Deltoid

Anyone know about a study i heard (from Cornell I think) about aerosols maybe a month ago. It was a woman on NPR talking about their research that shows aerosols not only block some radiation, but that they can also have a decade effect mitigating CO2 by biological processes as a precipitate after coming out of the atmosphere. This is the type of thing I have always thought if there were mitigating factors that biological ones might be more likely. But I have read nothing about it since

Posted by: Tony Duncan | January 2, 2012 11:39 PM

First of all Happy New Year to you all and I can only hope fervently that your prognostications for global warming hurry up and manifest themselves - I can't stand yet another dim, drear, wet, chilly Summer.

However, I have another reason to enter these august columns today because I wish to bring to your attention some very wise words of warning from Friedrich Hayek, delivered during his acceptance speech for his Nobel Prize in Economics. Referring to the over-use and over-reliance on 'mathematical models', he said this, and I would simply urge you all to substitute the word 'economists' with 'global climate technologists':

“It seems to me that this failure of the economists [global climate technologists] to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, ‘is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.’”

The comments thread to the post is worth reading, too:

http://cafehayek.com/2011/12/hayek-on-scientistic-hubris.html

So, there is your new Year's resolution - avoid 'scientistic attitudes'!

Posted by: David Duff | January 3, 2012 9:43 AM

I can only hope fervently that your prognostications for global warming hurry up and manifest themselves - I can't stand yet another dim, drear, wet, chilly Summer

The U.K. experienced its second warmest year on record in 2011; same over here in the Netherlands. Spring was the warmest and driest yet recorded in both countries; autumn was also near the warmest and the driest as well. For the first time ever water restrictions almost had to be applied here in late November. The winter has so far seen record warmth: no frosts at all in December, and to my utter shock spring and summer annual plants - crucifers, umbellifers etc - are not only growing well but many are flowering in warm microclimates along south facing ditches and slopes. I spent the Christmas period on the island of Terscehlling and the level of plant growth along roadsides and medaows was something I have never seen at this time of year. Unprecedented. If this goes on it will cause havoc amongst a wide array of late winter-early spring ecological interactions, and further exacebrate phenological asynchronies.

Eastern North bAmerica has also had an exceptionally warm winter period: no snow at all in Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota, and a colleague at the University of Toronto told me that lakes in central Ontario that normally freeze in late Novemeber were still open just before Christmas.

Duffer: go back to school and learn a little.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 3, 2012 10:03 AM

'Yeah, but it's just weather, innit'!

Now where have I read those words, or something very like them,before?

Posted by: David Duff | January 3, 2012 12:08 PM

re:3 and Hayek's rejection of scientific models

Not surprising since Hayek's ideas are closer to religion than science.

Posted by: Jeffrey Davis | January 3, 2012 12:17 PM

Jeff @ 5

If this goes on it will cause havoc amongst a wide array of late winter-early spring ecological interactions, and further exacebrate phenological asynchronies.

Absolutely, I have heard much about such disruption of late but I doubt Duffer can even parse those last three words without reference. Quite beyond his experience.

Posted by: Lionel A | January 3, 2012 1:16 PM

'Yeah, but it's just weather, innit'!

Sure thing Duffo, but isn't it interesting that when the deniers conflate climate and weather its OK, but when their opponents do it the deniers scream foul play! Foul play!

Sunspot has honed the technique. He cuts-and-pastes obscure articles about cold weather events some place or other, than when others do the same with many more examples showing record high temperatures, extended heat waves etc., he goes off on a tangent about the evils of 'warmers' and how they just don't understand the importance of scale.

Tells me all I need to know about deniers: hypocrites one and all.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 3, 2012 3:53 PM

Why does anyone bother to engage with this pompous buffoon?

Posted by: Alan | January 3, 2012 5:50 PM

Hey Duff, did actually read that Freidrich Heydeck quote? He said that the problem with the economists is that they have (unsuccessfully) tried to "imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences".

Climate science is one of those "brilliantly successful physical sciences". Well done on the home goal!

If economists had even a fraction of the success of climate scientists with their predictions, the economies of World would not be in such a mess.

Posted by: Craig Allen | January 3, 2012 6:53 PM

Good point Geoff Beacon.

Climate models make an important contribution to our understanding of the effects of AGW but I too am concerned that they often exclude data related to Arctic slow feedbacks, particularly retreat of ice sheets, loss of albedo and increase in methane emissions.

How can one possibly predict likely movement in sea level rise and average global temperature without taking these matters into consideration?

Posted by: Mike Pope | January 3, 2012 8:28 PM

David Duff.

We had our warmest January night ever the day before yesterday, so by your previous winter logic global warming is now moving apace.

Glad to see that you're finally on board.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 3, 2012 10:55 PM

The Duffer said:

So, there is your new Year's resolution - avoid 'scientistic attitudes'!

That's excellent advice. If the deniers take it to heart, we should have less noice and more signal in discussions on questions of climate. They are forever copying and pasting stuff they don't understand or can't be bothered reading merely so they can sound as if what they propose is scientifically rigorous when their misuse of the content and copy and paste tropes amount to scientistic gaffleflab. Plimer's "questions" to Monbiot (use the flitches, Luke) some years back were an excellent example of this. So too is anything from Monckton.

Posted by: Fran Barlow | January 4, 2012 3:35 AM

Well, I'm delighted to tell you that compared to the last two or three winters this one has so far been as mild as May - well, not quite, but you know what I mean. Mind you bitter British experience tells me that we will pay for it in Jan/Feb.

However, I have returned to chide you all - you must do better:

"UAH Global Temperature Update for Dec. 2011: +0.13 deg. C"

The same as November! Come on, chaps, burn a bit more coal!

Posted by: David Duff | January 4, 2012 4:58 AM

Duff,

However, I have returned to chide you all - you must do better: "UAH Global Temperature Update for Dec. 2011: +0.13 deg. C" The same as November! Come on, chaps, burn a bit more coal!

You are nothing more than a pitiable wind-up merchant who is best ignored. I have come across many such as you over time, those in the navy often had poor survival prospects on long voyages for they eventually were turned ashore for treatment at Stonehouse and Netley after they grew mum-chance by being ignored.

Posted by: Lionel A | January 4, 2012 6:57 AM

Anthony Watts has a post about shark hybridisation, where the media confabulated the scientists' claims with signatures of global warming.

See if you can count how many cherries he picked for this one.

And he has the hide to winge about the media's twisting of the facts...

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 4, 2012 9:17 AM

Wow! Graham Lloyd manages to write an article about climate/weather issues without distortions or quoting any lies from contrarian non-experts.

Wonders will never cease. Maybe the family Christmas lunch saw him set straight by his wiser relatives?

Posted by: Vince Whirlwind | January 4, 2012 6:18 PM

I'd like to echo the call to be done with David Duff. I see little point to his posting here or to others responding. I stop by fairly regularly to get information on what's happening in climate circles, but I find the posts between Mr. Duff and others largely noise.

Posted by: Charles | January 4, 2012 11:14 PM

From Nikolov and Zeller:

Pressure by itself is not a source of energy! Instead, it enhances (amplifies) the energy supplied by an external source such as the Sun through density-dependent rates of molecular collision. This relative enhancement only manifests as an actual energy in the presence of external heating.

[...]

Hence, the atmosphere does not act as a ‘blanket’ reducing the surface infrared cooling to space as maintained by the current GH theory, but is in and of itself a source of extra energy through pressure. This makes the GH effect a thermodynamic phenomenon, not a radiative one as presently assumed!

Posted by: Andy S | January 5, 2012 3:25 AM

Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller also feel they can make up new values for established figures like the mean surface temperature of the Moon, which they put at 154K, not the standard 250K. This enables them to claim their calculations show perfect agreement with observation. The Dunning-Kruger Effect at its best.

As a funny aside, a denier at a different forum had made a claim a few weeks ago that the IPCC doesn't consider water vapor a GHG, so I showed a direct quote from the last report saying it was the most important GHG responsible for a majority of the GHE. He ignored my post and made the same claim to someone else a day later. Now, he's pushing this Unified Climate Theory crap, which actually does relegate water vapor to insignificance for the GHE. Like most deniers, he never even noticed the inconsistency. Anything But CO2!

Posted by: Robert Murphy | January 5, 2012 4:50 AM

Maybe the trolls should be contained in their own thread. Don't feed them.

Posted by: Andy S | January 5, 2012 6:36 AM

Seen elsewhere: Back in 1990 Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman wrote "Good Omens The nice and accurate prophesies of Agnes Nutter, Witch"

A few quotes from a scene: "Been letting ourselves go a bit with the old hydrocarbons, perhaps?" "I'm sorry?" "Could you tell me your planet's albedo, sir?"... "Er. no." "Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you sir, that your polar ice caps are below regulation size for a planet of this category."

...

"CO2 level up point five percent"..."You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominent species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?"

Posted by: Turboblocke | January 5, 2012 7:23 AM

Hey Tim, Thought you might be interested in a post over at Skepticblog. Shermer posted a review of a presentation by John Lott (more guns = less crime hypothesis). I linked to an old post of yours which I thought was a good critique. Lott shows up in the comments at #29. He doesn't seem to care for you much. If you have time you may want to join the discussion. http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/01/03/more-god-less-crime-or-more-guns-less-crime/#comments

Posted by: CrookedTimber | January 5, 2012 10:37 AM

Ned Nikolav has now decided that it wasn't enough to compare himself with Copernicus:

"I suppose you also have a problem with the Theory of Relativity, since it was proposed by a low-level clerk working for a Swiss Patent Office … :-)" http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/29/unified-theory-of-climate/#comment-854111

The Newton analogy can't be too far away. lol

Posted by: Robert Murphy | January 5, 2012 12:14 PM

Bernard, the shark hybridization is even worse than we thought:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqGQyMF5a_0

:-)

Posted by: Olaus Petri | January 5, 2012 12:39 PM

Composer99, don't bring unrealistic shark scenarios into the picture. Hate to brake it to you but your sharks are Scifi. Mine are real though. ;-)

Posted by: Olaus Petri | January 5, 2012 1:25 PM

Trolls out of their enclosure alert! Back to the Jonas thread please, boys.

Posted by: bill | January 5, 2012 5:02 PM

Fran,

Would another question be, what numbers are plague proportions for ducks?

Posted by: Jeremy C | January 5, 2012 5:41 PM

Climate Progress have an article on carbon tax reporting in Oz.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/05/398594/murdoch-press-carbon-price-negative-campaigned-against-it/

While the Murdoch press predictably occupy the top 6 spots for negative campaigning against the carbon tax, the SMH and West Australian are not far behind.

What is striking about the analysis (from Australian Center for Independent Journalism) is how the fossil fuel industry lobbyists have shaped the reporting.

Posted by: MikeH | January 5, 2012 6:39 PM

@5 and on the general topic of unseasonable weather, particularly relating to unusually cold weather in Europe and-or North America, NOAA ClimateWatch Magazine has a piece on the effect of the Arctic Oscillation - variation in a jet stream which can cause average winter temperatures in parts of the northern hemisphere to vary as much as plus or minus 7 degrees from long term averages, http://www.climatewatch.noaa.gov/image/2011/so-far-arctic-oscillation-favoring-mild-winter-for-eastern-u-s

New Scientist had an article last December 16, "Snowmageddon: What's behind extreme winter weather" http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228432.900-snowmageddon-whats-behind-extreme-winter-weather.html (paywalled). It began:

"LAST winter, Florida got so cold that torpid iguanas fell from trees, pythons froze to death, crops were damaged and corals in the seas around the Florida Keys died in greater numbers than ever recorded before. Further north, heavy snowstorms caused chaos across much of the US.

"Across the pond in the UK, it got pretty nippy too - and it stayed cold for much longer than usual. The average temperature of the country in December 2010 was -1 °C, well below the long-term December average of 4.2 °C. It was the second coldest December in central England since records began back in 1659. Here too, heavy snowfalls brought cars, trains and planes to a standstill..."

It goes on to note though that the northern hemisphere as a whole was actually warmer than the long term average - and in arctic regiions, very much warmer. The article concludes that "the jury is still out" as to whether changes due to global warming are implicated in such extreme winter weather events, but says this is suggested by "a growing number of studies".

We are reminded yet again that the connection between climate and weather is far more complex that "if the climate is warming the weather should be warmer".

Posted by: MikeM | January 5, 2012 7:39 PM

Fran.

As pterosaur noted many duck species exhibit boom-and-bust type breeding behaviour, in the vein of an r-strategist organism.

Certainly, if one is going to point a gun at ducks, the current season would be the time when doing so has the least effect on overall numbers.

