Talk:Global warming controversy

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[edit] Rewrite of the Section

While I did not see anything wrong with the previous version, I have decided to rewrite the section attempting to address the issues raised. However, I do not think I can address WP:IDONTLIKEIT]. Here it is:

[edit] Confidence in GCM forecasts

The IPCC states it has increased confidence in forecasts coming from General Circulation Models or GCMs. Chapter 8 of AR4 reads:

There is considerable confidence that climate models provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above. This confidence comes from the foundation of the models in accepted physical principles and from their ability to reproduce observed features of current climate and past climate changes. Confidence in model estimates is higher for some climate variables (e.g., temperature) than for others (e.g., precipitation). Over several decades of development, models have consistently provided a robust and unambiguous picture of signifi cant climate warming in response to increasing greenhouse gases.[1]

Certain scientists, skeptics and otherwise, believe this confidence in the models’ ability to predict future climate is not earned. Pat Frank writes:

The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable. [2]

Roger Pielke believes computer models do not have predictive power:

A model is itself a hypothesis and cannot be used to prove anything! The multi-decadal global model simulations only provide insight into processes and interactions, but we must use real world data to test the models.[3] RonCram (talk) 04:45, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Latest revert

(1) We don't need a blog post by a chemist working far outside his sphere of expertise (e.g., he makes it clear he doesn't understand the difference between weather and climate). (2) Roger's quote was made in the context of a somewhat nuanced discussion of nonlinear dynamics. Raymond Arritt (talk) 05:53, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

Raymond, you are wrong on three points. First, Pat Frank's quote is not from a blog post but from the highly respected magazine Skeptic. You can learn more about the magazine here. [4] It would help if you would actually read the links before you delete a well-sourced entry. Second, chemists are involved in the atmospheric studies. The highly respected Senior Scientist of Brookhaven National Labs' Atmospheric Science Lab, Stephen Schwartz, began his career as a Assistant Professor of Chemistry.[5] Third, the context of Roger's quote does not change the meaning of his words. Your somewhat obtuse statement might lead readers to think the context makes a difference in this case. It does not. RonCram (talk) 06:11, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Assuming you mean "sensitivity" Schwartz, he's wrong and has admitted as much [6]. Not that will stop you quoting him William M. Connolley (talk) 06:47, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
William, you don't need to assume. I provided a link to his webpage. I glanced at Schwartz's paper and noticed that his numbers are still far below the IPCC. Thank you for the link, however your comment has nothing to do with this discussion. Raymond was trying to make the claim chemists are far afield the arena of climate. It simply is not true. Atmospheric chemists play an important role in understanding climate. Whether Pat Frank is involved in atmospheric chemistry or not, I don't know. It does not matter. The thesis of Pat Frank's paper is that the physical uncertainty accumulates year after year. When calculated in the right way, the rapid growth of uncertainty means the GCMs cannot predict either warming or cooling. The author of such a paper does not need to be an expert in atmosphere or climate. He only needs to understand how science is done. Pat Frank points out the IPCC is not doing it right.RonCram (talk) 14:20, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Raymond was trying to make the claim chemists are far afield the arena of climate. Do you seriously think that I'm that stupid??? I never said any such thing. I made a specific remark about the views of a specific person. Please stop doing this. I've always thought that your errors arose simply from an absence of scientific background rather than willful misrepresentation, but I'm becoming less and less certain. Raymond Arritt (talk) 15:02, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Raymond, do you really know that much about Pat's area of expertise? I doubt it. You didn't even read the article he wrote. You thought the link went to a blog posting. Pat's views on uncertainty accumulation in the models, as published in Skeptic magazine, are notable. There was no reason to revert the entry about this important controversy. I am restoring it.RonCram (talk) 16:05, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Once again you are leaping to unjustified conclusions. I did read the article, and that was the basis of my comment. Yes, I misstated that it with a blog, though I am familiar with Skeptic (presumably you have never made such a casual error yourself). And I googled Pat Frank to read up on his background. Raymond Arritt (talk) 16:40, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
I make mistakes all the time, but I've never referred to a magazine article I just read as a blog posting nor tried to convince people it was not RS for that reason. If you had read Pat's article, then you would know his argument does not depend on his expertise in climate or atmosphere. It has to do with how science properly deals with uncertainty. Nothing you wrote indicates you had any familiarity with the subject matter of his article. My conclusion was hardly unjustified. It may have been wrong, but it was certainly justified as none of your reasons for reverting have held up under scrutiny.RonCram (talk) 17:42, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pat Franks opinion

