Comments Alastair has made

Concencous?

All it takes is to go onto the internet and doing a bit of your own research to quickly realise that claims that there is a scientific concencous simply isn't true, therefore I struggle to believe the typical AGW claim that there is a unanimous concencous.  It's all very well to say that AGW has the seal of approval from an "impressive array of international organisations", but without individual experts prepared to speak out, these "organisations" are likely just a mechanism for the AGW industry to avoid accountability and responsibilty.  Many a time I have heard in the media (newspapers, TV and film) reports of the latest global warming scares, but these reports are almost always arrive via journalists, reporters and politicians.  You almost never see any actual scientists themselves endorsing the media reports which are almost always anonymous in that respect.  

I have just recently watched "An Inconvenient Truth" for the first time and one thing I noticed was the lack of scientific experts to appear in the film and endorse the films messege "in name".  Contrarily, the british documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" was endorsed by an impressive array of climate scientists.On 'There is no consensus'--If this is not consensus, what would consensus look like? posted 2 years, 5 months ago 109 Responses

Stunned Silence

I see a lack of response to my previous posts.  Is that because you know I'm right?On 'CO2 doesn't lead, it lags'--Turns out CO2 rise is both a cause and an effect of warming posted 2 years, 5 months ago 43 Responses

Not all that glitters is gold

So it is true what you say in your example about potentially producing a model linking the stock market and global temperature in the past.  The main thing is, does this model so constructed also predict the future?  If it doesn't, the scientist can choose to tweak the model or throw it away.  If it does however, there may be a relationship after all that deserves closer examination. When empirical data consistently follows the models, a person that understands real science as opposed to scientism would not dismiss something just because it seems preposterous according to "what is known".

In other words, I think you can be more than 99% sure that the models are empirical, because actually all scientific models are.  This is all the more reason why we must be wary of them.

I disagree that all scientific models are empirical.  Perhaps you are misunderstanding what I mean by an empirical model as opposed to a model based on first principals.  

Models that are based on first principals would use known and proven laws of physics and thermodynamics to predict the future, this often involves an iterative process and usually requires considerably computing power.  In a system as complex and large scale as global climate, sucessfully developing a model in this way would be incomprehendably difficult since there are so many factors involved and so many different positive and negative feedbacks.  It would also require incomprehendable computing power.  Unlike empirical models, these models do not use the output parameters (temperature or CO2 concentration) as an input to the model and for that reason are fundamentally better though as I mentioned earlier, they are much more difficult to produce.

The other type of model is the empirical model.  These models do not use established laws of physics and are merely an extrapolation of an existing trend.  These models take the measured inputs (temperature & CO2 conc) and fits an equation to this data, the equation will contain hundreds of "fudge factors" in order to produce an equation that fits the input data.  The problem is that the model uses the very same input data as the data that is later used to varify the output.  For this reason, empirical models should be used with caution.  Empirical models may still be useful in certain applications but they are a tool for interpolating simple systems where the relationship between the variables is obvious, they are not a tool for proving that a relationship between two variables exists, especially for unknown and complex systems.
On 'CO2 doesn't lead, it lags'--Turns out CO2 rise is both a cause and an effect of warming posted 2 years, 5 months ago 43 Responses

Experts

Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.

The problem with that is that you are talking about the concensus of many people who may be self proclaimed "experts" but the reality is that they are not really experts at all.  The real definition of an expert in such an enormously complex subject such as global climate is in fact very narrow and is strictly limited to climatologists only and possibly even narrower than that, climatologists that are specialised in certain area of climatology.  You see all sorts of non-climatologists in the media talking about "global warming".  These people might specialise in fields like geology, oceanography or cosmology.  Such people should not be considered true "experts" in this complex subject yet these are the very people that are considered amongst the 2500 leading scientists.  I'm not a climatologist myself however I do have a Masters degree in engineering and have published articles in scientific journals.  I am therefore well aware that people specialise in very narrow fields and that it only takes a small deviation from this narrow field to no longer be an expert.  On 'They predicted global cooling in the 70s'--But that didn't even remotely resemble today's consensus posted 2 years, 6 months ago 29 Responses

Sharp drop in early 1990's

If you look at the temperature record for the 1990s, you'll notice a sharp drop in '92, '93, and '94. This is the effect of massive amounts of SO2 ejected into the stratosphere by Mount Pinatubo's eruption. That doesn't mean CO2 took a holiday and stopped influencing global temperatures; it only means that the CO2 forcing was temporarily overwhelmed by another, opposite forcing.

If you take a closer look at the graph, you'll see that there are dozens of similar sharp drops to the one in the early 1990's, they seem to occur with a frequency of 5 to 10 years.  The sharp drop in the early 1990's is completely unremarkable in this sense therefore I see no sound basis for suggesting that the cause of this drop was due to the Mount Pinayubo eruption.On 'What about mid-century cooling?'--No one said CO2 is the only climate influence posted 2 years, 6 months ago 11 Responses

Models

I had a look at the models, however I am still skeptical.

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-4.htm

Here's why.  I'm 99% sure that these models were produced using only emperical data, not using scientific first principals.  What they did is they took the input variables such as CO2 concentration and natural variables (eg solar radiance) and produced an emperical equation of best fit to match the observed global temperature.  This is very easy to do for anyone who is a competent user of Microsoft Excel but is of no use in predicting future temperature because it doesn't consider cause and effect or scientific first principals. On 'CO2 doesn't lead, it lags'--Turns out CO2 rise is both a cause and an effect of warming posted 2 years, 8 months ago 43 Responses

CO2 and temperature

I don't believe I did say that "CO2 becomes an increasing influence" I only said that GHG forcing dominates the overall temperature change.

That comment itself is mutually contradicting.  If CO2 does not become an increasing influence, how can it dominate the overall temperature change?  You've already acknowleged that CO2 is not important at the beginning of the cycle (low concentration), therefore if your theory is true CO2 must become an increasing influence at higher concentrations, this would be seen as an increasing differential or slope of the curve.  Unless it can be proved that higher CO2 concentrations lead to a higher temperature differential, it would seem very unlikey that CO2 is an important factor in determing global temperature.  Without this proof, the theory of CO2 dominance on global temperature falls apart.
I don't deny that CO2 will have some effect on global temperature, even the staunchist skeptics will admit this because CO2 is a greenhouse gas.  But we are talking orders of magnitude here.  CO2 forms only an order of about 1% of the greenhouse effect, a inrease in temperature of 0.1 degrees with sea level rises of millimeters or centermeters due to human activities is far more likely than global catastrophy.On 'CO2 doesn't lead, it lags'--Turns out CO2 rise is both a cause and an effect of warming posted 2 years, 8 months ago 43 Responses

Sceptics View

Your theory is interesting but I have an important question that hasn't been mentioned.  You admit that the sun initiates the warming cycle and that the CO2 follows 800 years later.  You then explain that after this time, CO2 becomes an increasing influence on global warming and overtakes the sun in importance.  If this were the case you would expect that the temperature would increase gradually for the first 800 years while CO2 is low and the rate of temperature rise would increase as the CO2 concentration becomes higher.  In the graph this would be seen as an upward curving temperature trend, ie the temperature curve would be more parabolic than linear.
This certainly doesn't appear to be the case from the graph, the temperature rise looks relatively linear, this suggests that CO2 concentration has no significant effect on temperature over and above that of the sun.On 'CO2 doesn't lead, it lags'--Turns out CO2 rise is both a cause and an effect of warming posted 2 years, 8 months ago 43 Responses