Posted by Tim Lambert on February 24, 2008 Remember last year, when Exxon said that they would no longer fund organizations like the International Policy Network and the George Marshall Institute that misrepresent the science of global warming?
Well, they are still funding them. Also still on the list, are CO2science and the Center for Science and Public Policy.
Hat tip: Brian Schmidt.
Tim: could you please get Exxon to use a little more quality control? Or maybe they need to spend a little more money. After alll, the lefties get some real academics suicking of the teat of the taxpayer and all we get are crappy bloggers who can’t even write clearly. Sheesh.
And so what if Exxon is still funding these guys… surely you are not suggesting that this is dodgy… come on.. it must be innocent 
TCO, why do you expect those who think that science and truth is preferable to company special interest serving disinformation, are all leftists?
“are all leftists?”
because they have very simplistic minds, stupidy is the major accomplishment of right wingers (their only accomplishment)
Dude, can you rephrase that please? I’m not even defending myself (yet), but I don’t track the sentence. I get the impression that I’m going to need to discuss why I haven’t stopped beating my wife, but I’m not sure. The sentence is just a bit opaque. Simple it down, please.
TCO’s got a point; You’d think that with all that oil money they’d get somebody better than Christopher Monckton, et al.
But maybe Exxon has a plan. After all, the lefties have to fill up their gold-plated Jaguars with something, right?
Actually we, I mean they, are being double-probation sneaky. See we’re using dummies like McI and such with obbvious logical flaws to lure you into thinking that we, I mean they, aren’t actually behind a diabolical plot with massive money and slick producing that will convince all right thinkers to cut trees down and buy stretch hummers.
But I confuse myself.
TCO, you didn’t understand my question?
Put in another way, is someone who is interested in truth, automatically a leftist? (Of course not, you reply…)
So let’s go a little further:
Or are some truths leftist (like AGW) and some rightist (Insert some thing that is uncomfortable to the left wing, and true)?
I’m trying to understand how your mind works.
mz,
I’m trying to understand how your mind works.
It’s… well, I won’t call it a “mind”. It “works”, but it doesn’t work anything like what I’d call a “mind”.
Or are some truths leftist (like AGW) and some rightist (Insert some thing that is uncomfortable to the left wing, and true)?
There’s no Truth, mz. No Facts.
There’s only Freedom. Or rather, £reedom. More £reedom good, less £reedom bad.
£reedom from facts is the ultimate £reedom.
Yes. The truth is the truth. It doesn’t matter who it makes unhappy. It just is.
rightie unhappy truth: no significant WMD were found in Iraq after we went in.
leftie unhappy truth: the Rathergate memos are isomorphic with memoes produced by MS Word default settings and have NEVER been reproduced by a vintage typewriter.
THE TRUTH IS THE TRUTH. You have to look it in the eye whether it supports your position or not. How can you monsters on both sides be so ignorant of that. The truth should rise up out of it’s grave and nkick you all the asses.
TCO:
How can you monsters on both sides be so ignorant of that.
So I take it that ExxonMobil (whom ExxonMobil refers to as “we”) is now in the Middle?
I mean, ExxonMobil is an oil producer, right? If there’s anybody in the Middle when it comes to the great debate on the polluting effects of oil, then ExxonMobil has to be it. Obviously.
TCO:
“all we get are crappy bloggers who can’t even write clearly”
I disagree, TCO. McIntyre is capable of writing very, very clearly. He routinely does not, however. I think that tells us something about the purpose of his writing.
I think he’s a lazy writer. There are a lot of signs of it. He probably could do better if he held himself to a standard, but he doesn’t. Anyhow, he hasn’t been published for 2.5 years. That’s incredible for someone working full time in a field with such rich questions. His old lady should kick him in the ass and tell him either write real papers or get your ass back into the office.
“We” committing conspiracies is joking. Truth mattering is from the heart.
Even as TCO continues to push the “facts are all fact, no heart!”… it’s a good idea to look at the facts:
“In his biography and in news coverage, McIntyre is reported to be a former director of several small public mineral exploration companies. But in 2003, the annual report of CGX Energy, Inc., an oil and gas exploration company, listed McIntyre as a ‘strategic advisor’.”
So… yeah, McIntyre is merely a crank who’s drooling just for fun. My heart tells me so.
conspiracy of academics = army of cats
bi, you are a chirpy little conspiracy nut. Bet you think 911 was done by Mossad too.
