I have cleaned up my Powerpoint presentation and added my narration on the notes pages. I have this available both as a .ppt file as well as a pdf. The pdf, I think, works particularly well — it looks and reads more like a book. This is my best current cut at presenting the science of the skeptic’s position and mostly supersedes my earlier book. Right click either to download. You are welcome to use the presentation with your own local groups.
Powerpoint presentation with notes pages (.ppt)
Some example pages:
Your presentation of the Mann hockey stick is clear and compelling compared to my own efforts, and others I have seen.
I had to think for half a minute before I convinced myself that your blank charts (page 10, for example) were indeed supposed to be blank. I suggest a caption like “this chart intentionally left blank.”
Your graph of ocean heat, page 63, shows 2003 to 2009 data. But this graph over at RealClimate has the data from 1955 to 2010, and shows a big jump from 5×1022 J to 12×1022 J from 2001 to 2003. Clearly, you did not intend to hide this jump from the reader. If this jump is real, it undermines your trend in dotted red, which you extrapolate from 2003.
Your display of the failure of model predictions is convincing and clear.
You suggest that CO2 cannot cause climate change without causing warming first. You also accept, at least for the sake of your presentation, that heat absorbed by CO2 will cause some incremental warming of the entire atmosphere. Neither of these statements have empirical backing. They seem reasonable, but so did The Celestial Ether. My experience with systems that contain feedback suggests that heat in one place can cause the overall system to cool down. By warming the upper atmosphere, CO2 might cause overall cooling instead of warming. And CO2 might cause climate change without initial warming.
So, have you chosen to accept the fundamental precepts of AGW because it strengthens your presentation in the face of AGW believers, or have you chosen to accept them because you actually do accept them?
Corn growth has increased also because of genetic modifications and improvements in methods. I’m not sure how you could separate these from growing CO2 concentration.
Thank you for bringing together all the glacier and ice cap data, especially the graph of glacier retreat.
I’m not an expert on economics, so won’t comment on final sections other than to say: they were clear and convincing to me.
The part about 385ppm being analogous to a plane trip is completely wrong. For one thing, it’s not ppm its ppmv (parts per million by volume). Think of it this way, you have a volume that is 100 units on a side, then you have 1 million units. Consider if one cubic unit was the 1 ppmv. If sunlight were to strike one side of this volume with one ray going through each unit square on one side and passes through the container. The chances of a ray hitting the one unit in question are not 1 in a million, but 1 in 10000. Granted this model is very simplified, but it shows how we should think about this ppmv issue. I think you should drop this part about the airplane trip.
The final section on policy is not as good as the data and science summary.
Have you looked at ‘Cool It’ and ‘The Copenhagen Consensus’ by Bjorn Lomborg?
Also worth reading might be ‘An Appeal to Reason : A Cool Look at Global Warming’ by Nigel Lawson.
These books look at costs from the IPCC but then use realistic discount rates for future damage and how adaption may be cheaper than mitigation. Lawson is skeptical of the IPCC but starts with their figures while Lomborg accepts their figures.
Both suggest a carbon tax that is used to fund research into new energy research.
Great presentation though, it continues on from where your book was with more updates which is well worth it. Having the citations on each page is also a good idea.
Great presentation!
A couple of questions re the glacier in Greenland: It seems that the glacier rapidly decreases over the last decade, accounting for what looks like about one third of its total decrease over the last 150 years. Is there any info on this? Is the glacier more shallow where it seems to be receding at a quicker rate? Or is there a tipping point in the temperature?
Maybe a bit more about the Sun’s method for heating the earth? The Sun also radiates energy on multiple frequencies. It’s distributed like a bell curve and most of the light energy comes to the Earth in the form of visible light.
The energy the radiates back into space on multiple frequencies also distributed like a bell curve. Based on the temperature of the Earth in general, the radiation is mostly in the form of infrared and long wave radiation.
Parts per million is not really a good way to look at Carbon Dioxide. Often poisons become effective at the ppm level. What would be interesting would be when Carbon Dioxide concentrations start interfering with physiological functions of the human body. We humans could never live in an atmosphere made up entirely of carbon dioxide.
Before discussing the US temperature histories and the flawed stations, you should explain how science is usually done with controlled singly-blind or doubly-blind experiments. The scientists will have multiple groups, the control group and the experimental groups. The methodology will be so strict that the only difference between the groups will be factor(s) being tested by the experiment. If designed well, such experiments will be able to quantify and isolate the effects the factor(s) in question.
In contrast, observation studies are studies where the scientist has no strict control over the subjects. The scientist can only watch out for contributing factors and note the outcomes. The scientist can still divide th observations into a control groups and experimental groups and note the correlation between factors and outcomes. The identification of a correlation can be very valuable, but these kinds of studies are frowned upon for establishing causality.
One subset of the observation studies are called longitudinal studies where scientists observe subjects for years and publish their results a generation or two later. Observational studies deteriorate in certainty as time passes and exogenous factors get introduced so longitudinal studies have lots of possibilities for error. These studies are also impossible to replicate because it takes too damn long to even try.
The kicker is this:
The compilation of weather station data in the USHCN and other network as it relates to global warming effects of carbon dioxide is a longitudinal study of temperatures without a control group. These is no man-free Earth to compare the results against.
So given that climate science is already on such shaky grounds, the least we can do is to ensure that temperature collection been strict, uniform, and accurate – which it hasn’t been.
The other interesting thing to note is that climate science isn’t about testing hypothesis with experiments anymore. It’s guess and check based on climate models. And if the guess was wrong, then there is refinement of models. It doesn’t sound like science at all.
