Do you think Bolt will mention this?

Note down the prediction:

David Jones, the head of climate analysis at the Bureau of Meteorology, said yesterday that claims by sceptics the planet was cooling were wrong… Dr Jones said an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean – linked to hotter, drier conditions in Australia – would have an effect on the world’s climate next year. ”There is a significant probability next year will be the globe’s warmest year on record.”

NASA:

Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

NOAA:

For 2010, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature tied with 2005 as the warmest such period on record, at 0.62Â°C (1.12Â°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9Â°C (57.0Â°F).

Do you think Bolt will mention this?

Comments

#1 Rick Bradford
January 24, 2011

Thanks for the humour – this debate needs some.

All fun aside, Phil Jones is to intellectual integrity what Amy Winehouse is to temperance.

He writes to a colleague:

> Thanks for the email. Steve McIntyre hasn’t contacted me directly about the Antarctic data (yet), nor about any of the data used in the 1998 Holocene paper or the 2003 Geophysical Research Letters one with Mike. I suspect (hope) that he won’t.

> I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in Climatic Research Unit.

> At that time, I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met(eorological) Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through the Global Climate Observing System.
#2 Rick Bradford
January 24, 2011

He continues:

> Most of the data for most of the graphs have just appeared on the Climatic Research Unit web site. Go to “data”, then to “paleoclimate”. We did this to stop getting hassled by the skeptics for the data sets.

> Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we’ve done anything wrong.

Yeah, just oozes “intellectual integrity.”
#3 Wow
January 24, 2011

Yup, it’s intellectually corrupt to demand continually data to “find if you’ve done something wrong” then, when the data shows that no wrong has been done, demand more data, proclaiming that “there must be a pony in there!”.

Several inquiries into CRU and all exonerations. Yet what is the result?

Before:

Denialist: This is going to be GREAT! Finally, these eco nazis will be shown up!!!!

After:

Denialist: This is a whitewash! They’ve been bought off!!!!

Repeat ad nauseum.

PS where are these denialists looking at Wegman’s “doing wrong”?

Seriously silent, aren’t you Prick…
#4 John Brookes
January 27, 2011

I tried very hard the other day to put myself in a “skeptics” shoes, and surprisingly realised that they had a point. It is simply this: Action on AGW will make a pretty big change to our way of life. It won’t be as easy as some think (and it won’t be nearly as civilisation-destroying as others think). So the scientists working on AGW have a greater than normal responsibility to get things right.

However, this doesn’t let the skeptics off the hook, for they too should recognise what is at stake and behave responsibly.

Incidentally, if, just hypothetically, AGW had increased the intensity of the QLD rainfall by 10%, then that extra 10% would have accounted for a good fraction of the flood damage in QLD. It makes me wonder if that sort of damage is factored into the cost of the “do nothing about AGW” option so beloved by extremists?
#5 Wow
January 27, 2011

> It is simply this: Action on AGW will make a pretty big change to our way of life.

Mind you, so was the move to petroleum based fuels and fertilisers.

People who made the man with the flag walk in front of the car (demanded by the horse cab owners) are denoted as idiots nowadays.

As to your final query, no, they deny there’s ANY attributable effect on ANY event, even if they agree that AGW will increase the catastrophes.
#6 Chris O'Neill
January 27, 2011

Rick Bradford:

Mike Mann refuses to talk to these people and I can understand why. They are just trying to find if we’ve done anything wrong.

Yeah, just oozes “intellectual integrity.”

More like, these useless idiots can get lost. But fact-denialists like Rick Bradford wouldn’t understand this.
#7 Chris O'Neill
January 28, 2011

John Brookes:

Incidentally, if, just hypothetically, AGW had increased the intensity of the QLD rainfall by 10%, then that extra 10% would have accounted for a good fraction of the flood damage in QLD.

With 0.8 deg C of warming, the quantity of rain would have been increased by 0.8 x 7%, let’s say 5%, for the same event. There are reports of 7500 Gl falling in the Brisbane catchment so AGW increased the rain that fell by 375 Gl. Wivenhoe dam sent 280 Gl down the river above the flow rate deemed to be non-damaging (3,500 m3/s). So AGW is pretty much entirely responsible for flooding Brisbane given the way Wivenhoe was controlled (which wasn’t necessarily the most rational choice).

It makes me wonder if that sort of damage is factored into the cost of the “do nothing about AGW” option so beloved by extremists?

As if they’d ever do any cost estimation.
#8 Rick Bradford
January 29, 2011

> More like, these useless idiots can get lost.

That is indeed an accurate precis of the attitude of the Climategate ‘scientists’ — anyone who challenges The Faith must by definition be a ‘useless idiot’.

Galileo faced similar problems with the fundamentalists of his day — blind denunciation of ‘heresy’ has a long and sorry history.
#9 Dave R
January 29, 2011

>Galileo faced [similar problems with the fundamentalists of his day](http://climateprogress.org/2010/10/05/cuccinelli-mann-post-normal-science/)
#10 Chris O'Neill
January 29, 2011

Rick Bradford:

The Faith must by definition be a ‘useless idiot’.

If you don’t produce any research that produces any advance in science then what, pray tell, is useful about that?

You, on the other hand, are a useful fool for your religion.
#11 Rick Bradford
February 1, 2011

^
Religion is an unfalsifiable belief in an all-powerful and unquestionable force and hence is much closer to the cultish belief in man-made global warming than the stance of remaining open and questioning.

> “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” (Bertrand Russell, 1872 – 1970)
#12 Wow
February 1, 2011

> much closer to the cultish belief in man-made global warming

Sorry, you misspelt “science” as “cultish belief”.

