Russian model, uses less sensitive values.  But we need to ignore the model that doesn’t predict crisis temperatures, even if it appears to be the most accurate.

·       I said in the beginning, the research assumes all the warming has been from CO2.  A necessary assumption in most cases, but one that would clearly bias things higher.  Then clouds/water vapor - go do some reading on that and then re-evaluate the confidence you have in the “science”.