Dear Dr. Nielsen-Gammon, re. statistical certainty vs geophysical realities

Dr. Nielsen-Gammon,

I want to start by apologizing, I got carried away and didn't mean to imply that you are part of the climate science denial community - I know that you are not and that I was sloppy, it was an unfair untrue grouping.  However, I also want you to understand the issue I'm trying to define.  

The feeling I get is that your, and the scientific community in general, approach is that it's a dialogue with no sense of urgency, no interest in reaching resolution, the joy of the discovery and all that.  

Instead of gathering information in order to act, it seems like gathering information for the sake of gathering yet more information. 

Seems to me, one of the two strangest parts of our society's entire AGW public dialogue is how it has gotten mutated into this demand for ever greater levels of details - while ignoring the monster in the room we all know about.

What has changed about our basic understanding of Anthropogenic Global Warming over the past two decades?  

Has there been anything of significance - besides ever greater coverage and higher resolution and increasing certainty that we are taking our planet out of the bounds its experienced for millions of years?

To me it seems all you're doing is hand wringing: "man oh man, we gotta get the DPI cranked up another few hundred PDI before the picture comes in HD sharp."

Works great for Evolution - but this "subject" is the health of the biosphere and weather system that we depend on.  It's not just another interesting problem, it's a real future filled with hard consequences.

We are destroying the planet as we knew it not too long ago - you know, the biosphere that we depend on for everything.  What good is spending all our time and energy defining the crisis to exquisite certainty and forgetting to act to avert the crisis?

Sincerely, CC

I am including an article I wrote last autumn, it's another attempt to define this issue.

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Friday, October 25, 2013

Colorado Floods - statistical certainty vs geophysical realities

Colorado experienced its most extreme weather event in memory between September 9th to the 15th. Golden, Boulder and Larimer counties received the worst of it with rain accumulations of sixteen/seventeen inches and more, some areas receiving nine inches on Thursday alone, resulting in massive flooding compounded by destructive run-off from mountainsides of burned-out forests that could no longer hold water.

Predictably folks are asking: Is this related to manmade Global Warming? It's an easy and tough question to answer.

Consider please, our climate system is a global heat distribution engine and our land, atmosphere, and the oceans have indisputably warmed, not only that, our atmosphere's moisture content has been measurably increasing. Given such geophysical realities, it is self-evident that all extreme weather events contain elements of this newly energized climate system.  And that much more of the same must be expected.

On the other hand,

Open letter to Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon

The last couple days I've been catching up on some of Dr. Nielsen-Gammon's articles and comments over at the Climate Change National Forum (more on them later) and I find myself struggling with the way he manages to frame all of his evidence and arguments.  And although it's pretty much the same spiel I've listen to and struggled with understanding for the past couple decades, this time I think I've finally stumbled onto something important. 
[I should be clear Nielsen-Gammon is not a denialist, he is a respected scientist familiar with climatology - but what grabbed my attention was how his arguments were framed… and that led to this] 

Here's my open letter to John Nielsen-Gammon, 

Dear JNG,