Alright, I was trying to figure out where to post this, which is hard since someone has split up the discussion in 3 different threads. Anyway, I fail to see why the fact that "Certain scientists (...) believe this confidence in the models ability to predict future climate is not earned" is notable. That is hardly a surprising fact, one would assume, given enough scientists, that there would always be a few who didn't agree with the majority. I am very curious what makes this particular chemists views so interesting that it should be included in the encylopedia?
— Apis (talk) 00:08, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Apis, this is an article about global warming controversy. Readers want to know what aspects of the science around global warming are controversial and why. Lots of scientists are of the opinion the IPCC's confidence in the GCMs is not earned, but most have not published their views. Pat Frank's opinion is notable because he is an established researcher at an elite institution (Stanford) and his views were published in a notable magazine. Your viewpoint that it is not surprising that some scientists would feel this way is reasonable, but not particularly common. Let's say you were a student who read this article for a paper, would you be satisfied with the article if it did not discuss Pat Frank's views and you learned about his views later? I don't think so. I think you would be very dissatisfied with the article. If this were not an article about the controversy, Pat's views would not be notable. Since the article is about the controversy, why pretend there is no controversy around the GCMs? Is reverting the entry really providing a service to readers who want information about the controversy? How does that help or inform readers?RonCram (talk) 03:22, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
Apis, I just looked at the article to see what the entry looks like now. I see that you had deleted everything but the IPCC view. That is hardly NPOV in an article about the controversy. Then you allowed in the bare statement that some people disagree, but you left the statement without any citation to either Pat Frank's view or Roger Pielke's view. I am restoring the citations, at the very least. I am willing to wait to see what Oren0 or other editors may think about the necessity of the quotes. RonCram (talk) 03:43, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
Obviously quoting the IPCC only was unacceptable, and I suspect that Apis realized this which is why he reinserted all but the quote. Obviously we can't provide every quote and link every article that comments on this issue. Our goal should be to try to reflect the most common arguments on both sides. The problem is that some of the editors of this page will call OR/SYN if we try to draw any conclusions from anything, so all we can really do is quote people. I think the reasonable thing to do is to quote the IPCC and then try to find one or two quotes from dissenters that summarize the general points we're seeing. I'd like to point out in terms of weight concerns that the previous revision had a much longer quote from the IPCC than from the skeptic side. Oren0 (talk) 03:57, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
I'm glad you noticed that I put that section back in, If you check carefully you will see that I didn't remove the other items you mentioned either. I only removed the reference to the text by Pat Frank that was inside the block quote, since it was a reference to the quote. I'm not sure the references indicate fully what the sentence is saying though. I have only had time to check the article by pat frank, but I presume the other source also refer to a reliable source by a credited scientist who express concern about the validity of the IPCCs confidence in the GCMs. As you suggest, lets say I was a student who read this article for a paper, would I be upset if it didn't mention Pat Frank? Well that depends. Lets say I read an article about the Earth, would I be upset if it didn't mention the flat earth society's opinion on the shape of the earth? No, most likely not. I would however be very upset if it did indicate that some scientists believed the earth was flat, and I later found out that the flat earth society's opinion only reflect a tiny minority view. What I am concerned about here is that we invent a controversy that don't really exist (except for a tiny minority). That would be very misleading, don't you agree?
— Apis (talk) 01:46, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
I just looked at the other reference in the article, and it appears my assumption was incorrect. It looks like it refer to a blog about climate science discussing a website called "RealClimate". I don't think that is relevant at all in this case. I think it would be appropriate to have a reference that somehow show that the IPCCs confidence in GCM is indeed a notable controversy, and not the opinion of one (or a small minority) of scientists.
— Apis (talk) 02:01, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
"Lets say I read an article about the Earth, would I be upset if it didn't mention the flat earth society's opinion on the shape of the earth? No, most likely not." - This isn't the global warming page. Just try adding anything there that diverts even 1% from the consensus and see what happens to your edit. This is a page about the controversy, and as such controversy belongs. If you were a student who wanted to read about global warming, you'd check out global warming or scientific opinion on climate change. If you wanted to read about the controversy, I think that leaving out controversy regarding models would be a noticeable omission. I would also say that there is no evidence that doubting the accuracy of GCMs is a "tiny minority" view. Especially, again, given the rather awful predictive performance of these models to date. Oren0 (talk) 02:20, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
Its about the controversy... yes. But its about the part of the controversy that is notable - its not just a page collecting quotes from individuals. I have nothing against a section on Models and the public controversy about it - in fact i agree that there must be meat to be found here. What i am against is cherry-picking primary sources to generate a completely original take on it. The correct way to do it, is to find some reliable secondary sources, and then flesh it out with primary sources. (as for the IPCC quote - i frankly don't see what it does on the page - except as the only part of Ron's addition that survived.... get rid of it (imho). --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 10:23, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
Basically I agree with what Kim is saying here. I'm not convinced there is any "meat" to be found though. To me it seems rather ridiculous to question the IPCCs faith in models, "because they are only models". I mean, there might be some argument on what should go in to the model and what not, but the use of models should not be an issue (i would have thought). Whats important in this case though is getting some reliable sources for the claim that there is controversy about this (if there is, it shouldn't be hard to find), and then we can discuss exactly what it should say. I agree that only having the IPCC quote is rather silly and pointless which is why I put back some of what I originally removed. It would probably be better to simply remove the entire section but I didn't want to be overly confrontational about it since it is constantly being reinserted. (It is generally better to discuss changes on the talk page instead of reverting back and forth). (As for what Ron originally put into the article, that was obviously wp:syn as was said to begin with.)
— Apis (talk) 16:39, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
Well 5 minutes of Googling points me to David Douglass's paper in the International Journal of Climatology: "Model results and observed temperature trends are in disagreement in most of the tropical troposphere, being separated by more than twice the uncertainty of the model mean" [7]. This was also picked up in other sources/media: [8] [9] [10] [11]. I could also point to other stories/articles: [12] [13] but I think this is "meaty" enough to start. Oren0 (talk) 17:22, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
Those are basically rewrites of the same press-release (some are even verbatim). I was looking for something a bit more substantial. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 19:24, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