After alll, the lefties get some real academics suicking of the teat of the taxpayer and all we get are crappy bloggers who can’t even write clearly.
Well, I am one of these crappy bloggers who’s native tongue is not even English. We do it for free because of a strong conviction. Wheather or not Exxon funds some of their favored think tanks doesn’t tell us anything about the truth behind the whole issue.
C’mon, guys, TCO is not that bad. He’s a skeptic who actually recognizes that McI is full of it.
I’m glad TCO recongizes McIntyre is full of it, but his contention that AGW is somehow a leftist plot is fully as delusional as the most extreme charges McIntyre has ever brought.
climatepatrol:
Wheather or not Exxon funds some of their favored think tanks doesn’t tell us anything about the truth behind the whole issue.
When your oft-touted “truth” is so “independent” that it’s based on the $cientific work of these think-tanks, then it does tell us a great deal.
Barton Paul Levenson:
his contention that AGW is somehow a leftist plot is fully as delusional as the most extreme charges McIntyre has ever brought.
Yeah. The idea that leftist forces in the US somehow managed to coerce the whole world’s scientists into pushing the AGW theory, and still not leave a single trace of their nefarious scheme… who coulda thunk it?
For somewhat unrelated fun and laughter…
Over at DeSmogBlog, an idiot who calls himself co2isgoodnotbad decided to cut-and-paste the exact same denialist rant three times under the same blog post, and totally ignore all responses to it.
(Unfortunately the comment feature over there seems to be hosed as of writing this, otherwise I’d have written something about it over there…)
Well duh! Of course AGW is a left wing communist plot. That’s why Stalin never built any smoke belching factories or power stations.
Lambert, you forgot to note that they are also funding the George C. Marshall Institute.
Come, come Thom – funding the George C. Marshall Institute is hardly funding organizations like the George C. Marshall Institute, now is it?
#23 Barton, I think I speak for most of those so called skeptics of the IPCC approach: AGW is not a leftist plot, it is part of a most comprehensive globalization plot. You find this plot in the last book of your Bible. Remember, Noah was a laughing stock, just as I am now writing this, but he turned out to be right.
When your oft-touted “truth” is so “independent” that it’s based on the $cientific work of these think-tanks, then it does tell us a great deal.
Bi, coming back to my rational mode, I like to take this challenge of yours. Please tell me any statement I’ve made so far which source you can trace as Exxon funded scientific work, and I will try to come up with a research source idependant of the petroleum societies. Independency? I would be interested in scientific research on climate change that does not touch any of your much despised $$$ (freedom or not) but comes entirely out of a private pocket of the researcher with a genuine heart. I would truly appreciate such a source.
Deltoid doesn’t seem to like too many links in one reply, so I’m splitting this into two…
climatepatrol:
Remember, Noah was a laughing stock, just as I am now writing this, but he turned out to be right.
Um, did anyone spot the irony in the fact that (according to the Bible) Noah predicted flooding?
And I’m not even a Christian, so this whole “Bible as evidence” thing doesn’t even work on me. Massive lossage on multiple levels.
You should’ve just used Galileo.
Please tell me any statement I’ve made so far which source you can trace as Exxon funded scientific work
To continue…
climatepatrol:
Wait, there’s more. Right after you promised you’d “focus on more or less controversal papers that seem to come from reliable sources”, in your very next blog post you decided to quote CO2Science (after engage in quote-mining from a bunch of other papers).
So why should I trust that you’d keep a promise when you’d already broken the exact same promise before?
Bi, since you are quoting my blog post, I kindly ask you to chose between:
a) You engage in a topic based discussion in my blog where everbody can make their judgment on how seriously I take inputs from commenters there and how seriously I am in finding a reliable source, OR, if you want it to be discussed here,
b) Which statement from CO2 science I used do you mean exactly?
Just for the records:
So let us continue to focus on more or less controversal papers that seem to come from reliable sources.
I agree with you. Co2 is not a paper – and their quotes have to be used with much caution. Loehle even needed to correct their misinterpretations.
“Wheather or not Exxon funds some of their favored think tanks doesn’t tell us anything about the truth behind the whole issue.”
True, but if Exxon continues the funding after stating they’re going to stop,it tells you something about their honesty.
climatepatrol writes:
[[AGW is not a leftist plot, it is part of a most comprehensive globalization plot.]]
It’s not any kind of plot at all. It’s really happening.
