Al Franken refers to Michael Mann “the Meryl Streep of climatologists.”
Mueller: 'If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so'.
Germany proposes to give up coal...by 2038. Not helpful. The link has a graph of their electricity generation mixture. Coal is slowly declining, but still rules.
"Why natural cycles only play small role in rate of global warming," Karsten Haustein et al, CarbonBrief, 5/24/19.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-natural-cycles-only-play-small-role-in-rate-of-global-warming
Cato closes its climate shop; Pat Michaels is out.
The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers' concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization.Finally:
"They informed me that they didn't think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, 'OK, bye,'" Michaels said in an interview yesterday. "There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn't work out...."
Cato also is no longer affiliated with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long been critical of established climate science. Lindzen was a distinguished fellow at the think tank.
Prediction of the future from 1982 by @exxonmobil , along with data showing how it has actually evolved. Exxon's predictions were extremely accurate. #ExxonKnew @GeoffreySupran @NaomiOreskes pic.twitter.com/Syf8AR6XXJ— Andrew Dessler (@AndrewDessler) May 14, 2019
> Prediction of the future from 1982 by @exxonmobil...
ReplyDeleteI saw AD tweet that; and now you repeat. But you and he are coy as to what moral we should draw from this. Is it entirely value-neutral and just an interesting factoid? Or that Exxon are a quality company and we should take their opinions seriously, as proved by past successes like this? Or something else?
William, I think it shows that Exxon's scientists (at least) were honest about the science. And that projecting temperature, at least, into the future isn't/wasn't that difficult. One of the morals is that if Exxon's management had been honest about what their scientists were finding, we'd all be better off. Of course, I understand that you can't expect corporations to be honest when tens of trillions of dollars are on the line. But it shows climate denial for what it is.
ReplyDelete> projecting temperature, at least, into the future isn't/wasn't that difficult...
ReplyDeleteIs that true? How can you tell they weren't just lucky? That pic shows them to be within better than 0.1 oC. If you're asserting that predicting temperature 40 years ahead within 0.1 oC is possible, then I've got an IPCC report to show you that disagrees.
> One of the morals is that if Exxon's management had been honest...
I don't see how you get that moral from this picture. The picture tells us nothing new about the state of the science or of the state of Exxon's knowledge, AFAIK. Unless you incorrectly assert that they knew what the temperature rise would be accurately.
There is a CSALT model -- uses only CO2, SOI, aerosols, length-of-day and Total Solar Irradiance -- that does a pretty fine job of reproducing global temperature:
ReplyDeletehttp://contextearth.com/2015/01/30/csalt-re-analysis/
https://forum.azimuthproject.org/discussion/1674/csalt-model-of-global-temperature-time-series
Exxon's model WAS accurate. What else can you say? Maybe they got lucky. Or maybe they knew what they were doing and projecting temperature even back then wasn't very difficult.
I think there's a definite moral to the story -- trust the scientists, not the corporations and politicians.
But if you actually believed these simple models could be that accurate *for the future* you'd be arguing strongly to throw away all the expensive GCMs and stop wasting our money on them. And, as I say, the IPCC certainly doesn't believe it can predict the future that accurately.
ReplyDeleteNo, the CSALT model only returns global temperature. There are many more parameters one would like to know that can only (AFAIK) come from global climate models -- precipitation, polar ice melt, regional changes, changes in extremes, ocean acidification, sea level, ECS, TCR, etc etc.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I would expect the CSALT model to become less accurate -- on the low side -- as feedbacks become more prominent.
ReplyDeleteExxon's behavior reminds me of that of the pharmaceutical industry. You'll find excellent, high quality science being done in the industry, but politics then playing fast-and-loose with those results, in particular in their marketing.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Marco.
ReplyDelete