I will continue to use "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW) to describe this ideology. Although atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase, global temperatures have more or less plateaued in the past decade. Since the plateau occurred at a warm average temperature, we've been treated to innumerable accounts of the fact that recent years have been among the warmest in recent history. So, despite the use of the term "climate change", it's clear that proponents are invested in creating the public perception that the earth is continuing to warm (and that such warming will soon accelerate out of control).
Climate change really is a term of art, because it allows CoGW adherents to insist that all weather -- wet or dry, hot or cold -- validates the AGW orthodoxy.
Floods in China: check. Drought in China: check. More hurricanes: check. Fewer hurricanes: check. Summer ice melt in the Arctic: check. Winter refreezing of Arctic ice that exceeds that which originally melted: check. Collapse of the West Antarctica Ice Shelf: check. Net increase in Antarctic ice: check. Record warm winter in 2006-2007: check. Record cold winter in 2007-2008: check.
And so on.
This leads me to ask a question of those of you who believe that human activity is negatively and catastrophically impacting the earth's climate:
Is the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis falsifiable?
I am asking this within the context of the scientific method. Integrity demands that a scientist, when proposing a hypothesis, list the conditions whereby the hypothesis would fall apart:
We believe that this hypothesis sufficiently describes the reality we are studying, but if anybody can demonstrate any of conditions a, b, c, d or e, our hypothesis is fatally compromised and it's back to the drawing board.So, AGW folks: can you name any condition (series of weather events, temperature trends, etc.) that would make you doubt the current orthodoxy, or are we witnessing the most bulletproof hypothesis ever?
UPDATE: After a quick Google search, I was pleased to discover that this question has already occurred to minds much greater than mine. As I composed this post earlier today, I had the folks at RealClimate in mind (among others). It turns out that Roger Pielke, Jr. tossed the following rhetorical grenade into the midst of a RealClimate discussion about how awfully cold Antarctica is right now:
The ensuing debate is pretty interesting.There are a vast number of behaviors of the climate system that are consistent with climate model predictions, along the lines of your conclusion: “A cold Antarctica and Southern Ocean do not contradict our models of global warming.”
I have asked many times and never received an answer here: What behavior of the climate system would contradict models of global warming? Specifically what behavior of what variables over what time scales? This should be a simple question to answer.
Thanks!
Pielke followed up on the question in his own blog. The debate is pretty lively in the comment section over there as well.
(Found via: Seeker Blog)
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4 comments:
The way it is falsifiable is if the weather stays exactly the same over the course of a century. If there is no deviant in temperature (probably scaled down to .0003 degrees C), if the number of hurricanes each year across the century is exactly 32. If the floods in Europe and China are exactly 34 feet of land during the summer and retract back 34 feet during the non-flood months. The Arctic melts exactly 16cm in the summer and is replaced by 16 cm (with a .001 cm difference) during the winter. There is your way to falsify the current trend of "climate change."
That is an interesting way to look at the question. If memory serves, each of the numbers listed are an average. That gives us at least two problems in hitting the numbers exactly. 1) Climate figures are a moving target in that some of the more commonly quoted averages look not at all of the data collected at a station or group of stations, but limit at 10, 20, or 30 years. 2) Averages are tricky things, for example on average every game in a casino pays the house more. Yet there is enough variability in the system that some players win big.
On taking Atlantic hurricanes average 32 per season using the NOAA National Hurricane Center's data we see that the variance (number of storms - Average) or delta is
2000 -13
2001 -14
2002 -18
2003 -13
2004 -16
2005 -1
2006 -22
This is only the data for the first 6 years of the current century. Yet we see that we have not hit the target even once in the seven years of observed data, even as atmospheric CO2 is acknowledged to have increased.
Notes:
1) 2007 Hurricane Data is not yet available at http://maps.csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/reports.jsp
2) Methodology was to count the number of named Atlantic storms for each year.
"The Arctic melts exactly 16cm in the summer and is replaced by 16 cm (with a .001 cm difference) during the winter. "
Are you kidding??? At that rate, we would lose 1cm every thousand years!! After a few million years, Kansas would be underwater.
We need to ban all sources of heat immediately. Our future depends on it.
Excellent post. Really like your blog.
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