This little nugget emerged from a regular commenter:

I called the corporations psychopaths, not those running them, and for a very good reason: they are legally bound to consider only maximising shareholder value. Damage to the environment? No. Deaths among employees, customers or third parties? No. So long as such deaths or damage do not break the criminal law, and will increase profit, that’s what they are legally bound to do. That’s why I said capitalism created these psychopaths...

I'm seeing this bizarre view appear more and more and I'm not sure where it comes from, but probably the film I have yet to see about corporations and how evil they are.    I think it's called "The Corporation".

One can easily make the case that corporations *emphasize* profit.  They should do that within legal means - that is the *whole point*.   American style socialist (ie heavily taxed) capitalism is the reason we live large while those in less corporate driven societies struggle just to keep fed and keep healthy, often failing in both measures.  

Almost *every single corporation* will typically factor in a variety of environmental and social factors in the interest of the greater good,  the good of employees, and the prevailing cultural and ethical standards.   This is in part due to the laws and prevailing cultural standards as is almost every type of collective behavior, but it is also because contrary to the assertion above, corporations that act psychopathically   

In the USA these factors generally make big businesses a great place to work.  Yahoo, for example, has extensive 'green' initiatives.  Google not only pays a small fortune in stock and salaries but pays for all the meals and does the laundry...free.  You'll say these are the exceptions but good stewardship is the corporate rule which is why the west enjoys such high living standards.  That prosperity sure didn't come from the bureacracy - it came in spite of it.   This is why your rules are better applied to enterprises run by those who generally despise US style multinational corporations.

My challenge to corporate critics is to randomly pick 10 companies from S&P 500. Assign either “mostly psychopathic activity” or “mostly morally acceptable activity” to each and also do that on the “mostly exploits those in developing world” or “mostly helps those in developing world”. In most cases 9 of those 10 will pass both tests if you answer these rationally and reasonably without cherry picking from the companies or company histories as CL has done above.  

Here's a list of the S&P 500 - clearly a good list of companies that powerfully represent a globalized capitalist vision and experience:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S%26P_500_companies

Now let's grab ten of these.  Presumably the first letter should not bias the sample so I'll grab the first and last five on the Wikipedia S&P 500 list:

3M
Abbott Labs 
Abercrombie & Fitch Co. 
ACE Limited
Adobe Systems 

OK so now the questions to apply to each are whether they are "psychopathic" or not, and whether they are "exploiting more than helping".     My test allows only ONE to fail either test.

----- to be continued after I get some real work done --------

----- Ouch, Karma injection alert?   Just after posting I was trying to get Bank of America to credit my card for the Beijing Scam I was conned with in China.   After charge dispute sent me away claiming that becaue I signed the paper it was out of their hands, fraud said (incredibly) that even if they had changed the number it would not be a fraud case - fraud is basically only reserved for stolen numbers.  I'm not sure this makes Bank of America a psychopathic corporation but it's also true that they are helping perpetrate scams all around the globe by failing in follow up.   Given that I *cancelled my card number* after this they should assume I'm not just ranting without cause.   But backwards Karma injection: Super low interest for one year will save far more than my $85 ripoff from the Tea House.

-------- back to work! ------------

The answer ("yes it may well be right!") is buried deep among the dozens of comments to RealClimate's quick rebuttal of Freeman Dyson's ideas on global warming. And it is written in clear and concise explanations by a "card-carrying economist" signing as "Bob Murphy" (and no, I don't think he considers himself as an "AGW skeptic").

I report Murphy's comments below (for my own convenience, mostly). Nothing against RealClimate here: there are plenty of blogs with hundreds and hundreds of replies by readers, and who knows how much truly insightful stuff is simply lost in the crowd.

One thing to note is that the reactions to Murphy's perfectly reasonable remarks clearly show what the political and ethical slants of the RealClimate scientists are. Gavin's conclusion is that "ethics are not discountable [so] there is no reason to think that [we should use] the same discounting rate that applies to today’s monetary investment decisions". I am sure those are not the last words on this subject.

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 3:04 PM

Like Lou above, I also am a card-carrying economist, so you may want to discount what I say (ha ha)…

For the people who think economists have nothing to contribute to this issue, I guess all I can do is remind them that the various solutions being proposed to tackle climate change involve things economic. E.g., a tax on carbon or a cap-and-trade program. The hard sciences alone don’t tell us how many dollars per ton a carbon tax should be, just as it would be ridiculous for an economist to try to calculate that figure without asking help from the climatologists.

As far as discounting for future generations: You need to use a discount rate to make sure you’re helping them as much as possible. It seems that some posters here are objecting not to the discounting per se, but to the conversion of everything to dollars and cents. I have no problem with that objection.

However, if we’re going to quantify future damages from climate change into dollar terms, then we need to discount those numbers to sensibly determine how much it’s worth spending today to try to mitigate those damages. The reason is simple: We could take the money and invest it, giving a larger inheritance to future generations. Discounting makes sense even if the recipient isn’t alive yet. Presumably our grandkids would rather get something worth more than something worth less. And so that’s why it would be silly, say, to spend $900 today to avert $1000 in damages in the year 2100. It would make more sense to take that $900 and buy T-bills, and keep rolling them over for our descendants.

Again, if that talk sounds crazy to you, because “you can’t put a number on climate damage!” OK fair enough. But your problem isn’t with the discounting per se.

[Response: My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation? David]

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 8:47 PM
David wrote:

My problem is with discounting over long time frames, longer than a human lifetime. What if the ancient Greeks two thousand years ago had come up fossil energy, allowing them to thrive for a couple of hundred years? Would we thank them for leaving us a degraded world? Or do you think there would be some bank account somewhere where we could get all the invested money back, with interest, in compensation?

If the ancient Greeks had attained our current level of technology, then right now I think we would all be thousands of times wealthier than we currently are. If the Earth were a bit warmer than it is right now, that would definitely be worth the extra wealth; everyone would turn up the AC in his or her hovercraft on the way to his or her 10-hour-per-week job.