35:
I appreciate that climatepatrol took the time to clarify what kind of conspiracy theorist he is. Kudos.
@Barton
Sure, warming is happening on a long-term global scale with an increasing anthropogenic part in it (still hidden in the natural variability noise). No doubt about that. But cap and trade is part of the plot. Clinton, Barack, McCain – they all favor it. Only Ron Paul is save. Huckabee? I am not sure. – Carbon-666-trade, you see? World power – world currency – big money – EU – Nafta–>NAU (bye U.S.A.) – –>ASEAN, U.N. for the rest of the world. Next step: U.N.–>World Parliament, De Hague —> World Court, World Council of churches —> World Gaia Religion. It is all happening right now. Influencal – “environmently friendly people” which I’d better not name here, have already their share in the new surge. Million Dollar salaries paid for carbon trade specialists and hedge fund managers in London. There is no compare with this little exxposed charity as discussed here. “All we need is the right major crisis,” David Rockefeller.
@Boris
You are welcome, Boris.
climatepatrol:
World power – world currency – big money – EU – Nafta–>NAU (bye U.S.A.) – –>ASEAN, U.N. for the rest of the world.
As seen from totally evidence-based studies of the Great Seal of the United States:
“ANNUIT C?PTIS”, which means “your anus is grass”; and
“NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM”, which means “we own your scrotum”
And climatepatrol will save us all from the Great Gaia Plot with his gratuitous quote-minings and writings auf Deutsch. Alex Jones, you’ve met your match!
climatepatrol posts:
[[Sure, warming is happening on a long-term global scale with an increasing anthropogenic part in it (still hidden in the natural variability noise). ]]
It’s not hidden. It’s been quite clear for the past 30 years.
[[No doubt about that. But cap and trade is part of the plot. Clinton, Barack, McCain - they all favor it. Only Ron Paul is save. Huckabee? I am not sure. - Carbon-666-trade, you see? ]]
Well, no, I don’t see.
If you want to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, putting a cap on them is a logical first step. The trading permits companies to select the best way they want to go about it. A similar scheme was put in place in the 1980s by the first President Bush to control sulfur emissions and acid rain. It worked. I live in Pennsylvania; you can see the trees growing back along the interstates now. Cap-and-trade is a good mechanism because it harnesses market forces to achieve a common good. What’s the alternative? Direct regulation is inefficient and costly. Nobody wants a carbon tax. And doing nothing is the worst course of action we could take. There are big costs to doing nothing.
Those who failed to click the first link in their eagerness to dispute its contents should read it:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/environmental_law/2008/02/exxonmobil-de-1.html#more
It’s not hidden. It’s been quite clear for the past 30 years.
Well, it is allowed to ask questions of the natural component of the warming of the past years, since it represents an upswing after a period of rather cooling, an upswing that is within the variety of upswings since the Little Ice Age.
The question is whether a worldwide crisis is so big as to justify the Nations to give up part of their sovereignity to establish a world-wide currency and to give the steering power to a small elite worldwide. I am willing to pay more taxes on gasoline and heating, provided the money stays in the country for the reserach and development of alternative energy sources. But I would not like to strengthen the authority of the Worldbank, the IMF, the Carbon Exchange Bank, the EU, the United Nations.
s
What did The Guardian come up with? (Thanks Hank Roberts)
The contents of the IPCC report have been an open secret since the Bush administration posted its draft copy on the internet in April. It says there is a 90% chance that human activity is warming the planet, and that global average temperatures will rise by another 1.5 to 5.8C this century, depending on emissions.
Well, I don’t believe in that 90% for a warming of 1.5 to 5.8C by 2100 depending on emissions. This cannot be mathematically correct. It assumes there is no God and no more natural availability in the Universe. Sorry but sometimes common sense can tell us that ‘academic sense’ has flaws…
Well, let’s see what Exxon Mobile claims now:
Over the years the company has supported major projects at such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics, Batelle Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Princeton University, Charles River Associates, the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, the International Energy Agency Greenhouse Gas R & D Programme, Yale University, The University of Texas, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) at Stanford University, Partnering with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Partnering with the European Commission to study Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
I wonder why all the above institutions accepted money from ExxonMobile?
@Barton Paul Levenson
Btw I read the joint statement of the Academies of Sciences. It has a political side. Having read more carefully the page of the “Law professors blog”, I want to be more precise in my questioning: Why should I trust into the 90% confidence interval for future temperature projections based on human actions when the anthropogenic share in the past warming is not specified more precisely by the IPCC than “most” of the warming?
