CC3 -- Why I believe that a third option is needed for climate change

GL, the Toronto station has always been located somewhere within 1 km of its current location, which is on some open grass-covered land east of the northeast corner of the Trinity College residence and south of Varsity Stadium. Before it was located there around 2003, it was for many years at 315 Bloor St West which is an old headquarters building of the weather service, located west of Varsity Stadium. While it was there from perhaps 1908 to 2003, the site was surrounded by increasingly tall high rise buildings and the population of Toronto went from about a quarter million to over four million, although the largest urban heat island increases take place in the jump from 10,000 to 500,000 population (I consider the u.h.i. about 75% complete by 1931).

Before 1908 the station was near another building on the university campus located about 1 km south of its current and previous locations (which are themselves less than 0.25 km apart). Not that it means anything, but the new location could have been seen out my back window when I lived in residence at the university. The previous location was a five minute walk around the stadium and the original location about a fifteen minute walk across campus. So the obs have been taken at similar locations in a generally flat well-treed mid-town location. The core of Toronto's c.b.d. is between the university and the lakeshore but I would describe the area immediately east of the university as the northern extension of same, so in some ways this is a similar location to NYC's Central Park observation site. However it is not as distinctly parkland as that setting.

If you googled Trinity College and Varsity Stadium then the current location is closer to the college and you can see the instruments in a grassy open area on google earth imagery. It appears that, as in my time at university, the space between the two is a soccer field, not sure if that's still true. The weather station is located about 50 paces southeast of where the corner flag, closer to the northeast corner of the residence, is placed for that soccer field. The residence is an older stone structure and has smallish windows, I doubt that it's radiating a lot of reflected solar heating towards the instruments. There are no other buildings near the observing site. The back of the Royal Ontario Museum can be seen in the google earth imagery off to the northeast. It's a little strip of tall trees in a slight valley between the buildings.

Toronto airport (CYYZ) is about 20 kms west-northwest of this location and Toronto City Centre airport (used to be called Island Airport) is about 4 kms south-southwest. Another station with useful data is located at North York civic centre. North York is a northern borough of the city that would be "mid-town" in the same way that Bronx or Queens would be in relation to Manhattan. It's definitely fully within the large-scale urban heat island and when the Toronto site goes missing I use its data instead. That happened on perhaps 20-25 days in the past decade. Before 2013 the Toronto "City" weather station had a near-perfect observing record.

As to that data saving business, I think what happened over-rode everything in place for some odd reason, the power did not go off, it just surged and maybe all the systems failed because one component thought it was a shutdown and another didn't (like the power was off for maybe 1 second). I've never had that happen before and I do routinely save my work.

So one might ask, what is the right answer to the question of future trends in global climate, if both sides have lost the plot? Or are you saying that while both are likely wrong, you have no basis for making a call? I am not trying to wind you up with this question, just curious since I think I understand what you're saying but I haven't read anything in past musings to say what will actually happen in your opinion (or perhaps to be more precise, in the opinion of the philosophers you are quoting).

I would agree that we are not in any position to make definitive forecasts, and what the public may have heard from the experts is really their best estimate, not something as reliable as an eclipse forecast or even tomorrow's weather forecast. And in my own case, I have made no claims of a definitive forecast, I am merely saying that on balance of probabilities, we would be wise to assume a warmer future and therefore some significant sea level rises. But this is a bit like saying that Sweden would be wise to assume they might lose a big football match with Germany.

This stuff from Oriel36 has me stumped, I have no idea what he thinks is the fatal flaw in our understanding of seasons or basic principles of climate. But I do want readers of this thread to understand that his insertions have nothing to do with the subject matter being discussed here, and form no basis whatsoever for my objections to the orthodox climate science theories.

I have always understood the difference between sidereal and synodic day length. We get one extra sidereal day per synodic year. There is no temperature cycle from any observation point that corresponds to the sidereal day (roughly 23 hours 56 min), or if so, it would have a very small amplitude compared with the synodic day (24 hours).

I'm wondering if Oriel36 can provide any publications of articles to support his point of view, or if this is entirely his own personal theory.

Anyway, I do hope the discussion can proceed without what I would consider to be irrelevant sidetracking to theories of persons not connected to the debate at hand. Somebody might have made a whopper of a mistake about the evolutionary details of the Turkish titmouse, and I could join in the finger pointing and ritual shaming for a bit of fun, but what progress do we then make to solving the climate change conundrum?

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On a separate issue, we are probing around the edges of a big philosophical question when it comes to established science and peer review. At some point, it becomes obvious to neutral onlookers (i.e., intelligent laypersons who have no personal involvement in the scientific community, just an interest in their research and announced findings) that a given science is suffering from some combination of tunnel vision and inappropriate oversight. It continues to function like the other sciences that are perhaps not suffering, but "by their fruits shall ye know them" applies.