> than the stance of remaining open and questioning.

This would be nice if you were actually opening and questioning like the scientists who are investigating the results of AGW as opposed to useful idiots like yourself, Dellingpole, Monckton or Watts.

It’s definitely a religious fervour that insists that all the evidence for AGW is merely cult belief.

Of course, Rick’s mind is so open that he can contain several contradictory memes all at the same time without conflict. This is made easier if you have avoided learning anything, since there will be plenty of space.
#13 Wow
February 1, 2011

> – blind denunciation of ‘heresy’ has a long and sorry history.

Oddly enough Rick and his fellow adherents of the Church Of Denial (available outside Egypt) blindly denounce the IPCC scientists.

Aren’t denidiots like Rick useful.
#14 Chris O'Neill
February 4, 2011

Religion is an unfalsifiable belief in an all-powerful and unquestionable force

and in this case, unknown force that is causing the earth’s surface to get warmer.
#15 Rick Bradford
February 10, 2011

> … unknown force that is causing the earth’s surface to get warmer

It’s that same ‘unknown force’ that has caused the earth to get warmer, and then cooler, over billions of years. We don’t know exactly what causes it, so we call it ‘natural variation’.
#16 Fran Barlow
February 10, 2011

Rick proposed:

We don’t know exactly what causes it, so we call it ‘natural variation’.{emphasis added}

So because you don’t know, you choose a term you don’t understand {natural variation} and use it to make your ignorance sound quasi-scientific and perhaps sage.

Of course people who do understand use descriptive terms (e.g. orbital forcing, radiative forcing) to describe things they can map to data. If there are unexplained anomalies they don’t pretend it’s “natural variation”. They hypothesise and foreshadow further research.
#17 Fran Barlow
February 10, 2011

Rick Bradford’s does unintentional irony quoting Betrand Russell:

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts. (Bertrand Russell, 1872 – 1970)

This passage appears in a Wiki intro to Dunning-Kruger and is of course one of the more persistent attributes of those fools and fanatics adopting the naysaying position on anthropogenic climate change.
#18 adelady
February 10, 2011

…same ‘unknown force’ …..

I’m perfectly happy with the idea that there may be other forces as yet unidentified. But we already know about Milankovitch cycles, albedo, volcanoes, oceans, forests, greenhouse gases, solar irradiation, clouds.

There’s quite a lot to work with already. And we have physics, chemistry and biology to help us do that work. Anything we’ve not yet identified will show up one way or another.

Whether it turns out to be an ‘unknown force’ is as yet unknown.
#19 Wow
February 10, 2011

> I’m perfectly happy with the idea that there may be other forces as yet unidentified.

However, the forces we already know about explain the observations.

So why must “skeptics” multiply the factors?
#20 Chris O'Neill
February 10, 2011

… unknown force that is causing the earth’s surface to get warmer

It’s that same ‘unknown force’ that has caused the earth to get warmer, and then cooler, over billions of years. We don’t know exactly what causes it, so we call it ‘natural variation’.

It might have been natural but it had a force that was determinate if the observations were available. We are perfectly capable of observing forces if they are real now. Your force does not now exist in observations. No observation now => fiction.
#21 Wow
February 10, 2011

> so we call it ‘natural variation’.

Why not call it God?

Or Tabasco?

What is CAUSING the variation.
#22 Rick Bradford
February 16, 2011

> What is CAUSING the variation.
Well, considering it has been happening for billions of years causing periodic ice ages and their opposite, it certainly isn’t human industrial emissions of CO2.

As I expect they sing at CRU parties: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Prof. Jones?”
#23 Jeff Harvey
February 16, 2011

*It’s that same ‘unknown force’ that has caused the earth to get warmer, and then cooler, over billions of years*

Nonsense. Certainaly climatic changes are the norm, but that has never been in doubt. The problem is the *rate of change* for a system that is largely determinsitic. It’s too bad, Rick, that you are evolutionarily programmed to think in terms of temporal scales that relate to a human life time. It is the same pit that the denialists always dig themselves into. They seriousl think that 10 or 20 years is a long time; that 50 years should be long enough for natural forcings to be elucidated. It explains why people like Peiser and others makes constant references to the old ‘it hasn’t warmed since 1998′ meme. But for a deterministic system, the time scales normally required to generate the changes we are witnessing now would certainly require some profoundly significant external forcing agent. Its certainly not due to solar forcing; there is little evidence to suggest that it is anything but us; swtich that around, and the evidence for a human fingerprint on the current warming is immense.
#24 Wow
February 16, 2011

> > What is CAUSING the variation.

> Well, considering it has been happening for billions of years causing periodic ice ages and their opposite, it certainly isn’t human industrial emissions of CO2.

I don’t know if that is the way that should have been formatted, but if I take it as this is the right way and the “Well..” but is a response, can I just say “complete bollocks, Rick”?

Complete bollocks, Rick.

What’s been causing the warming is CO2. And other greenhouse gasses. And things like the Sun cooling or warming.

And in each event, at different times, the relative effects of each of them have changed.

These are the same variables that when plugged in to our natural CO2 emissions (natural because the natural result of combustion of hydrocarbons in an oxygen rich atmosphere is CO2) show that this time it’s CO2 and specifically our contributions to that CO2 level that has caused this warming.

So “certainly wasn’t human CO2 production” is complete bollocks, Rick. What CAUSED the variations are CAUSING the variations NOW. And the biggest contributor is human CO2 production.