I’d rather believe in reports claiming that the danger of clobal cooling (with all its energy and nutrition problems involved) in the case of two ‘dalton or maunder minimum like’ weak solar cycles could overpower the (in that case positive) effects of AGW during the coming decades.
BTW Exxon (more clever than in the past when they almost ruined the U.S. automobile industry with their stubbornness) plays the Malaria card now.
climatepatrol:
Well, I don’t believe in that 90% for a warming of 1.5 to 5.8C by 2100 depending on emissions. This cannot be mathematically correct. It assumes there is no God and no more natural availability in the Universe.
Is there supposed to be a coherent argument here?
@bi
Is there supposed to be a coherent argument here?
That is a valid question indeed. (Oops. Natural VARIAbility I mean.). Here is my coherent argument: I wonder if this analysis is also Exxon funded.
I wonder if this analysis is also Exxon funded.
I don’t know. But it quotes Christy, who is.
RealClimate has already written about the “paper”, by the way.
The tone of this thread is that deniers are being bought by oil. The list for Exxon shows funding of around 6.5 US dollars to a hundred or so organisation. Some like Women in Government and the John Hopkins University are not obviously just the mouthpiece for oil.
When you see X recieved, Y dollars, you also have to see if Y dollars is a signifcant part of the income for Y. Even then you have be careful about jumping to conclusions.
The tone of this thread is that deniers are being bought by oil. The list for Exxon shows funding of around 6.5 US dollars to a hundred or so organisation.
Tim is complaining about Exxon not doing what they claim they are doing. (or actually claim that they stopped doing, while continue doing)
talking about the funding, i agree. but you can add in some other “big bullshit” questions: are the guys doing the research climate scientists? do they publish in real peer reviewed magazines? do they have a respectable reputation? did they always work for some lobby group?
CO2science is one of the worst pages on the net. plenty of people really think they do science, just because they put it in their name…
the “forecasting” paper cited by climatepatrol above fails this basic test as well..
@sod
the “forecasting” paper cited by climatepatrol above fails this basic test as well.
Are you as a statistician implying that the principles of econometrics have little to do with climate forcasting?
Are you as a statistician implying that the principles of econometrics have little to do with climate forcasting?
Um, the RealClimate critique makes it clear that Green and Armstrong’s “paper” doesn’t have much to do with the “principles of econometrics”.
(And even when considering econometrics, yes, climate modeling is a very different beast on econometrics, since it’s based on knowledge of physical processes.)
sod:
but you can add in some other “big bullshit” questions: are the guys doing the research climate scientists? do they publish in real peer reviewed magazines? do they have a respectable reputation? did they always work for some lobby group?
And here’s the billion-dollar question: Is their “scientific” work so transparently bogus that you can actually tell?
I could actually spot the ? / ?(N – 1) bogosity in Douglass et al.’s International Journal of Climatology paper on my own, even before reading the RealClimate critique. I think that speaks volumes about the quality of the skeptics’ “science”.
climate modeling is a very different beast on econometrics, since it’s based on knowledge of physical processes
depending on emissions. Exxon, good at econometrics, knows that there is something wrong with that.
climate modeling is a very different beast on econometrics, since it’s based on knowledge of physical processes.)
Well, I’ll wait and see if sod has an answer. He seems to be an expert in statistically assess the accuracy of knowledge of all interactions between present and future physical processes and their perturbations by homo economicus’ interference with that system.
Um, the RealClimate critique makes it clear that Green and Armstrong’s “paper” doesn’t have much to do with the “principles of econometrics”.
Who? A climate expert said that??? Not too quick, bi. You are in the middle of something…
“Well, I don’t believe in that 90% for a warming of 1.5 to 5.8C by 2100 depending on emissions. This cannot be mathematically correct. It assumes there is no God and no more natural availability in the Universe.”
So in order to be “{mathematically correct” climate modelling must take God into account?
“climatepatrol”:
It assumes there is no God
You’re right. The IPCC has assumed there is no God that could change the laws of physics at any time.
Chris O’Neill posts:
[[You're right. The IPCC has assumed there is no God that could change the laws of physics at any time.]]
Sorry, but that’s not even remotely correct. The IPCC has made no such assumption. An assumption about God’s existence either way is irrelevant to the question of what the climate is actually doing. If God exists, it’s entirely possible that he will miraculously intervene to stop global warming, or to do anything else that would require a miracle. But that’s not something science can say anything about. Science tells you what will happen if the laws of nature are followed. It has nothing to do with events originating outside nature.
