Stirring the pudding stick

[rogue06]

The title is a reference to a saying occasionally heard up in the southern Blue Ridge portion of the Appalachian Mountains and essentially refers to stirring up trouble.

I'm using it wrt an assessment of some of the predictions made about global warming (now often referred to as climate change) back when it first surfaced as an issue in 1988. I've always remained neutral on the issue -- largely accepting that it is taking place at some degree (no pun intended) but has largely been hijacked by extremists who present worst case scenarios as inevitable and hypocrites like Al Gore who maintains a lifestyle that produces a carbon footprint similar to what a small town would cause.

Anywho...

From the "anti" side

Source: Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up?

Source

© Copyright Original Source

And from the "pro" side"

Source: Listening to James Hansen on Climate Change, Thirty Years Ago and Now

smiley bleep.gifSource

© Copyright Original Source

Let the games commence

[Sparko]

[TheLurch]

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that this statement, from the anti editorial, is false. And it seems that it's the entire crux of their argument.

EDIT: my guess is that either they're using the satellite record (which isn't actually the surface temperature), or arbitrarily cherry picking the year 2000 rather than, say, 1998 when Hansen testified, in order to get something that's almost but not quite statistically significant. Both of those are assuming that they're making the effort to be technically correct.

[TheLurch]

Incidentally, for people interested in a detailed analysis of how Hansen's predictions are holding up to the data, the head of NASA's GISS has written a detailed blog post on it.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...ny/#more-21478

The TL;DR in visual form:

[HMS_Beagle]

I can say with a fair degree of certainty that this statement, from the anti editorial, is false. And it seems that it's the entire crux of their argument.

Quite a bit of the anti article is demonstrably false. .

For example, their claim about the Greenland ice sheets not melting significantly is 100% bogus.

The claim that global warming isn't making hurricanes stronger / more destructive is false. The additional destructive power of Hurricane Harvey last year which clobbered Houston was conclusively linked to extra atmospheric moisture from AGW. Hurricane Harvey Links to Ocean Heat Content and Climate Change Adaptation

The claim about the Lewis and Curry model being the new "correct" one is also empty propaganda. Judith Curry is well known for her anti-climate change stance and this latest work has not been accepted by the large majority of the climate community.

Most of the anti article is standard boiler-plate climate change denier BS, the same garbage you get from anti-science websites like Watts UpWithThat.

[rogue06]

Incidentally, for people interested in a detailed analysis of how Hansen's predictions are holding up to the data, the head of NASA's GISS has written a detailed blog post on it.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...ny/#more-21478

The TL;DR in visual form:

If I understand it correctly it looks like the observations are between scenarios B & C (being slightly closer to B) which really isn't that far off what the anti story claimed (that scenario C is "closest to reality").

[TheLurch]

If I understand it correctly it looks like the observations are between scenarios B & C (being slightly closer to B) which really isn't that far off what the anti story claimed (that scenario C is "closest to reality").

I was mostly using that in reference to the claim that there's been no significant temperature change, but i now see i wasn't at all clear about that.

If you read the article it came from, you'd find that the Hansen projections were made prior to the Montreal Protocol, and thus assumed significant CFC emissions. CFCs are greenhouse gasses, so we were on track for larger emissions at the time. Scenarios A and B reflect that, C assumes we limit their emissions. The WSJ editorial doesn't mention this at all.