Bishop Hill Cosmos and consensus
Jan 6, 2012 Climate: other Ethics This is a guest post by Kevin O'Sullivan
In his book Cosmos, published in 1981, Carl Sagan highlights the controversial issue surrounding the hypothesis proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky that the Planet Venus was spun off from Jupiter. Sagan gives his own reasons why this idea is implausible, but was troubled more by the cosy world of scientific consensus, and attempts made by some elements in the scientific community at the time to silence Velikovsky. It has a chilling resonance of the intolerance we see today emanating from the "consensus" view on climate change, and attempts by some proponents of AGW to block any opinion contrary to their own. The concerns expressed by Carl Sagan are as relevant today as they were back in 1981.
Cosmos: Chapter four. Heaven and Hell.
Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non-scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence. The worse aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that his hypotheses were wrong or in contradiction to firmly established facts, but that some who call themselves scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky’s work. Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the evidence of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights.
The IPCC and our “unbiased” science correspondents at the BBC would do well to adhere to this simple advice.
Reader Comments (76)
William M Briggs
Stove's 1972 paper on Velikovsky can be found here. Thank you for alerting me to its existence.
Velikovsky would have been ignored had it not been for the efforts at suppression. The fact that the scientific community was actively trying to suppress his work lent it some degree of legitimacy in some quarters. Beyond that, most of his work is ludicrous. Much respect to Einstein and Sagan for being willing to listen to all theories, no matter how far out they might be.
I think today's equivalent to Velikovsky might be Zachariah Sitchin. He too takes historical evidence and tries to fit various parts of the puzzle together. Interesting reading, but amazingly inaccurate. Sitchin also had several predictions come true, but that did not validate his work, it just made him lucky a few times.
Thanks for the link Jane! The Velikovsky discussion page on Wiki is also fun to read, from that page a definition :
A heretic holds beliefs that are heresy with respect to the dominant scientific and/or scholarly consensus.
BBS: the 1984 paper by Hansen describe the use of the CLIMAP model to simulate palaeoclimate, the different physical processes that led to the cooling.The 1988 paper used the 1984 paper as reference for the 4.2 K derivation.
Milankovitvch forcing on its own cannot explain the fast heating needed to cause the end of ice ages. 0.5 W/m^2 is amplified by 4 to give the 2 W/m^2 Hansen uses. This link to palaeoclimate may be being airbrushed out of history but some people have long memories.
As for the Kruger and Grassi paper, like everyone else who accepts Sagan's two stream aerosol optical physics, they've got it wrong. I thought I was on my own in realising there's a very bug problem here but the US' top cloud physicist realised the same at the same time as me: www.gewex.org/images/feb2010.pdf
See p 5. 40 % of low level clouds have different physics. The present climate models are totally broken.
From the blog post it is clear that Sagan was talking about scientific hypothesis and not scientific theory. The poster doesn't seem to know the difference.
Sagan's views on AGW were fairly certain;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ5u-l9Je0s&feature=player_embedded
Lazarus; Sagan's correctly warned against high feedback CO2-AGW based on his understanding of the physics, in particular that on Earth, it may have been hidden by man-made pollution making clouds backscatter more solar energy.
However, his physics was wrong. Because of that, his warnings were misconceived. Hansen has continued to plug the Sagan fears. Hansen is wrong too.
I'm sure you are qualified to determine the error in Sagan's physics but as a sceptic I wouldn't accept such claims without credible evidence which you have yet to supply.
Lazarus; I gave the URL reference in my last but one post.
There is now little doubt that the 2nd AIE is a far more powerful global warming mechanism than CO2.
Your URL doesn't look like a peer reviewed journal and says nothing about Sagan's physics being wrong. Call me sceptical by Carl Sagan was a cosmologist and I think it unlikely that he had his own special physics adopted by climatologists.
My original point remains, Sagan was talking about Hypothesis which the poster clearly cannot distinguish from scientific theory.
mydogsgotnonose
First, you have not admitted that you were wrong about Hansen, but you have changed your statement. It has gone from this:
To this:
Which is just evasive and weak. The estimates in both papers were emergent values derived from model II runs. As I said above.
Anyway, never mind that.
The amplification processes operating on Milankovitch forcing are plausibly hypothesised to be seasonal albedo flip (per Hansen), ice sheet dynamics (marine ice shelf collapse and gravity, basically) and GHG forcing which in act in concert to reduce the dominant ice albedo feedback. Once the NH ice sheets begin to break up, the reduction in ice albedo accelerates warming, further reducing ice albedo which accelerates warming even more... and so on. Glacial conditions terminate.
You say:
But despite repeated requests for some evidence, you apparently cannot provide any.
On top of that, you got the phytoplankton/cloud effect wrong, claiming warming when in fact it is cooling. So not a likely planetary-scale amplification mechanism capable of terminating glacials.
