Re: OT: sea level 'rise' hmmmmm....

On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:33:36 -0700, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:10:22 -0700, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:51:59 -0700, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
On Wed, 16 Jul 2008 09:14:46 -0700, Joerg
<notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]

May I suggest you also write Dr.Steve Nerem?
Only a few days have passed. People have lives. My normal practice
is to wait a month, if my question is likely to involve more than a
minute or two of their time. I don't know what you wrote (feel free
to publish it here), but if you asked for something that might take
some care in responding I'd tend to allow a little more time.
Agreed. However, what I do when there is a request I don't have time to
handle right now: I send a short email that I've got to run but will get
back to the requester in about x weeks. Personally I try to avoid
auto-replies but even that would be ok in this case.
Okay.

Let me know what you asked. If I can see what that is and agree with
the slant of it, I'd be willing to put it in my own words and find
someone else who might be able to answer. You've already started Dr.
Nerem on your point, so jumping from two sides within a week would be
a bit... excessive. But there are other scientists working in the
area and I could probably track one or two down on my own and try that
approach.
Email is on another secure PC, not easy to copy. What I wrote:

Thanked him for the quick reply. Wrote that I clicked all over their
interactive map, could not find step increases either, suggested he try
the same. Asked him how the graph was calculated.
Okay. I get the gist. Sounds like a reasonable question to me. I'll
see what I can do. I'll probably phrase it a little differently, of
course. But I'll see if there is someone "down in the mud" on this
stuff who can provide some insight.
Thing is, their data on the interactive map is given in cm while the
main page has mm. So there may very well be a rise but one cannot say
from the data presented.

Everything is in the details. As you well know. Let's just see about
what they are and let it all fall out where it may.

Coincidentally I had a discussion with a group in Germany who kind of
ganged up on me as a hardcore denialist. Which I am not, I am just a
skeptic. They were blaming the last record flood in Hamburg on the
rising sea level. So, I asked them to present some data I could throw on
Excel that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the level there is
rising. A link would suffice. Since then, silence ...

I don't have much to add. I think they overstepped. But unless they
are practicing scientists expressing a professional opinion, I
wouldn't worry too much. Like you and me, they are just folks.

Suppose you were looking at an oscilloscope trace, Joerg. It's
displaying the amplified voltage received from one narrow band of a
spread spectrum broadcast. And someone pointed to a specific peak at
a specific moment of time on the curve and asked you .. "Is this peak
because of the transmission? Or ambient environment or electronic
noise?" Who's to say? But in the end, the communication of an
intelligent signal works very well, as you know. Even if you can't
nail down one specific event as belonging here or there.

Climate science isn't so dissimilar, which is about detecting the
meaningful signals not concentrating on voltage X or current Y along
the way. And just like the several spread spectrum techniques are
quite obviously successful in communicating meaningful signals for us,
the anthropogenic signal is also quite clear and understandable.
Weather is essentially individual data points along the time axis. If
you have enough of them you can start to say something about their
collected meaning. But isolated? Nothing much, really.

For a more down to Earth example, you can look at Oregon. We have a
lot of water on the western side. 40-60 inches a year isn't all that
uncommon and some places regularly get more than that. We have "100
year flood plains" that are considered quite buildable for homes...
because, well, floods don't happen all that often there and the few
times they do is ... acceptable risk. But let's say that these areas
start seeing, because of an increase in the hydrologic cycle caused by
global warming, more precipitation per year and a change in the time
distribution of it so that there is even more in the winter and less
in the summer. So now we start seeing areas which only saw a certain
kind of flood once or twice or maybe three times in a century starting
to occur at a rate of once every 10 years. Is such a flood event
happening in 2008 caused by global warming?? Or the one in 1996? Or?
Noone can say, obviously. But what they can say is that the frequency
has indeed changed, the plains are no longer 100 year flood plains but
now appear to be 10 year flood plains (much worse to build on) and
that perhaps at least 5 or 6 of them in a century WERE the result of
global warming. Can't say which ones, of course. But there they
still are, all the same.

It's over-reaching to pick out a hot spell and say "Ah hah! Global
warming!" But it is also over-reaching to pick out a cold spell and
say "Ah hah! Global warming is over or never was!"

Now back to the spread spectrum point. Let's say someone looks at the
raw amplified curve of data and tells you, "There is no such thing as
spread spectrum communications." And they point to the noise level
without it and the noise level with it and it appears to the eye to be
about one and the same. Does this mean they are right?? No. But if
one is ignorant about how it works, and it takes some education to
fully apprehend all of the details how it works, then it would be easy
to argue that it was wrong or impossible and then to point to the raw
data here and there to make their ignorant claim seem right. Yet, you
would know infinitely better than they would. And you'd have no
question, at all. No matter how much they tried to convince you,
you've only to point to the obvious fact that it works.