Having said that, whether ducks are "in plague proportions" is another matter. Again, as pterosaur notes, native species rarely demonstrate ecological impacts, as we usually perceive them, that are attributable to "plague species" such as mice. Sometimes we might be inclined to use the term when we plant an agricultural crop on the old habitats or near the extant habitats of natives (think cockatoos), or do something else similarly stupid in terms of inevitable consequence, but this is usually an economic value judgement rather than an ecological one.

And this leads me to expand on Jeremy C's point about the absolute numbers. What vested interests might term as "plague proportions" is often a fraction of what is an equilibrium size of the population in a non human-impacted context.

Take minke whales for example. Japan justifies their hunting in part by claiming that they are in "plague proportions". Erm, hardly.

Or, to hark back to the waterfowl subject of your question, I once spoke with an old fisherman who worked the Kooragang wetlands and the lower the Hunter River back in the early 20th century. He, and his father before him, used to shoot ducks in flocks that he said darkened the sky from one horizon to the other. He could bring down three or four birds with one shot, and other old-timers I spoke to told of similar bird numbers. From the details they gave, I estimate that at least three or four bird species that used to use the Hunter estuary did so in numbers in the order of millions of individuals of each species. Compare that to today, where one would be fortunate indeed to see a flock of any species that actually reaches into the tens of thousands, let alone more.

Interestingly the fisherman said that their gizzards were sometimes full of rice, apparently from a direct flight from Indonesia: Australia was not growing rice at that time. If this is the case then the numbers and patterns of waterbird migration along the east coast of Australia have been greatly altered indeed over the last century or so.

The bottom line - context is all. One man's "plague proportions" are another man's recovering tattered remnants.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 5, 2012 11:42 PM

[Pentaxz -- from now on you can only post to the Jonas thread]

Posted by: pentaxZ | January 6, 2012 2:24 AM

Thanks for that background info on Kooragang, Bernard. I may have talked to the same gent at one stage. While the numbers of waterbirds around the Kooragang area aren't what they were, the number of species commonly sighted is on the improve* and with the openning of the floodgates at Hexham a couple of years ago numbers hopefully should improve further (and isn't it the aim of all threatened species programs that they are so successful the target animal becomes a pest itself?).

*Saw a Jabiru on the saltmarsh there about 6 years ago and apparently they're regularly spotted these days.

Posted by: spottedquoll | January 6, 2012 4:08 AM

[Stupidity filter applied]

Posted by: pentaxZ | January 6, 2012 4:32 AM

Tim,

Thanks for sending Pentax where he belongs. I think that you should do the same thing with Olaus.

Re: Olaus, you are clutching at straws. Essentially, all that you do is surf a few anti-environmental climate change denial blogs and rehash their nonsense elsewhere. How much of the primary literature do you read? That's a fairly easy question, because I have not yet seen you discuss the findings of a single peer-reviewed study. Instead, you simply cut-and-past gibberish from WUWT and then expect people here to engage in rational discourse with you.

As many have said, the issue of climate change-related effects covers an immense amount of literature showing biotic and abiotic effects. What does Watt's think he will get out of data showing that the number of F3-F5 tornadoes has not icnreased significantly since the 1970s? That there is no warming? Even the most die-hard denialists generally acknowlege that the biosphere is warming at present, and there are thousands of biotic indicators to prove it. I can be certain that, since you apparently cannot tell a mole cricket from a giraffe, your understanding of range shifts, pehnological changes, altitudinal shifts, and changes in life-history patterns along with a suite of other biotic responses to warming will be poor or non-existant. That's why my advice for you is to keep your head firmly ticked up your a@#* and stick with the semi-literate brigades over at the denial sites who tell you what you want to hear.

Finally, its no use throwing staw man arguments such as fantasies about the 'rigth wing illuminati' at me. Its pretty well established by now that those most bitterly opposed to the science of climate change and any means of dealing with warming come from the wacky end of the political right. That you deny this tells me more about you than just about anything else. Since you clearly have a very poor grasp of environmental science, along with the Joe Barton's and James Inhofe's of this world, what else is there to conclude? That you motives and opinions are driven by a deep-rooted heart-wrenching search for the truth? Get real.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 6, 2012 7:11 AM

Sometimes people ask me why I bother to visit here so often. The answer is simple - the commenters here are so witty.

I agree. What this website needs is more hilariously original cracks about Obama using teleprompters and black lesbian mother-in-laws. Har har har har!

Nice to see you crawling back in here Duff. How many times have you posted since you said you'd never post again?

And any closer to telling me just how you can believe Morner's predictions when his observations are so wrong? Or what alleged projections Prof. Mann has made?

Or are you just going to keep making tepid ad hom attacks to hide the fact your scientific method is opinion first, evidence second?

Posted by: John | January 6, 2012 7:46 AM

And I long for more of Duff's revolutionary theory on why biology isn't Real Science.

Posted by: John | January 6, 2012 7:59 AM

John:

Or are you [David Duff] just going to keep making tepid ad hom attacks to hide the fact your scientific method is opinion first, evidence second never?

FTFY

Posted by: Composer99 | January 6, 2012 10:19 AM

Food for thoughts:

http://judithcurry.com/2012/01/05/error-cascade/

Curry is a real climate scientist, by the way.

Posted by: Olaus Petri | January 6, 2012 1:12 PM

Olaus Petri:

If the wattsian claim are true

If.

as I said above (and many times before), in retrospect (C)AGW will be looked upon

In other words, your 'predictions' have invariably been shown to be bullshit, and that makes you very proud?

Go buy some land in Bangladesh and knock yourself out.

  * * *

Meanwhile, some good news.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 6, 2012 1:48 PM

Olaus Petri:

In other words, your 'predictions' have invariably been shown to be bullshit, and that makes you very proud?

I [...] said "retrospect" which means in a near future

Enough said.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 6, 2012 2:06 PM

Curry is a real climate scientist, by the way.

Really? You've found a real climate scientist? Is she the only one, or are there others?

Posted by: Stu | January 6, 2012 2:26 PM

GSW:

In the main, they tend to keep very quiet about it

Or maybe it's just your excuse to ignore what someone actually says so that you can put words in his mouth. GSW, you are an idiot.

(Hint: when I say 'GSW, you are an idiot' I don't secretly mean 'GSW, you are a genius'. Seriously.)

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 6, 2012 3:15 PM

I see that the biggest CO2 emitter in the world, China, has decided to implement a carbon tax. Makes for uncomfortable talk around the denier dinner table. "Oh noes, theys are all against us. Imagine if they end up creating a better world & its all for nothing!".

Posted by: Phil M | January 6, 2012 5:41 PM

Also in that den of ignorant and illogical deniers (none of whom Curry ever corrects, regardless of how blatantly wrong they are), one can find posts by a handful of sensible people, like Joshua. His comments are indeed food for thought -- by people able and willing to think, unlike cherry pickers like Olaus for whom the only "real" climate scientists are those who say (or can be misinterpreted to say) what he wants to hear.

Posted by: ianam | January 6, 2012 6:35 PM

I see that dear old Uncle Fred is at it again. He claims that the recent warming is all a big Fake! Fake! Fake! Fake!

Posted by: TrueSceptic | January 6, 2012 7:46 PM

In the main, they tend to keep very quiet about it {my emphasis}

OK GSW, if 'in the main' is not the same thing as 'all of them' which are the exceptions the 'real climate scientists'?

Posted by: Fran Barlow | January 6, 2012 7:50 PM

Curry is a real climate scientist, by the way.

In the same way that Olaus is a real sceptic.

Posted by: SteveC | January 6, 2012 10:43 PM

In the same way that Olaus is a real sceptic.

Curry, whatever she is doing now, at least has the training and credentials of a climate scientist, whereas Olaus is just a gullible ignoramus who will swallow anything that plays to his preconceptions -- like that piece that Curry lifted from a raving denier blog (the articles before and after that one are "Naming and shaming the AGW fraudsters", which quotes approvingly from James Delingpole, and "The Great Blizzard of 2010", the title of which speaks for itself).

Posted by: ianam | January 7, 2012 3:32 AM

Of possible interest here. Have folks seen this item from the '7.30 Report'? :

Robert Purves throws weight behind climate science

Hope the link works.

Missed all but the end of it myself on ABC News24 until online search for it just now.

There was also a good interview with Naomi Oreskes & somebody else - a Tasmanian environmentalist on rainforests (if vague memory serves here?) on another ABC news24 programme seen whilst staying up to see comet Lovejoy a few weeks ago.

Posted by: StevoR | January 7, 2012 4:06 AM

@David Duff | January 3, 2012 9:43 AM

First of all Happy New Year to you all and I can only hope fervently that your prognostications for global warming hurry up and manifest themselves - I can't stand yet another dim, drear, wet, chilly Summer.

Referring to the over-use and over-reliance on 'mathematical models', he [Friedrich Hayek] said this, and I would simply urge you all to substitute the word 'economists' with 'global climate technologists': “It seems to me that this failure of the economists [global climate technologists] to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, ‘is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.’”

Um, okay. But how is this relevant exactly? Where is Hayeks's supporting evidence here?

Also you know HIRGO predictions and understanding is based on an awful lot more than just climate modelling don't you?

So, there is your new Year's resolution - avoid 'scientistic attitudes'!

Thanks but I've already made my New Years Resolutions and that one misses the cut.

Posted by: StevoR | January 7, 2012 5:05 AM

Olaus writes, Yes, I believe so frankie. Take a deep breath and exhale all the hot air that is reckoned as science at Deltoid. :-)

A bit rich coming from someone who has never read a published scientific article in his life and who, like his ignoramus sidekick, PentazZ, relies for his world view on the garbage spewed from a few web logs like WUWT and Joanne Nova.

As I said before, Olaus and Pentax are completely incapable of reading published studies in the empirical literature and of understanding the science in them. So they instead endlessly surf the internet in search of web sites that spew out the kind of interpretations they like to read. I demolished PentaxZ's claim earlier regarding the effects of warming on polar bear population demographics, and what does the schmuck do here? Rehash the same demolished argument. He was unable to debate the concept of temporal lags, the extinction debt, optimum habitats, critical thresholds, tipping points etc. etc., so he said nothing when I rebutted his comic argument on another infamous thread. No response. Nada. Then he re-pastes the same polar bears are doing fine argument up here that he cut and pasted from another denilalist web site run by a blogger who has no relevant expertise in any field of science.

Olaus, Pentaxz, given that both of you nincompoops clearly have never set foot within 100 miles of a science lab, why do you continue to pollute this blog? I will certainly debate you on the concepts above as well as on other ecological concepts and processes related to the current warming, but since your understanding of this is at the level of a child in kindergarten level, do you really think its worth your time to try?

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 7, 2012 5:30 AM

@69. Jeff Harvey | January 6, 2012 7:11 AM

Even the most die-hard denialists generally acknowlege that the biosphere is warming at present, and there are thousands of biotic indicators to prove it. I can be certain that, since you apparently cannot tell a mole cricket from a giraffe, your understanding of range shifts, pehnological changes, altitudinal shifts, and changes in life-history patterns along with a suite of other biotic responses to warming will be poor or non-existant. That's why my advice for you is to keep your head firmly ticked up your a@#* and stick with the semi-literate brigades over at the denial sites who tell you what you want to hear.

I would strongly disagree with that advice.

Olaus is to be welcome here in my view because he (& those like him) may, just may, eventaully learn something and be exposed to ideas and facts that the denial sites try to keep folks like him unaware of.

Its the denier sites that want to keep people misinformed and I think we should be fighting such misinformation and trying to expose as many as possible to the real situation and real science instead of condemning them to ignorance through not wanting to engage them.

Of course I'd rather Olaus and folks like him didn't just troll and post garbage constantly but it gets such rot out there where it can be debunked and countered so even that's not the worst thing possible. It'd be nice if the contrarians just lurked and learned here but at least they are here where they might potentially learn something and one day understand how wrong they are.

It is tedious and annoying often I'll grant you that much.

But climate contrarians can be convinced otherwise. How do I know? Well, to my shame I was one myself for some years -taken in by Plimer - before arguing & researching online gradually convinced me otherwise.

Posted by: StevoR | January 7, 2012 5:57 AM

Judith Curry is a real climate scientist, not because she set herself a conclusion and is working back from it to the most supportive facts, but because she has gained the necessary qualifications and has published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.^fn1

That doesn't make her right, however. Furthermore, what she chooses to say on her blog is not the same as gathering the evidence and publishing it in peer reviewed scientific literature. Curry's current foray into a febrile psychological (self?) examination as to the motives behind what other climate scientists publish, well, it speaks volumes to the examiner, but not in a manner likely to be to her pleasing.