Well, I’ll wait and see if sod has an answer. He seems to be an expert in statistically assess the accuracy of knowledge of all interactions between present and future physical processes and their perturbations by homo economicus’ interference with that system.
climatepatrol, that sentence doesn t make any sense at all. (and i still am not a “statistician”)
but when you look at the question i gave you, to evaluate work on climate science, you will see how Armstrong and Co fail:
they are NOT climate scientists. (and as RC told you, they didn t ask any climate scientist either)
they do NOT publish in peer reviewed climate science magazines.
that they don t have the slightest clue on the subject, can be seen by this gem:
May 21, 1974 Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing:
A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable
page 1001.
http://forecastingprinciples.com/Public_Policy/WarmAudit31.pdf
i would love to see some scientific sources for this claim!
how you can take someone seriously, who will considers scientific research worthless, when they don t cite HIS book (the definite volume on forecasting) is beyond me.
but the claim that CLIMATE RESEARCHERS need help from an economics prof on the subject of FORECASTING (SIC!) is totally bizarre.
@ Ian and Chris
You’re right. The IPCC has assumed there is no God that could change the laws of physics at any time.
The laws of physics and its variabilty and interactions affecting the radiation budget are not fully understood (Pacific Decadal Oscillation that changed around 1977 and again changed around 2007 (your period of spurious correlation of temperature versus CO2), the exact carbon cycle, the interaction of the various bands of solar and cosmic radiation with the atmosphere and its effects on surface temperature along with time lag, what caused LIA and could it happen again?, changing vertical temperature profile during precipitation and the cooling effect of increased precipitation, the effect of sulfate reduction of the nineties in America and Europe on aerosols and cloud formation, cloud feedback, quantification of other anthropogenic influences that are not greenhouse gas related, Or at least I don’t know that the science is settled about all these questions. If it is – I don’t find it in the IPCC report.
I am sorry. It doesn’t add up – this 90% confidence with a range of +1.5 to +5.8C by 2100 the uncertainrty of which is claimed to depend on human policies rather than future natural variability.
May 21, 1975″Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable” New York Times,
Mason 1976
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,944914,00.html>Time Jun. 24, 1974
http://wizbangblog.com/content/2006/04/02/before-global-warming-there-wa.php
Earth Day 1970
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/194/4270/1121>sciencemag 1976¨.
That’s why we need forcasting principles. Trying to draw my attention to the little flaws of other skeptics, is the worst you can do to convince me into the 90% confidence of climate forcasting scenarious by 2100. So the the accuracy of knowledge of all interactions between present physical processes influencing the present global surface temperature, as well as all future physical processes and their perturbations by homo economicus’ interference with that system will give a 90% confidence that a rise in temperature of the magnitude of 1.5 – 5.8°C will happen, depending on future greenhouse emission scenarios? What about if there is a new natural cooling on its way? Is this just noise, like the 0.75°C global cooling from January 2007 through January 2008? And don’t tell me this is too short notice. 30 years is also too short. it does not cover more than a cycle of Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
I would rather believe Green and Armstrong’s paper – even in the case of Exxon funding. It makes perfectly sense to me although it is obvious that Green and Armstrong are biased themselves.
“conspiracy of academics = army of cats”
LOL, so true. Obviously, TCO has never sat through a faculty meeting.
You’re right. The IPCC has assumed there is no God that could change the laws of physics at any time.
“climatepatrol”:
The laws of physics and its variabilty and interactions affecting the radiation budget are not fully understood
That’s right, because God keeps interfering to make it impossible to fully understand, not because of kaos or any other natural process (but what does this have to do with Exxon going back on their word?).
“climatepatrol”:
I would rather believe Green and Armstrong’s paper – even in the case of Exxon funding. It makes perfectly sense to me
If it makes perfect sense to “climatepatrol” then I can safely assume it’s nonsense.
