APS and the Global Warming Scam

[jts]

2 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

  In point of fact we cannot do anything empirically which is not somewhat theory laden.  Example. Measure a piece of wood.  Easy you say.  Take a ruler and lay it lengthwise on the wood.  BUT!!!! you have to pick up the ruler and move it to the wood.  You have hypothesized that the mild acceleration applied to the ruler to carry it to the wood  does not distort the ruler.  In a word, you have assumed the ruler is rigid enough to withstand your handling of it to bring to the wood.  So even a carpenter cannot escape hypotheticals.....

I took some courses in carpentry many years ago. They didn't teach me Einstein's theory of relativity and how it applies to measuring a piece of wood.

 

[BaalChatzaf]

2 hours ago, jts said:

I took some courses in carpentry many years ago. They didn't teach me Einstein's theory of relativity and how it applies to measuring a piece of wood.

 

So much the worse for your carpentry course.  You have assumed rigidity without even being aware you have assumed it.  

[jts]

5 minutes ago, BaalChatzaf said:

So much the worse for your carpentry course.  You have assumed rigidity without even being aware you have assumed it.  

How would applying Einstein's theory of relativity to measuring a piece of wood make me a better carpenter?

 

[BaalChatzaf]

 

 

4 hours ago, jts said:

How would applying Einstein's theory of relativity to measuring a piece of wood make me a better carpenter?

 

It is possible to be a very fine carpenter and to be oblivious that most of our "common sense" suppositions are theory laden.  If you are making a cabinet for someone you are being paid for doing carpentry,  not being aware of the underlying physics of measurement. 

[jts]

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

 

It is possible to be a very fine carpenter and to be oblivious that most of our "common sense" suppositions are theory laden.  If you are making a cabinet for someone you are being paid for doing carpentry,  not being aware of the underlying physics of measurement. 

Then why is omitting Einstein's theory of relativity and how it applies to measuring a piece of wood a defect in the course on carpentry?

 

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, jts said:

Then why is omitting Einstein's theory of relativity and how it applies to measuring a piece of wood a defect in the course on carpentry?

 

It misses a scientifically and epistemologicaly important point.  Much of what we take to be obvious or common sense is rooted in assumptions that we might not be aware of.   Think of  this as dotting the i and crossing the t. 

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Headline porn for Ellen:

Michael

[william.scherk]

On 3/13/2017 at 0:18 PM, william.scherk said:

-- I am taking bets on a return of El Niño in 2017.  If I lose, twenty bucks to OL for the continuance of this site ...

No bites.  

CATO just published an article by Chip Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels, titled Natural Variability’s Role in Arctic Sea Ice Decline Strengthens Case for Lukewarming.

Quote

Ten years ago, a study was conducted by a team led by Julienne Stroeve that looked at the observed rate of Arctic sea ice loss and compared it to climate model expectations. [A side note here: the loss of Arctic sea ice (which is floating ice) does not lead to sea level rise just as the melting of ice in your cocktail doesn’t lead to your glass overflowing]. What Stroeve and colleagues found was the Arctic sea ice was being lost at a far brisker pace than climate models had predicted (Figure 1).

Porn ... 

 

Speaking of models, I keep coming across a (skeptical) argument from Roy Spencer, and a robust response, all to do with model skill and relevance and honesty and bias. There is a graphic much shared which I post below. The issue for me remains, who has the strongest rational argument in the dispute?  Is there deception or error or partisan cherry-picking, or what? Who is zooming who?

A post at Quorum gives an introduction to the dispute, with several links to more in-depth discussions/flaming outrage, What do people think about former NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer's assertion that 95% of global warming climate models are exaggerated?

 

 

Edited March 17, 2017 by william.scherk
Who is Roy Spencer, and why should I care?

[BaalChatzaf]

Spencer's reservations are well founded.  He does not deny warming, by the way,  but he believes most of the warming is due to natural drivers and feed backs and only a small part due to human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere.  There is no doubt that CO2, CH4, NO2 and water vapor   slow the radiation of energy in the infra red frequency range into space.  Further,  if none of these trace gases were in the atmosphere the Earth would have an average surface temperature of nearly -7 F.  That is 39 deg F below the freezing point of water.  On the surface of land and ocean it would be too cold for life.