(dedent) How do we feel about the most recent attempted addition over at global warming? This seems to fit into what we're talking about here.

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT, indicates that the "current climate models exaggerate the impact of carbon dioxide on temperature because of a poor understanding and representation of the feedback effects due to clouds and water vapor.” Professor Lindzen further states "Attributing global warming to the rise in greenhouse gases has been reduced to an issue of religious faith modulated by policy relevance." [14]

How much of this is usable? Oren0 (talk) 04:59, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New research on upper troposphere warming

Blow for the skeptics  :)

Upper troposphere is warming after all, research shows Research performed in the US has helped lay to rest one of the lasting controversies surrounding climate models: whether or not the upper troposphere is warming. Climate models have long predicted that the upper troposphere — a region of the Earth’s atmosphere that lies beneath the stratosphere at an altitude of 10–12 km — should be warming at least as fast as the surface. However, since the 1970s temperature measurements carried out by weather balloons have found the lower-troposphere temperature to be fairly constant. This conclusion was backed up in 1990, when researchers used data taken from satellites to measure temperature changes in the troposphere. For a while climate scientists have known that weather-balloon instruments are affected by the warming effect of the Sun’s light. They have also struggled to interpret the extent to which the satellite data of the troposphere could be influenced by the stratosphere. But the awareness of these uncertainties has not made it any clearer as to what temperature changes, if any, are taking place in the upper troposphere. Now, Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood of Yale University have used wind data taken from weather balloons as a proxy for direct temperature measurements to give the first conclusive evidence that the upper troposphere has been warming after all. Although they are an indirect measure of temperature, these wind records can be backed up by satellite and ground instruments, making them more reliable than existing direct temperature measurements (Nature Geoscience doi: 10.1038/ngeo208). ‘Put the controversy to rest’ Allen and Sherwood took wind data from 341 weather-balloon stations — 303 in the northern hemisphere and 38 in the southern hemisphere — covering a period from 1970 to 2005. To covert the data to temperature measurements, they employed a relationship known as the thermal-wind equation, which describes how vertical gradients in wind speed change with horizontally varying temperature. They found that the maximum warming has occurred in the upper troposphere above the tropics at 0.65 ± 0.47 °C per decade, a rate consistent with climate models. “This research really does show the tropical troposphere has been warming over the past three decades,” says Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “And it will, I hope, put this controversy of weather balloon and satellite data to rest.” Santer, who was one of the lead authors of the 1995 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, thinks the next step is to confirm Allen and Sherwood’s findings with direct temperature records. These, he explains, must be taken with advanced weather-balloon instruments that can be calibrated against older models to remove biases. “The approach by Allen and Sherwood is a promising start,” says John Lanzante of Princeton University. “But more confidence can be established as other investigations further scrutinize the wind data and method used to translate winds into temperature-equivalent measures.”