Yes this is a fanciful scenario, but only because you gave me a fanciful assumption and asked about its implications.

There are billions of people who right now lack basic utilities like clean drinking water and dependable electricity. If they are encouraged (forced?) to try to leapfrog over fossil fuels and go right to solar or whatever, their development will be hindered. And hence their grandchildren will be much poorer than under the business-as-usual case.

I used the T-bill example just to make the point, but it doesn’t rely on direct lineage. E.g. you and I benefit right now from the capital accumulation of earlier generations. When people work with tools and equipment, their labor is much more productive than if we all had to start from scratch with just nature and our bare hands.

Obviously, if you think that business-as-usual will lead to catastrophic damages, then a rational response would be to limit GHG emissions in the present, notwithstanding the high cost. But I’m just saying, the way to handle this in economic terms is to realize that the future damages are so high (measured in $$) that, even with discounting, they are still higher than the present costs of mitigation.

One other point: I want to second the statement of a previous poster, that yes Stern actually does discount future climate damages. This is because of the small probability that those generations won’t exist to enjoy the fruits of our current, costly mitigation efforts. E.g. there could be nuclear war, an asteroid could blow up the world in 2025, etc.

But Stern does not allow a “pure” discount rate, where the utility of future generations is discounted simply because of its futurity. So that’s why his overall discount rate is lower than Nordhaus’, who bases his on the market’s observed discount rate.

Bob Murphy Says:
25 May 2008 at 8:53 PM
David Benson wrote:

Lamont (48 ) wrote “Why can’t mitigating climate change and GHGs produce economic stimulus, rather than be a drag on the economy?” It can. I opine that it largely will be, due to ingenuity and innovation.

I agree that human ingenuity will always find ways to make a given situation better. But the point is, requiring a reduction in CO2 emissions takes away our range of options. Other things equal, it necessarily makes us poorer.

Now of course, most posters here would say other things aren’t equal. They would say the costs of mitigation are outweighed by the avoided damages of further global warming.

I’m not arguing that point right now. I’m merely saying that it’s not correct to, say, count up the “green jobs” as a benefit of a carbon tax or cap-and-trade program. This is because you would have to then include all the jobs that were destroyed (in SUV manufacturing, coal-fired power plants, etc.) by those measures.

If the government passed a law forbidding the production of anything that was yellow, that could only make us poorer. By the same token, if the government says industry has to reduce its carbon emissions by x% next year, in and of itself that makes us poorer.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 9:26 AM

The real problem with doing nothing now will be the cost in lives not air conditioning later. That means you, your kids and the rest.

But this is also the “real problem” with severe restrictions on the use of fossil fuels. As I said earlier, there are billions of people who don’t have what we consider to be necessities of life. They really are dying every day in ways directly traceable to this lack.

So if your criterion is, “Minimize the number of premature deaths over the next 200 years” or something like that, it doesn’t automatically follow that a massive carbon tax now is the answer. It could be the answer, but it is an empirical question. Many posters here are acting as if altruism for others necessarily implies support for radical curbs on carbon emissions, when it doesn’t. You would have to (a) care about future generations, and (b) agree with some of the more catastrophic predictions, in order to support radical measures today.

On the issue of discounting, I agree that on the face of it, it sounds crazy to even ask, “How many future people are worth one person today?” But as I tried to get across (obviously not very persuasively) in earlier posts, the fact is that the price of current purchasing power is higher than (right now) the price of purchasing power in the year 2100. So there needs to be some discount rate (and people can argue about how high it should be) to make sure present mitigation efforts are as effective as they can be.

One final note: I am not saying that the psychological motivation of most “deniers” is concern for people dying of dysentery in Africa today. Of course not. But even so, it is a fact that there are people we know are dying today from poverty. Their efforts to climb out of poverty will be hampered by mitigation proposals. So it’s not simply a matter of, “Do you value human lives?” It’s an empirical an ethical issue of, “Is allowing x more people to die for sure over the next 20 years, counterbalanced by models that lead us to believe we will thus save x+y people over the next 200 years?”

Incidentally I am not being sarcastic in writing the above. The answer may very well be “yes, it is worth it.” I’m only trying to show that it is a question of balance, to quote Nordhaus. It’s not simply, “Do I value my SUV more than 80 kids 100 years from now?”

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:25 PM
In response to post #70, raypierre wrote:

The two points you make have been quite thoroughly addressed, but you weren’t paying attention….Besides [Nordhaus’ dubious model], there’s the highly questionable issue of the discount rate assumed by Nordhaus and many other economists. David addressed that specifically in his post.

Hang on a second. The following is David’s addressing of the issue of discount rates:

I personally can get my head around the concept of discounting if the time span is short enough that it’s the same person on either end of the transaction, but when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now.

There’s no polite way I can say this, but the above is honestly analogous to me (an economist) criticizing the IPCC at a website like WeHateGore.org and saying, “Personally, I don’t see why we should put any faith in these models. They can’t even tell me if it’s going to rain next week, so when the time scale goes to hundreds or thousands of years…!”

So whatever your thoughts on discounting, David’s expression of personal confusion over the practice of economists hardly counts as a thorough disposal of the practice.

And yes, some people pointed to Weitzman’s work, and the RFF paper. Again, this is analogous to me pointing to Lindzen and saying, “Look, even an MIT expert on this stuff agrees with me! These models are bunk!”

It’s hard to keep the different objections separate on this thread. As I keep pointing out, a lot of people here don’t like the idea of using dollar measurements in the first place, in which case the discussion of discounting is superfluous.

But if you are prepared to accept that a cost/benefit test of proposed mitigation measures isn’t absurd, then the next step is to ask whether future costs and benefits should be given equal weight to present ones.