Climate science (with regards to AGW, ie anthropogenic global warming) is fast becoming the most re-examined science on the planet, and yet, it consistently passes the testing and re-testing of the evidence. Judith Curry is out on a thin limb, on this one...

fn1: Yes, I lapsed into some sarcasm, irony, call it what you will.

Posted by: Donald Oats | January 7, 2012 6:23 AM

I was one myself for some years ... before arguing & researching online ...

Trust us on this: Olaus and PentaxZ aren't like you.

Posted by: ianam | January 7, 2012 6:44 AM

SteveoR,

Please take a look at the Jonas Thread and despair.

Posted by: Andy S | January 7, 2012 8:47 AM

Can I interest anyone in a second-hand Chevy Volt? Awfully green, you know, and will win you lots of kudos with concerned and caring people in the global warming movement.

Posted by: David Duff | January 7, 2012 9:04 AM

Saith Roger "I am Spartacus" Tattersall:

Let the chips fall where they may.

Whatever, Spartacus wannabe.

And by the way, is Spartacus still planning to punish the policemen guilty of "malfeasance" resulting in an "inappropriate" search warrant? Or is Spartacus just preparing to launch phantom lawsuits against the Internet?

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 7, 2012 3:56 PM

Nice to see my ramblings are regarded as "lesser nonsense"

Joel has misidentified/mischaracterized you, since there seems to be very little nonsense (the grossly incompetent G&T, "[It's a] ridiculous notion [that CO2 is a pollutant because] [i]t is a naturally occurring gas") that you don't purvey. Your comment on the latest drivel from G&T is priceless:

This is a technical paper and I don’t understand all the squiggles, but I’m sure the recent addition to the Talkshop of some real atmospheric thermodynamic expertise will make this an interesting thread.

Posted by: ianam | January 7, 2012 4:32 PM

check,

Isnt' this

I strongly suspect that old (and they're always old) 'Spartacus' Tattersall is merely another in the long, long think-tank production line of anything-but-the-IPCC dupes with delusions of grandeur who should've stuck to making T-shirts for deluded old cows.

Of course a few million residents of Pakistan might argue with this, but hey nobody in the US was killed or inconvenienced by the event in Pakistan last year... Being a bit harsh on the brilliant thinking exemplified by this quote:

More rainfall is good news for the Asian monsoon region. This is a good analysis that illustrates the interplay between AGW and natural variability.

Posted by: Rattus Norvegicus | January 7, 2012 5:52 PM

Thanks for the intervention, RN. Upon reflection, I retrospectively amend my previous statement to: "deluded, old sacred cows".

but hey nobody in the US was killed or inconvenienced

A little close to La Curry's previous area of expertise, but similar to "if a hurricane doesn't make landfall in the USA, did it really even happen"?

Posted by: chek | January 7, 2012 6:21 PM

Canada after Kyoto http://deepclimate.org/2012/01/06/canada-after-kyoto/

“Canada’s message: The world and its climate be damned”. That headline on Jeffrey Simpson’s scathing commentary on Canada’s pending formal withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol said it all. ...

But I want to turn today to an analysis of the Conservative government’s putative alternative to Kyoto, namely the 2009 Copenhagen agreement, as well as the GHG reduction plans put forth in 2008 by Canada and the province Alberta (home to the oil sands and Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper). That analysis confirms the contention of Jeffrey Simpson and others that the government of Canada is “mocking” the 2020 target agreed to only two years ago; the promised 17% reduction in annual GHG emissions (relative to 2005) is already out of reach. A big reason for this is an Alberta target (itself very unlikely to be met) that calls for a rise in GHG emissions until 2020. Not only that, but Alberta’s 2050 target, predicated on massive expansion of oil sands operations, is only 14% below 2005 levels, and sets Canada on a path that can not possibly be reconciled with the Harper government’s own stated long-term target, let alone any reasonable goal compatible with Canada’s responsibilities.

Posted by: Deep Climate | January 7, 2012 8:42 PM

Sorry gents, I mistook this for a science blog. As you were.

Posted by: Rog Tallbloke | January 8, 2012 9:22 AM

I asked Roger "I am Spartacus" Tattersall:

And by the way, is Spartacus still planning to punish the policemen guilty of "malfeasance" resulting in an "inappropriate" search warrant? Or is Spartacus just preparing to launch phantom lawsuits against the Internet?

The answer from our Spartacus wannabe:

Sorry gents, I mistook this for a science blog. As you were.

Shorter Spartacus wannabe:

This questions embarrases me, so here's a lame excuse.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 8, 2012 9:51 AM

Sorry gents, I mistook this for a science blog.

Ah, I see your mistake now. You're confusing a 'science blog' for example like Deltoid here or Deep Climate or Tamino's, with 'crank blog' like your own, or Climate etc.. or WTFUWT.

Not an easy mistake to make, to be sure. Unless perhaps you're suffering from Spartacled delusions.

Posted by: chek | January 8, 2012 10:31 AM

By the way, I thought you guys might be interested in seeing an example of how one of the owners of a "skeptic" blog, tallbloke, censor you if you write correct science that he happens to disagree with, I posted this comment in this thread there http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/g-t-weigh-in-on-adiabatic-atmospheres-and-raise-the-bar/

Maurizio Morobito says: “Bryan – yes, there’s no effect of radiative properties in the troposphere. Because whatever effect there might be, it is going to be counteracted by convection (and conduction).” Actually, this is not at all correct. The radiative greenhouse effect would only be counteracted completely by convection if convection could relax the profile of the troposphere all the way to an isothermal profile. It can’t because it only goes as far as relaxing it to an adiabatic lapse rate profile. What is important for the greenhouse effect is that the temperature at which emission escapes to space is colder than the temperature at the surface. (Ray Pierrehumbert’s book is very clear on this point, in fact.) If there were no convection, then the lapse rate in the troposphere would be higher and the radiative greenhouse effect would be greater. Convection reduces the radiative greenhouse effect but it can’t completely counteract it because the lapse rate only relaxes to the adiabatic one. This is why Nikolov and Zeller had to put in convection in such a way that, by their own emission, it drives the temperatures T_a and T_s to be the same (in obvious contradiction to what convection does in the real atmosphere). By adopting an incorrect assumption about how convection operates, they were able to essentially eliminate the radiative greenhouse effect in that simple model. Unfortunately, that is not the way the real world operates.

The response I got from the moderator (I presume tallbloke) was:

[Reply]Hi Joel, I’m all for informed debate from people on both sides, but you’re not posting here unless and until you apologise to Nikolov and Zeller for spreading misinformation about conservation of energy in their theory all over the blogosphere and failing to correct it. Rog

So, apparently I am censored from the site for stating something so obvious that even skeptics like Willis Eschenbach and Roy Spencer agree.

Maybe he will yet have a change of heart and decide that censorship isn't the way to go...but it will be interesting to see.

Posted by: Joel Shore | January 8, 2012 2:55 PM

Hi, tallbloke. It is nice to see that blogs like this truly allow the free exchange of ideas, as opposed to your blog which just gives lip service to the idea! Here is what I posted back to you on your blog:

tallbloke: The evidence that they have violated conservation of energy is clear from all of the amusing contortions that people are going through to try to explain to Willis and I how it could possibly not violate conservation of energy. Stephen Wilde has gone so far as to try to get around it by appealing to the gravitational redshift. Unfortunately, it turns out that said effect is 9 orders of magnitude too small, besides which, we already know the solution to the conundrum that the Earth’s surface is emitting ~390 W/m^2 whereas there is only 240 W/m^2 absorbed by the Earth and atmosphere from the sun: It is that as seen from space, the Earth is only emitting 240 W/m^2…The rest of the emissions from the Earth surface are absorbed by the atmosphere. We call this the atmospheric greenhouse effect…and it is what allows the surface to emit more energy than the Earth and its atmosphere receive from the sun. P.S. – So, is Willis banned from posting here too?

Posted by: Joel Shore | January 8, 2012 3:13 PM

Roger "I am Spartacus" Tattersall:

Sorry gents, I mistook this for a science blog.

Joel Shore:

Unfortunately, it turns out that said effect is 9 orders of magnitude too small, besides which, we already know the solution to the conundrum that the Earth's surface is emitting ~390 W/m^2 whereas there is only 240 W/m^2 absorbed by the Earth and atmosphere from the sun: [...] The rest of the emissions from the Earth surface are absorbed by the atmosphere. We call this the atmospheric greenhouse effect...

Roger "Spartacus" Tattersall:

you seem unable to comprehend

Ooh, Spartacus wannabe is looking vewwy vewwy oppwessed at the moment, is he not? But maybe we are just "unable to comprehend" the supreme Spartacus-ness of the great Spartacus wannabe who's feeling so oppressed right now, even as he refuses to answer questions on the phantom lawsuit against policemen guilty of "malfeasance".

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 8, 2012 5:37 PM

re: Roger,

If I may paraphase the 'skeptics' take on this;

'Roger moderates becuase he knows he's lost the argument.'

Or it's some vast right-wing conspiracy has made scince corrupt.

Take your pick.

Posted by: Michael | January 8, 2012 6:55 PM

Am I understanding this correctly: WUWT and its fans are in fact denying the existence of the atmospheric Greenhouse Effect?

I'm getting very confused about the denialist position: one minute they're all saying "Oh, nobody denies that, we're just saying models exxagerated adaptation".

So, when the latest review of US temperature stations came out showing there was nothing wrong with them, they started saying "We never denied temperatures are going up, we're just saying the anthropogenic factor is overstated".

And yet, now, they're right back to saying there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect on the back of a crank paper by two people whose expertise in climate science is not very well established.

Which ones of them are stupid, and which ones are part of the Oreskes-documented campaign of dishonesty?

Posted by: Vince Whirlwind | January 8, 2012 7:11 PM

Roger (may I call you that - Roger?).

I haven't laughed so much in weeks. Thank you.

The fact though is that I wasn't laughing with you...

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 8, 2012 8:22 PM

You don't often see such a perfect example of incompetence combined with arrogance as we see in Rog Tallbloke: classic Dunning-Kruger in fact.

C'mon, he's a web content editor for a university, obviously well-positioned to be the next galieinsteinarwin!

Posted by: dhogaza | January 8, 2012 8:41 PM

Apart from a roll-call of the usual suspects (including the hilarious 'Galileo Movement') I note Noam Chomsky, George Monbiot and Oliver Cromwell(!) on that list!...

And no Hayek!

Posted by: bill | January 8, 2012 11:42 PM

Sorry...in my last post I wrote the pseudo-libertarian opposed military adventurism. That was the opposite of what I meant. They are in favor of such when the majority of libertarians are against it. Anyway, again I apologize for the rant.

Posted by: JRC | January 9, 2012 2:48 AM

Sorry gents, I mistook this for a science blog.

The gents here are scientists or educated in science, whereas you are an ignorant crank who doesn't understand the "squiggles" of technical papers, someone so mindbogglingly stupid as to proclaim that it's ridiculous to think that CO2 is a pollutant because it's a naturally occurring gas (so is sulpher dioxide, moron), and so inept and lacking in scientific understanding as to proclaim the unscientific dunces Gerlich and Tscheuschner -- who reject basic physics -- to have "real atmospheric thermodynamic expertise" (so much for appeals to authority not cutting it with you). You're a cherry-picking sack of shit, an idiot and a liar, an asshole and a jackass, a shit stain on humanity. Since this isn't the sort of blog you were looking for, you should get lost.

Posted by: ianam | January 9, 2012 4:27 AM

Roger Tattersall's remarkable (heh heh) level of scientific understanding, as well as his credulity, are on full display at

http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/why-the-sun-is-so-important-to-climate/

For someone who claims to reject appeals to authority, ya gotta love his comment,

I have been waiting for someone to properly critique Ferenc Miskolczi’s papers on the greenhouse effect. Who better than Dr Roy Spencer?

But when Spencer explained what a crock Miscolczi’s theory is (for more trashing see http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=232818 ... gotta love the denier idiots there who argue that the fact this garbage paper isn't cited proves that there's something to it and it's "being carefully ignored"), Tattersall didn't understand a word of it, except that it wasn't what he wanted to hear, and so he hopes that Miscolczi will respond so his confirmation bias can latch onto that.

Since he is incapable of grasping it from what Spencer wrote about Miscolczi, Tattersall ought to ask him what he thinks of G&T, heh heh.

