Hi SilentZ; Re: "No, temperatures have been stable since around 1997." "That's not what NASA's showing us:";
Since you obviously can't read a graph to save your life, I've notated the NASA graph you linked to:
The light green vertical bars are "uncertainty estimates". This is the 1-sigma estimates which are exceeded by random chance almost half the time. You can see for yourself that the uncertainty estimates are perfect for temperatures not having changed since 1998.
The reason this is a scandal for climate science is that the CO2 levels for those most recent years, compared to the rest of the graph, are off the chart. It's apparent that natural variation can and did swamp the CO2 signal. This means that it's not possible to pick out the CO2 signal without understanding the mechanism which causes it. Unfortunately, all the climate scientists have to go on with "understanding the mechanism" are models with huge numbers of free parameters.
Here, let me recount a famous physics story that was published in Nature a few years ago:
A Meeting with Enrico Fermi
Freeman Dyson, Nature 427, 297 (2004)
One of the big turning points in my life was a meeting with Enrico Fermi in the spring of 1953. In a few minutes, Fermi politely but ruthlessly demolished a programme of research that my students and I had been pursuing for several years. He probably saved us from several more years of fruitless wandering along a road that was leading nowhere. I am eternally grateful to him for destroying our illusions and telling us the bitter truth.
...
In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk." With that, the conversation was over. I thanked Fermi for his time and trouble, and sadly took the next bus back to Ithaca to tell the bad news to the students. Because it was important for the students to have their names on a published paper, we did not abandon our calculations immediately. We finished them and wrote a long paper that was duly published in the Physical Review with all our names on it. Then we dispersed to find other lines of work. I escaped to Berkeley, California, to start a new career in condensed-matter physics.
...
nature.com
What's going on with the climate scientists is that they've been proved wrong but they "did not abandon their calculations immediately." Instead, they're continuing to publish papers. Some are publishing papers that agree with the skeptics, that is, that climate sensitivity is small enough that the earth is not in peril. Others are publishing papers that support the positions they staked out when they were younger.
And it's not at all surprising to see scientists sticking to their guns long after they've been proved wrong. Famous examples of this litter the history of physics. Einstein, for example, rejected the foundations of quantum mechanics.
-- Carl |
