re: #465 LudwigVanQuixote

Good grief, Lud, you responded to my post right away! Don’t you work?

I have another couple of minutes. I have nothing to do with banking or finance. I analyze markets using econ and stat methods. Maybe that’s not scientific enough for you. But I DO have one advantage - I recognize BS when I see it, especially when numbers are involved. That is what I see in the IPCC reports and their underlying papers and analyses.

As for your the “proof” you claim is in those links of yours, I still haven’t seen any specific reference to a paper that deals with the direct cause of temperature rise by increased emissions. Nothing. Here’s what your links show:

There’s one that simply talks about the “history of climate change science,” a cursory overview that just makes claims without girding it with academic papers. It’s put there by someone working for AIP, another cheesy College Park firm aimed at consulting for the non-scientist. They apparently write well, but stay away from too much data and analysis.

There’s the NOAA-related site, which is another overview site but includes references only to the usual closed, assumption-driven models, usually years old, but with no mention of any statistical connection between emissions and warming. I discussed one of those papers referenced, above. Where are the analyses using observed, measured changes showing this important connection.

Then there’s the UC San Diego site (party!). It’s a mess, throwing all the pretty pictures it could find onto the page, but once again it’s just a cursory treatment.

All this leads me to the inescapable conclusion: These sites appear designed for undergraduate students in some survey course like History of Climate Change or some such. Is that your problem - you’re still an undergraduate, which would explain why you’re fixated on that old book from the MIT Press (1970! I was in college then. We did the first Earth Day, never dreaming this stuff would become a religion). It would also explain how you get time to read these blogs all the time.

You make the folling assertion: “And if you knew anything at all about the math you would know that you can not find such a function. You are constrained to use a system of linked non-linear partial differential equations and numerically evolve the system.” Specifying a system of equations seems right, but there’s no reason they need to be non-linear. But even if they were, you could certainly specify a system of several equations. I do that a lot in my own research. So why can’t I “find such a function.”? Your two sentences contradict each other.

Then you continue: “This is because no analytical solutions have been found. The only regressions that make sense are in fitting trends to the data that we have observed.” This is exactly my point! (I apparently was not clear before - sorry.) No analytical solutions have been found! Your second sentence is right on, as well. When researchers have tried to fit trends to observed data, using regression analysis, their results have been at best inconclusive! Their explanatory variables have been shown to be insignificant in their power to move the dependent variable, temperature! This is my problem with all of these assertions that anthropormorphic CO2 emissions cause most of the observed climate change. Maybe they’ve misspecified these equations, maybe the measurements are unreliable, or maybe the climate systems are so complex that they cannot include all the important variables without getting all the statistical problems you usually get with large systems (feedbacks, autocorrelation, etc.). But that’s no reason to throw up their hands and go all religious on us (Heretic! How dare you question the UN or NAS? Get a rope!).

Oops, gotta get back to work. Boss is looking nervous…