Count Iblis (talk) 13:26, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] There is no controversy

In science it is normal for people to put forward different hypotheses and debate their merit back and forth - often for a long time - this is not a controversy, this is how it works. That thousands, possibly tens of thousands of uneducated idiots who spout ill informed opinion based on emotion still doesn't mean there is a controversy. To keep this article with this name is like having a "evolution controversy" - which doesn't exist either. --IceHunter (talk) 02:33, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree if you interpret "controversy" as "scientific controversy". I think we should make this clear in the lead of the article. We should mention that in the scientific community global warming is not controversial, that the controversy is political in nature. Count Iblis (talk) 02:40, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, that sounds like a good idea.
—Apis (talk) 11:55, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Possible Bias

I have never edited an article on wikipedia, so I feel I should post my 2 cents on the talk page. The chart concerning percents agreeing with statements is, from a statistical standpoint, very biased. I have not read the original chart that the data is taken from, but it is a fallacy to present the view sought in the information requested. It's of my opinion that someone who knows a bit more about the subject matter on this page either find a slightly less onesided chart to post on a secular page concerning an ongoing debate, or at least go over the original survey (assuming the information was changed to be placed on this site)to ensure that wikipedia remains secular on this subject.

An alternate solution would be to make sure that there is a note at the bottom of the chart stating that there may be bias in the survey. All of this may seem anal retentive, but then again, it's an encyclopedia. 2:12, June 8, 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.89.52 (talk) 09:19, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

I don't quite understand your concern. I assume you speak about the table in the "History of public opinion" section? The data is taken from published polls, as far as I can tell without further analysis. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:58, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
It's a bit hard for me to explain, but asking a question that essentially includes the answer is virtually guaranteed to garner the answer "yes". Each question seems to fit that bill, not presenting the person with the option of "Is global warming occuring?" but with "Do you agree that global that global warming is probably occuring?". That "probably" qualifier presents bias in the polls. Again, I'm probably just going a bit overboard with this, but I still think there should be a little note at the bottom stating that the poll data could be in favor of one side.
Aha! Yes, but then the table is only the summary of the polls in the cited sources. The original polls gave multiple (and hopefully exhaustive) options. Check e.g. [15] and [16], two of the sources. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:54, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
The polls from ABC seem pretty much the same, but has another chart on there that might be a little bit better. I'll go ahead and add that one and put in a footnote on the other chart that there may have been some issues in the polling, since they don't really site there charts very well in it. Tomorrow, of course, since I don't have an account. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.18.89.52 (talk) 05:59, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
(ec)Be careful of not adding your own analysis thought, since it might be WP:OR. I feel that as long as the questions are equivalent, as suggestive as they may be, when ask over time they serve a purpose (again, as long as the poll asks essentially the same thing.) More to the point, the "probably" in the question does not affect what this table shows since the word was contained in both questions. The percentage in each case is not important, the change in percentage over time is. Brusegadi (talk) 06:04, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
I'll keep that in mind. A little caption below the chart would probably solve all problems, but it's not going to let me make the change on a new profile. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Blueguy90 (talk • contribs) 05:09, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
You can paste your change here (what you would want) and if people agree I can do it for you. Or, wait a few days (make a few edits) and you should be able to edit semi-protected articles. Brusegadi (talk) 06:23, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Footnote 52

The link to the Scientific American article "Skeptisizm about Sceptics" appears to be a dead link. Can someone please fix this? I can't seem to find the article. Maybe one needs to subscribe to Sci. Am. Mag to get it.--CurtisSwain (talk) 10:04, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Dead link, but still on web.archive. --Van helsing (talk) 10:47, 12 June 2008 (UTC)