Very good presentation. Just a small nit — when commenting about sunspots and the little ice age in your pdf file, you refer to the “modern” sunspot minimum that took place during the little ice age. I believe it should be the “Maunder” minimum, named after the individual who first called attention to it.
Thank you for putting this together! Interesting points on feedback, which I haven’t heard before. The idea of positive feedback is pretty suspect. I think the digs at Gore weaken the overall persuasiveness of the work however.
Thank you Warren for a masterful exposition, nearly avoiding all the unpleasant implications of the debate. I would love to take you for dinner if you are ever in the UK, family too. Sadly, I would not be my usual extrovert self but realise I would be with someone cleverer! Making a comeback, my golf is pretty good and my wife very attractive.
Ironically the glacier claim was what first alerted me to the CO2 scam, reading old national geographic on disk, and I found an article in an early edition about a lagoon that had 5 glaciers meeting and calving icebergs from the mouth of the lagoon into the sea, some 20 years later another explorer found the glaciers had retreated on to land and were calving into the lagoon. This was all before the car was invented, being old enough to have learnt about the Romans growing grapes by Hadrian’s wall and the Vikings being frozen out of Greenland I figured out that it was all just normal cycles, also CO2 is the basis of life so vilifying it is foolish (if there was any chance it was a danger then the catalytic converters on our cars would be gone) Why not look at O2 levels? surely if we are burning enough fossil fuel to pose a threat the oxygen use to facilitate this combustion should show up. As for Gore, he is a treasonous fraudster and deserves all that is coming his way.
Your presentation is as clear and persuasive as anything I’ve read. Thanks for the excellent work.
I have been working on a climate paper for over three years. It seems that when I think it is completed, more data becomes available. Recently I was given a report written or published by Leon Ashby. I would like to use some of his diagrams, but I can’t authenticate the data. Bad data destroys credibility. The paper touches on so many of the sciences, that I changed the title of my paper to “Compendium On Global Warming.” My attempts at a PowerPoint presentation are not progressing very well. Perhaps too much data. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide is an extremely small part of the climate equation. Convincing the public of that premise is the hard part.
You need to change the slide on Corn yeilds.
You say that someone else said that that corn yeilds should be going down because of the increase in temperature, but they are going up.
Yes, it does show that the people who though corn yeilds would decrease were wrong. But it doesn’t show that the increase in temperature didn’t had a negative effect . Infact you don’t actually mention the change in temperature around the corn fields in Iowa and your map you show when looking at Tucson shows that from the measurements from the weather statinos the increase in temperature has been minimal.
You’ve got a coll/cause problem here. In the past half century there has beeen huge technologiy advances aimed at increasing the corn yeild per acre. However, this does not mean that the temperature isn’t having a negative effect that is basically dwarfed by the effect of, for example, genetically modifying corn sees allowing bushels to be grown closer together.
You’re probably going to argue that this slide was just to show that the starvation alarmists were wrong… but corn in iowa is again, a terrible proxy for food availability. America has enought food to feed itslef many times over. The problems would be in places were there are shortages.
Basically, I think this slide is terrible.
While as you note it’s not clear to what degree production increases can be attributed to temperature increases (such as they might be), I don’t believe that’s the intention of the Corn Yield slides. The intention is, as I understand it, to point out that predictions of negative impacts based on catastrophic AGW have been completely wrong. One need not demonstrate causality to make that point. If advocates of a theory (in this case of catastrophic material impacts from purported ‘Climate Change’) make predictions based on their theory that are wrong, they are wrong regardless of the specific reasons. In this regard it’s up to those having made such erroneous predictions to explain why their predictions were inconsistent with actual outcomes, not the other way around.
By the way, Corn Yields aren’t a “proxy” for “food availability”; it’s a direct measurement of exactly that. Distributive (and local structural problems) are not attributable to basic ‘global’ productive factors like Climate. This merely points out failures in the predictive quality of parts of Catastrophic AGW theory, it can’t be expected to account for why structural socioeconomic misadventures like the various forms of collectivism and socialism so consistently result in shortages (and actual starvation in many cases)!
Tristan,
On the subject of “food availability”, You might enjoy this: http://www.youtube.com/v/oefeqCmuZRk
(copied from Coyote Blog)
Interesting slide on the timing of glacier melt, and chris edwards’ comment about it all happening long before cars were invented. Have you guys ever heard of the Industrial Revolution? You know, when the internal combustion engine was 1st invented? Around mid-1700s…..
ADiff – You say:
“By the way, Corn Yields aren’t a “proxy” for “food availability”; it’s a direct measurement of exactly that.
Corn Production in Iowa is not the same as global food avaiablility, unless you can show me a fancy correlation (with at least logical causation) I will not believe you when you say corn in Iowa is a proxy for food availabilty globally. It’s picking a convenient data point.
Hi, got a question:
On page 64 and 65 you make the claim that Hansen’t climate model is significantly over predcicting and you have to select senario A. I started to look onto this, to see if your claim was right… because it certainly was a zinger if it is.
Anyway, over at your enemys blog (Real Climate) they have selected Senario B because they say this was the closest senario to what occured in terms of emissions… IF (a big IF) senario B is actually the one you should select then your presentation would need to be updated and Hansen’s models would look bad… but not AS bad.
Blog post:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-projections/
Data file here:
http://www.realclimate.org/data/H88_scenarios_eff.dat
Image here:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen88_forc.jpg
Anyway, I am not saying you are wrong, but at the moment they have a justification for selecting senario B that it greater than yours for selecting senario a.
What’s you evidence for selection of senario A?
Can you poke holes in their reasons for selecting senario B?