And I’m saying the answer is no, because whether we agree with it or not, the market right now undervalues future dollars. So we can achieve our aims more cheaply by recognizing this basic fact, rather than declaring it immoral.

I’ll try one more analogy to get the point across. Suppose there is a homeowner trying to decide whether to spend $1000 renovating the insulation in his house, in order to save $100 on utility bills per year. Should he do it or not?

If David is right, then before we can answer that question, we need to know how old the homeowner is. After all, if he’s going to die in two years, then clearly the expenditure isn’t worth it, right?

(The standard answer of course is no, the age of the homeowner is irrelevant, assuming he wants to pass on as much wealth as possible to his heirs. They will reap the benefits of the efficient purchase of insulation. They would rather get the insulated home, and $800 less in cash, than the non-insulated home, and $800 more in cash. [The $200 comes from the two years of life left in the homeowner, in which he lowers his utility bills from the new insulation.])

[Response: There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time. There is a difference and pretending that only the economically illiterate think so, is not constructive. It is however an ethical decision, and can’t be proven one way or another using economics alone. - gavin]

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:28 PM
One final comment, and then I think I should quit while I’m ahead (or not too far behind): Nordhaus is actually on “your” side in this. He has been one of the most vocal economists on the importance of climate change.

If you think he is unduly activist, it might be because, as a professional economist, he sees costs of your personally favored policies that you aren’t considering.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 1:52 PM
Whoops–typo: I meant above to say that if you think Nordhaus’ isn’t activist enough, then it might be because he is worrying about drawbacks to mitigation policies that you aren’t taking seriously. I.e. there seems to be a sense here that because he’s skeptical of some approaches, he must not care about the environment as much as Gore (or Stern) does. And I don’t think that’s it at all. Believe me, I have been a critic of Nordhaus on this very issue, so it’s odd that I’m defending him here.

Bob Murphy Says:
26 May 2008 at 2:54 PM
Well shoot, I said I was done pestering you guys, but then Gavin goes and makes a great analogy that I hope will really clarify our different positions on this. So if you’ll forgive me for one more attempt:

There is a real difference between assessing a discount rate for dollar investments for which clear alternatives are available (i.e. why bother to invest in something special if the bank interest rate is higher than the expected return), and assessing the worth of non-economic goods (’the social discount rate’). Confusing the two concepts is at the heart of most of the noise surrounding this issue. To give an extreme example for clarity, if someone uses a bomb to blow up someone today, that is surely just as heinous as if they bury the bomb and set it to blow up tomorrow (or next week or next year). It is equally unethical to set the timer for a day in the future as for a hundred years, yet any substantial social discounting would downgrade the crime to a misdemeanor given a long enough lead time.

OK thanks, as I said this really crystallized our differences on this. Note that we’re actually closer to agreement than you seem to think; all along I have said, “If you don’t want to put a dollar value on lives or the environment, that’s fine. But if you do then you need to discount.” I think we’re both agreed, then, that the basic problem with Nordhaus is his attempt to monetize everything, rather than his application of a discount rate to those monetary values.

But anyway, back to your example: First of all, under the law you will get a lighter sentence (today) for planting a bomb set to go off in one year, than if you planted one that went off two minutes ago. And the difference of course is that you haven’t actually killed anybody with the first bomb. This is relevant to the climate discussion, because those future harms might not actually occur. And I don’t even mean, maybe carbon-munching trees will be developed. As I said, Stern discounts the future because of the possibility that those people won’t exist (asteroid, nuclear war, etc.).

(Now in fairness, you could say, “OK, if the bomb is set to go off in one week, versus one year.” I don’t know what the legal treatment of these cases would be, but in either case you would not be charged with murder, because no one is yet dead.)

But now let’s make your bomb scenario a little closer to the climate change one, and hopefully you’ll see why I keep insisting that discounting is important. Suppose that instead of just an outright government crackdown on bomb-planting, the government capitulates to the bomb lobbyists and only imposes a $35 tax on every bomb planted. (Maybe most citizens view bomb planting as essential to their way of life.)

Now in that case, it really would be crazy to not discount the fine based on the timer setting, because otherwise the same crime would be penalized at different levels. E.g. someone today plants a bomb set to go off in one year, and he gets fined $35. Then next year, someone plants a bomb to go off in 24 hours, and he also gets fined $35.

Both bombers killed one person in the year 2009. But the first bomber paid a higher fine, because he had to pay $35 in 2008, while the second guy had to pay it in 2009. During his trial, the first guy in 2008 could have said, “Hang on a second! Don’t make me pay it now, make me pay the $35 when it actually kills someone.” And naturally he would prefer that outcome, because he could set aside less than $35 today (in 2008 when he’s convicted), and let it roll over to $35 in 2009 when his bomb actually causes damage.

So that’s one way of seeing why, if you’re going to bring monetary incentives into it, which plenty of environmentalists want to do, then it matters that “current money” is more expensive than “future money.”

To insist that monetary fees (carbon taxes, prices for cap-and-trade permits, etc.) reflect the prevailing exchange rate between present and future dollars, is no crazier than saying a carbon tax expressed in Japanese yen has to be higher per ton than a carbon tax expressed in US dollars.

To push the bomb analogy even further, yes it certainly would be better if the bomb planters could be persuaded to set their timers farther into the future, even if we’re solely concerned about minimizing the damages from their actions. This is because we have more time to adapt to the bombs. People in the vicinity can move away, they can buy armor for their cars, etc.

Obviously I’ve carried the analogy a bit far, but I’m just trying to show that the closer you make it to the actual situation of carbon emissions causing future damages, and especially where the government’s response is to inflict monetary fines on the parties doing the damaging, then you need to use discounting. Otherwise you end up with an outcome that is inferior from everyone’s viewpoint, to what would be achievable if discounting were used.

