http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/the-people-vs-the-cru-freedom-of-information-my-okole…/

John Moore: No, it’s not anecdotal. It is historical fact. There is quite a difference. There is no doubt that there was warming in Europe (and Greenland) in the middle ages that exceeds what we see today. The “climate proxies” in this case are historical records and artifacts, such as the large barns built in Greenland.
OK, so please point to a 1000-year quantitative temperature series produced from these historical records and we might be able to compare the methodology and underlying data of this to what was used in Mann et al.

Most temperature reconstructions depend sensitively on a small group of proxies, including the “Yamal series” and the bristlecone pines. Take them out, and there’s no Hockeystick. Here’s one study that doesn’t use them.

The only people who should be getting investigated and prosecuted here are Phil Jones and the rest of the Hockey Team, given the evidence now made public against them for conspiracy to falsify data, to violate FOIA, to subvert the peer review process, defrauding the taxpayer, filing false expense reports, falsely testifying before congress, and in one case, a solicitation to commit assault and battery.

The Team is as dirty a group of white collar criminals as they come, akin to Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, and the Enron crew. If they are not investigated and prosecuted, then the system is well and truly corrupt.

lucklucky: Funny. Suddenly Deep Throat of Watergate fame is bad, those workers that leaked documents of firms that polluted rivers too, leaks by unnamed functionaries that show corruptions, malfeasance etc are now a bad thing…How the world turns…

Actually, all actions are criminal, including those government officials that allowed the NYT to disclose sensitive anti-terrorism programs. Anyone who commits such an offense should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and the information obtained, no matter how noble, should not and cannot be used to mitigate the crime(s).

That said, the method of obtaining the information does nothing to discredit the validity or legitimacy of the information. While I agree the e-mails do not point to some great left-wing conspiracy, it does show that the “science” being conducted is sloppy at best and dishonest at worst. Further, you have scientists that are so deep into it that they are no longer acting as scientists, but as advocates/fanatists and are conducting themselves as such. My biggest problem with AGW has always been the refusal to release the data and the unwarranted adhominum attacks whenever questioned or challenged. Based on these e-mails we see what feeds those actions.

It will be interesting to see what ramifications result from this peek behind the curtain.

Very little data go back 150 years.

If our interest is global temperatures, then we need something akin to global data.

I wish to get a pony for Christmas. It’s really, really important for me to get a pony.

Well, that doesn’t mean there’s a pony.

Maybe we are poisoning the atmosphere and killing our unborn children. But the method being used to demonstrate that is incapable of demonstrating it. Cue trumpets and invoke precautionary principle.

The real problem with Jones-Hansen and their crowd is not that they are telling us more than they know, they are telling us more than they can know. There are people on the other side of the opinion doing the same.

John Moore: Measuring it’s volumetric concentration is not enough. You have to look at its contribution to albedo, which this doesn’t do.

This is the ant and the rubber tree plant. The volumetric (molar)concentration is so low that it would have to have a HUGE effect to see any difference. For example, 5000 TIMES the effect of CO2 to have the same volume weighted contribution. Same with all of these trace gasses. Water vapor is the biggest contributor because it’s in such high concentration AND has a high response factor.

OK, so please point to a 1000-year quantitative temperature series produced from these historical records and we might be able to compare the methodology and underlying data of this to what was used in Mann et al. Temperature records today are based on hundreds of individual land– and sea-based temperature stations or on satellite imagery covering the entire surface of the earth. Obviously, no method of reconstructing a past temperature record can come close to our contemporary methods. That’s not a valid criticism of attempts to do so, though.

You miss the point. The historical evidence, while not providing a time series, is sufficient to refute any hypothesis or methodology that fails to produce a Northern Hemisphere midieval warm period and a Northern Hemisphere “mini ice-age.” It is not necessary to provide an alternate hypothesis when refuting one!

The site I referenced shows that there are lots of indicators of global midieval warming. Is it a proof? No, but it sure provides lots of data that needs to be, and hasn’t been accounted for.

As to the proxy data… the fact that it uses lots of stations and produces lots of data is insufficient evidence of its accuracy. Furthermore, the temperature data is only from the last 150 years – before that it is all proxies, with their many problems.

Yeah, so what about methane?

It’s only at 70 ppbv in the atmosphere. That’s 0.0000070%.

Measuring it’s volumetric concentration is not enough. You have to look at its contribution to albedo, which this doesn’t do.

It’s only at 70 ppbv in the atmosphere. That’s 0.0000070%.