Climate science works. And it can point to the very rapid warming,
the unparalleled loss of ice on Greenland and the north polar ice cap,
the decline in nearly 100% of all mountain glaciers around the world,
etc., to say "it works" to you. Now, that doesn't get into the
details. Just as you wouldn't need to in order to show them a
communications rig that obviously works just fine without having them
know how it works. But if one wants to get into the details of
climate science and see how the signal is extracted, they can do that.
It takes time, and education, and some math skills. But it is doable
if one is seriously engaged. But if not, all one needs to do is to
look at the broader reality.

The case grows by the week, too. Imagine the case where you are
looking at the tiny output of a single, small, 20mA LED pulsing from
across the room. You have a detector and an amplifier sitting across
the room, which itself is lit by bright fluorescent lamps using
various lower and higher frequencies to drive them and are of varying
lengths and with varying gas pressures in them (mean free path of
electrons.) It's a mess, at the detector. The tiny LED is simply NOT
visible to you. But you know, a priori, the exact pulse rate of the
LED (not necessarily the phase relative to anything.) So you set up
an accumulator process. You sample at a higher rate and bin the
samples. Soon, after some long time period, you will begin to see
that one of the bins (or, at most, three of them) are starting to rise
out of the "noise." The longer you continue, the higher above the
other bins it rises. Soon, it is clearly unmistakable when perhaps
somewhat earlier it would be arguably missing, entirely. And the more
time, the stronger the signal becomes. Like that.

I see the parallel to spread spectrum you are pointing out. But as in
your example with the bins that requires that one never, ever alters
data. In the same way one shall never leave out certain data points that
don't fit the picture unless it is for sure a measurement error. Here I
cannot resist the feeling that many AGW proponents are a bit too tempted.

Also, when someone criticizes a certain observation or conclusion as
Moerner did the others should hear him out, and then answer his points,
dispute them in a fair discussion. Simply stating that his work isn't
reputable and that the media where he published it isn't credible does
nothing to advance climate science. On the contrary, it discredits this
science in the eyes of many. After all, this guy was on the IPCC team
not very long ago AFAIK.

Understood. But I'm also an 'expert reviewer.' Doesn't mean my
opinion is worth taking as a gold standard or even a small piece of
brass. Just this one guy, you know?

It's not that I am saying all AGW proponents are in that same boat, it's
just that there are too many who IMHO (and that of others) seem to be
out of line.

Hell, I'm out of line far too often. Don't hold me against the
science, though. The one thing that really makes me feel like
punching someone, and I don't mean it literally, is when they won't
WORK FOR THEIR OPINION. I don't care a whit if someone completely
disagrees with conclusions -- even conclusions that whole truck loads
of scientists have arrived at through decades of time necessary to
allow a proper consensus to take place. So long as they put in the
appropriate level of work on their part.

Mörner is an example of someone I'd say has a right to express an
opinion, even if (frankly) I think it isn't very sound. He's put in
effort and no one can take that away from him. But let me add a note
of caution on this point:

Einstein insisted that the universe wasn't expanding or contracting,
modified his own theories, because of unsettling conclusions that were
obvious to him without it, to include a fudge factor to "make it so."
Einstein also refused, to the very last moment, to accept Heisenberg's
and Dirac's and Schrödinger's approach to quantum mechanics, despite
the unique successes their particular perspectives had in not only
explaining earlier experimental results but also in predicting,
literally out of whole cloth, new particles that wouldn't be seen for
decades -- including specific masses and behaviors (I'm thinking of
mesons, in particular, here.) This illustrates the problem of the
opinions of just one person, no matter what other contributions they
may have also made. It's part of why consensus is important and it's
why time is required, as well, to allow it to develop carefully.

And Mörner is not even Einstein.

Point here being, consensus is roughly the best we've got going right
now regarding climate science.

Although the first papers did occur in the mid to late 1800's, they
are few and far between and for at least five decades afterwards were
largely ignored because of a badly designed experiment by Angstrom or
his assistant. It wasn't until WW II that interest was renewed
seriously in how the atmosphere attenuated various wavelengths and
that folks actually discovered things like pressure broadening. In
addition, around that time some new instrumentation was developed that
could actually monitor the tiny fractions required to 'see' what CO2
was doing. Not only Keeling's design, but also Lovelock's (which
could monitor in parts per billion and was used to investigate world
wide air current flows for the first time [factored into weather
prediction, which was also a new field that people were interested
in].) So although some basic physics was understood, it was only in
the late 1950's and 1960's that data started pouring in. One needs
data AND theory, you know. Anyway, interest in the stratosphere
increased with the desire for SSTs and the US engaged some studies,
which resulted in worries about CFCs, but also began to learn more
about the various layers within the stratosphere and circulation at
that level. Plus, some of the first papers on aerosols and 1D
estimations of the effects of additional CO2. So by the early/mid
1970's, we were seeing some new thinking stimulated by real world
data. It wasn't until the late 1970's that satellites began to be
cheap enough to consider putting up for some further climate studies
and the very first one to monitor the sun went up, I think, in
November of 1978. Then there was the discovery of the ozone hole
(first observed by a British researcher in Antarctica in 1981? I
think, but he held back his observations because he believed that NASA
must have known about all this with their expensive satellites and
decided it must have been his own fault) around 1985, when the error
in the software was discovered and the data re-examined. Then U2
flights in the stratosphere over Antarctica confirmed the early 1970's
work of Mario Molina and FS Rowland from way back in late June of 1974
and the specific chemistry processes they (and others) predicted.
(Hearings in congress in the late 1980's about that.) Around this
time the very first inklings of the ability to begin to pull together
the data and theories into global models allowed the IPCC to actually
try their hand at a consensus and we got our first report from them --
quite conservative, it turns out.