Posted by: ianam | January 9, 2012 4:58 AM

Sometimes ianam's short fuse and colourful language make me wince, but I had to laugh at:

You're a cherry-picking sack of shit, an idiot and a liar, an asshole and a jackass, a shit stain on humanity. Since this isn't the sort of blog you were looking for, you should get lost.

I'm not saying that I necessarily agree (or disagree) with it, but one has to concede that he does put his point across...

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 9, 2012 5:17 AM

I think that government shouldn't intrude in people's lives as much as possible

Whereas liberals think it should?

t is the government's responsibility to take action where I as an individual cannot

Without taxation?

They are just neo-cons pretending to be libertarian

Other libertarians might say you're just a liberal pretending to be a libertarian.

Libertarians are naive, ignorant, dogmatic, hypocritical, and intellectually dishonest ... just not all in the same areas.

Posted by: ianam | January 9, 2012 5:21 AM

Some clarification.

Frank removes context in order to create the impression we are claiming that the relevant effect we are discussing is the 'gravitational redahift' which is 9 orders of magnitude too small to do anything exciting. This is incorrect, but indicative of his debating methods.

Thanks for your thoughts, even the nasty ones. I got a laugh too. - thread saved.

Posted by: Rog Tallbloke | January 9, 2012 6:16 AM

Tallbloke is an industrial strength crank magnet who believes that there was a conspiracy to hide evidence that proved the existence of an ether. According to Tallbloke the evidence was "buried by mainstream astrophysics in favour of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity."

Posted by: MikeH | January 9, 2012 7:25 AM

Roger "I am Spartacus" Tattersall:

Frank removes context in order to create the impression we are claiming that the relevant effect we are discussing is the 'gravitational redahift' which is 9 orders of magnitude too small to do anything exciting.

You mean the context in which you scream "I am Spartacus!" while threatening to launch phantom lawsuits against policemen and the Internet? Ah yes, I may have omitted that, Spartacus wannabe.

There is no single 'denialist position'.

Yes there is, and it's called 'Not The IPCC'.

The 'position' where anything and everything that disagrees with the IPCC is right and good, even if they flat out contradict one another.

At the moment, the Talkshop is concentrating on assessing the.claims in the Nikolov and Zeller extended conference poster. At the end of the process (which will take some time yet, because properly assessing theories which cover a lot of ground and offer major paradigm shifts can't be judged overnight), we will arrive at our conclusion. let the chips fall where they may.

OK, so not only is Tattersall Spartacus, he's also

I also provide the environment in which the discussion can take place in relative calm

I didn't know Spartacus was about civilized debate. I thought that was the province of Cicero. Or was it Galileo? Dang, mixed metaphors are so confusing.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 9, 2012 8:49 AM

I mistook this for a science blog

This is a quote of one of the authors (Nikolov) that Tallbloke goes gaga over at his blog:

The CO2 increase over the past 50-60 years is most likely due to degassing of the oceans as a result of a warming driven by reduction in cloud cover. Contrary to popular beliefs, man-made CO2 emissions are quite tiny (3-5%) compared to the CO2 fluxes between oceans and the atmosphere. The claim that human industrial activity is driving recent CO2 increase is a myth

This Nikolov character is capable of a wide range of science denial. I don't know sort of blog Tallbloke is running but it has very little to do with science.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 9, 2012 2:06 PM

Degassing due to surface warming does not explain the observed decrease in pH in those surface waters over the same period of time. It does not explain the observed stable isotope signature. Deniers who throw these simple responses up ignore the fact that the earth is an interconnected, system, subject to conservation of mass and energy.

Posted by: Anthony David | January 9, 2012 3:33 PM

Not only that Phil, but the phrase 'background in' is itself super vague. As Jeff Harvey once memorably observed to some unlikely candidate claiming 'a background in high-energy physics' that could just as easily mean working in the security hut in front of the CERN building as much as the attempted intended implication.

Posted by: chek | January 9, 2012 4:24 PM

And Roger (may I call you that - Roger?)...

Given just the commentary on this thread, I'd be forced suggest that perhaps you consider asking for a refund of the money you spent on your formal education.

If the evidence here is any indication, something - a lot of something - didn't stick.

John Mashey's oft-repeated advice is also good: go visit the scientists at your institution, listen - and start to learn.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 9, 2012 7:48 PM

@Anthony #163: Don't forget that there's another problematic issue when invoking the oceans as the source of the CO2 increase: with a simple calculation, assuming that more than 80% of the CO2 increase is due to ocean outgassing, you'd have to find a sink that takes up well over a hundred gigatons each year.

After all, humans release about 30 Gt CO2/y mainly through fossil fuel burning, and if that's only 20%, this means oceans would release (net!) 120 Gt CO2/y. Since the increase in CO2 is about 15 Gt CO2/y (let's keep it simple), that means there's a sink that currently takes up 135 Gt CO2/y.

That's more than 1000 Gt in a decade, and allowing for the somewhat exponential increase, probably around 3000 Gt over the last 50-60 years. If the ocean is a net emitter, the biosphere must be the net sink. Estimated total carbon in the biosphere is around 2000 Gt C, which is ca. 75000 Gt CO2. You'd think we would notice if the biosphere increases by 30%, no?

Posted by: Marco | January 10, 2012 1:39 AM

I wonder if the faculty and students of the two departments you mention are aware of how Rog T amuses himself in his spare time?

If I were at that college, I'd be sure to spend a few hours networking with staff and students of the faculty concerned to make sure they were all aware that their web jockey plays a climatologist-wannabe online and promotes reactionary tosh. That's just the sort of retaliation we need to mount against these subversive Luddites.

Posted by: Scribe | January 10, 2012 5:56 AM

I'd never thought I would be commending Omnologos... but here he is precisely right.

I hereby award Omnologos the Stopped Clock Award for the month of January ...

Posted by: dhogaza | January 10, 2012 9:57 AM

Another phantom lawsuit by Rog "I am Spartacus" Tallbloke?

http://ijish.livejournal.com/43788.html

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 10, 2012 12:56 PM

ianam says: "I'm not clear on why Joel identified tallbloke as someone who was 'previously smart enough to reject' denial of the greenhouse effect, when he seems to be and have been a leader of that imbecilic pack."

Well...You are probably right that I did not realize how imbecilic he was from the start.

Marco says: "Martin, remember that there also are plenty of scientists who are at least as deluded. See Gerlach and Tscheuschner"

Actually, that is only one possible interpretation. Another possible interpretation is that G&T are engaged in intentional deception of others. I tend to imagine that G&T might think of themselves as defense lawyers for CO2. So, for example, they jump on picayune details that the eyewitnesses disagree on or get wrong in order to distract the jury from the fact that this still doesn't show that the defendant is guilty as sin. (This is particularly apparent in the section where they critique various statements of the greenhouse effect.)

Posted by: Joel Shore | January 10, 2012 1:10 PM

Marco:

Hmmm..."Natural Science", apparently another journal to scratch off the "real scientific journals" list!

Posted by: Joel Shore | January 10, 2012 1:22 PM

Joel, fair enough to put it here also. I am not an expert in climate science, but even I can see the strawmen arguments in that paper. I just loved their "does not make physical science". There, now it has been proven it does not make physical sense, because we said so. Or the "as we have argued", and then suddenly that argument (with the argumentation perhaps(?) embedded in a lot of math) is proof. After all, they have argued, and therefore it is so.

But I really can't understand what reviewer (or Editor) would allow the personal attacks they put in their introduction. That by itself tells you enough about "Natural Science" as a journal.

Posted by: Marco | January 10, 2012 2:06 PM

Marco,

Yeah...It makes you wonder if there was any review whatsoever! It does seem to have undergone one revision which makes me wonder what it could have possibly been like before that revision?!?

I just saved that paper to my computer with an appropriate name: Krammcrap2000.pdf

Posted by: Joel Shore | January 10, 2012 4:15 PM

Chris O'Neill says: "Don't forget to mention Roy Spencer and his delusional 'natural' CO2 hypothesis. So many qualified crackpots, so much denial."

Yeah...That was a low point for Roy Spencer, and to my knowledge he has never even admitted his incredible error there. To his credit, Roy has been trying to explain why the Unified Climate Theory is nonsense. Unfortunately, his worshipful fans like tallbloke seem to have no problem ignoring what Roy says when he actually says something intelligent.

I guess tallbloke is a perfect garbage filter: No matter what goes in, only the complete garbage gets out.

Posted by: Joel Shore | January 10, 2012 4:52 PM

That was a low point for Roy Spencer, and to my knowledge he has never even admitted his incredible error there.

A low plateau, as he continues to feature it (#2 on the menu, after the home link but before "about" Dr. Roy Spencer) on his web site. A good rebuttal is at http://www.skepticalscience.com/how-we-know-recent-warming-is-not-natural.html .. in typical intellectually dishonest denier fashion, Spencer makes no mention of this or any other criticism of his argument.

Posted by: ianam | January 10, 2012 5:23 PM

From new article in the Australian Conservative

The Galileo Movement is promoting the book to schoolteachers and school librarians, with an offer of a free copy. Full details of the offer are available at Connor Court.

Time to apply for your free copy of Plimer's latest offering. This is a new paradigm in book publishing: publish and give away. Where's the profit, you may ask? It's in the smokestacks of the polluting industries funding this trash pamphlet.

Posted by: Scribe | January 10, 2012 8:43 PM

Well spotted sillyfilly. I posted this at his site. We will see if it survives.

The first graph is the chance of exceeding the median Max Temp which is based on 56 years of data 1950 to 2005.

The second graph is labelled at BOM with "All temperature anomalies are calculated with respect to the average over the 1961 to 1990 reference period."

You are comparing apples and oranges.

Posted by: MikeH | January 10, 2012 10:43 PM

Joel (and others): Steve Carson (at Science of Doom) has already taken on the Kramm & Dugli article, nicely pointing out that its conclusion does not follow from the article itself, as well as its odd way of dismissing a theory in part because there's an error in a textbook and an (semantic) error in a description of the greenhouse effect.

Quite telling: Kramm has responded, but not to Steve Carson's questions and comments...

Chris: the Roy Spencer argument has been accepted by Ned Nikolov, he points to Spencer's analysis in a comment at Tallbloke. I would like to remind everyone that Nikolov's job at Forest Service is to look at exchange of various gases between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Quite worrysome that someone who is so deep into that part of the carbon cycle makes such uninformed comments about other parts of the carbon cycle.

Ned, if you are reading this: has the biosphere increased in mass with 1000 Gigatons of C in the last 50 years?

Posted by: Marco | January 11, 2012 12:51 AM

Hi everyone, I know this is a bit of a deviation from the thread, but I wanted to let everyone know that in just over a week I will commence a winter camping/hiking trek across one of Canada's most famous parks in Ontario. One of the themes (see below) of the trek is to bring attention to the effects of climate change on local biomes and their biodiveristy. We have a facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/AlgonquinTraverse

Officially:

Beginning on Saturday, January 21st a long-time friend of mine in Canada, Mark Williamson (he is also a professional biologist) and I will commence a winter hiking/camping trek across Algonquin Park, which is located in central Ontario, Canada. The park consists of a huge expanse of unbroken wilderness consisting mainly of boreal forests (some northern hardwoods) and hundreds of lakes, and there is only one road going through the extreme southern part of the park. The trek will cover some 180-200 km, in winter conditions, where the average daily temperatures are -6 -10 C and the night temperatures a 'balmy' -15 -30 C(!!!). Its been a lot warmer than that over the poast two monthsm though, and researchers at the University of Toronto have already noted shifts in vegetation patterns in the province over the past 20-30 years. I will present a lecture at the University on the mechanisms underlying plant invasions in late February.

We anticipate that the entire trip will take us some 20-25 days to complete. A successful winter traverse of the park from west to east has never been done before, so its nice to be doing something for the first time! We have acquired excellent gear for the trip, including some sponsorship for various materials, and expect to have some of our adventures published in one or two Canadian outdoor publications. The aim of the trip is twofold: first, to bring attention to the effects of climate change, which is certainly impacting local biomes in the region, and to collect samples of snow and ice and to test them for the presence of trace organic contanimants. We also hope to see some of the native fauna whilst hiking across the park: grey wolves (there are at least 15 pack territories in the park), lynx, fisher, American Marten, Moose, White-Tailed Deer, Great-Horned, Barred and Great Grey Owls, two species of crossbills, Pine Grosbeak, Boreal Chickadee, Common Raven, Grey Jay etc. We have set up a facebook page for anyone who might be interested (see above). This will be updated regularly.

