Steven Burnett:
Most of my income is derived from tutoring, with part being tied into the Google helpouts system. One of my most loyal customers for my physics and mathematics tutoring sent me a link to a $10,000 reward challenge for skeptics. Which is now up to $30,000, seen here.
Below is what I wrote back with minor edits. While I could have added more links, or graphs, I feel that this synopsis is the most compact skeptic’s case, without dropping off too many details. Perhaps I should submit it for $30,000.
These kinds of challenges pop up all the time here’s one for creationism:
The problem with the climate change challenge is that no one is denying that there is likely an anthropogenic signal. The question is how much.
This article probably offers one of the better overviews of the issue
You can demonstrate in a lab that CO2 absorbs IR wavelengths within the same range as the earth gives off. The data shows that the northern hemisphere has had a shift in the mean temperature since before the industrial revolution.
Overwhelmingly the people pushing the issue like to try to box skeptics in by presenting it as an all or nothing issue, which those who don’t read skeptic statements take on faith. In reality the skeptic’s side has a much larger range of stances on the issues, I have tried to bold them out. There are some people who make ridiculously stupid claims that there is no anthropogenic signal but it’s a very small minority. Many skeptics feel that they are just internet trolls, we try not to feed them.
A better way to examine skeptics is to look at them as scientific critics, and more specifically to evaluate the criticisms as issues with each step of the scientific method in climate science fields. The standard scientific method goes:
Observations->Hypothesis->Experiment->Analysis. If we were to go back to the ’90′s Then we could state that this was doled out as…
Observations: A warming/CO2 concentration correlation and CO2 absorbs IR spectra, the same trend in the ice core data existed,
Hypothesis: Emissions cause global warming,
Experiment: Climate Model,
Analysis: a close approximation of the hind cast, statistically significant temperature increases, hockey sticks, etc. Through the late 1990′s and early 2000′s the conclusion that global warming is real was scientifically acceptable. The next stage is usually peer review and scrutiny and this is where the theory ran into problems.
The Problems:
The observations aren’t very good prior to the late ’70′s and they get worse as we go back to the earliest records. We weren’t looking for tenths of a degree trends and we weren’t controlling our instruments for them. Stations have been moved, cities have grown etc, all of which would induce a warming bias on those stations, the data is frankly of poor quality. But there are other problems that came up. The ice core data, using better instrumentation, actually shows CO2 lagging behind temperature changes. More importantly temperatures stopped rising on all data sets, but CO2 levels continued their upward expansion. We also have not detected the “hot spot” that was sure to be proof of an anthropogenic contribution.
Our Hypothesis for how the climate system operates is essentially coded into the climate models. There are 114 of them that are used by the IPCC all of them are going up, all of them are rising faster than observations and most of them have been falsified. But the work falsifying them is very recent.
This paper falsifies the last 20 years of simulations at the 90% confidence interval, within that blog entry you can find another paper that falsifies them at the 98% confidence interval. That paper cites a third that falsified at the 95% confidence interval. What this means is that there is less than a 10%, 2% or 5% chance that the models are wrong by chance.
As the models are mathematical representations of how we think the climate system operates, that means climate scientists were wrong. In response there has been a flurry of activity attempting to attribute the pause and explain it, but explaining a problem with mathematical models after it occurred and claiming that your hypothesis will still be born out requires its own period of time to validate.
There are well over 10 different attributions at this point for the pause, most of them entirely explaining it away. This means the pause in its current state is over explained and more than one of those papers is wrong. In science we aim for a chance at being wrong of 5%, apparently climate science gets a pass.
This divergence also has impacted the metric known as climate sensitivity. Climate sensitivities note a thermal increase of 1.2-1.5 C per doubling of CO2, as in if we went form the current 400ppm CO2 to 800PPM CO2 the temperatures would rise approximately 1.2-1.5 degrees, climate simulations produce much higher results typically between 3 and 4.5 degrees per doubling.
Digging even further there are major issues with the models, our experiments, themselves. Depending on the compiler, operating system and even hardware modeling output can change due to rounding errors. They can’t predict clouds. Nor do they have theresolution to see many of the atmospheric processes that transport heat. But that’s only the climate models themselves. The impact models, or integrated assessment models have almost no data upon which to base their claims. That’s why the IPCC stated that the costs of climate change for 2.5 degrees of warming range from .2%-2% of world GDP. This is again for predictions almost 100 years in the future, which at this time are untestable and unfalsifiable.
When evaluating the cost of a ton of CO2 emissions the integrated assessment models depend very heavily on the discount rate. The current administration cites a discount rate of 3% at 37$ per ton but the most appropriate discount rate, and the one which long term assessments are supposed to be performed at is 7%. This means the actual social cost of carbon is about 4-5$ per ton. As was discussed in an EPW senate hearing, the current administration has failed to produce the 7% discount rate as is required and instead produced 5%, 3% and 2.5% rates. The reason the cost varies so much is partially due to uncertainty in the integrated assessment models which are fed the outputs of the GCM’s. A common coding colloquialism is GIGO garbage in garbage out.
But the worst issue is the analysis. As part of the attempts to preserve the theory there have been some gross statistical practices and data torture employed. The first monstrosity to be slain was Michael Mann’s hockey stick which used a special algorithm to weight his tree samples. That was taken down by Steven McIntyre a statistician who proved not only the weighting issue, but also found the splice point of thermometer data when the proxy and thermometer temperatures diverged.
Call me a troll. There is no anthropogenic global warming. Oxygen isotope data over the past 10,000 years shows that virtually all of the time between 1000 and 9000 years ago it was hotter than it is “today”.
Man contributes a mere 3 % of the co2 in the atmosphere. If co2 causes warming, how is 3 % significant?
As to the professor offering $30,000 to anyone who can design an experiment showing that there is no anthropogenic effect to warming?
How clever! He has got it backwards! There is no documented scientific experiment that proves that there is an anthropogenic effect.
I would think that the more humans the more lands occupyed, the more tree cut forever,
the more fires so intense that it burn the under neat of the earth,
the more houses build, the less food originated from here, the higher the building are built,
the less insects are alive because they where there to carry a task on benefiting the climate,
by interacting with the birds as food for them, but the birds are massacer by the turbines
the raptors are down with their head cut of by it AT A NUMBER DISTURBING,, that all and more influence on the CO2,
but it seem to be a UNSEEN equalizer at work to play in fixing the problem forever forgotten in calculations,
we forgot GOD IS SENDING HIS TROOPS TO RECONSTRUCT OR DECONSTRUCT WHAT HUMAN DO
TO DESTROY…..
thousands of years ago it was warmer they say, there was gigantic animals on this EARTH,
but we forgot to see that there was more bare lands on the continent, THE GIGANTIC ANIMALS WHERE CONSTANTLY ON THE MOVE, IT HELP THE EARTH REGENERATE,AFTER THEY PASS,
WE ARE STANDING FIX TO OUR LIVING QUATERS, IT COULD MAKE A NOTCH IN CALCULATION,
yes i think the lost of land more and more might be a danger of CO2 INCREASE, AND A CONNECTION INTO CALCULATIONS,
i just lay my thoughts bare as they come,
Heartland Institute Conference: CO2 Rise Increases Biodiversity, Crop Yields