Stephenson's work is indeed interesting and thank you for providing a reference. But in his GWEX article he is forced to concede that he has no evidence of climatologically significant effects:
A number of studies find evidence that suggests cloud feedback to be positive, eg Chang & Coakley (2007); Eitzen (2008); Lauer et al. (2010) and of course Dessler (2010).
Once again, you say:
But you do not make even a vaguely plausible case for this. I think we are going to have to differ on just about everything here.
interesting.....Hengist, the guy with zero reading comprehension skills has not answered the critique of his idiotic misreading of the post
and the astonishingly boring BBD hijacks another thread onto an irrelevant side-topic...
nothing changes
Diogenes
Yes, the science stuff is awfully tedious, isn't it?
Diogenes, in this particular instance, I think you are being a little unfair on BBD. He didn’t bring the subject up, MDGNN did. BBD merely called him out on his claim and, as far as I can see, correctly at that. He also did so without resorting to insult and kept his responses coolly polite. I can’t see that he did anything wrong. As just about every thread tends to drift off topic anyway and he was merely responding to something claimed by another poster, I don’t see any justification for accusing him of thread hijacking in this instance either.
Those of us that have been hanging around here for any length of time know what to expect from BBD now. Most of us here will undoubtedly disagree with him to varying degrees. I, for one though, wouldn’t want him not to come here. We want debate here, not rhetoric. Sometimes, he will reference papers I haven’t read, or ones I’d forgotten about. Though his opinions on the “robustness” of the conclusions in many of those papers will invariably be different to mine, I can often still learn something from them. All I ask from BBD (notwithstanding that this is the Bish’s blog and not mine) is that he tries to remain calm and polite. Admittedly, it would be nice if he would open his mind to other views a little, but we won’t get him to open his mind by telling him to shut his mouth ;-)
BBD: I refer you to: Hansen et. al. Climate Processes and Climate Sensitivity Geophysical Monograph 29,
'We study climate sensitivity and feedback processes in three independent ways : (1) by using a three dimensional (3-D) global climate model for experiments in which solar irradiance
So is increased 2 percent or CO2 is doubled, (2) by using the CLIMAP climate boundary
conditions to analyze the contributions of different physical processes to the cooling of the
last ice age (18K years ago), and (3) by using estimated changes in global temperature and the
abundance of atmospheric greenhouse gases to deduce an empirical climate sensitivity for the
period 1850-1980. Our 3-D global climate model yields a warming of -4OC for either a 2 percent increase of So or doubled CO2'
The key part of this is the reference to palaeoclimate which gave the empirical 2% increase of S0. Since 1997, when it was shown that CO2 rise followed T, climate science has been airbrushing the palaeoclimate connection out of history. This won't work. What's more, the 2% increase of S0 was justified originally as 0.5% from Milankovitch amplified by 4.
As for your spiel about Northern ice sheets, that won't do either. Stott 2007 shows that CO2 rises 2 ky after warming of the deep Southern Ocean. That means massive heat increase which restores the ocean currents. Simultaneously there is significant regional climate change with 20 ppm rise in CO2 and melting of the Southern high glaciers. This was 1000s of years before any Northern hemisphere warming.
There were many previous such events; biofeedback via phytoplankton blooms. The albedo flip process is laughable; the reality is significant reduction of cloud albedo, the same process which has given recent Arctic ice melt, now reversing..
No CO2-GW is needed to account for ice age warming, nor recent warming, but there may be some. Stephens work is lacking the key physics. iIve solved that problem.
mydogsgotnonose
You originally said this:
It is wrong. Kindly have the good grace to admit it. The quote from H84 you provide simply emphasises the (large) role of modelling in the three-pronged approach that paper employed. I'm not going to respond on this again.
You say:
First, it is nonsensical to claim that "climate science has been airbrushing the palaeoclimate connection out of history". So much so that I'm not going to waste time disputing this with you.
Second, things have moved on. I have briefly discussed Milankovitch amplification above. I am not going to repeat myself. You appear to have latched on to the understandable deficiencies in a twenty-eight year old study in an attempt to discredit the entire field of climate science. This does not work with me, so you can stop now. You may also benefit greatly from reading Hansen's current work. Might I suggest Hansen & Sato (2011) Paleoclimate implications for Human-Made Climate Change.
You say:
But nobody is suggesting that CO2 is a dominant or even significant factor in the initial amplification of Milankovitch forcing. Your argument here is misleading. The study your reference, Stott et al. (2007), concludes that slight changes in austral Spring insolation reduced SH sea ice extent. Consequent reduction of ice-albedo feedback (the dominant feedback in glacial climate states) amplified the warming.
This is consistent with what I have said above.
You say:
And yet again provide no evidence. You have none, and we both know it. Please stop making wild, unsupported claims. Or I will stop taking you seriously.
You say:
From what I can see here, you have solved nothing and convinced nobody except yourself. And now you disown your own reference: Stephens too doesn't understand the physics (although apparently he was fine and dandy yesterday when he was "the US' top cloud physicist").
This is going nowhere and I think I've said enough.