Providing I make it out of the park in one piece, I should be back in Holland on February 27th.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 11, 2012 5:12 AM

I am seeing Denialist trumpet a new paper by Scaffeta. It looks like to me it is the same old, same old. How did it get published? And what do you people think is the best rebuttal?

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 11, 2012 1:26 PM

Hello Marco,

That is a different paper than the one I linked too. From my amateurs and none to competent look it appears to be saying the same thing. Yet, I am seeing it published in pretty respectable Journal

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 11, 2012 3:32 PM

Thanks for the info, Jeff. I have already pointed out that the paper fails to explain such phenomena as a cooling stratosphere, etc, etc. I got into a "debate" with some clown over at Scientific American on an article about Michael Mann. He is claiming expertise in computer modelling and waving this latest paper from Scaffeta around like a holy relic. If you or any one else would like to join in I would appreciate it.

What is the likelihood of this paper ever being addressed by the scientific community?

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 11, 2012 6:13 PM

Oz: this is one of yours. I've taken on a task that requires serious head-vise, that of reviewing numerous issues of Heartland's Environment and Climate Newsletter. See IPCC Author Selection Process Plagued by Bias, Cronyism: Study, based on a study for SPPI (Science and Public Policy Institute, by John McLean. This was 2008. Has anything much been heard from him of late?

[SPPI is a 1-man effort by Robert Ferguson, actually a PO box in a suburban UPS store about 10 minutes' walk from Ferguson's house.

Posted by: John Mashey | January 11, 2012 7:06 PM

John McLean is some sort of IT guy who was pretending for a while that he had a PhD.

He predicted 2011 would be the coldest year since 1953.

He's totally clueless.

Posted by: Vince Whirlwind | January 11, 2012 7:49 PM

Jonas N finally admits that my

attempt... to derive knowledge/information [about the papers he read in order to accuse the IPCC of making up its confidence level numbers is fraught due to] ...the absence of such.

I've acknowledged his confession.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 11, 2012 9:17 PM

Watts has changed the banner on WWWT so that there is now a graph of global temperature in the background... superimposed with Spencer's favourite 3rd order polynomial as a 'trend' line...

The thing is, a third order polynomial is the only order polynomial (less than 7, at least) that gives a clear (or indeed - any) negative slope at the end of the current mean annual global temperature data, implying cooling. Running averages of various lengths also describe consistently increasing trends beyond the noise.

What Watts and Spencer have done is select (from dozens of options) the only simple curve that can be fitted so that it is monotonically decreasing at the end of the temperature series. On top of that there is no mathematical justification for fitting the single "valley and hill" shape of that category of cubic polynomial to the temperature series (I'd actually spent some time explaining why this is so, but decided that I'd just make people's eyes roll back in their heads).

Watts and Spencer should be embarrassed and ashamed.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 11, 2012 11:08 PM

Mclean has become infamous for predicting "it is likely that 2011 will be the coolest year since 1956 or even earlier"

I was thinking that now the data for 2011 should (just about) be in, it would be a good time to revisit the prediction, preferably in as many places where it was prominently touted as possible.

Don't think the 2011 data is quite complete at WoodForTrees yet - looks like another couple of months for most data series are needed - but they'd have to be bloody cold to make the year anywhere near 1956.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 12, 2012 1:03 AM

Speaking of McLean's "cold 2011", the GISS Dec-Nov annual mean anomaly is available for 2011, but Jan-Dec is not yet.

No prizes for guessing that 2011 Dec-Nov was a lot warmer than 1956: +0.51 C vs -0.20 C.

Now all McLean requires is that Dec 2011 proves to have been about -8 C to be in with a chance on the 2011 Jan-Dec metric!

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 12, 2012 1:25 AM

Re #214 John Mashey, yep, they are specialists on the subject of misleading people... well worth a read.

Amazingly they don't insist on plotting global temperatures on the Kelvin scale ;-)

Posted by: Martin Vermeer | January 12, 2012 3:55 AM

Hasis,

Yes, the discussion about Fig 21 is hilarious. The image shows a glacier in 1928 and a lake at the same place in 2004. The text:

The comparison certainly suggests that much snow was lost between 1928 and 2004 at the Upsala Glacier, part of the South American Andes in Argentina. Of course, there is no indication of the month in which each photograph was taken. One might have been taken in the summer and the other in the winter. ...

Posted by: Lars Karlsson | January 12, 2012 7:19 AM

That booklet is pathetic, but the thing that really amuses me is the overwhelming air of smugness that pervades it.

Posted by: Bob | January 12, 2012 9:05 AM

SteveC it never gets to that many posts if people ignore the person who'd grab attention for hundreds of posts. It's the byplay. If you're caring about the lurkers, gather the technical points and make them all at once in a post without using a troll's name, is my advice.

Posted by: Marion Delgado | January 12, 2012 10:00 AM

Shermer's a radical market fundamentalist. Yet another person whose definition of skeptic should be followed by "for other people's religions and fixed ideas, but never mine."

Posted by: Marion Delgado | January 12, 2012 10:10 AM

http://www.thelocal.se/2173/20050928/

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/13/business/13PRIZ.html

Posted by: Marion Delgado | January 12, 2012 10:25 AM

re: #214, etc. Regarding the booklet, I really do suggest checking Rychlak's background to assess his expertise and viewpoints. This may help explain some of this ...

and really, do look at #210. Polynomials are fun.

Posted by: John Mashey | January 12, 2012 12:15 PM

216

Last night when I went to sleep my back yard was ice free but this morning there was a glacier there. Record summer cold snap in southern Australia. Damn those glaciers - up and down like a bride's nightie.

Posted by: Roger Jones | January 12, 2012 5:42 PM

Hello Everyone,

I got this guy over at Scientific American in a thread who claims he wants to wager 100,000 usd on climate. I thought I recalled someone here who wanted wager 10,000 Euros? Anyway I invited this guy over here to see if anyone wanted to play with him.

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 12, 2012 6:22 PM

Okay, here's a comment over on WUWT that I have to admit has left me totally speechless: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/12/earths-baseline-black-body-model-a-damn-hard-problem/#comment-862396

It had never before occurred to me that this sort of depth of lack of self-awareness could actually occur in sentient human beings.

Posted by: Joel Shore | January 12, 2012 10:53 PM

Trent1492.

That was me trying to wager with Jonas N and his Scandinavian trolleagues about the eventuality of significant/catastrophic climate change.

As a marker of 'catastrophic' warming, I selected Arctic sea ice volume, because it conspicuously and undenialbly reflects polar atmospheric/ocean temperature, and because it serves as important habitat for at least two iconic species - the walrus and the polar bear. Loss of summer Arctic sea ice would be unprecedented - at least, for approximately the last 700 thousand years - and it would be ecologically 'catastrophic'.

The logic of my wager is simple... Denialists say that there is no global warming; I say in response that if the planet is not warming, they should be prepared to put money on it, and to put more money on it, the warmer the planet (potentially) becomes as indicated by decreasing summer Arctic sea ice volume.

The conditions are on the Jonas thread. My only concerns now are that:

1) neither of the landmark time periods - 2025 and 2050 - might be reached with escrow accounts intact: the global economic system is decidedly wobbly, and is likely to be more so in the future, especially over longer-term spans. Even so, if I can find a denialist who's prepared to put even 10K euros down for my 10k, then I'd be interested.

2) the euro seems to be a currency whose value is not guaranteed in the future. Perhaps the answer to this would be to convert the current wager values into gold gram equivalents.

Strangely, once confronted with odds reflecting their stances, no denier seems to retain the desire to stand behind their positions...

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 12, 2012 11:10 PM

Thanks for the response Bernard. Do you have a link to the bet? I do not think this guy is serious or honest but I think being able to counter him by being able to direct them to that wager will shut him up.

I also want to just put in a word for you gang showing up at Scientific American occasionally.

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 13, 2012 3:32 AM

“Monckton says he advised Margaret Thatcher on climate change. He didn’t.” I did.

I see Monckton comes from the Pentaxz school of logical argument.

Posted by: John | January 13, 2012 7:09 AM

233 Joel,

Could it really never have occurred to you before?

You have been bravely and thanklessly attempting to educate the uneducable at WUWT for quite some time. How could you still be surprised?

Posted by: TrueSceptic | January 13, 2012 9:16 AM

I have been asked to post an offer of a wager at this site regarding the reliability of the current set of GCM’s.

I am will to wager $100K usd that your GCM of choice will not be able to reasonably accurately predict the annual rainfall amounts 36 months from now at 30 different locations around the world. I have used this to demonstrate that GCMs are not accurate enough to give us reliable predictions of future rainfall at any specific location around the globe. For the wager we will call reasonably accurate as being =/- 5%.

Would anyone like to make this wager?

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 9:51 AM

pokerplayer, whoever thinks that they want a GCM to predict the weather "36 months from now at 30 different locations around the world" doesn't understand what GCMs do, or what climate is.

You'd be better off trying your weather wager with a crackpot like Piers Corbyn

Posted by: chek | January 13, 2012 10:31 AM

242 Joel,

What's that saying? "There's no bottom to stupid"? ;)

Posted by: TrueSceptic | January 13, 2012 11:10 AM

Trent, let him crow. He's just portraying his ignorance of GCMs and climate.

Worse, he does not even realise the implicit problem of the uncertainty of 'predicting' rainfall. We know that the regional projections are not only dependent on the emission scenarios and potential natural variations we cannot control (if another Pinatubo goes off, our current 'prediction' will get even more likely to be wrong), we also know the regional projections are still not accurate enough to make any solid projections.

However, unlike what pokerplyer likely implies, this does not mean we should not worry about climate change. In fact, quite the opposite: it means this uncertainty should make us worry even more. Due to the uncertainty, we have no idea what we have to adapt to. In other words, the uncertainty makes mitigation by far the only acceptable path to take!

Posted by: Marco | January 13, 2012 11:42 AM

I am an aerospace engineer and am very familiar with complex model development and use.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

Really, before you try to fit that sock onto your hand for the third time, you should look up the words "turbulence", "chaos", and "stochastic" in an undergraduate level textbook. If you don't have the appropriate undergraduate level textbook, consider getting one.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 13, 2012 1:14 PM

Marco I have not written that we should not be concerned about future weather, but I have written that we have limited resources and should address the issue smartly and efficiently.

Virtually every concern that could come about as a result of the world being somewhat warmer can easily be adapted to by the construction of proper infrastructure. Humans need to build or re-built infrastructure every 25 to 30 years as a matter of course, so this is a very cost effective approach and can be done in the US quite easily.

Many countries around the world do not build proper infrastructure to protect their citizens and societies. They do not do this for a variety of reasons, including cultural and corruption related factors. That is not a problem for the US or the EU to resolve. I see no reason why the US owes funding to any other country or the UN in general over the issue of CO2 emissions. Independent countries can adapt to the future climate if they build what is needed, but if they fail to do so, it is not a problem for the US tax payer to be a part of fixing.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 1:21 PM

Chris

If the IPCC or other alarmist individuals writing papers are using GCMs to claim that a particular region of the world will be harmed by a warmer climate because that region will receive 10% less rainfall it means that the IPCC or the writer of the paper is using the GCM to forecast future weather. I am writing the models are not sufficiently accurate for that purpose.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 1:28 PM

Frank

Whether you believe it or not I don't really care, but it happens to be a fact. Mechanical engineering undergrad with a masters in economics and finance.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 1:32 PM

pokerplyer:

So you previously claim to be an "aerospace engineer", and suddenly now you just have an undergraduate in "mechanical engineering" and a "masters in economics and finance"?

And you claim all these things even though you can't grasp the undergraduate level concepts of "turbulence" and "chaos"?

Whether you believe it or not I don't really care,

Oh, I think you do care. Because without all that pretentious degree dropping, your 'arguments' are nothing more than the blatherings of a blatherer.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 13, 2012 1:42 PM

pokerplyer:

If the IPCC or other alarmist individuals writing papers are using GCMs to claim that a particular region of the world will be harmed by a warmer climate because that region will receive 10% less rainfall it means that the IPCC or the writer of the paper is using the GCM to forecast future weather.

No it doesn't.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 13, 2012 1:43 PM

Frank

When an engineer has worked in the aerospace industry for over 25 years they are generally called aerospace engineers. Care to make a wager on my resume idiot?

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 1:45 PM

and what part of comment #250 does anyone think is incorrect and why? I'll try to check back

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 2:00 PM

Again to "pokerplyer":

Really, before you try to fit that ["I am an aerospace engineer"] sock onto your hand for the third time, you should look up the words "turbulence", "chaos", and "stochastic" in an undergraduate level textbook. If you don't have the appropriate undergraduate level textbook, consider getting one.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 13, 2012 2:10 PM

pokerplyer said:

Independent countries can adapt to the future climate if they build what is needed, but if they fail to do so, it is not a problem for the US tax payer to be a part of fixing.