[Response: My point was only that ethics are not discountable. It is equally unethical to plant the bomb with a one day setting as with a century setting. Your extension to my analogy is really a stretch to make an ethical point into an economic point - I don’t see that any of your additional assumptions are necessarily valid. But nonetheless, there are clear uncertainties with future actions that mean that something that is almost certain to happen if I plan it for a day ahead, is less certain if I plan for a century ahead. Fine - some kind of allowance needs to be made for that (as Stern does). But there is no reason to think that it should be the same discounting rate that applies to today’s monetary investment decisions. - gavin]

Having read Real Climate (RC)'s "Butterfly" blog and engaged in some commentary about it at that site, and having followed the AGW debate for the last five years, my impression is that:

• the AGW climate scientists are just doing what they can, after heavily restricting their area of research
• I and some other fellow science-minded skeptics are simply pointing out to the vast, unexplored regions outside of your average climate modeller's understanding and computational ability.

Imagine if paleontologists had decided to concentrate on the skulls of Rift Valley hominids, treating with disdain (aka as "noise") all of a find's context, including other human bones, remains of other animals, local geography (and climate). And deliberatingly ignoring every other hominid find, anywhere else in the world.

That'd still be science, but within such a very focused line of research quite unlikely to add much knowledge or understanding, apart than about itself.

There Must Be Some...
If such a colossal misunderstanding is indeed in place, that would go a long way in explaining the extraordinary ill feelings surrounding the whole of climate science at the moment (and I am deliberately keeping politics outside of this), with one side treating skepticism itself as a dishonest scandal that should be stamped out of existence once and for all, and the other side dismissing years and years of research as pretty much irrelevant gibberish written by incompetent liars.

No wonder they (we) can't see each other eye-to-eye...how could two judges agree at a canine show contest, if one of them were only interested in (and had built a whole theory of canine beauty about) the shape of the tails?

Climatology: An Abridged History
The story of how contemporary climatology has ended up like this is illuminating.

At first, basic laboratory experiments gave some indications on how atmospheric constituents could interact with one another, and with the incoming solar radiation. Notable among them, the study of CO2's "greenhouse effect" by Arrhenius in 1896. But the real world of meteorology (including climate) is somewhat more complex than a lab's setting.

For example, vast energy exchanges manifest in atmospheric cell circulation, oceanic heat exchanges, and whole climate-affecting cycles currently known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, el Nino/la Nina, etc etc.

With no way of replicating that in controlled laboratory conditions, climatologists opted at one point to computational models of the atmosphere. This was of course possible only and after a minimum of computational power became available.

Computers of course understand only numbers and formulas/commands. In order to get to that, a momentous assumption was made: in an approach curiously reminiscent of the science of aeronautics, climate was taken as the response of the atmosphere to "forcings", i.e. discernible components pushing and pulling the atmosphere in one or the other direction.

"Climate" is then the resulting overall effect of the action of each forcing, averaged over a certain lentgh of time.

In that context, "forcings" were purely operational, "digitizational" tools, providing some basis for computing the climate. By definition, in fact, forcings cannot be measured: all observations of the actual atmosphere will (obviously!) include the effect of them all. If "forcings" exist or not is therefore irrelevant. For all they were worth, forcings could have been substituted by Fourier analysis, or Principal Component Analysis, or whatever other technical tool that can transform a set of signals (and formulas) of any sort into computer-friendly figures (and procedures).

However, alongside a steady increase in available computational power, there came the a shift in focus, from real (observable) climate to forcings: in a first dichotomy with the real world, models became ways of investigating the (possible) effect of each forcing, instead of forcings being ways of investigating the (possible) evolution of the planet's climate.

This change is less subtle than it appears. It entails throwing one's hands up in the air about trying to understand the actual atmosphere, choosing instead to concentrate on known (pre-set) effects of known causes. Models in fact are far from independent from assumptions about forcings: they are made out of them. The effect of each forcing is already written in the code of each model, and model runs will show that effect at work. Even if results could vary for example modifying a model's representation of geography, there is no way that model will be able to run contrary to its pre-assumed behaviour, for example in the case of increased CO2 concentration.

If I write a computer program that just adds one every time a white objects traverses a camera's field of view, there is no way my program will ever count down, say to minus 20. And the fact that the counter always increases says nothing about how many white objects there are in the real world. It just shows how the counter works.

Nothing But Parameters
What can you do when all you have are models only useful to investigate what a particular forcing's effect might be? You are left with playing with the parameters, modifying them to "fit" observations and "plausibility". This is manifest for example in Hansen et al's 2007 article, "Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE", literally saddled with innumerable "estimations", six of them explicitly "subjective" (little more than guesses, that is) but still able somehow to get published in a peer-reviewed scientific article.

Note that comparison to the real world is but a side issue in that paper. "Observations" (25+ years of averages) are useful to evaluate what the parameters are likely to be, i.e. the relative importance of each forcing. There is nothing important outside of them. In a second dichotomy with the real world, in such a vision of the world everything that is not included in the modelling is "noise", in other words "irrelevant".

There is no "going back to the lab" in contemporary mainstream forcings-based climate science, eg to learn anything new after finding unexpected observations, because those are "noise" (sometimes called, "weather") and thus have to be ignored. And there is no meaningful effort to measure what if anything is going wrong: for example, comparisons between model results and observations are simply visual.

The good thing about this is that there are enormous avenues of research left open to future generations. The downside is that the reality of climate models is, at present, literally set in stone, whatever the real climate is out there.

Can climate models predict anything?
Skeptics and non-skeptics alike seem to agree that models cannot predict (i.e. make predictions that can be falsified, or confirmed, by observations) for timeframes shorter than around 25 years from the time of computation.

In fact, RealClimate seems to be willing to take a quarter of a century, more or less, as the minimum amount of time needed to get "averages" that can be called "climate" rather than mere "weather". That is a second example of AGW climate scientists pigeonholing themselves: just as anything that cannot be modelled by forcings is "noise", so anything that doesn't cancel itself over 25 years is "noise" too.