BBD: had to work hard at this didn't you! Hansen derived 4 K climate sensitivity by using CLIMAP and post-industrial warming assuming CO2 drove the end of ice ages and that CO2-AGW is responsible for most modern warming. Go into the detail and the 0.5 K Milankovitch warming has to be amplified by ~4.
When in 1997 the CO2 link to the end of ice ages was broken, we had to have the end of the MWP and the hockey-stick. And don't tell me there was never a claimed CO2 palaeo link - have another look at Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' where the time axis was shifted to make it appear that CO2 rose with T.
The real answer is here: R. Rothlisberger R., Bigler M., Wolff E. W., Joos F., Monnin E.and Hutter M. A., GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 31, L16207, doi:10.1029/2004GL020338, 2004
The end of ice ages is driven by biofeedback, which also gives rise to the Arctic melting we've had since the late 1980s, and is now reversing. This means CO2 climate sensitivity is probably much lower than claimed by the IPCC. You see this cooling in falling N. Atlantic OHC, a process that is impossible if CO2-AGW is dominant. In science, experiment is the trump card.
As far as I can see, this paper does not exist. Can you please provide a link to - at the very least - the abstract. A pdf would obviously be preferable. You've had me looking for this study before. It didn't seem to exist last time either.
R. Rothlisberger R., Bigler M., Wolff E. W., Joos F., Monnin E.and Hutter M. A., GEOPHYSICAL
RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 31, L16207, doi:10.1029/2004GL020338, 2004
You have repeatedly referred to a large body of evidence supporting the biofeedback claim. I have done a literature search and find nothing. Even if the Rothlisberger paper argues this, it will be a single, apparently isolated study.
Polar melt is not reversing. Why do you keep making this claim?
And you misrepresented Stott et al. (2007) substantially above. Now I have pointed this out, do you now retract that misrepresentation?
I am finding your commentary to be suspiciously misleading at this point.
BBD: see my paper when I get it past the peer review traps!
BBD: try this: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004/2004GL020338.shtml
Phytoplankton blooms over 3000 years reduce cloud albedo, heat the oceans.
No CO2 is necessary! The whole IPCC case est kaput!
mydogsgotnonose
From Rothlisberger et al. (2004):
Once again, you are referencing a source that does not support your incessant assertion that:
And:
And:
To deal with the last first: Rothlisberger et al. deals with a 60ka record. It does not extend back to the period 2.8Ma - 0.7Ma when glaciations had a 41ka periodicity.
R04 argues that temperature variations in Antarctica were in phase with variations in non-sea salt calcium (nss-Ca2+) indicative of large variation in dust deposition. The authors propose that this may have caused CO2 to rise by 20 ppmv (SO) and 8 ppmv (NP) respectively. The authors do not endorse the view that CO2 "is not needed to account for ice age warming" or that "the end of ice ages is driven by biofeedback".
You have not withdrawn your previous misleading claim about Stott et al. (2007). Why?
You have not withdrawn you incorrect statement that the Arctic ice melt trend is reversing. Why?
You have not accepted that you got the actual effect of phytoplankton on clouds wrong. Why?
On the matter of cloud optical physics, other than moving from referencing Stephens to saying that he has 'got the physics wrong' you do not address the fact that the man himself states:
Why?
When I pointed out that all other researchers in the field find evidence that suggests cloud feedback to be positive, eg Chang & Coakley (2007); Eitzen (2008); Lauer et al. (2010) and of course Dessler (2010) you chose not to respond. Why?
Good luck with getting your paper through the review process. I think you may be in for a rough ride.
BBD: My intention has been to create an entirely CO2-GW free explanation of the end of ice ages and of present Arctic, all that needed to take the rug from under the feet of the zealots. I've succeeded.
The present Arctic melting, now reversing, proves the biofeedback process. Arctic experts have logged the reduction of cloud albedo above melting old ice and the physics is now understood.
It's only a matter of time before the IPCC consensus is transferred to the dustbin of scientific history there to rest with phlogiston. I hope you remain gainfully employed. I'm retired!
mdgnn
I very rarely agree with BBD about anything except the futility of wind power but I do think we are entitled to a reference to support this statement. Firm evidence that CO2 is not a major driver of recent global warming would be a game changer.mydogsgotnonose
If you are retired you will have sufficient time to re-read and respond to the questions I asked at Jan 10, 2012 at 8:54 AM. Accurately and succinctly please.
You have comprehensively failed to make your case. Mike Jackson and me have ongoing differences. For him to comment as he does here should sound a very loud warning in your ears.
BBD
Still with the "you must answer my questions" theme.
The reason I'm asking for some solid evidence that limits the CO2 influence is that it might just bring you back to a level of reasonable discussion.
As well as confirming what a lot of people suspect, namely: warming, yes; global warming, perhaps; anthropogenic warming, to an extent; catastrophic warming, absolutely not.
Mike
You seem to be missing an important aspect of the concept of 'discussion'.
People need to answer reasonable, relevant questions. Gish gallops of assertion don't cut it.