Why should they have to pay to improve their infrastructure when it is others, mostly Western countries, who have caused the problems they wil be facing?

You are a typical arrogant, ignorant and selfish denier. Your motto is:

I can do what ever I want and too bad for anyone who has the misfortune to be affected by my arrogance, ignorance and selfishness

Posted by: Ian Forrester | January 13, 2012 2:57 PM

Care to make a wager on my resume idiot/

Pokerplayer, I'd certainly wager on your complete inability to understand the significance of short term versus long term events as well as temporal trends. Your wager infers that you think that weather and climate are interchangeable concepts. In other words, in inferring a short term linear relationship, this does not allow for stochastic events to occur along a significant statistical gradient.

I am a scientist with a PhD in population ecology, and if I analyzed regression data sets I generate in my experiments the way that you are suggesting, then I would have to consider no result as being statistically significant if there were only one outlying data point somewhere along the x axis. This is clearly what you are suggesting - that every data point along the axis must, by your inane definition, be higher than the previous one closer to the point of origin. Your wager is that the odds are that some of the points along the regression will be (in terms of some short term meteorological event) lower on the y-axis that a point that follows it along the x-axis, without taking into consideration the many data points along a long x-axis (representing years).

You may be an aerospace engineer, but this is hardly rocket science. Clearly you have not got a clue about even basic statistics. Statistics is not my strong suit, but your grasp of it is abominable.

Then you write this patent nonsense:

Virtually every concern that could come about as a result of the world being somewhat warmer can easily be adapted to by the construction of proper infrastructure

How many times must one put this kind of anthropocentric clap-trap to bed? The problem is not human adaptation to a rapidly changing climate, but the ability of complex adaptive natural systems to adapt. Warming threatens to disrupt the flow of a wide range of supporting ecological services that sustain humanity but which have few or no technological substitutes. Pokerplayer writes as if humans are exempt from the laws of nature, and that we can forever continue hammering away at the planet's natural systems to death and that, thanks to some miracle of human ingenuity that we can forever increase the human carrying capacity. But the planet's natural systems already have a reduced capacity to support man. Its time we factored in the costs to natural systems of human overconsumption and simplification, because at present these are excluded from economic pricing. Costanza et al's seminar 1997 Nature article estimated the value of supporting ecological services to the material economy alone and concluded that they were worth a staggering 33 trillion dollars, or more than twice the combined GDP of all nations on Earth at the time. As Costanza explained, the reason he wrote the paper is that he was fed up with neoclassical economists estimating the value of nature to be about 2% of global GDP - a complete inverse of reality. More and more economists are now realizing that the value of nature in sustaining human civilization goes well beyond consumptive value - something pokerplayer clearly does not understand.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | January 13, 2012 4:05 PM

Jeff You misunderstand my perspective. I am not claiming that additional atmospheric CO2 will not warm the planet, or that the significant increase in the human population is not impacting the habitats of other creatures. I do claim that we do not really understand what the rate of warming will be from additional CO2 and that there is no reliable evidence that a warmer world is worse for the world human population overall, or for the US in particular over the long term.

You wrote- “The problem is not human adaptation to a rapidly changing climate, but the ability of complex adaptive natural systems to adapt.” I suggest that your position is clearly different than the one of the IPCC, and that yours would be stronger to argue for population control or reduction than it is for CO2 control.

You wrote- “Warming threatens to disrupt the flow of a wide range of supporting ecological services that sustain humanity but which have few or no technological substitutes.” What specific supporting ecological services do you believe are threatened by potential warming? Again, what you have written seems less about warming than it is about the human population disturbing the environment overall and the natural evolution of that human population to desire to have the highest lifestyle that it can obtain in spite of the impact on the environment.

By no means do I believe that humans are exempt from the laws of nature. I am simply a realist who understands that the planet is governed by 200 independent nation states with frequently conflicting goals. I do not see any reason why taxpayers in the US should be obligated to work harder or to pay more taxes because people in India of Pakistan (as examples) have not built proper infrastructure and have had unsupportable population growth.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 4:48 PM

Given that it is accepted that that has been happening because of the LIA rebound

[Citation needed]

Posted by: chek | January 13, 2012 5:26 PM

Looks like we've found ourselves another Dunning Kruger posterboy! Yet another surly buffoon with multiple degrees in Advanced Geniusness who cannot distinguish between weather and climate.

Posted by: bill | January 13, 2012 5:49 PM

automagically

Killer, John. That should pass into the lexicon.

Posted by: chek | January 13, 2012 6:05 PM

Pokerplyer.

I don't do silly strawman excursions such as your GCM nonsense is, and I've come to realise that most denialists are scared of the wager to which I refer above (I'm sure that you can find the details), probably because there are to many options, so I'll cut to the chase.

I'll bet you $100k against your $100K that the summer Arctic PIOMAS sea ice volume will, by 2020, drop below the current summer record.

In the interest of informed decision-making I refer you to:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Arctic-sea-ice-low-means-what.html

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 13, 2012 6:28 PM

279 Chek,

Computer geeks (and others?) have been using that for years. ;)

Posted by: TrueSceptic | January 13, 2012 7:40 PM

Pokerplyer @ 250

I do not claim to be an expert on the development of GCM's...

As a engineer, I am telling you that the current GCMs are HIGHLY unreliable ...

What is it with climate change deniers that they wear ignorance as a badge of honor?

Like the man with a hammer who sees every problem as a nail, our intrepid idiot (I am engineer - listen to me) who claims a passing knowledge of models in the aerospace industry believes that GCM models of a chaotic and non linear system must be the same even though he admits he has little knowledge of them.

His wager is simply additional illustration of his ignorance.

I am will to wager $100K usd that your GCM of choice will not be able to reasonably accurately predict the annual rainfall amounts 36 months from now at 30 different locations around the world.

If he bothered to actually educate himself before making his blowhard comments, he could have read the following FAQ on climate models at Real Climate.

Q. "Can GCMs predict the temperature and precipitation for my home?"

A. "No. There are often large variation in the temperature and precipitation statistics over short distances because the local climatic characteristics are affected by the local geography. The GCMs are designed to describe the most important large-scale features of the climate, such as the energy flow, the circulation, and the temperature in a grid-box volume (through physical laws of thermodynamics, the dynamics, and the ideal gas laws). A typical grid-box may have a horizontal area of ~100×100 km2..."

Or he could have read "Why global climate models do not give a realistic description of the local climate"

So tell us please Pokerplyer - who is claiming that GCMs can predict the annual rainfall at a specific location 36 months from now? Or did you just make it up?

Posted by: MikeH | January 13, 2012 8:25 PM

Comment #269- My comment- Independent countries can adapt to the future climate if they build what is needed, but if they fail to do so, it is not a problem for the US tax payer to be a part of fixing

Ian’s response- Why should they have to pay to improve their infrastructure when it is others, mostly Western countries, who have caused the problems they will be facing?

My response- They should have to pay for the infrastructure in their own country and not the US taxpayer. It seems as though you are unknowledgeable of actual world conditions. Much of the world does not build virtually any infrastructure and as a result when it rains heavily people are harmed. Travel in SW Asia and you will learn that infrastructure is not built largely due to vast corruption. It has nothing to do with anything the US or the EU has done or not done. If (hypnotically) that everything you believed was true regarding AGW, the difference in degree of harm to people from severe weather would be minimal as compared to the difference between a country that has prepared by building proper infrastructure and those like those in SW Asia that have not.

The US has not been responsible for the fact that many countries have not built proper infrastructure to protect their citizens from bad weather. The vast majority of people harmed by severe weather events would not have been harmed if proper infrastructure had been constructed.

Posted by: pokerplyr | January 13, 2012 9:36 PM

Comment #281 by Bernard- “I'll bet you $100k against your $100K that the summer Arctic PIOMAS sea ice volume will, by 2020, drop below the current summer record.”

My response-I think you would win that bet, but do not think it is evidence of any overall harm.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 9:58 PM

My, my. Pokerply piles ignorance onto ignorance.

Travel in SW Asia and you will learn that infrastructure is not built largely due to vast corruption

SW Asia is the Middle East, you geographically challenged clown. Much of the infrastructure in the ME is more modern and advanced than the aging infrastructure in the USA.

In one of the poorer nations, the slums of cities like Cairo are in part a result of years of US military support for dictators like Mubarak. The citizens of Egypt may be poor but they are smarter than you - they identified the problem and are dealing with it.

Egypt's carbon footprint is around 233 Mt of CO2e per year, the USA's is 7000 Mt of CO2e. Historically the contribution of the developed world to CO2e in the atmosphere dwarfs that of the poor nations.

Your argument is "I can tip all my garbage into my neighbour's back yard and if he cannot afford to clean it up too bad." You are grotesque.

Posted by: MikeH | January 13, 2012 10:13 PM

My response [to “How accurately do you need to know the future rate of warming and what level of confidence that a warmer world will be worse do you need before you accept that action needs to be taken?”] -I would agree that actions are warranted as long as they are cost efficient based upon a cost benefit analysis. Taking actions that are expensive but do little to nothing to address the issue are pointless. It all depends upon the specifics.

You are waffling.

The drought in Texas is a weather event and not the result of AGW. The result of the drought would have been better adapted to by better, deeper reservoir construction which would have provided for more water having been saved to prepare for droughts.

But it is the type of weather event that is expected to become much more common with global warming. How can you save more water if the rainfall is decreasing (think Colorado)?

I do not believe ocean acidification is a real concern that is related to AGW. Much of what has been written on the topic is nonsense.

Oh, really? What do you think is the cause of ocean acidification? Care to give an example of this nonsense from the scientific press?

Posted by: Richard Simons | January 13, 2012 11:05 PM

chris o'neill- perhaps you didn't get or wish to respond to the point that the IPCC has referenced potential harms that are based on the premise of changes in rainfall can be predicted by GCM's. I state that is an incorrect assumption.

Mike H- Since i grew up in Saudi Arabia as a teenager I am very familar with the area and infrastructure is not a priority in the region. I am in the region and was referencing India and Pakistan as SW Asia

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 11:12 PM

Bill

Your comment that "Ocean chemists" believe that human relaesed CO2 is the primary cause of the ph level of the oceans changing, and that this is a harm is so far fetched as to be laughable from what I have read. I absolutely agree that humans are damaging the oceans. Do you seriously think that human release of CO2 is at or near the top of the list?

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 13, 2012 11:22 PM

Pokerplyr @ 286

Yes - I have noticed that Real Climate does not suffer fools so I can understand why you are not welcome there.

Here most commenters prefer the Aussie tradition of "doing you slowly".

Posted by: MikeH | January 14, 2012 12:45 AM

Pokerplyr @ 295

I am in the region and was referencing India and Pakistan as SW Asia

As I said geographically challenged. This is South West Asia

Posted by: MikeH | January 14, 2012 1:04 AM

Fixed link

Ocean Acidification.

Posted by: MikeH | January 14, 2012 1:19 AM

re: Pokerplyer @ 297

I absolutely agree that humans are damaging the oceans.

So, in your vast multi-discipline scientific experience, what do YOU think is the primary cause?

Posted by: clippo uk | January 14, 2012 4:21 AM

Comment #281 by Bernard- “I'll bet you $100k against your $100K that the summer Arctic PIOMAS sea ice volume will, by 2020, drop below the current summer record.”

My response-I think you would win that bet, but do not think it is evidence of any overall harm.

So you admit that the planet is warming, but you think that it doesn't matter...

Erm, excuse me if I appear to be sceptical, but exactly how much does the planet have to warm, in the opinion of an "aerospace engineer" who doesn't seem to play much poker, before there is "overall harm"? And what exactly constitutes "overall harm"?

I do not believe ocean acidification is a real concern that is related to AGW. Much of what has been written on the topic is nonsense.

+

Your comment that "Ocean chemists" believe that human relaesed [sic] CO2 is the primary cause of the ph [sic] level of the oceans changing, and that this is a harm is so far fetched [sic] as to be laughable from what I have read.

Why exactly is ocean acidification not "a real concern that is related to AGW"?

Exactly how much of what has been written on the topic is "nonsense"? What is it exactly that is "nonsense"?

What exactly have you "read" that permits you to discount the opinions of chemists and physiologists? I'm a biologist with a decade and a half experience in biomedical sciences before jumping horses to ecology (including, recently, marine ecology), and I have decades experience in maintaining (both professionally and as a hobbyist) freshwater and marine aquaria. And I have no doubt that the scientific consensus on the dangers of ocean acidification are as serious as they are described.