So we started with "climate science" only to get stuck into "multi-decadal averaging to evaluate parameters to use in estimating the effect of forcings".

Can anything ever disprove a forcings-based model?
No. Nothing at all ever will. Some AGWers are answering that with improbable claims about Popper being long dead, an eery reply one would expect only from inventors of perpetual-motion machines.

Actually, the prove/disprove question may simply be the wrong question. Models are only tools to investigate the possible effect of each forcing. Hansen et al talk about "using the model for simulations of future climate change".

The key word there is of course "simulations".

Models are not a weather-predicting tool (remember, they are about "climate", not "weather"). And they are not a climate-predicting tool either, even if they are often abused as if they were. In its 2001 report the IPCC itself stated as much, in no uncertain terms: "In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible" (from the IPCC TAR-WG1, 2001).

What models can do is simulate the effect of individual forcings in isolation, something that can never be observed anyway. They also simulate the cumulative effect of forcings, with added uncertainty as interactions must be modelled too. Such a cumulative effect is not necessarily expected to be observable either.

It must be stated that as far as I can remember RC has never claimed anything more. Good for them. Perhaps they could have been clearer before more clear and more often, but things are starting to move in the right direction, of late. As already quoted in a previous blog: "[...] The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world. [...]"

And Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the IPCC-TAR report, recently wrote: "In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers 'what if' projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios."

Compounded Weaknesses
Don't get me wrong: on its own, doing an estimation is part-and-parcel of conducting scientific research; computer modelling is a great tool for very complex situation; forcings are a good way to translate a system into a manageable model; and scenarios are the standard way to evaluate risk.

But with regards to forcings-based climate science, all of those combine together compounding their weaknesses rather than their strenghts: estimations are often subjective, computer models are used to study forcings rather than climate, forcings are taken as "real" even if they cannot be measured, and scenarios are interrogated not for current sensitivities but as forecasts.

They have become the basis for a large Intergovernmental organization, tens of international meetings, the collective action of thousands of people, one Oscar and one Nobel Peace Prize, all in the name of what every knowledgeable person knows it is impossible to predict.

What Kind of Science is Climate Science?
Restricted to "the computation of scenarios (the 'what-ifs' projections)", climate modelling is a science (the "science of climate forcings", in fact). And RealClimate is as good as it gets. The same applies to much of contemporary AGW scientific journalism and publications, including Scientific American, American Scientist, New Scientist, Nature, Science. And the BBC.

Just try, next time you read their reports, to imagine a world view (a "climate narrative") where climatology, the most uncertain of exact sciences, is applied science, a policy-making tool where only forcings count and, among the forcings, only those of anthropogenic origin are relevant (as there is little to make policies about, for non-anthropogenic forcings).

That is too narrow a view to be useful for risk management, let alone to bring science forward. It may lead to worries wasting time worrying about possible future stronger hurricanes, rather than about certain concentrating on preventi present-day catastrophical levee failure for present-day storms.

Time to Expand the "Climate Narrative"
Models have been the cradle of climatology, Tsiolkovsky would have said, but we cannot live in the cradle forever. It is time to expand the "climate narrative", by getting climate science of the models-forcings-scenarios hole.

Because "real" climate is much, much more than RealClimate.

It's just that (finally!) there is a RC claim that can be compared to the real world; next to it, a good dose of outright sincerity (surely it must have been there before,  perhaps buried in the polemic...)

From What the IPCC models really say (May 12, 2008):

• Claims that GCMs project monotonic rises in temperature with increasing greenhouse gases are not valid. Natural variability does not disappear because there is a long term trend. The ensemble mean is monotonically increasing in the absence of large volcanoes, but this is the forced component of climate change, not a single realisation or anything that could happen in the real world.
• [...]
• Over a twenty year period, you would be on stronger ground in arguing that a negative trend would be outside the 95% confidence limits of the expected trend (the one model run in the above ensemble suggests that would only happen ~2% of the time).

Note that even the fabled 20-year negative trend may still be interpreted as consistent with at least one model run.

But it's a good step in the right direction: bringing back climate science from its forcings cage to the actual world...

• "[GCM] model outputs at annual and climatic (30‐year) scales are irrelevant with reality"
• "model predictions are much poorer that an elementary prediction based on the time average"
• "The GCM outputs of AR4, as compared to those of TAR, are a regression in terms of the elements of falsifiability they provide, because most of the AR4 scenarios refer only to the future, whereas TAR scenarios also included historical periods"

Those are not the insane ramblings of yours truly, but the conclusions of D. Koutsoyiannis et al's "Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series", a poster presentation at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2008 in Vienna, Austria, 13‐18 April 2008.

Of course, it's only a poster presentation...and of course, there was really no space at all to talk about it in the news, eg on the BBC.

Well, there is one good thing that has come out of this though: some explicit references in RealClimate about the need to have "a very civilized and friendly chat", "to be respectful, sincere, and show courtesy in our criticism, even when we argue why we think that a paper has flaws", and that "we some day may be mistaken, so it's important to be humble and check our drafts amongst ourselves".

This will mean no more verbal attacks about "negationism", and few if any displays of condescension. Sure it will... 

I re-post here a comment I just left at RealClimate (one never knows what gets published over there, and what doesn't...)

Re: #101 As a matter of fact if you search on PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ there are four articles with my name. In two of them I appear as first author. And no, they are not first-rated earth-shattering Science or Nature articles about climate science.

But as we all agree now, that's beside the point.

Let's me start again from a simple question. Hansen et al did compare model results to observations.

"Climate simulations for 1880–2003 with GISS modelE", Clim Dyn (2007) 29:661–696 - DOI 10.1007/s00382-007-0255-8

For example, consider fig. 9 (the PDF of the article is on the internet, apologies but I do not have time to search for it right now):

"Fig. 9 Global maps of temperature change in observations (top row) and in the model runs of Fig. 8, for 1880–2003 and several subperiods. [...]"