There is no doubt the planet has warmed.  From the pit of the Little Ice Age to today the average temperature at the surfaces has gone up 4 deg. C.   Ice Ages end when the world gets warmer.  Curry is in concurrence with Spencer's reservations.  The IPCC sponsored models for GCM  all run hotter than the actual temperature. 

What I do not fully grasp  is why our climate and weather which are thermodynamic effects  should have become a matter of politics and ideology.   The world did not  become ideologically and p;olitically  polarized when Celsius and Kelvin discovered the second law of thermodynamics,  which has very pessimistic consequences.  In the very long run the Cosmos will become cold, dark and dead. 

[william.scherk]

Define: fisking

"Fisking" is named after British reporter Robert Fisk. it refers to a kind of line-by-line, or claim-by-claim riposte. I don't put much faith in latter-day Fisk reporting, especially his Syria theatre of war 'taxi-driver' all-seeing narrator romps, and that is where earlier better critics began to pick apart his otherwise persuasively constructed tales of war. OL members often 'fisk' other's comments, offering commentary or discussion on each point made by the interlocutor.  I think somebody called it 'venetian blinds' ...

Anyway, there is a kind of science-reportage Fisking being done via Climatefeedback.org. When a large-bore article or opinion piece appears that may need context or correction, a bench of players is consulted. 

So ... that boring backstory aside, check out this one:

Analysis of “Why are climate-change models so flawed? Because climate science is so incomplete”

Quote

[...]

Notes: 
[1] See the rating guidelines used for article evaluations. 
[2] Each evaluation is independent. Scientists’ comments are all published at the same time.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS

The statements quoted below are from the article; comments and replies are from the reviewers.

1. It is clear that humans are causing climate change through emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which acts as a control knob on the climate system.

“CO₂ is certainly a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, but hardly the primary one: Water vapor accounts for about 95 percent of greenhouse gases. By contrast, carbon dioxide is only a trace component in the atmosphere: about 400 ppm (parts per million), or 0.04 percent.”

Christopher Colose, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, NASA GISS:
First, it is true that water vapor constitutes the bulk of Earth’s present-day greenhouse effect (measured in terms of infrared absorption). Quantitatively, however, Jacoby is off by quite a bit. In fact, water vapor constitutes ~50% of the terrestrial greenhouse effect, not 95% (see here*). Clouds (solid and liquid water that form when the vapor condenses) constitute another ~25%, but CO₂contributes to almost all of the remaining fraction (only ~5% or so from all of the other combined gases). This is because CO₂ still absorbs well in spectral regions where water vapor doesn’t, and also because the upper troposphere is very dry; the ability to absorb intense surface emission and re-emit it at colder, higher layers of the atmosphere is critical for the maintenance of a planetary greenhouse effect.

Secondly, the water vapor greenhouse effect is not independent of the CO₂ in the atmosphere.
Jacoby stresses that CO₂ is only a trace component of the atmosphere, an argument that is irritatingly unoriginal and provides useless context when describing the flow of radiation through the atmosphere. As before, CO₂ accounts for ~20% of Earth’s greenhouse effect. N₂ and O₂account for nearly all of Earth’s atmospheric mass. However, if the atmosphere were purely N₂and O₂, the planet would likely be in a snowball state due to the lack of greenhouse trapping. This is where the equations of radiative transfer must be applied, rather than a naive intuition about proportions.

• Schmidt et al (2010) Attribution of the present-day total greenhouse effect, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Mark Zelinka, Research Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:
Another helpful quote comes from this article:

“The contribution of CO₂ to the greenhouse effect, considerable though it is, understates the central role of the gas as a controller of climate. The atmosphere, if CO₂ were removed from it, would cool enough that much of the water vapor would rain out. That precipitation, in turn, would cause further cooling and ultimately spiral Earth into a globally glaciated snowball state. It is only the present of CO₂ that keeps Earth’s atmosphere warm enough to contain much water vapor.”

I like to think of CO₂ as analogous to a military commander and water vapor as analogous to an army of foot soldiers. Even though the water vapor foot soldiers do most of the fighting, the CO₂commander sends the army to battle.