It’s literally a gnat fart.

and

‘Temperature records today are based on hundreds of individual land– and sea-based temperature stations or on satellite imagery covering the entire surface of the earth.’

You need to know that global satellite observations of surface temperatures did not begin until the 21st century. (The satellite observations that began in 1979 were of levels of the troposphere, whose relation to surface temps are unclear but, in any case, not linear.)

Records in 1900 were not based on hundreds of stations. About 70% of the globe was not being observed in 1900, so claims that the global temperature has risen X (usually they say, 0.6 C) in a hundred years are based on a merely notional idea of what the globe’s temperature was a century ago.

Most people who engage in this debate, even the strong critics of AGW, accept that there has been warming in the 20th c., but it’s just an assumption. There is very little observational data to show it.

It is you that don’t understand what is the issue. There is no reliable temperature record even today. The error that could occur is bigger than the differences that we usually talk. With data e anecdotal evidence we have can only get big temperature changes. Or are you telling everyone that 70% of earth (I suspect that you know there something called Oceans and Seas ) that doesn’t have any reliable temperature record ever. Only recently there have been put buoys.

Written in 1800s refering a text of 1683 an example of anedoctal:

“…Qui in Italia è voce e querela comune, che i mezzi tempi non vi son più; e in questo smarrimento di confini, non vi è dubbio che il freddo acquista terreno. Io ho udito dire a mio padre, che in sua gioventù, a Roma, la mattina di pasqua di resurrezione, ognuno si rivestiva da state. Adesso chi non ha bisogno d’impegnar la camiciuola, vi so dire che si guarda molto bene di non alleggerirsi della minima cosa di quelle ch’ei portava nel cuor dell’inverno”. Ouesto scriveva il Magalotti in data del 1683. L’Italia sarebbe più fredda oramai che la Groenlandia, se da quell’anno a questo, fosse venuta continuamente raffreddandosi a quella proporzione che si raccontava allora…”

Chapter XXXIX
http://www.leopardi.it/pensieri.php

So is there even someone that can say what are and have been the earth temperature(with degree precision) without more than 70% of earth!? To not talk about issues like
cloud cover.

But all of above that is missing only helps us describing the climate, doesn’t tell us what affects it, what are the main forces behind it.

For example IPCC says textually that feedbacks aren’t well understood.
Nevertheless without shame and showing clearly how corrupt they are CO2 is the culprit.

Strangely showing once more how “settled” the science is:

“A Nasa study says climate scientists have underestimated by 20 to 40 per cent how much methane warms the planet – even though it is already believed to be 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The study, led by Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said methane blocked the creation of aerosols that would otherwise cool the planet – a new finding not counted in current estimates of global warming.”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10608122&pnum=1
Monday Nov 9, 2009

So with underestimations(if true) of 20-40% for such a mundane thing like methane what have been the quality and value of simulations?

Science settled? no we just know that we are very far from knowing enough and all resources should be spent trying to know more, instead of serving a political-economic takeover by a corrupt clique.

Ricardo: OK, so please point to a 1000-year quantitative temperature series produced from these historical records and we might be able to compare the methodology and underlying data of this to what was used in Mann et al.

The problem is, trivial changes to the algorithm and data samples of Mann’s methodologies (and those of similar reconstructions) result in completely different quantitative results – including temperature series which show a strong medieval warm period.

For example, eliminating just one location in Mann’s original work (the West USA strip-bark Bristlecone Pines) results in a medieval warm period hotter than today. So one of your original criticisms – that results should not be dependent on just one location – means we must also reject Mann’s work. Because that specific conclusion is dependent on just one location.

What is worse is that the strip-bark Bristlecone Pines are well known for having non-climatic influences (probably reaction-wood growth from damage to the tree), and Mann’s algorithm has no way of dealing with non-climatic effects mixed in to the data.

Mann’s 2008 paper boasted that he was no longer dependent on the Bristlecone Pines – but on further investigation, it was found he added another series which was hopelessly contaminated with non-climatic influences (this time, lake sediment that had been disturbed by civil engineering projects in the 20th century). Unless you believe civil engineering projects are a good proxy for northern hemisphere temperature, this is little more than a bad joke.

These are examples of sensitivity of the results to data – European scientists Gerd Burger and Ulrich Cubasch demonstrated similar sensitivities in their paper “Are multi-proxy reconstructions robust” (Tellus, 2005). Here they show trivial changes to the algorithm which are inconsistent between studies yield entirely different chronologies.