May 21, 1975″Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable” New York Times,
the NYtimes is NOT a scientific source.
but the article is pretty brilliant. you never read it, did you?
oh, and you got the headline wrong. (yours is only the second one…)
Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead
By WALTER SULLIVAN
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/ny-times-1975-05-21.pdf
Hmm, does climatepatrol understand and believe in:
1. First Law of Thermodynamics
2. Second law of Thermodynamics
3. General Greenhouse Effect
4. Predictability of Earth’s orbit, precession, etc, over next few years?
@John Mashey
I do not fully understand the 4 points you mentioned but I basically believe in them because the science is settled about these basics. My questioning regards the magnitude of this greenhouse warming within the natural “noise” (as I tried to list before) and other (not global) human impacts (deforestation, black carbon, urbanization). The general (background) greenhouse effect (as I understand it) should manifest itself best in areas not affected by human interference other than greenhouse gases, which is not the case on a time scale of – say – 100 years. Sahara and Antarctica show no warming trend. Too much noise.
I would consider the 90% confidence as mentioned to be mathematically correct if we no the power of the forcasts. But this seems to be not the case. We don’t know the proportion of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect in the past warming. How much less do we no its proportion in the future. The Green and Armstrong’s paper may be flawed, but its main critisism regarding the IPCC process and most particularly the IPCC blank check towards GCMs is valid.
@Chris O’Neil
what does this have to do with Exxon going back on their word?
. It is possible that Exxon chips in laundred money here and there if they like what people are saying about climate change. I don’t expect Exxon to keep their word. Their tentacles seem to be all over…
Oops – “How much less do we KnoW its proportion in the future”. Sorry the many typoes.
As bi has already noticed. markeebiel and climatepatrol is both me. But the internet pseudonym should read climatepatrol. Apologies.
sod:
oh, and you got the headline wrong. (yours is only the second one…)
Facts are overrated, Sir.
climatepatrol:
We don’t know the proportion of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect in the past warming.
Ah yes, the magic words “we don’t know”. Spoken with such indubitable doubt.(*)
most particularly the IPCC blank check towards GCMs is valid.
It’s the same old climate models are useless meme. And guess what? It’s bollocks.
Can we have something that’s not already debunked a hundred times over?
(*) to borrow someone else’s phrase…
..but, but, sod, that article is on page 92 — exactly where the NYT places articles to set the public agenda. It was obviously the biggest news of the day.
Winnebago:
OK, on second thought, maybe it does have something to do with that… so here’s how it works:
First, Green and Armstrong get the title of the news article wrong.
Next, Green and Armstrong erroneously claim that the news article is “important”.
Now Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior comes in, the two errors cancel out, and Balance is restored to the world.
“climatepatrol”:
homo economicus’ interference with that system will give a 90% confidence that a rise in temperature of the magnitude of 1.5 – 5.8°C (by 2100) will happen
Where does this “90% confidence that a rise in temperature of the magnitude of 1.5 – 5.8°C will happen” come from? The only 90% confidence figure, a.k.a. “very likely” statement, that I could find in the IPCC’s FAR SPM that applied to 2100 was:
Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century. {10.3}
BTW, the global climate system warmed less than 0.8 deg C in the 20th century.
I couldn’t find what “climatepatrol’s” statement properly applied to in the FAR SPM. Perhaps he could enlighten us? (Yes I know that’s not very likely.)
bi,
You got it. Whenever the denialists cite some 1970s newspaper article on ‘global cooling’ you should pop over to Wm’s site. You’ll see that none of the articles were ever really ‘news’ — most were just space fillers in the back pages, all emphasize the speculative state of teh science at that point.
Quote from sod who brought the issue up:
that they don t have the slightest clue on the subject, can be seen by this gem:May 21, 1974 Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing: A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable
There is nothing wrong with this claim. “A major cooling widely considered to be inevitable” is not a title, it’s in the third paragraph of page 43 NYT.
Anyway, thanks for the link. The article is reveiling.
@Chris O’Neill
It is possible that I misunderstood part of the Guardian quote. I thought they quoted from a draft of AR4, not FAR. But still, your quote would again be about the minimum warming of 1.5°C during the 21st century. It boils down to the same.
..and what does it reveal? That a) you have serious reading comprhension difficulties or b) you’re a cherry-picking liar?
“climatepatrol”:
I thought they quoted from a draft of AR4, not FAR.
Bring yourself up to date, at least.
But still, your quote would again be about the minimum warming of 1.5°C during the 21st century. It boils down to the same.
So you think 0.8 is the same as 1.5. Now I know the sort of ignoramus I’m dealing with.
“Whenever the denialists cite some 1970s newspaper article on ‘global cooling’ you should pop over to Wm’s site”
oft cited time magazine article from 1974: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,944914,00.html quotes Reid A. Bryson and Donald Oilman, both of whom are now widely quoted as being skeptics of agw. Ironic; using the same guys as examples to show climatologists tend to be wrong, and that climatologists can doubt agw. Presumably, the thinking is that they are due to be right, by random chance.