[...]

This is evidence the writer had a lot of fun writing for the Urban Dictionary.

Quote

3

  

Fisking

Fisking is a written argument where one person sequentially addresses each point of an of another person's argument. 

This is done in a precise manner relying on semantics and ambiguities to infer a defect in the original point. This approach is tantamount to taking a sentence out of context in order to refute an entire argument. 

Fisking does not pay heed to the opponent's thesis as a whole, and thus does not disprove the thesis as a whole. 

 

That bastard was Fisking my posts. So I had to create a hydra to Fisk him. I really fisted that Fisking fucker.

 

#fisk #neo-con #war #blog #post #flame

by mattyqwerty February 12, 2009

4394

BUY THE MUG BUY THE TSHIRT

Whiner.

[william.scherk]

 

Update to climate model/observation surface temperature comparisons through Feb 2017 (for NOAA/NASA/Berkeley). Now includes Copernicus. pic.twitter.com/xe0PtaeBMj

— Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) March 17, 2017

 

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

What I do not fully grasp  is why our climate and weather which are thermodynamic effects  should have become a matter of politics and ideology.  

We should not conflate American public opinion or right-left polarization on climate change policy with the rest of the world. The US is the outlier in the sense of deep partisan gulfs in 'beliefs' about global climate and associated debates. The Yale Climate Change Communications project has documented this split of US opinion, which I have mentioned before.

An aid to grasping why 'politics and ideology' fuels a debate or robust discussion in the USA is to consider the presence of vested interests.

Such is the world of public opinion that it can be manipulated by canny marketers and persuader-class designs. In other words, politics (or free-market ideology) might presume that 'environmentalism' is an ideological foe and a danger. Regardless of any truths subsumed in an 'enviro' platform, it would make sense to wage information war (if only defensively) against government over-reach.  

This is I guess why some 'alarmist' arguments point back to industrial interests slowing down a public-health warning against smoking tobacco.  Whatever seeks to restrain this mighty industry or that, must be countered.

On the other 'side,' of course, any emotionalistic pot-banging argument's weakness is waved away as a necessary 'exaggeration' in service of ideological goals.  To my eyes, at least, there is a remnant of dis/trust and dis/respect of any policy that could-would-should restrain the power and freedom of industry -- which means trust and respect can be undermined nine ways to Sunday, even by dishonest means.

Add that to assumed or imagined impacts of 'activist' de-carbonization goals and fancies, most vested interests will tend to deepen and extend the gulf because of the pure social costs measured in dollars and debt and loss.  Billions and trillions of penalties/punishment or economic dislocation is feared, justifiably or not. The information market can exploit any fear of both 'sides.'  And the merry-go-round turns.

Curiously, or not so curiously, the climate of 'belief' continues to shift in the USA, at least according to Gallup and the Yale group.

A long screenshot of the kinds of data-slices and questions plumbed in their surveys of American opinion:

Spoiler

That quite surprised me after twenty months of Trump and strikes me as interesting -- in contrast to recent budget proposals and directives to tighten 'climate change' spending and loosen and remove 'climate change' regulations and strictures.  I had thought that a new quasi-majority had formed on the skeptical side of the gulf. Not yet true.  It is still early in the Trump era, so I expect the numbers to shift .  But it seems to me that the administration might be out of touch with actual public opinion right now.  

In an oligarchy, of course, this wouldn't matter one whit.  

We shall see if the earth-science observatory cuts and programme closures at NOAA (and less noticeably at NASA) proposed becomes law. (my Trump-friendly meteorologist Twitter acquaintance, Ryan Maue, is criticizing today those who have had fainting fits and other hysterics over 'Gutting' of climate-science research and data collection by the space and atmospheric agencies. He says that the cuts are not graven in stone, and are actually much less wounding than the fainting-fits had reported. So maybe some emoting has to be forestalled. No celebrations or funerals need be scheduled right now.  Link to Ryan Maue here** ...)

Quote

The world did not  become ideologically and p;olitically  polarized when Celsius and Kelvin discovered the second law of thermodynamics,  which has very pessimistic consequences.