Sorry, this has been a long post, but I can finally deliver the punch line. If trivial changes that cannot be determined a priori result in completely different medieval / modern temperature relationships, the methods are inadequate for determining the correct warmth. This is science 101.

Furthermore, archeological evidence cannot be dismissed. And it isn’t just one or two data points – we have a huge range of proxies showing consistent NH warmth in medieval times, ranging from Finnish tree lines, to UK vineyards and frost fairs, to Greenland settlements and burials, to Sargasso sea sediments, to American mountain range tree lines, to Scandinavian pollen stratigraphy. In science, you can’t just dismiss this mountain of evidence. You can’t just say “this newer result is better”. If two sets of results are inconsistent, you have to find a definitive reason why one set is wrong and the other is right.

Unfortunately, there are many more reasons to doubt the modern multiproxy studies than there are to doubt the archeological evidence. Meanwhile, the most honest scientific answer at present has to be “we don’t know”. The e-mails show how the top climate scientists try to control the peer-reviewed literature to keep “we don’t know” off the options list.

A. Zarkov: He doesn’t have any work to read. He’s published a coffee table book called An Inconvenient Truth. Have you ever looked at it? No index. No references. No table of contents. It’s a polemic, not any kind of work of science. Gore won’t debate anyone. When a journalist asked him some embarrassing questions at a press conference, they cut off his microphone. Why would he not be a whipping boy with that kind of record?

There are frequent reports in the financial press that Al Gore will soon have a net worth exceeding $1 billion, mostly from climate-related investments.

John Moore: No, it’s not anecdotal. It is historical fact. There is quite a difference. There is no doubt that there was warming in Europe (and Greenland) in the middle ages that exceeds what we see today. The “climate proxies” in this case are historical records and artifacts, such as the large barns built in Greenland.

OK, so please point to a 1000-year quantitative temperature series produced from these historical records and we might be able to compare the methodology and underlying data of this to what was used in Mann et al. Temperature records today are based on hundreds of individual land- and sea-based temperature stations or on satellite imagery covering the entire surface of the earth. Obviously, no method of reconstructing a past temperature record can come close to our contemporary methods. That’s not a valid criticism of attempts to do so, though.

I browsed the website you pointed to and most of the papers seem to be analyses based on one particular localized area. It’s not a good faith argument to criticize Mann et al for their own localized data while citing papers that also rely on localized data just because they agree with your preconceived biases. Not to mention there is almost certainly selection bias in the studies this website cites. What is needed is a rigorous meta-analysis which I don’t believe is provided on this website.

Skeptics at this point usually bring out anecdotes about wine vineyards and olive plantations existing in Northern Europe as proof of the Medieval Warm Period. This evidence is a) anecdotal (and therefore given appropriately low weight by scientists)

No, it’s not anecdotal. It is historical fact. There is quite a difference. There is no doubt that there was warming in Europe (and Greenland) in the middle ages that exceeds what we see today. The “climate proxies” in this case are historical records and artifacts, such as the large barns built in Greenland.

and b) every bit as “localized” as the tree ring data. Fortunately, Mann et al do not rely just on tree rings but use several other proxies and use principal component analysis to extract a proxy measure of temperature.

At least this argument starts with a valid issue: locality – sort of like the 12 bristlecone pines used in the hockey stick! However, check out http://www.co2science.org/ for a substantial list of papers indicating that the midieval warming and the “little ice age” were global.

What is their motivation to act in this manner?

I am always reluctant to speculate on people’s motives. It could be anything from a sincere belief that they have the gospel truth, to petty viciousness, to a willingness to ignore science in order to “protect the planet”, to a desire not to be challenged. I truly don’t know.

Willis Eschenbach: SG, you ask:
These are some of the most central scientists in the entire climate debate. Phil Jones is responsible for creating and maintaining the HadCRUT3 global temperature dataset used to show that the earth has warmed. Michael Mann is the creator of the infamous and discredited “Hockeystick Chart” of global temperatures used by the IPCC. He and Gavin Schmidt are the main force behind the realclimate.com website, which claims to be scientific but in fact ruthlessly censors dissenting views. They claim that they do not screen scientific ideas and questions, but the emails say different. From Michael Mann:
Bradley and Hughes are co-authors on the “Hockeystick” paper. Tim Osborne is a scientist at EAU. Keith Briffa has written numerous papers supporting the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hypothesis.Taken as a whole, they are some of the most prestigious and visible climate scientists supporting the AGW hypothesis. All of them are or have been authors and lead authors for important sections of the IPCC reports. For them to act in this manner is absolutely shameful.