Also quoted is Kenneth Hare, who is quoted as saying that if the drought continues people will go hungry, with no reference to cooling. In fact, a little googling shows that what Hare said re cooling was: “The slow cooling trend in parts of the northern hemisphere during the last few decades is similar to others of natural origin in the past, and thus whether it will continue or not is unknown”.
Now that I think of it…
TCO’s got a point; You’d think that with all that oil money they’d get somebody better than Christopher Monckton, et al.
But as we all know, in the great game of blowing smoke, what’s important isn’t quality, but quantity. I guess this is what ExxonMobil and friends have realized.
(For some mysterious reason, this reminds me of something which Seymour Cray (creator of the Cray supercomputer) once said: “If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1,024 chickens?” Hah.)
Seymour Cray’s error was that you don’t need 2-to-the-10th chickens.
You need a few, and a movable cage — and they’ll clean up the cowpies while weeding. It’s one variety of permaculture.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22chicken+tractor
http://www.backyardpoultrymag.com/issues/2/2-1/Link_Dellinger.html
#67 markeebiel/climatepatrol
Green & Armstrong clearly *did not* understand even the simple physics principles I mentioned in #66, or they knew, and didn’t care.
You say that you don’t completely understand them, but you believe them, which puts you way up on Green & Armstrong.
Surface temperature series are NOT some random time-series unconstrained by physical laws. When more energy is retained by the Earth as a whole, the temperature (as a whole) will go up (and it is), but the temperature measured in that miniscule slice we call “the surface” will go up, but with lots of jiggles caused by the oceans.
SO:
1) Due to Greenhouse, the overall energy level of Earth is rising, because it is in disequilibrium. Occasionally, a big volcano rises the raises the albedo for a while, lessening the amount of energy arriving, and the surface temperature drops. Still, overall, energy is coming in faster than it is being radiated away.
2) The energy has to go somewhere (First Law). From IPCC AR4, section 5,1:
“The ocean’s heat capacity is about 1,000 times that of the atmosphere, and the ocean’s net heat uptake is around 20 times that of the atmosphere.”
But ocean-atmosphere oscillations (like El Nino / La Nina) are well-known to transfer large amounts of energy to/from the atmosphere and cause geographic variations. This easily causes large jiggles in the *surface* temperature.
In addition, some places, like parts of the deep ocean and (especially) East Antarctica are relatively isolated and slow to change (thank goodness in the latter case). Your fridge doesn’t melt just because you turn your oven on, but if your house burns, it will.
3) We live on the surface, our best temperature records are of the surface, we care about those numbers … but most of the heat energy in the ocean/atmosphere system is in the oceans.
4) SO, IF one believes in the conservation of energy (First Law), that energy flows (but sometimes slowly) from hot to cold (Second), that the Greenhouse Effect works (yes), and that Earth’s motion is fairly predictable, and not going to put us back into an Ice Age any time soon …
THEN, even if we stopped generating any CO2, it’s going to get warmer before the Earth gets into radiative equilibrium, and CO2 lasts a long time. We can hope for another Maunder Minimum, but even that’s not enough to cancel the GHG warming.
One doesn’t need supercomputers to know it’s going to get warmer; the supercomputers are good for reducing the uncertainty bounds on lots of effects, using *physics* models, not “forecasting.”
It would appear that Exxon funds organisations outside the USA to the tune of half a million dollars, but feels under no obligation to say who they are.
I’m guessing the denialist organisations operating in Europe get a slice of this cash – the organisation linked to the ‘Living Marxism’ creeps such as ‘Spiked’ and it’s spin-off spring to mind…
This just in…
The denialists are now calling themselves “climate realists”. Yeah, right.
@John Mashey, Chris O’Neill
THEN, even if we stopped generating any CO2, it’s going to get warmer before the Earth gets into radiative equilibrium, and CO2 lasts a long time. We can hope for another Maunder Minimum, but even that’s not enough to cancel the GHG warming.
One doesn’t need supercomputers to know it’s going to get warmer; the supercomputers are good for reducing the uncertainty bounds on lots of effects, using physics models, not “forecasting.”