My quick sketch might have cleared up some mystery.  Hard cash futures and trillions of dollars lost to shitty risk-assessments were not at issue when the 2nd Law was posted at the courthouse.  I mean, the human-relevant timescales are not comparable in your comparison.

1 hour ago, BaalChatzaf said:

1 hour ago, william.scherk said:

The issue for me remains, who has the strongest rational argument in the [Spencer graph] dispute?  Is there deception or error or partisan cherry-picking, or what? Who is zooming who?

Spencer's reservations are well founded.

My focus was on the discussion of deception in his presentation. Did you not dig?

 

____________________________

** a better place to drop into the 'robust discussion' initiated by Maue is here on Twitter:

 

The opinion being expressed here is that if Trumpworld floats an idea, people address real-world implications, and Trumpworld doesn't... https://t.co/yXz3PNoorf

— Letzter with a 'tzt' (@RafiLetzter) March 17, 2017

[turkeyfoot]

19 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

It misses a scientifically and epistemologicaly important point.  Much of what we take to be obvious or common sense is rooted in assumptions that we might not be aware of.   Think of  this as dotting the i and crossing the t. 

As a former nail banger I think of it as measuring once and cutting twice.

[BaalChatzaf]

3 hours ago, william.scherk said:

 

My focus was on the discussion of deception in his presentation. Did you not dig?

Apparently not...

[Brant Gaede]

5 hours ago, BaalChatzaf said:

Spencer's reservations are well founded.  He does not deny warming, by the way,  but he believes most of the warming is due to natural drivers and feed backs and only a small part due to human additions of CO2 to the atmosphere.  There is no doubt that CO2, CH4, NO2 and water vapor   slow the radiation of energy in the infra red frequency range into space.  Further,  if none of these trace gases were in the atmosphere the Earth would have an average surface temperature of nearly -7 F.  That is 39 deg F below the freezing point of water.  On the surface of land and ocean it would be too cold for life.

There is no doubt the planet has warmed.  From the pit of the Little Ice Age to today the average temperature at the surfaces has gone up 4 deg. C.   Ice Ages end when the world gets warmer.  Curry is in concurrence with Spencer's reservations.  The IPCC sponsored models for GCM  all run hotter than the actual temperature. 

What I do not fully grasp  is why our climate and weather which are thermodynamic effects  should have become a matter of politics and ideology.   The world did not  become ideologically and p;olitically  polarized when Celsius and Kelvin discovered the second law of thermodynamics,  which has very pessimistic consequences.  In the very long run the Cosmos will become cold, dark and dead. 

And if "trace gas" water vapor only were in the atmosphere the average surface temperature would be what?

+NO2 would be what?

+CH4 would be what?

As for politics and ideology, there are those who want to rule the world so they ride the likely horses. This one is a Clydesdale.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 3/17/2017 at 8:55 AM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

Headline porn for Ellen:

More headline porn for Ellen (from Zero Hedge):

Trump Wins: G-20 Drops 'Anti-Protectionist, Free-Trade, & Climate-Change Funding' Commitment

Michael

[william.scherk]

13 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

13 hours ago, The Avenging Angel said:

There is no doubt that CO2, CH4, NO2 and water vapor   slow the radiation of energy in the infra red frequency range into space.  Further,  if none of these trace gases were in the atmosphere the Earth would have an average surface temperature of nearly -7 F.  That is 39 deg F below the freezing point of water.  On the surface of land and ocean it would be too cold for life.

And if "trace gas" water vapor only were in the atmosphere the average surface temperature would be what?

-- see the logical end of Colose's explainer. Or puzzle through Bob's explainer again.

18 hours ago, WSS, quoting ClimateFeedback's fisking, said:

Christopher Colose, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, NASA GISS:
First, it is true that water vapor constitutes the bulk of Earth’s present-day greenhouse effect (measured in terms of infrared absorption). Quantitatively, however, Jacoby is off by quite a bit. In fact, water vapor constitutes ~50% of the terrestrial greenhouse effect, not 95% (see here*). Clouds (solid and liquid water that form when the vapor condenses) constitute another ~25%, but CO₂contributes to almost all of the remaining fraction (only ~5% or so from all of the other combined gases). This is because CO₂ still absorbs well in spectral regions where water vapor doesn’t, and also because the upper troposphere is very dry; the ability to absorb intense surface emission and re-emit it at colder, higher layers of the atmosphere is critical for the maintenance of a planetary greenhouse effect.