What is their motivation to act in this manner?

As to the importance of the taint from this behavior, time will tell. I doubt these are the only climate scientists around talking about climate change, though.

And finally I'm glad people have moved to talk about the substance, and not try to justify the theft.]

Here’s my question — I don’t follow the AGW debate that closely so I don’t recognize the names involved here. If you were to completely discard the implicated scientists’ research, how much of the case for AGW remains? Is the research at stake fundamental to the case for AGW or is it tangential?

These are some of the most central scientists in the entire climate debate. Phil Jones is responsible for creating and maintaining the HadCRUT3 global temperature dataset used to show that the earth has warmed. Michael Mann is the creator of the infamous and discredited “Hockeystick Chart” of global temperatures used by the IPCC. He and Gavin Schmidt are the main force behind the realclimate.com website, which claims to be scientific but in fact ruthlessly censors dissenting views. They claim that they do not screen scientific ideas and questions, but the emails say different. From Michael Mann:

>> Anyway, I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC [realclimate.org] in any
>> way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful
>> about what comments we screen through, and we’ll be very careful to
>> answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other
>> hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself.
>> We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or
>> not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any
>> comments you’d like us to include.

Bradley and Hughes are co-authors on the “Hockeystick” paper. Tim Osborne is a scientist at EAU. Keith Briffa has written numerous papers supporting the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) hypothesis.

Taken as a whole, they are some of the most prestigious and visible climate scientists supporting the AGW hypothesis. All of them are or have been authors and lead authors for important sections of the IPCC reports. For them to act in this manner is absolutely shameful.

I would like to obtain a list of the meteorological stations used in the preparation of the HadCRUT3 global temperature average, and the raw data for those stations. I cannot find it anywhere on the web. The lead author for the temperature average is Dr. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit.

Many thanks, Willis Eschenbach

Receiving no reply, I filed the FOIA application. They stuffed me around with a bunch of bogus excuses, even after I had appealed the decision. Basically, they just tossed my request into the trash.

Now the emails reveal that Jones convinced the University FOI official to simply blow off all of the emails from people associated with Climate Audit. Since I post there regularly, I was automatically one of the evil people whose requests could just be thrown away.

From Phil Jones:

1. Think I’ve managed to persuade UEA [University of East Anglia, where CRU is located] to ignore all further FOIA requests from if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.

and

When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions – one at a screen, to convince them otherwise showing them what CA was about. Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA … became very supportive.

Now I’d like all of you folks that are claiming that is just boys being boys, and thats how scientists act, and that there’s nothing there, to explain how blocking my honest, sincere, legitimate Freedom of Information Act requests, along with FOIA requests from everyone who posts at Climate Audit, is normal science at work. It is not. It is a direct and scurrilous attack on the scientific method itself.

Science works by one person making a claim, and backing it up with the data and methods that they used to make the claim. Other scientists attack the work by (among other things) trying to replicate the first scientist’s work. If they can’t replicate it, it doesn’t stand. So blocking the FOIA allowed Phil Jones to claim that his temperature record (HadCRUT3) was valid science.

So this is not just trivial gamesmanship. This is an attack on the heart of science, trying to keep people who disagree with you from ever checking your work and seeing if your math is correct. I am astounded by people like the guy above who says:

Besides, the data itself is there for you to see — hell, the entire IPCC report, technical sections and all, is freely available on the Internet over at the IPCC website.

That’s the point. The data is not all there to see, not only that, you can’t get to it even with a legal FOIA request … because they simply illegally evaded the request. Now, they’re trashing emails to try to hide their trail … anyone else want to say that’s how normal science operates?

Here’s my question — I don’t follow the AGW debate that closely so I don’t recognize the names involved here. If you were to completely discard the implicated scientists’ research, how much of the case for AGW remains? Is the research at stake fundamental to the case for AGW or is it tangential?

One should note that even if there’s lots of other research — how do we know it’s not been corrupt, too? This demonstrates that we need complete transparency from all of them so we can evaluate. They are not entitled to the presumption that they are telling the truth since, obviously, some of them are lying.

A. Zarkov:
He doesn’t have any work to read. He’s published a coffee table book called An Inconvenient Truth. Have you ever looked at it? No index. No references. No table of contents. It’s a polemic, not any kind of work of science. Gore won’t debate anyone. When a journalist asked him some embarrassing questions at a press conference, they cut off his microphone. Why would he not be a whipping boy with that kind of record?

