To: koan who wrote (85859 ) 9/17/2011 1:47:21 PM From: longnshort Respond to (Satire warning - however this is basically the argument thats made for CAGW) Interview With A Climatologist Briggs Climatology Fun Today, an exclusive interview with famed international climatologist Dr Arturo Calor. Dr Calor is leading the scientific fight against man-made global warming. Thank you for being with us, Dr Calor. Let me ask you this: how do we know the Earth is imperiled, that it’s really growing ever warmer? We have thermometers of various kinds at several locations around the planet. Most of these have been in place a few tens of year, others longer; some have been moved, some have seen cities grow up around them, others have seen cities die. Some locations are new, some old. The thermometers measure the temperature at various heights, but usually near the surface. There is some error in this process, and incompatibilities, but we can down weight these difficulties because the subject is so important. Because the instrumental record is so brief, we also infer temperatures using proxies. Proxy? widths of tree rings, ratios of isotopes of certain chemicals in other living things and ice, and so forth. What we do is match the proxies with known temperatures measured by thermometer, and then build a statistical model which estimates a parameter. We report that parameter as the error-free estimate of the temperature. Wouldn’t it be better to remove these parameters—”integrate them out,” in statistical parlance—and report on the uncertainty of the actual predicted temperature, which will always be much higher than the uncertainty of the parameter? I see. Very compelling. What’s the next step? up by a little over a half degree centigrade since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Do we know the plus and minus of this estimate? Well, all these different locations and ways of measuring temperature and all the models that predict but do not directly measure temperature. Surely there is some uncertainty in that half degree estimate. Ah, I see. It is the duty of science to seek certainty, to dispel the dark clouds of ignorance. It would be of no use to concentrate on uncertainty. Many professionals are working on this problem, therefore we are very sure of the results. I see what you mean. Can you tell us about satellites? But satellites don’t directly measure temperature. Isn’t it so that they measure radiation and through a physical-statistical algorithm estimate temperature? This implies that there is uncertainty in that estimate: another plus and minus. Do you account for that in your estimates? we are as sure as we are about anything that the temperature has increased a few tenths of a degree and that most of this increase is due to the activity of mankind. How do we know that? We build very beautiful, extraordinarily complex computer models which prove this. Although they are difficult to fully comprehend, at base they are very simple. We know that carbon dioxide captures heat in the lower reaches of the atmosphere. The more CO2 there is, the more heat captured. We also know that a doubling of pre-industrial levels of CO2 will only raise the temperature an insignificant amount. Yes?So we build into these models a feedback mechanism that says as more CO2 is added, the temperature increases non-linearly. We then run these models and we find exactly what we expected to see: increasing CO2 leads to a positive feedback in temperature! But aren’t you just seeing what you put into the model? It’s not quite an independent verification of the theory. these models have produced simulations that look, after some processing, like actual observations. That should be enough proof that our theory is correct .Perhaps. But aren’t there literally hundreds of knobs and dials that you need to tweak to “tune” the models so that they first produce those simulations? Do you have independent evidence that these models predicted new data better than predictions based on the assumption that your theory is wrong? You can’t argue with that. Thank you for talking to us, Dr Calor. I hope this interview increases the chance that my grant is funded. wmbriggs.com ..... says: 16 September 2011 at 12:16 pm