So we are roughly just two decades post that era. In that time,
compute power has dramatically grown (33MHz PCs going now to 3GHz PCs
and at much less real cost, to boot.)

Well, you get the idea. Things are moving very fast. Even in just
the last few years there have been dramatic improvements. For
example, we now have a long enough track of solar insolation from a
variety of satellites (see PMOD site) that we can pretty much lock
down the fact that the sun isn't a significant contributor to the
changes seen of late. Cloud parameterization is very much better, as
well. Grid sizes have greatly shrunk, land shapes such as gorges and
mountains and so on have been added, upper air flows have been studied
and added to the data bases for theoretical analysis and calibration,
and on and on.

It takes teams to process all this and to consider various arguments
and arrive at crafted conclusions. One person is overwhelmed. Unlike
things such as planetary motion, where one can ignore almost all of
the real forces involved with impunity and reduce the problems to
something one person can manage alone, climate science has a great
many profound influences operating in non-linear combinations and so
many of them cannot be ignored that no one person is up to the sole
challenge of it. One of the reasons why GCMs are developed, in fact,
is to work them not just forward, but also backwards, to see how they
predict. What are the odds that some large collection of various bits
of known physics (coupled to parameterizations from measurements
around the globe today) could predict regional cooling and warming
events, if they weren't "skillful?" You know the dangers of
extrapolation beyond the end of a curve, just using simple
mathematical-only models! VERY DANGEROUS and quite unlikely to be
skillful beyond the range of data supplied to them, unless the
mathematical model is a REAL REFLECTION of the situation. For
example, it would be appropriate to use an exponential model for an RC
decay. Given some data, one could reasonably predict (extrapolate)
outside of the data range. But what if you didn't know anything about
the curve and just picked a "linear fit model" instead? Might be okay
close-by to the data... but it would soon fail horribly. GCMs help
test out the physical understanding like this. If they can be used
backwards in time and are skillful at predicting events and if they
can be used forwards in time and are skillful at predicting ahead of
time, too, then that helps you gain some confidence. Pinatubo, for
example, was one such test -- and successful in many regards for the
models at the time. Anyway, that's why there are GCMs. To help us
test out the physics we think applies and help test out the domains we
believe they apply to. One gains a measure of additional confidence
in them when they are more successful at their _extrapolations_, taken
long ways backwards.

Anyway... there it is. I'm out of line a lot, myself. But abstract
yourself away from the visceral reactions to individuals' comments and
remember that human emotions have nothing to do with nature, which
remains immune and inert to our desires, anger, wishes, and so on. If
I say something demeaning to another, that's all it is. Just an
emotional comment, perhaps designed to goad them into better behavior.
It has nothing whatever to do with the science knowledge or with
nature, other than human nature. The fact that lots of people are
upset and express it publicly on various sides of this has NOTHING to
do with nature or the actual science knowledge. Just as the fact that
William Shockley was abusive to others doesn't change the results of
his work, not one iota.

Just because Osama bin Laden may, let's say, express his own personal
support for the election of one presidential candidate over another ..
I'm sure you'd realize well that such a statement would have nothing
whatever to do with either candidate. No one can control what bad
people say or care about. Doesn't change anything, though. It can be
hard to separate one's visceral reactions and the abuse some folks
dish out, perhaps unfairly, from the science knowledge. When people
are dead wrong and obstinate about it, it can make anyone angry. When
people are just plain mean-spirited, it can also make anyone angry.
But don't confuse/conflate the two sources of anger. Getting angry
doesn't mean anything much. It's just a symptom, but it says very
little about the cause. For argument's sake, if I say something to
make you angry, that's my fault. But it's no fault of climate
scientists. Just because I happen to feel convinced now of many of
their conclusions and am also a bona fide ass, none of that has
anything at all to do with these conclusions I agree with. It just
means I'm an ass, that's all. (Hopefully, I won't be too much of
one.)

Jon
.

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