I'm very curious to hear why an "aerospace engineer" has so much insight into scientific disciplines completely detached from his own trade that he can discount the understanding of physicists, climatologists, chemists, and biologists.

It seems to me that your problem is that you are "plying" that poker a little too hard. Your proctologist would probably advise you to ease off a little from your pernicious habit.

It's a shame that you turned out to be just another Denialatus windbag. I was hoping that you might actually believe your own guff sufficiently that you would put that $100k on the table: it would have been by far the biggest single contribution to my house construction that I am likely to see.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 14, 2012 4:36 AM

It is interesting to interact with so many true alarmist concerned about the potential harms of CO2. Here is another summary of some of the points raised: 1. Ocean acidification-Rather than me writing I’ll provide a link that also references other studies- http://www.thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/4704-matt-ridley-taking-fears-of-acid-oceans-with-a-grain-of-salt.html

1. This question was posted- “but exactly how much does the planet have to warm, before there is "overall harm"? And what exactly constitutes "overall harm"?

My response-It is the sum of the known harms. In relation to AGW the issue is whether the actions being proposed will be efficient when evaluated based on a cost benefit analysis to address the reported “harms”. Many suggested actions “harm” people to a greater degree than the benefit justifies.

1. What is SW Asia?-- http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?advprop=image&fr=yfp-t-701-s&va=southwest+asia+map

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 14, 2012 6:07 AM

Chris #304: I would like to stress again that Nikolov actually is involved in analysis of parts of the carbon cycle in his job. This makes it even more mindboggling to see him make such a mistake.

And it should be a real concern to his employer...

Posted by: Marco | January 14, 2012 6:42 AM

Many suggested actions “harm” people to a greater degree than the benefit justifies.

A post-grad finance/economics grad should know that one can't evaluate that equation until you've got a handle on the potential "harm", which a person of ordinary intelligence here understands to be the risk due to climate change. Risk by definition involves a range of possible outcomes and some form of probability distribution. You've previously indicated you cannot quantify this risk to any reasonable level of certainty, although you can't admit it to yourself so you assert that it is low.

Which means you're pulling the claim to have evaluated this cost-benefit equation out of your arse.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 14, 2012 7:32 AM

I believe a post-grad finance/economics grad should know that one can't predict climate change until s/he got a handle on the mechanism behind climate change, which all person of ordinary intelligence understands.

Posted by: Olaus Petri | January 14, 2012 11:53 AM

Erm, excuse me if I appear to be sceptical, but exactly how much does the planet have to warm, in the opinion of an "aerospace engineer"

Actually, pokerplyer isn't really an "engineer" -- for his Master's degree, he took the path of least resistance and chose finance/business instead of hard science/engineering.

He's a PhB (Pointy-haired Boss) beancounting-type, not a hard-core technical person. And it shows in his posts.

Posted by: caerbannog | January 14, 2012 12:19 PM

What is interesting is the tendency of the posters here to be so sure of their position as throw out insults vs. actually discussing the relevant issues in play.

I started out posting what I acknowledge is a silly bet that nobody familiar with what a GCM can do would have accepted. The purpose of that wager was to get people who fear cAGW to actually learn about the capabilities and limitations of general circulation models. These models were not designed to provide data for government policy making and are unsuitable for that purpose. Mann has pushed the approach but it is wrong due to the unreliability of those models. If you believe GCMs outputs are consistent and reliable you are mistaken.

One the questions several times is how much the planet has to warm to be considered dangerous climate change I offer the following rationale for discussion. http://judithcurry.com/2010/10/05/what-constitutes-dangerous-climate-change/

Btw--please notice I have not really slammed those who have posted really stupid comments that are factually wrong. Read the one who told me to learn geography for considering Pakistan and India to be part of SW Asia? I guess you all think I was wrong about that also.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 14, 2012 3:26 PM

pukerplyer @ 309

Our intrepid explorer is still searching for SW Asia. Here is a tip dullard - try an atlas instead of a random collection of images.

http://www.physicalmapofasia.com/regions-of-asia/southwest-asia

Showing the same ineptitude for science as he does for geography, he provides a link to the laughable climate denier outfit, the GWPF (described as 'misinformed', 'wrong' and 'perverse' by the energy secretary in the UK Conservative government). That in turn links to some reheated tripe in Murdoch's WSJ. The Murdoch press - the go to place for phone hacking, far-right opinion and Ocean Science. What's next pokerplyer - a link to Fox News.

Posted by: MikeH | January 14, 2012 7:07 PM

Hello Everyone,

Poker Player is now claiming that he has been banned from this site. I know he is lying because I am cognizant of the how this site handles trolls. And Poker Player has been here nowhere here as long as David Duff and his fellow idiots.

His claim of banning is found here on comment #69. By the way, the article I linked too is an interesting interview with Michael Mann on computer models.

I want to thank everyone who took part in the destruction of Poker Player. A link back to this thread is going to serve as a nice big cudgel. His collapse in the face of Bernard J. is just something that is going to come in very handy.

And yes, he is geographically ignorant. I served in the Persian Gulf back in 1991 and one of the the medals I received was the Southwest Asia Service Medal .

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 14, 2012 9:07 PM

Pokerplyer may have written a comment that got caught in the moderation filter awaiting action by a human, and concluded that his comments are being SUPPRESSED, I TELL YOU!!!!

He wouldn't be the first. Some of them also aren't aware that when cleared by the moderator their comments appear in submission order.

You might want to ask him at SciAm how he knows he has been banned. Bet that proves somewhat interesting ;-)

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 14, 2012 10:47 PM

Yes. CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

However, the observed global temperature does not show accelerated warming with increase in CO2 emission.

Global Mean Temperature (GMT) data => http://bit.ly/pxXK4j

The most important observation in the above data is that the upper GMT boundary line passes through all the GMT peaks, the lower GMT boundary line passes through all the GMT valleys, and these lines are parallel. Also, the line that bisects the vertical space between the two GMT boundary lines is nearly identical to the long-term global warming trend line of 0.06 deg C per decade for the whole data. This result indicates that, for the last 130 years, the GMT behaved like a stable pendulum with the two GMT boundary lines that are 0.5 deg C apart as the end points of the pendulum’s swings, and the long-term global warming trend line of 0.06 deg C per decade as the pendulum’s neutral position.

In the above data, the GMT touched its upper boundary line only 3-times, about every 60-years, but has never crossed it for long in the last 130 years.

In the GMT data, a shift in climate to an accelerated global warming would have been indicated if the upper GMT boundary line had been a curve with an increasing positive slope with increasing years, or the upper and lower GMT boundary lines had been diverging with increasing years.

Fortunately, the upper GMT boundary line is a straight line having, interestingly, the same global warming rate of 0.06 deg C per decade as the global warming trend line for the whole data. Also, the upper and lower GMT boundary lines are parallel, showing no change in the magnitude of the GMT swing with increasing years. As a result, the vertical cooling or warming swing of 0.5 deg C between the two GMT boundary lines is cyclic and is therefore natural.

However, there is evidence of a persistent but natural global warming of 0.06 deg C per decade. Not 0.2 deg C per decade as claimed by the IPCC.

Posted by: sam | January 14, 2012 11:23 PM

Hmm, one of AWOL PorkiePyer's comrades-in-arms has joined us; 'sam' is 'selti' at SciAm, and this is a just a copy of his post #72 over yonder. I cheerfully leave this masterpiece of almost Girmaesque WFT selective detrending to those with more patience than me, such as Trent 1492, who has already pointed out the obvious over there.

Posted by: bill | January 15, 2012 1:52 AM

Sam @ 327 You are an imbecile.

Posted by: MikeH | January 15, 2012 2:54 AM

GWB's nemesis.

Samn is from the Scientific American blog deniosphere.

The Stupid is so dense there that poe-ing would be a largely fruitless exercise: I suspect that this one is real.

It would be a frabjous day indeed if sam was in fact a poe. That would inch SciAm back just that little bit more from the brink. Speaking of which: Trent, you're doing excellent work there countering the flood of scientific illiteracy - keep it up.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 15, 2012 4:43 AM

Pokerplyer's #319 has shown up. I'm guessing it was held up in moderation and that was why he claimed to have been banned here.

Mind you, it sounds like a bit of hasty arse-covering revisionism which rarely works around here (acknowledgement that his original bet was silly, but no unsilly new bet offered), and re-assertion of various unjustified claims. The latter include "models are unsuitable for government policy making", which presumably still relies on his initial fallacy that models must predict long range local weather to be suitable for that purpose since he hasn't withdrawn that implication. (That was a bit like claiming that a model of future average traffic demands is useless for deciding when to build more freeway capacity because it can't tell you how many cars will be on a particular 5km stretch of freeway 17 years, 2 months and 13 days from now between 3:22pm and 3:34pm.)

And still no glimmer of acknowledgement that if models aren't sufficiently reliable for government policy making, then we have to make policy under even more uncertainty, which means we have to slam the brakes hard on GHG emissions right now.

Oh, and he links to Curry re: "what constitutes dangerous climate change".

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 15, 2012 7:09 AM

Wow, as a marine biologist who used to specialize in chemical ecology on coral reefs (in SW Asia) and who now works on coastal development in South Florida, it almost seems like Pokerplayer is a gift from the heavens offered up to me.

First, for your claim that it's relatively cheap and easy to adapt to warming... Consider where I live in South Florida. There are 5.5 million people living within 20 miles of the coast on land that mostly falls within 3m of sealevel and is interwoven by hundreds of miles of bays, canals, and inlets. All of the fresh water comes from aquifers which are susceptible to (and already suffering from) saltwater intrusion. As sea levels continue to rise, how do we protect our water source from saltwater intrusion or find another source that is as cheap as using the naturally occurring aquifers? Also, how do you protect the billions of dollars in property that are already essentially at sea level? Parts of Miami Beach and Ft. Lauderdale already flood with seawater during extreme high tides. Are you going to relocate 5.5 million people and have them abandon their property- some of the most valuable in the country? Or maybe you would build several hundred miles of seawalls, gates, and massive pumps (and where are you going to build these structures in a coastal area that's already almost 100% developed?)? Lets not forget how that solution worked for New Orleans either. Is this something we really want to try in a more hurricane-prone city? How much do you figure that would all cost just to protect 1 coastal metropolitan area? How about for all the major coastal cities in the US? How does that cost compare to improving energy efficiency and reducing reliance on fossil fuels?

Now, as for the GWPF link in 309- "bafflingly stupid" is about the best summary of it. A couple of hints to anyone who has any desire to understand ocean acidification-

1. Learn the difference between the terms "alkalinity" and pH as used in marine chemistry. In marine chemistry, alkalinity refers to the concentration of certain buffering ions- usually carbonate and bicarbonate(but not including H+), not to pH. While any solution with a pH above 7 could be described as alkaline, in the case of seawater, saying you've reduced the alkalinity is NOT equivalent to saying you've reduced the pH. Acidification is the term used because it describes the process of adding acid and it avoids the ambiguity of using alkalinity/alkaline in regards to seawater chemistry.

2. Look up "light-enhanced calcification." The diurnal variation in pH is not physiologically insignificant, as the GWPF author would like you to believe. Most corals and calcifying algae show reduced growth at night. The reason? Photosynthesis consumes CO2 from the water in the calcifying tissue layers during the day, which makes the local chemistry more favorable for CaCO3 deposition. At night, respiration produces CO2 which makes conditions unfavorable for calcification. Despite what the author implies, what we know about diurnal variations in CO2, pH, and alkalinity and the impacts they have on calcifiers is in no way comforting in the face of a long-term decrease in pH due to addition of CO2. In fact, it's a large reason why we're worried.

3. In looking for studies which examine the impacts of reduced pH on calcifiers it's important to distinguish between those studies which manipulate carbonate alkalinity vs. those that don't. As you add CO2 to seawater it shifts the carbonate/bicarbonate equilibrium towards bicarbonate. However, in order to isolate pH as a variable, lots of studies have artificially maintained constant carbonate concentrations (which isn't what happens in nature). Under these conditions, calcification often remains fairly close to normal even at reduced pH. However, if you reduce the pH without maintaining high carbonate concentrations (which is what happens in the oceans) calcification is reduced.

Posted by: Mike G | January 15, 2012 1:52 PM

Over at that SciAm thread, "selti" a.k.a. drive-by "sam" continues his nonsense.