He’s not my guy to defend so it doesn’t matter.

kdackson: Ricardo, if you want to use proxies based on a sampling of 12 trees in a local area to extrapolate to global conclusions, then more power to you.

I’m not sure you understand the context of the academic dispute between Mann et al (the tree ring, hockey stick people) and the skeptics. The debate is not over whether there has been significant warming in the past century: that is already settled by the direct temperature record. The dispute is over whether there was such a thing as the Medieval Warm Period and whether temperatures in this period reached higher than they did in the 1990s.

Skeptics at this point usually bring out anecdotes about wine vineyards and olive plantations existing in Northern Europe as proof of the Medieval Warm Period. This evidence is a) anecdotal (and therefore given appropriately low weight by scientists) and b) every bit as “localized” as the tree ring data. Fortunately, Mann et al do not rely just on tree rings but use several other proxies and use principal component analysis to extract a proxy measure of temperature.

Is their method biased? I honestly haven’t followed the debate closely enough to know. But I do know that a true skeptic would not use anecdotal evidence from one small corner of the earth to make generalizations about the temperature record of the past 1000 years. If you want to say that we simply don’t know much of anything about global temperatures before 150 years ago, then please do so. But you cannot deny the warming of the past century (which relies on direct measurement rather than rough proxies) nor can you make any claims about the natural variability of the climate or past warming periods.

rpt: I have not read any of his work. I do know that hie is a popular whipping boy for one side of the debate.

He doesn’t have any work to read. He’s published a coffee table book called An Inconvenient Truth. Have you ever looked at it? No index. No references. No table of contents. It’s a polemic, not any kind of work of science. Gore won’t debate anyone. When a journalist asked him some embarrassing questions at a press conference, they cut off his microphone. Why would he not be a whipping boy with that kind of record?

False, as a proxy of what? up and down? It certainly can’t be proxy of temperature. Because temperature has a value. Not knowing the process it is all thin conjecture not science like this news show:

“The growth of British trees appears to follow a cosmic pattern, with trees growing faster when high levels of cosmic radiation arrive from space.
Researchers made the discovery studying how growth rings of spruce trees have varied over the past half a century.
As yet, they cannot explain the pattern, but variation in cosmic rays impacted tree growth more than changes in temperature or precipitation.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8311000/8311373.stm

“See my example of adult height and life expectancy and the millions of dollars life insurance companies bet on this correlation.”

Insurance companies aren’t making science. Insurance companies need to justify how to get bigger premiums.

But the above is all Blablabla…not even todays is possible to say what is the earth temperature. There is not enough data(stations don’t cover whole world) and even less reliable(many stations are affected by land use) to say what is any value.

Even less possible is to have an historical series. Stations in Europa have been moving to Mediterranean, those in Pacific, a big part of the world for those that forget forget have several issues.

1. Growing degree days. This is just like heating degree days where you average the temperature above a threshold.

2. Soil conditions.

3. Root pathogens.

4. Rainfall.

5. Altitude.

6. In some cases forest fires.

7. Air pollution such as ozone and sulfur dioxide.

8. Competition from other vegetation.

9. Stuff I can’t remember.

Now are you going go to take a small sample of trees from one place and extrapolate that to the whole planet? You couldn’t do that if you had temperature stations instead of trees.

I also worked on calculating the global temperature field using the available station data at the time. The most successful method was radial basis functions, specifically Hardy’s multiquartic. I don’t know if people use this technique today, but I would be very interested to see how they go from station data to the global temperature average. But Mann, Hansen et al won’t provide data and methods. As the emails show they would rather destroy data than release it. Is this science? I’m amazed that they every got away with concealing public data.

The actuaries can test their stats… if the correlation holds up over time, then their bets are good and they’ll keep making them. They also don’t care about co-factors, because it doesn’t matter what the mechanism of action is, the results are the same.

With climate proxies, this isn’t the case. The data is too sparse to just use correlation, and furthermore, what do you correlate with, when you don’t have good temperature measurements? We have only had decent global teperature measurements for a couple of decades or so – with satellite sensors. Any data before that is suspect, as is shown by the valid debates over the shape of the curves – even in the thermometry era. Even the satellite data is subject to systemic bias.

Hence, the paleoclimatic data is simply very noisy, too sparse and subject to systemic error. The consequence of this is that we can’t place much confidence in it. Make huge policy decisions from science dependent on this data is the height of folly (unless there are other motives).

