THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Warmists admit to pervasive uncertainties

Warmists admit to pervasive uncertainties

So their hedging is well underway. They feel sure that there is SOME warming but not sure how much. And one of their scenarios envisages a temperature rise of around one degree Celsius -- which even skeptics would be comfortable with. Such a rise would be trivial in its effects -- as it was in the 20th century

It was a long way from picture postcard blue skies in Cairns yesterday as the nation's top 450 climate scientists gathered to take stock of global warming.

The tropical rainstorm may pale alongside the political cyclone that has been unleashed by the federal government's talk about a carbon tax. But the continued wet weather may prove relevant to this week's scientific discussions, which are expected to have a heavy focus on how much there is still to understand about climate change.

For Australia, whether the north can expect to get more or less rainfall because of global warming remains one of the great unknowns.

The Cairns meeting is Australia's peak biannual conference at which climate scientists meet to discuss the state of research. And while organisers of Greenhouse 2011 say participants represent a broad church, the uniform view is undeniably one of a warmer future for the planet.

Beyond that, everything from atmospheric carbon, feedback cycles, ocean temperatures, sea levels, carbon sinks, mitigation and adaptation are on the table for discussion.

Delegates will even be told how emotional responses to climate change represent a missing link to behaviour, with those who accept man-made climate change motivated to act by fear. Others who believe the climate is changing naturally are likelier to feel irritation and refuse to engage or respond.

CSIRO principal research scientist Kevin Hennessy says understanding the causes, both natural and human, of climate change is central to the conference agenda, as is consideration of future projections of climate change globally and regionally.

Surprisingly, a key theme through the conference will be the state of scientific uncertainty. This does not mean that sceptics have crashed the CSIRO-sponsored climate change party, however. "These are the real uncertainties as opposed to the uncertainties that some of the sceptics might claim are important," Hennessy says.

The uncertainties include things such as the various causes of regional climate change and extreme weather events, uncertainty about the future level of greenhouse gas emissions, the rate of global warming, the rate of future sea level rises and the scale and impact of future extreme weather events.

"When we are talking about global warming it is not about whether there will be global warming but about the rate of change," Hennessy says.

The approach reflects a new approach by the climate science community after the issue lost significant momentum in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen conference following claims of exaggerated research claims.

The new caution was reflected in an updated statement issued by Britain's Royal Society last year summarising the scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers. The statement highlighted the areas where the science is well established, where there is still some debate and where substantial uncertainties remain. The Royal Society even held a two-day discussion meeting in March last year on handling uncertainty in science.

The Australian conference agenda reflects the new approach has been taking place elsewhere ahead of the release of a new data from global modelling that will form the basis of the International Panel of Climate Changes update due in 2013.....

Penny Whetton, a senior scientist with the CSIRO's Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, says there are two ways to deal with the uncertainty. "One is trying to reduce it," she says. "The other is working with uncertainty and communicating it because we have to decide how to deal with the climate change issue while the information is somewhat uncertain.

"There are some things we know with great certainty in our climate change understanding and some things we know with less certainty, and we really need to make that clear in our communications as well. "The best example is that we are expecting increasing temperatures in future and the only uncertainty associated with that is how much and exactly how rapid it will be.

"If you move to another variable such as rainfall change, although we are reasonably certain about decreased rainfall in southern Australia we don't actually know the direction of rainfall change in northern Australia.

"As we go forward, some of that growth in knowledge creates new uncertainties while clarifying the certainties we have been previously working with." ....

Clarification is also needed on what global warming means for rainfall in the tropical north. "I will be particularly interested to see what the new crop of models are showing for rainfall in northern Australia because that has been a major source of uncertainty," Whetton says.

"Many lines of evidence over many years have pointed towards decreases in rain in southern Australia. "But it has been more uncertain about how precipitation will change in the north, with some models showing decrease and some showing increase," she says.... Research is still under way to establish what role, if any, climate change has had on the most recent extreme rainfall events in Queensland.

Climate scientists generally say it is not possible to identify a climate change signal in any particular weather event. And the higher than average rainfall in eastern Australia last year is consistent with the La Nina weather pattern.

But the question of whether the La Nina system was strengthened by associated climate change phenomena is contested, just as there is global discussion about the extent to which natural feedback mechanisms, such as cloud and air-borne particulate matter, complicate the task of modelling effectively.

One of the reasons global climate models differ from one another on how much warming they show relates to different feedback processes operating in those models. Water vapour feedback is well understood as a positive feedback, reinforcing warming. Aerosols tend to have a cooling effect, but the amount of aerosol in the atmosphere is expected to decrease, limiting their beneficial effect.

While high cloud is understood to reinforce warming, there is uncertainty about the extent to which low cloud has a cooling effect.

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Warmists admit to pervasive uncertainties

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