Observations there are shown in periods respectively of 124 years (1880-2003), 54 years, 61 years, 40 years and finally 25 years (1979-2003).

Presumably, this provides a first approximation of what time spans are needed to talk about climate (around 25 years). The actual shortest period may be 40 years or longer, as 1979-2003 has been chosen primarily as "the era of extensive satellite observations". Please correct me if am wrong.

Let's take now a clear-cut example. The authors write "All forcings together yield a global mean warming ~0.1C less than observed for the full period 1880–2003.". And that's a remarkable result.

But...may I ask this rather elementary question: say, if the global mean warming yielded by all forcings together had been much less, or much more than observed, what would have been the (absolute) threshold above which the climate simulations would have been declared a failure?

Or has this question no meaning either? If not, why not?

Once again, I am consciously simplifying things here but this is a blog...more a brainstorming session than a week-long workshop.

There is a simple way to settle the falsifiability issue. Could anybody at RC please post a blog clearly stating what would falsify the climate models? Say (just as a way of example) “if temperatures will be cooler than today’s in 2020″ or “if there is a sustained negative trend over the course of 25 years”. Those statements are simplistic: I am sure you can come up with something more sophisticated.

Alternatively, if such a clear-cut answer has already been the topic of one of your blogs, could you please provide the link. thanks in advance.

=======

7 May 2008 at 7:03 PM

Re #107

I am preparing a relatively long commentary on what I am learning from this blog and its comments. For now let me clarify that I do not think that current climate models are based on incorrect physics.

The black-body radiation equivalence still holds though, as what looked like a relatively minor nuisance ("noise"?) to your average XIX century physicist, was the basis for a whole new understanding of the whole science of physics.

Think of genetics: yesterday's "junk DNA" is (in part) today's "gene switches". Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

As for the comments policy, in the past I have seen some thoughts of mine not published, for whatever reason. I am pleasantly surprised that nothing of the sort is happening this time around, and hopefully the situation won't change.

La religione del global warming ha finalmente avuto il suo Concilio di Nicea. Il blog RealClimate.org – una specie di assemblea dei saggi dell’allarmismo climatico – ha pubblicato un importante post in seguito alla scomparsa di Ed Lorenz. Lorenz ha conquistato la fama pubblica e l’immortalità scientifica inaugurando le teorie del caos e sintetizzandole nell’effetto farfalla: il battito d’ali di una farfalla in Brasile può causare un uragano in Texas. I redattori di RealClimate.org si sono sentiti in dovere di spiegare che sì, l’effetto farfalla crea qualche grattacapo a chi vorrebbe sfruculiare le interiora di gallina per cavarne previsioni affidabili sulle temperature tra cent’anni. Però, nessun grattacapo è insuperabile se lo si seppellisce sotto una dichiarazione di fede: e hanno risolto la questione deliberando in questa maniera: “But how can climate be predictable if weather is chaotic? The trick lies in the statistics. In those same models that demonstrate the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, it turns out that the long term means and other moments are stable. [...] Climate change then is equivalent seeing how the structure changes, while not being too concerned about the specific trajectory you are on”. Che può essere liberamente tradotto così: non importa cosa succede oggi, cosa è accaduto ieri, come andranno le cose domani; i nostri modelli guardano oltre, all’alba del giorno dopo, e allora si dimostreranno infine giusti e il mondo sarà un’immensa palla rovente a causa dell’uso indiscriminato degli spazzolini elettrici. Come ha rivelato l’attento Maurizio Morabito, “la mancanza di attenzione per la traiettoria specifica del riscaldamento globale fa sì che letteralmente non possa esistere alcun set di osservazioni in grado di falsificare i modelli”. A differenza del Concilio di Nicea del 325 dC, che era una cosa seria tanto che siamo qui a quasi due millenni di distanza e ancora ne parliamo, il pronunciamento di RealClimate.org non ha a che fare con la Verità ma con la fuffa, non con la vita eterna ma col cattivo tempo. Non c’è proprio più religione.

Gestito da ricercatori della NASA sotto lo sguardo dell'esimio James Hansen, "RealClimate" si propone da anni come il sito "de rigueur" per chi crede che le attivita' umane stiano cambiando il clima in una maniera che a breve (nel giro di qualche decennio) si rivelera' disastrosa.

Il problema pero' e' che come si sa, anche le previsioni del tempo a due settimane se non due giorni possono essere completamente sbagliate, per cui a tutta prima pensare di sapere quanto piovera' nel 2087 o quanto saranno estese le zone desertiche nel 2103 sembrerebbe davvero eccessivo. Il tempo contiene elementi molto instabili, per cui una piccola variazione iniziale puo' portare a risultati assolutamente divergenti.

RealClimate (attenzione: il gruppo intero, non solo uno o due persone come di solito) ha deciso di rispondere a quel dubbio approfittando della morte di Ed Lorenz, lo scienziato americano che sviluppo la Teoria del Caos proprio a partire dalle sue esperienze di metereologo.

Sfortunatamente, in "Le Farfalle, I Tornado e I Modelli Climatici" il gruppo di RealClimate ha inavvertitamente dichiarato al mondo che i modelli climatici non possono praticamente essere mai falsificati: qualunque cosa succeda, cioe', sia che faccia caldo, o freddo, o piova, o sia secco, o se ci sono piu' uragani, o meno uragani, o piu' tornado, o meno tornado, o se la calotta polare si scioglie, oppure se ingrandisce di dimensione: qualunque fenomeno atmosferico, semplicemente non potra' mai essere usato per negare veridicita' ai modelli climatici che prevedono il riscaldamento globale e il cambiamento climatico.

Discorsi perfettamente analoghi si applicano anche a qualunque insieme di fenomeni atmosferici nel breve periodo, dove per "breve periodo" si intende probabilmente "di durata inferiore ai venti o trenta anni".