Secondly, the water vapor greenhouse effect is not independent of the CO₂ in the atmosphere.
Jacoby stresses that CO₂ is only a trace component of the atmosphere, an argument that is irritatingly unoriginal and provides useless context when describing the flow of radiation through the atmosphere. As before, CO₂ accounts for ~20% of Earth’s greenhouse effect. N₂ and O₂account for nearly all of Earth’s atmospheric mass. However, if the atmosphere were purely N₂and O₂, the planet would likely be in a snowball state due to the lack of greenhouse trapping. This is where the equations of radiative transfer must be applied, rather than a naive intuition about proportions.

 

[Peter]

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."

Wow. No more wasting MY money on phony pseudo science. President Trump may end up being the opposite of Caesar.

Ba’al wrote: In the very long run the Cosmos will become cold, dark and dead. end quote

There you go again. Banging the drums of inertia. Have a little faith. What began will begin again. As of now we don’t understand the forces that continuously pull the Cosmos outward, but I have no doubt that just as local gravity pulls matter together, so shall the Cosmos eventually pull together into another Big Bang. It could be a determining factor unknown at this time but my money would be on massive black holes coalescing into one super - critical mass.  

The trick for sentient life will be to exist outside the remnants of the old *universe* until the new one explodes into existence . . . and then join the new reality.

Peter

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

7 hours ago, Peter said:

Have a little faith.

Peter,

Have a little faith indeed. Reasons and solutions tend to show up if you give them time.

For instance, I never understood your choice of font, Comic Sans. But I never complained or questioned. I merely had a little faith that one day I would find out.

That day has arrived.

So there is the hidden reason and it's a great one.

It appears you are wiser than one gleans on the surface.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

The only front available to me seems to be the one I'm using.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

The only front available to me seems to be the one I'm using.

Brant,

You have to click the "Source" button at the top left of the post field to go into HTML mode. Then put the following tag at the beginning of the text where you want the Comic Sans font:

<span style="margin: 0px; font-size: 10pt;"><font color="#000000" face="Comic Sans MS">

(I copied this from Peter's post above, so the size, color, etc. are the ones he chose.)

And close the tag at the end of the text:

</span>

If you're into geeking out on HTML, Google is your friend.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Brant,

He could have been using BB Code, too. But I don't feel like going geek to explain it.

Why?

Because I went into the Administrator dashboard to see if there was a button for font.

Yay!

I found one. There are not a lot of font options, but still...

So knock yourself out.

I also saw and added a "remove format" button. It looks like "T_x" in the buttons at the top of the post field.

Michael

[Peter]

I had no idea comic sans was ugly, though the guy did say “italicized” too.

“un-italicized version.” I had no idea comic sans was ugly, though the guy did say “italicized” too.

To me it looks good in either format. I chose it for that reason and made it standard on my MS word though I also have it in 12 point which is too big for OL so I change it to 10 point, unless I forget. I do that every time I cut and paste, so my text is the right size to read easily on my home computer (12) and suitable for OL (10).

If I add something on OL that I have already cut and pasted, the new text is in a different font, and you may notice that 10 point Times New Roman looks smaller to me. Here it is as 12 point. Here is something I have added on OL. Odd. It stayed Times.

How about Algerian? as I type I see it is the same font.

Berlin Sans FB is interesting, but I will stick with comic sans.

Peter

[Ellen Stuttle]

On March 16, 2017 at 9:58 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

Is that un-vague enough for you?  

It's further vague and doesn't so much as take a stab at answering the questions I asked.

Same with the second paragraph.

Ellen

[BaalChatzaf]

1 hour ago, Ellen Stuttle said:

It's further vague and doesn't so much as take a stab at answering the questions I asked.

Same with the second paragraph.

Ellen

that was my best shot.  Sorry.  