So I think I am not overstating it when I say that a disturbingly large number of intelligent laypersons have a deep skepticism about the health of climate science as compared to (let's say) astronomy or theoretical physics. There is a widespread perception that the reality is trending towards a science that excludes all dissidents, promotes one theory that is inadequately demonstrated to be either working or all-encompassing, and fails to recognize its own weaknesses and limitations. Peer review within such a failing enterprise will of course take the form of dissident ostracism. The notion that only "real science" is published and peer reviewed is an obvious example of circular reasoning (he is a scientist because scientists said he was a scientist, he lived in a scientist's house and drove a scientist's car). At some point, the clash between the orthodox and the inevitable alternate science turns into a fight to the death based on competing theoretical prediction (what else could separate the claims?).

This happened in geomorphology in the 19th century. The current established view of glacial landforms replaced a very elaborate but (it turned out) very wrong set of ideas about how erratic boulders came to rest in their present locations. They had not been dropped off from floating ice rafts, but instead had been pushed there by moving glaciers. There were terrible and highly personal debates at conferences in the mid-19th century during which time the new theory gradually pushed out the old one.

Other examples of things that the scientific consensus got wrong would be the non-existent ether, phlogiston (a non-existent compound to explain combustion), and unlimited general relativity (turned out to be capped by limits imposed by special relativity).

It could well be that AGW is another of these false doctrines, although in this case, all we are saying is that its proportion has been overestimated. Dissidents of many different opinions have not really come together on any one alternate theory, but continue to examine various possibilities. In my case, I am saying that AGW accounts for perhaps one third of observed warming of climate over the period 1890 to 2020, while natural variability accounts for the other two thirds. Within that general postulate, there would be room to accept (a) the contribution of natural variability could be different from decade to decade, and (b) the proportion of AGW could increase over time -- in fact I think this is the case. I think AGW is perhaps 10% of the observed warming 1890 to 1950, 20% of what could be seen 1950 to 1980, and could be as much as 40% in the past decade (when some data sets indicate a slowdown in the overall warming trend).

Some other dissident might claim other proportions, such as no AGW, all observed change is natural, or, data sets are compromised by faulty readings (not a claim I make or support), or, greenhouse gas is the driving factor but its increase is more due to warming climates than vice versa (a claim that I think resides within my own paradigm).

There likely won't be an end game to this debate until dissidents unite around one competing theory. It is pretty easy for the consensus to repel the outsiders when they are scattered all over the spectrum and if they ever got together, would be arguing radically different points of view. If on the other hand, dissidents adopted one theory, made predictions, and those predictions started to verify with smaller errors than IPCC predictions (which to be fair keep changing decade to decade, but I'll accept that in an evolving new science, that is normal enough), then we might reach a point where outside scientific bodies started to give more credence to the rival theory, and proponents started to switch sides (which is how the geomorphology debate was resolved).

The problem in our science is time scale. We make predictions for 20-50 years to illustrate our theories, but we are not (in some cases, notably mine) likely to be alive and working at the point where these predictions can be compared with outcomes. Meanwhile, the competing orthodox theory can continue to make new predictions and place a lot of emphasis on them (the "now we're really really screwed" paradigm). This is what leads to widespread public skepticism about the climate change lobby as it exists (and they get to run their show as they see fit, so they have made these choices, not had them imposed from any outside agency). Similar sounding predictions are made at longer intervals than the predictions reference. I have saved copies of newspaper articles published around 1990 claiming such things as disappearance of arctic sea ice, spread of tropical vegetation far to the north within a generation, end of winter, end of ski resort viability, great masses of people on the move in a desperate search for water ... yet reality produced a different outcome. Part of this will be explained away as a "new understanding" that climate change is more complex, blah blah, but then I am asked to believe things that are nonsensical, such as the arctic warming (which I acknowledge to be real) will displace the polar vortex to unusual southern locations creating cold waves in temperate climates. The reason this is both ridiculous and absurd is, (a) problem solved if you're saying the climate is too warm, (b) then what displaced these polar vortices in the cold 19th century when air mass frequency analysis shows that they must have been over lower latitudes more frequently than in the 20th century?

I make entirely reasonable statements about natural warming (obvious sudden surges in temperatures between the 1890s and 1910s for example) which must have been based largely on changes in air mass frequency, and I ask, how does that square with the announced theory that recent warming is all of anthropogenic origins and not only that, the AGW is greater than the observed warming, which implies that at any given time in that period, the background climate should have been cooling? Is there any knowledgeable weather historian who would agree that in fact this is what you can see from temperature records (especially those in eastern North America where this fallacy is easiest to demonstrate) or would those observers be more likely to conclude that strong natural warming occurred then? Yet I am told this is not the accepted theory in the science, and that basic physics somehow contradict what I can see in plain sight. So I come away thinking, well perhaps these self-defined experts and their proven science are just another example of a faulty science about to be shoved into a heap by a better (more accurate) alternative.

The only comeback they have is a power play -- we are the scientists, you aren't published (how could I be with the lockstep mind set of the faulty science?) so you're not a real scientist.

I would submit that sufficiently educated and literate people will see through that card game and look for the truth wherever it resides. And that is what I intend to do, no amount of name calling will deter me from it (and there has been a considerable amount of it already, some of it rather desperate sounding, such as that I am running a cult and encouraging an echo chamber). Can anyone point to even one individual whose free will or ability to think for him or herself has been even marginally reduced by any activity of mine, here or elsewhere? Feel free to publish the results. I'm not in the censorship game.