Entro in piu' dettagli nel mio blog sul clima (in inglese: "RealClimate rende la vita piu' difficile ai modelli climatici" e "Ulteriori considerazioni sulla infalsificabilita' dei modelli climatici su RealClimate") quindi almeno per ora mi limito a una brevissima citazione:

[...] per il problema del clima, il tempo metereologico (o la traiettoria individuale) e' [solo] rumore [...]

Se per esempio i modelli indicano riscaldamento prossimo venturo, e i termometri indicano Gennaio e Febbraio 2008 come abbastanza piu' freddi del solito, RealClimate puo' comunque dire che i modelli sono giusti, e si tratta solo un fenomeno momentaneo (il "tempo", appunto: "rumore").

E se i modelli dicono che all'aumentare della concentrazione di gas-serra devono aumentare le temperature globali, mentre tale aumento si e' interrotto dal 1998, di nuovo RealClimate puo' dire che i modelli sono giusti, e che semplicemente la strada verso un pianeta piu' caldo passa per alcuni anni senza aumento del riscaldamento (la "traiettoria individuale").

L'unica maniera per verificare i modelli climatici sembra essere l'aspettare venti o trenta anni per vedere se il riscaldamento c'e' stato. Difficilmente pero' un tale atteggiamento puo' essere usato per giustificare gli interventi drastici e illiberali che tanti richiedono, anzi pretendono.

Lo stesso Gavin Schmidt di RealClimate, in un blog di qualche mese fa, ha detto esplicitamente che le osservazioni servono "a migliorare i modelli" (invece che, che ne so, elaborare quelle "bestemmie" che sarebbero nuove interpretazioni). In altre parole: non e' il modello climatico ad essere subordinato al mondo esterno, ma l'esatto opposto...

===========

Forse e' solo un triste caso di "amore soffocante", con i modellisti cosi' innamorati dei modelli, da proteggerli a ogni costo, estraniandoli pero' allora dalla "scienza" che e' fatta, appunto, di teorie falsificabili, non corazzate contro qualunque critica o osservazione.

E' davvero ironico che cio' accada su RealClimate, dove non e' praticamente possibile postare commenti se non di elogio e di accordo per i gestori del sito.

RealClimate, insomma, e' il posto impermeabile al mondo esterno, dove modellisti impermeabili al mondo esterno pubblicano articoli impermeabili al mondo esterno...

Rather unfortunately for the authors, the conclusions contain a remarkable amount of unintended irony.

[...] But how can climate be predictable if weather is chaotic? The trick lies in the statistics. In those same models that demonstrate the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, it turns out that the long term means and other moments are stable. [...] Climate change then is equivalent seeing how the structure changes, while not being too concerned about the specific trajectory you are on

In other words, "climate change" is an entity that can only become observable in the long, long term. And since there is little concern for the "specific trajectory", there literally exists NO possible short-term sets of observations that can falsify the climate models.

Another way of saying it is that for the climate problem, the weather (or the individual trajectory) is the noise. If you are trying to find the common signal that is a signature of a particular forcing then averaging over a number of simulations with different weather works rather well [...]

In other words, since each and every atmospheric event can be obviously described as "weather", there is no single observation that can falsify the climate models.

Their work doesn't have to deal with any single observation, no short-term sets of observations...do they realize what they are saying???

Real climate is in their own words almost perfectly insulated from the real world. Nothing that can ever happen will be able to disprove the work of the climate modellers, apart from multi-decadal averages that are so poorly defined, they can easily be used to demonstrate anything.

Is this "science"? Looks more like long-term guaranteed employment to me... No wonder Anthropogenic Climate Change has important detractors in the metereological community.

In further irony, the above pairs up perfectly well with RC's "comments policy" that can be summarized more or less into "we will censor everything we do not like".

RealClimate: the insulated web site, where insulated researchers post insulated content. Now I understand why poor Gavin Schmidt had such a hard time dealing with an open debate...

In truth, one cannot fault people expressing their opinions, and their dissent from "consensus", for the fact that their views appear to be listened to by politicians (not sure they truly are), whilst the "consensus" usually results into idle talk or cures that are worse than the illness (see biofuels, or the idiotically expensive Kyoto treaty).

One important point to remember is that much of the Anglo-Saxon world's brouhaha around climate change is linked directly to the hysteria accompanying a lot of AGW proclamations and actions. Likely due to political naivete, groups of scientists-advocates have joined Greenpeace and the likes in an escalation of hyperboles, with the world depicted almost as turning into cinder by Tuesday, if we don't all go back to living in caves.

As some AGW scientists said about Al Gore's movie, those hyperboles are not scientifically right, but are deemed ok to "convey the message".

Distortion of science for a good cause was and unfortunately still is in fact a tactic devised to break down the BAU inertia (aka the "cost of Doing Something"). The problem is that there are only so many times such inertia can be countered with doom-and-gloom. AGWers have been unlucky enough to show up years if not months after major scares have fizzled out, like Y2K and SARS.

The general population then, and many politicians, have been healthily inoculated against unwarranted exaggerations. That's why the AGW camp, still using obsolete influencing techniques, have literally painted themselves into a whining-and-crying corner, with few listening to them unless when there is an occasion for swindling public money (see US corn subsidies, and the European cap-and-trade system).

You can just read Dr Pachauri's incredible declarations about the latest Antarctic huge iceberg, to see what I mean by hyperbole, exaggeration and distortion of science:

"if the huge bodies of ice of western Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets, sitting on land, were to collapse [...]"

There is no danger nor forecast nor model that suggests anything of the sort happening for a long long long time even under the direst temperature increases we can imagine. So what is the point of talking about that, rather than more pressing concerns, such as the droughts and floods that do seem to come out of the model runs???

=======

And so the situation is: in a corner, AGW scientists and advocates kicking and screaming for action. In the rest of the world, lots of people that are turned off any meaningful action...by the kicking and screaming of those AGW scientists and advocates. Little wonder politicians do nothing of any meaning on the topic, apart from when they can spread "pork" and get more votes.