The actuaries can test their stats… if the correlation holds up over time, then their bets are good and they’ll keep making them. They also don’t care about co-factors, because it doesn’t matter what the mechanism of action is, the results are the same.

With climate proxies, this isn’t the case. The data is too sparse to just use correlation, and furthermore, what do you correlate with, when you don’t have good temperature measurements? We have only had decent global teperature measurements for a couple of decades or so – with satellite sensors. Any data before that is suspect, as is shown by the valid debates over the shape of the curves – even in the thermometry era. Even the satellite data is subject to systemic bias.

Hence, the paleoclimatic data is simply very noisy, too sparse and subject to systemic error. The consequence of this is that we can’t place much confidence in it. Make huge policy decisions from science dependent on this data is the height of folly (unless there are other motives).

That’s like sampling 2 trees per continent and drawing global conslusions from that. Would you be comfortable with data of that high a “quality”?

Is a bogus method based on cherry picked data from a local data set, with no controls for variations due to species, latitude, elevation, rainfall, soil nutrients, etc.

Think of it another way. If the tobacco companies did a study that found a group of 12 people who were lifetime smokers and liven into their 90s, died of something other than cancer, and published the data as proof that there was no correlation between smoking and cancer, would you blindly accept that data?

kdackson: Do you care to reevaluate that statement, in light of the fact that you are using one correlation (measuring tree ring growth as a function of temperature) and applying another correlation (measuring temperature as a function of CO2) to decisively conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt that mechanistically increases in CO2 lead to catastrophic temperature rises? And by so doing, that we have a dire need to reduce CO2 emissions to keep temperature rise in check.

No, I don’t care to re-evaluate my previous statement at all since it is directly on point: the correlation v. causation problem has nothing to do with using proxies to reconstruct a temperature series for the past 1000 years. That’s what the discussion is about. Obviously, we can’t even begin to have a reasonable debate about AGW or the role CO2 plays in warming if we can’t even agree on the temperature data. Your objection to the use of proxies for temperature is simply wrong: we don’t need to know the causal impact of a 1 degree increase in temperature on tree ring density to use tree ring density as a proxy. If we wanted to know that causal impact then your objections are right — we don’t need it, though. See my example of adult height and life expectancy and the millions of dollars life insurance companies bet on this correlation.

A. Zarkov:
Do you think non-scientist Gore has some special ability with respect to AGW?

I have not read any of his work. I do know that hie is a popular whipping boy for one side of the debate.

The difficulty of dealing with CO2 forcing is exactly because of the feedback effects. There are known (at a gross level) positive feedbacks: warm the earth and the oceans hold less CO2; melt tundra and get methane. There is also negative feedback (more CO2 means more CO2 absorbed by growing plants, etc).

The most significant factor is indeed H2O – specifically, clouds. Clouds either increase or decrease the albedo depending on droplet concentration.

The way the alarmists arrive at their predictions is through the use of sensitivity models. These are typically GCM’s (similar to those we use in weather forecasting). Twiddle the parameters to what you think CO2 will do to the forcing, and then see what the model says. Needless to say, these are almost completely unfalsifiable, since there is no higher-CO2 atmosphere to try them against. Hence the interest in paleoclimatology. They can try to model the past and match it to the past’s climate record.

That seems to be very fraught with errors and enormously vulnerable to sampling bias.

So, let’s impoverish humanity (err, I mean create green jobs) based on this dog’s breakfast.

I am familiar with radiative heat transfer (Engineer and all that). However, I would guess that radiative heating of the landmasses and the ocean with convective heat transfer to the atmosphere would be a more mechanistic based model, primarily because the concentration of so-called green house gasses is relatively low.

Inbound and outbound fluxes? You mean absorptivity and emissivity? Since both O2 and N2 do not absorb in the IR range, the entire contribution to the radiative flux from the atmosphere is the CO2, O3 (0.07 ppmv), CH4 (2 ppmv), and H2O, and of those 4 compounds, H2O is the largest contributor and varies widely depending upon where you are and averages 4000 ppmv.

More likely is the reradiation from the surface of the earth to the black body of space at night. Cloud cover affects that most strongly, and you can see it on clear, calm nights in winter when the temperatue in my neck of the woods typically can get to -10 F (or lower) during the winter.

I never denied the fundamental physics of the situation, but I have not yet seen an adequate model that takes into account the topography and incident solar radiation, convection, and reradiation to space that would be a starting point.