 

Give me an example of an answer you consider "unvague".  Thank youl

[william.scherk]

Where knowledge is 'mined,' at the rock-face of disagreement.

Here, the context can be deceiving. Bob's comments follow his brief notes on the video presentation by the Jesus College researcher Palmer, the one who called for a European CERN-level international computer capacity, one that would or could accommodate larger, and more skillful models of Earth's climate.

 

On 3/13/2017 at 11:16 PM, Ellen Stuttle said:

On 3/13/2017 at 3:04 PM, BaalChatzaf said:

The interesting and ironic thing is that the climate alarmists might be right (although they have not proven themselves so).

Changing the prediction to something or other, we know not what, might or might not happen an unknown X number of years from now wouldn't retroactively make the string of failed predictions right.

Not to forestall Ellen's following comment, but to place 'alarmists might be right' back in context of Palmer's video. To over-simplify, he tried to make sense of the 'spectrum' of opinion ('alarmists' to to 'lukewarmers' to 'skeptics') as composed of different attitudes to risk-assessment. He raised the probability of 'alarmists' being correct -- in that no one can "rule out" all the pessimistic scenarios models reveal.  It is almost like a corollary to Judith Curry's work to estimate the 'too large' uncertainties of projections and scenarios or (more alarmingly) "warnings."   She tends to think most models/scenarios are likely to be 'proven' only at the lowest bounds, a very small century-long increment, nothing like a 4C increase, not likely to be 2C ... whereas he thinks attention needs to be paid to the upper bounds of uncertainty.  

The predictions or The Prediction has to be decomposed, I think.  A simple prediction rests perhaps in simple, non-mathematical language. So, "Increasing human-origin CO2 is likely to have contributed to the observed warming over the earth since the Industrial Revolution."  Or, "CO2 increases in the atmosphere will result in an energy imbalance. In the short, human-scale term, such an imbalance will resolve by increasing average temperatures at the earth's surface."

Decomposing further, some might point to thirty years of Arctic weather patterns to declare that "CO2 increases have led to Arctic amplification of the average global temperature rise."

Another thing to consider is how much the skeptic side has made 'predictions,' and more importantly, to consider which future evidence might tend to 'confirm' a skeptical hypothesis.  How many years from how, then, could a prediction we make today be judged?

If Ellen could be coaxed to make a climate change prediction ... or if not, if we could figure out a benchmark 'prediction' that each 'side' would consider a useful and telling indicator.

On 3/14/2017 at 4:42 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

Do you think it is worth the cost of finding out if  human activity will produce harmful weather and climate effects,  or what natural weather and climate effects are going to happen regardless of what we do?   I think it is worth the cost.

Ellen says that "worth the cost" is imprecise, and has appending a number of questions to you, some of which are interesting in themselves. But I notice she has not answered your question. 

On 3/15/2017 at 8:21 PM, Ellen Stuttle said:

On 3/14/2017 at 4:42 AM, BaalChatzaf said:

Do you think it is worth the cost of finding out if  human activity will produce harmful weather and climate effects,  or what natural weather and climate effects are going to happen regardless of what we do?   I think it is worth the cost.  

Well, that's nice and vague.  You think "it is worth the cost."

What cost? What price tag do you have in mind? Money provided by whom? Collected how? Allocated how?

Research conducted by whom? Overseen and vetted by whom?

The same pseudo-scientific modelers who have given us a stream of unfalsifiable crud and who you said above "might be right"?

Premise-smuggling, or useful corrective.  "Unfalsifiable crud"  now subsumes "alarmist" predictions, scenarios, model runs, what have you.  Which leaves us back with an opening challenge: what is a useful thirty-year prediction following on 'alarmism,' that can be made today and assessed later?  Or looking backwards, what predictions were made thirty years ago that have utterly failed today?

I am going to think about one I could propose, bounded by the Arctic. I will have an over-the-shoulder assistant helping me avoid wording that would show 'unfalsifiable crud.'

-- weird weather in the Arctic?   Yes and no.  The weirdness is only in divergence from the average.  The maps show that cold and warm air-masses appear to have been transposed from normal conditions, and that is true, but the question is how often will these transpositions occur in the years ahead? How uncommon were they in the years before instrumental or human records?