Thank you, John. I think this is a nice summary of what many call the mainstream view about AGW. After some lecture of AR4, chapters 2 and 8 (plus some offline life), I would like to attempt to summarise a skeptical (but not contrarian or even denialist) view in connection with EXXON’s behavior.
Your above statements are regarding forces and feedbacks (well understood) and known natural forcings (low to very low understanding) according to AR4. The IPCC, and AR4 in particular, concentrates on human induced forcings where the scientific understanding is high and the confidence also.
#75. Here comes Chris O’Neill’s FAR quote in, as the only 90% confidence (very likely) statement he could find, that…
‘continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century. {10.3}
BTW, the global climate system warmed less than 0.8 deg C in the 20th century.’
Here I ‘jumped the gun’:
‘But still, your quote would again be about the minimum warming of 1.5°C during the 21st century. It boils down to the same.’
after my #41
‘Well, I don’t believe in that 90% for a warming of 1.5 to 5.8C by 2100 depending on emissions.’
The +0.8°C duriing the 20th century contains a lot of natural noise: solar and vulcanic forcing – scientific understanding low and inner
variability (ENSO, PDO) (understanding very low, right?). This is also consisten with the Oreskes 2004 consensus that ‘most’ >50% of the warming
is human induced, even during the second half of the 20th century.
Conclusion
If you take <50% noise within that 0.8°C 20th century warming and project it into the future (21st century), assuming even more than 90% certainty that the PHYSICAL radiation budget and emission scenario will result in a minimum of 1.5°C warming within the 21st century (scientific understanding high), then you still have <50% noise in the form of uncertainty in the indirect solar forcing including UV, cosmic ray flux, earth magnetism (scientific understanding low to very low and therefore still debated according to Chapter 2, AR4) to deal with. So according to my understanding of AR4, we cannot be sure whether future natural variability could not overpower the anthropogenic forcing during the 21st century or not. Still, I do not believe in a 90% certainty that there will still be a further 0.8°C warming even during a new maunder minimum like event and a multi-decadal period with a lot of strong El Niñas and strong volcanic eruptions (ergo +1.5°C minus 0.7°C = again +0.8°C warming) with a 90% confidence. That’s even an understatement for many skeptics. Only a small paragraph in chapter 2 mentions that there could also be abrupt “unforced” climate changes of unknown reasons. This is not even accounted for here.
Bottom line. There is enough playground for Exxon and other sponsors to cast doubt on a supposed consensus view. Even AR4 states areas which are still being debated.
I do not believe in a 90% certainty that there will still be a further 0.8°C warming even during a new maunder minimum like event and a multi-decadal period with a lot of strong El Niñas and strong volcanic eruptions with a 90% confidence.
The IPCC did not say:
Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates even during a new maunder minimum like event and a multi-decadal period with a lot of strong El Niñas and strong volcanic eruptions would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century.
The IPCC said:
Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century.
Please try to understand the difference.
Climate Patrol,
What strikes me the most from your comments is that you just do not understand how science works. Being a layperson, this isn’t your fault, but let us get one thing straight. Science does not operate out of consensus. Scientists – of which I am one – are a rigorously self-critical lot. We rarely agree on anything.
On a recent tour in the UK, where I gave lectures at two universities (on population biology of plant-insect interactions), I was fortunate to attend a special lecture at the University of Birmingham by Sir Brian Hoskins FRS, a member of IPCC. Professor Hoskins outlined the uncertainties in the findings of the latest IPCC document with respect to the current warming episode, but, given these uncertainties, he left the audience in no doubt whatsoever with respect to what he felt was the indelible human fingerprint over the current warming. His talk was both outstanding and alarming.
Professor Hoskins went on to explain why debating sceptics is a waste of time. He argued that most climate scientists will admit to the various uncertainties in the models while still arguing that the best evidence we have available strongly suggests that human activities are the prime driver behind the current warming. Sceptics, on the other hand, will speak as if they know beyond any doubt that humans aren’t responsible for the current warming episode. So who will a policy maker or a laymember of the public believe? The cautious scientist on the one hand or the ‘utterly convinced’ sceptic on the other, who is actually abusing science big time?
I’d like to ask you how many conference you have attended on this and related subjects, or how many professional climate scientists you’ve discussed your perspectives with. This is important, in my view, because are the people doing the research. I’d also like to ask you why you think huge corporations like Exxon-Mobil are in denial over AGW. The answer should be patently obvious, and it should also be clear that no amount of empirical evidence is going to shift some of them from their position, no matter how flimsy this is.
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