=======

Every once in a while some analysis appears begging the "environmental" movement to change their ways of communicating what they care about:

• Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times, 2005
• Left-leaning British think-tank IPPR in 2006
• Professor Mike Hulme, head of a leading climate research centre in 2007

But the AGWers are still in the dark ages, as far as advocacy is concerned.

Lately the only novelty is that they appear to have decided to be relentless, as if following the old saying that if you keep repeating a lie, eventually it will be taken as truth. But time is not on their side: year-on-year climate fluctuations are larger than any AGW "signal", as admitted even by RealClimate.

There is so much we can say, think and care about the world in 2020, let alone 2050, when the models say evidence would be so much stronger. And when the news talk about a catastrophe for the 1,000-th time, the impact on the public will be much much smaller than it was 999 times before.

=======

Anybody believing in AGW can keep on lamenting the situation...just please, try to understand: the lament is part of the problem. The existence of scientist-dissenters is not.

Just look at France: where a "green package" was discussed, defined and delivered without anybody running around like headless chickens. Believe it or not, I may have even signed that package myself!

In the meanwhile, raypierre of RealClimate summarizes the latest info about the atmosphere of Venus, but somehow forgets to include the UV absorption mystery (it only shows up as an afterthought, comment #2).

One wonders why? Obsession with consensus and the need to demonstrate there exist such a thing as "climate science" spring to mind.

GUEST EDITORIAL: COMMUNICATING GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE TO THE PUBLIC AND CLIENTS
Bob Ryan^a and John Toohey-Morales^ba. AMS Past President; CBM; CCM; NBC-4, Washington, D.C
b. AMS Commissioner on Professional Affairs; CBM; CCM; NBC Telemundo, Miami, Florida

is the Abstract.

The one-page PDF (57K) looks like this, text below:

GUEST EDITORIAL: COMMUNICATING GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE TO THE PUBLIC AND CLIENTS

"Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get."

This often-used quote takes on a new meaning these days because what to "expect" in the future has become a spirited, often polarized, and increasingly nonscientific "debate". Increasing numbers of broadcast meteorologists, to whom the public looks for information and guidance on climate change and global warming, are not offering scientific information but rather, all too often, nonscientific personal opinions in the media, including personal blogs. Alarmingly, many weathercasters and certified broadcast meteorologists dismiss, in most cases without any solid scientific arguments, the conclusions of the National Research Council (NRC), Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and other peer-reviewed research. For example, a recent public claim is, "I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global-warming hype.^"1

Such posturing aside, sampling the many climate-change Web sites² may leave many of us who want to be objective communicators of weather and climate information confused to say the least. How do we maintain our professional integrity while also exercising our rights to freely express our opinion on an issue that a recent Harris poll indicated is of great concern to the public in many countries? How do we best apply our own specialized education, knowledge, and communication skills to help the public understand the complex issues of climate change? We strongly believe that, above all, if we are to professionally, fairly, and objectively communicate scientific information (as opposed to a personal or political opinion), we should use our scientific training to stay as informed as possible and make sure to read beyond the headlines.

Few of us possess extensive training or research experience in global climate modeling or paleoclimatology, solar physics, glaciology, oceanography, or the numerous other rigorous disciplines related to climate change. However, many AMS Sealholders, CBMs, and most CCMs have a bachelor's degree in meteorology or a related science and should be comfortable reading climate change-related papers or abstracts in BAMS, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, and other peer-reviewed sources such as summaries of recent IPCC and NRC reports.

The expertise of scientists actively researching climate change is well beyond that of most professional meteorologists, some of whom may only have basic training in weather analysis and forecasting. Nonetheless, the public sees media meteorologists as experts. If we "experts" communicate conflicting information, conveying personal opinions with no scientific basis, the public can become confused and often collectively "tune out" of the issue just when it requires the most attention. The same would happen if we gave conflicting personal opinions during dangerous weather events. When we stray from objectivity in communicating the latest scientific findings, we do the public a disservice.

As outlined in the CBM and CCM programs, a responsible broadcast and/or consulting meteorologist should continue to stay as informed as possible and look to the AMS for leadership. The "AMS Statement on Climate Change" recently adopted by the AMS Council should be required reading for all of us who communicate with the public or seek guidance on climate change. While some of us may disagree with its exact wording, the weight of the scientific evidence behind the Statement is very solid. If we consider ourselves practicing scientists or science communicators, those of us with little or no training in the science of global circulations, air-sea interactions, radiative physics, and/or global modeling would be hard pressed to disagree with the basic consensus view of so many outstanding researchers who contributed to documents such as the AMS Statement or other recent reports issued by prestigious national and international scientific panels and peer-reviewed scientific papers in journals such as the Journal of Climate. The consensus view certainly is not final or definitive: our science is dynamic, but it is the best science we have right now.

In its "Final Remarks", the AMS Statement reads:

"Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming that humans have significantly contributed to this change and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the twenty-first century and beyond."

If those who represent and communicate our shared sciences to the public feel a need to express personal opinions about global change and global warming, then they also have a professional obligation to at least share the above conclusions, which reflect the best thinking of our expert colleagues actively working to better understand and predict what may be the greatest challenge our science has ever faced.

Bob Ryan (AMS PAST PRESIDENT; CBM; CCM; NBC-4, WASHINGTON, D.C.) and
John Toohey-Morales (AMS COMMISSIONER ON PROFESSIONAL AFFAIRS; CBM; CCM; NBC TELEMUNDO, MIAMI, FLORIDA)

1 James Spann quote from http://climatebrains.com/?p=5
2 http://www.ipcc.ch; http://climatesci.colorado.edu; http://www.realclimate.org; http://www.climatescience.gov; http://icecap.us; http://www.climatepolicy.org; http://www.pewclimate.org

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