He implies that the concern about warming is merely due to a "continued warming projection" - but subsequently doesn't seem to realise he contradicts himself by arguing that "...GLOBAL WARMING has STOPPED..." (no prizes for guessing he's cherry-picked a 1998 start for his trend).

He also goes for "AGW is a fictitious theory not supported by the data", and asserts from his tortured graph (having not understood the earlier critiques) that "...true climate sensitivity is only 3x0.06/0.2 = 0.9 deg C".

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 15, 2012 7:35 PM

Does "selti" know that according to NASA temperature records, the hottest year on record globally is 2005?

Not that I expect it's likely to change his/her mind.

Posted by: zoot | January 16, 2012 8:06 AM

All I have re: degrees is a bachelor's in music, and I know I don't know very much about climatology.

Nevertheless from reading pokerplyer's nonsense I get the impression that I know a bit more than he does.

Posted by: Composer99 | January 16, 2012 9:31 AM

Engineer with 25 years of experience: "Michael Mann's method generates hockey sticks from random noise."

Me: How?

Engineer: you have to generate random noise, yeah, and then you get a hockey stick. I've done it!

Me: OK, I just get a wavey line that doesn't curve up at the end. How did you do it?

Engineer: You must be incompetent then, since I did it easily!

Me: OK, so how did you do it?

Engineer: You can get it from someone else on the internet, can't you use google?

Me: But you said YOU did it. Just pass over the program you had that generated the random data and I'll use that.

Engineer: I don't have time to do that, it's easy to get from the internet.

Me: You said YOU did it. Did you lie? After all, it should be fairly easy to show me YOU did it, by showing what you did. Go on.

Engineer runs away.

You see, the engineer hasn't actually done it. They just read someone used "Pink noise" and got a hockey stick.

What they seem to fail to realise is that

a) pink noise isn't totally random: it has a bias on it. A trend if you like.

b) you have to SELECT a curve that looks hockey-stick-like. Well, it's rather easy to get any curve you want from random numbers if you just select the run and period. But that's the selection process making a hockey stick, not random noise.

Posted by: Wow | January 16, 2012 9:59 AM

Let's see if this post goes through on a timely basis.

Mike G asks: “As sea levels continue to rise, how do we protect our water source from saltwater intrusion or find another source that is as cheap as using the naturally occurring aquifers?”

My response- Do you believe that sea levels are rising solely due to AGW? The rate of sea level rise over the last 20 years is roughly 1 foot per century. This rate is not a problem. Over a long term basis, since sea levels are near their all time low levels they are likely to rise. Local communities need to prepare since nothing related to CO2 emissions will lessen the long term trend.

Mike G asks: “Also, how do you protect the billions of dollars in property that are already essentially at sea level? Parts of Miami Beach and Ft. Lauderdale already flood with seawater during extreme high tides.”

My response- It is not my responsibility to protect property built in areas likely to be damaged by being built in areas highly susceptible to damage by natural disasters. They should probably build sea walls to protect the property built in an unsafe area or have very expensive insurance since the property is likely to be damaged by a storm.

Mike G asks: “Are you going to relocate 5.5 million people and have them abandon their property- some of the most valuable in the country?”

My response- No that is their problem to deal with. If the property is in an area likely to be damaged by storms it will have high insurance costs and the property values will fall as a result. People make choices where to live and deal with the consequences. Supply and demand is a system that works.

Mike G asks: “How much do you figure that would all cost just to protect 1 coastal metropolitan area? How about for all the major coastal cities in the US? How does that cost compare to improving energy efficiency and reducing reliance on fossil fuels?”

My response- Mike, all the areas you mention need to be protected from bad weather regardless of whether humans emitted CO2 or not. The issue is that sometimes people are shortsighted and do not build the infrastructure to protect their investments or build on property that looks pretty when all is well, but is highly susceptible to damage from storms. Should others have to pay for those people’s poor choices?

If this post goes through I will get back to discuss OA

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 16, 2012 2:04 PM

Pokerplyer, the difference in average annual temperature between Marseille (France) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands) is less than 5 degrees. Much less than the temperature swings these two places can experience on a daily basis (monthly high and low easily differ by 10 degrees or more during several months). The Netherlands is likely to see a 3-4 degree increase in temperature over the next 90 years on a business as usual scenario.

Compare the flora and fauna between these two places and then reconsider your comment in #348.

Posted by: Marco | January 16, 2012 2:33 PM

Pokerplyer clearly cannot understand the argument that Marco has put to him! It's as simple as that.

Posted by: bill | January 16, 2012 5:47 PM

It turns out that the ph level varies by a much higher amount than that on a regular basis. Therefore, it would not appear that the average amount of change over the long term would be harmful.

By golly I think he's cracked it. Based on pokerplyer's expose of the flaws in the science on the impacts of ocean acidification, it follows that since where I live the temperature fluctuates by more than 10deg C every day, and that since I and everyone else survives it easily, the 4degC rise in global mean temperatures predicted by all those climate "scientists" is nothing to worry about. And even if pokerplyer is wrong, well it's some some plankton and shit that'll die, and maybe some parts of the GBR won't be worth the trip, but the tourism industry will adapt, so who cares. And who the hell are The Puget Sound anyway?

Simple is as simple does.

Posted by: SteveC | January 16, 2012 6:09 PM

Oh, and the latest response to Trent by pokerplyer at SciAm is classic. Posted in full apart from the address to Trent, so that it may be correctly savoured:

You try to claim that sea level is rising at an alarming rate and ignore the 20 year trend of good measurements and reference data drawn based on salt-marsh sedimentary sequences from the US Atlantic coast. You must realize how inaccurate that information is don't you?

(What, the US Atlantic is "the globe" now? My denialist bingo card is starting to fill up.)

Now I don't have any idea what youthink I am lying about, since I take being truthful as extermely important. I am guessing it was my comment about being "banned" from that other site, when I was really only temporarily prevented from posting comments there. It is really interesting about the tone of the comments there. A very high degree of ranting and very little substance. I rather assumed that you run the site.

Methinks pokerplyer has a little problem with recognising substance.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 16, 2012 6:39 PM

I cheerfully leave this masterpiece of almost Girmaesque WFT selective detrending...

Hah - you called it!

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 16, 2012 7:02 PM

Porkyplyer needs to buy a clue.

Let's see if this post goes through on a timely basis.

Right where you post there's this:

Post a Comment

(Email is required for authentication purposes only. On some blogs, comments are moderated for spam, so your comment may not appear immediately.)

Deltoid posts are held for moderation when excessive links and/or keywors are used. I have posts held often: I don't assume that I'm temporarily or permanently banned.

Do you believe that sea levels are rising solely due to AGW?

Of course not. But unlike you, we have read the literature and have some understanding of attribution of causes of sea level rise. We accept that global warming is mostlly responsible for sea level rise.

What is your understanding of attribution of causes of SLR?

The rate of sea level rise over the last 20 years is roughly 1 foot per century. This rate is not a problem.

No, it's simply a problem over longer time-scales.

And you completely avoid the fact that the rate of sea level rise will increase greatly in the future. Or are all 'aerospace engineer[ing]' processes in your world linear?

Over a long term basis, since [sic] sea levels are near their all time low levels they are likely to rise.

What, like London and Sydney are near their "all time" [sic] proximities and are likely to drift closer?

Seriously, what constitutes "low" in "aerospace" engineering terms?!

Local communities need to prepare since [sic] nothing related to CO2 emissions will lessen the long term trend.

Except that if we stopped emitting today we'd save metres of sea level rise for future generations.

Unless of course you subscribe to the notion that humans have already tipped the mean global temperature toward a future maximum possible value.

My response- It is not my responsibility to protect property built in areas likely to be damaged by being built in areas highly susceptible to damage by natural disasters.

No, but it is your responsibility to ensure that you don't alter and/or increase in extent the "areas [that will become] highly susceptible to damage by natural disasters"

You are not responsible for the neighbour's tree that grows over your neighbour's house. You are responsible for ensuring that your tree does not grow over his house.

They should probably build sea walls to protect the property built in an unsafe area or have very expensive insurance since the property is likely to be damaged by a storm.

And who's going to pay for the increase in requirements for sea walls and insurance? The victims of the storms or (where the two do not coincide) the people whose emissions caused the increase in storms?

Mike G asks: “Are you going to relocate 5.5 million people and have them abandon their property- some of the most valuable in the country?”

My response- No that is their problem to deal with.

Why, if it's not their fault?

If the property is in an area likely to be damaged by storms it will have high insurance costs and the property values will fall as a result. People make choices where to live and deal with the consequences.

But what if the property is not presently in an area likely to be damaged by storms?

Supply and demand is a system that works.

Then sell me a fillet of dodo, please.

My response- Mike, all the areas you mention need to be protected from bad weather regardless of whether humans emitted CO2 or not. The issue is that sometimes people are shortsighted and do not build the infrastructure to protect their investments or build on property that looks pretty when all is well, but is highly susceptible to damage from storms. Should others have to pay for those people’s poor choices?

You're confabulating weather with climate again.

It would seem that the standard for entry into "aeropsace enginneering" is not an onerous one to fulfill.

If this post goes through I will get back to discuss OA

You'd better do a lot of homework first. I highly recommend the Skeptical Science series.

The argument has been that the average ph change of .3 [sic] ph [sic] units [sic] over 90 years will be harmful. It turns out that the ph [sic] level varies by a much higher amount than that on a regular basis.

Not in all parts of the ocean.

And a 0.3 unit change in pH represents a doubling/halving of acidity. For many marine organisms that is a seriously huge ecophysiological challenge. And yet you say that "the ph [sic] level varies by a much higher amount than that on a regular basis"?

This would be extraordinary news to marine ecologists: please, please reference this claim. Consider that a:

1. 0.4 unit decrease in pH represents a 250% increase in acidity
2. 0.5 unit decrease in pH represents a 320% increase in acidity
3. 0.6 unit decrease in pH represents a 400% increase in acidity

As an "aerospace engineer" you make a lousy marine ecophysiological chemist. Reread Lotharsson's explanations of press versus pulse exposure is you don't yet have a clue.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 16, 2012 8:34 PM

The magic sea-pixies told him! That link included a redundant bracket - this would work better.

Posted by: bill | January 16, 2012 8:46 PM

Chris.

Porkyplyer's outright untruth is all the more egregious for the fact that it's not just since the last glacial maximum that the current sea level is notable. If one considers the link in my earlier post it's clear to sea that sea level is presently almost as high as it has ever been over most of the last one million years, and that a business-as-usual carbon dioxide emissions scenario will soon push sea level to the highest that it's been in at least that period.

That's a definition of "low" that I've not encountered before. Perhaps I'm just not smart enough to be an "aerospace engineeer"...

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 16, 2012 9:00 PM

I have already noted that pukerplyer is geographically challenged. Let us see if he can find Britain on this map

Perhaps sea level rise, the movie will help.

Posted by: MikeH | January 16, 2012 9:28 PM

Supply and demand is a system that works.

Category error. (And after you remedy that, you'll still need to define "works".)

"Supply and demand" are two forces that may act upon or within a system, but they do not constitute a system - for that you need at least something that responds to those forces in some way that contributes to the system "working".

It's like saying that "gravity and air pressure is a system that works (to fly)". Nope. But add an aerofoil with some control surfaces and perhaps a controlled propulsion system and a few other bits and pieces and you might have one that "works (to fly)" in a reasonably controlled fashion under a certain range of conditions.

But you still won't get dodo fillet, and that system still won't fly to the moon. Understanding the limits of effectiveness of any system (and the tradeoffs that apply even within that range of effectiveness) is a key engineering skill, and you should consider applying it to the matters at hand.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 17, 2012 12:14 AM

Nice to see pokerplyer not getting my analogy at all...

It was pretty straightforward, with a very strong correspondence to the problem of ocean acidification. I'm sure most high school students would get it.

I also guess pokerplyer throws all his trash on the neighbours lawn and then blames the neighbours. Shouldn't have lived right next to him...

Worse still: he throws his trash on the lawns of people all over the city over including those who aren't even aware of his existence...and then blames them for not building high enough walls to keep his trash out.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 17, 2012 2:04 AM

Hmmm. When I saw comment 327 I did wonder ... could it be ... and sure enough ...

I made this bet with GO at Deltoid in Sep 2009.

If a global mean temperature anomaly yearly average of 0.526 °C is not exceeded before 1 Jan 2020 according to HADCRUT, I shall pay $100 (USD) into a charity of your choosing and I shall declare that mainstream climate science as it stood in 2009 was mistaken in grossly exaggerating the role of CO2. If a global mean temperature anomaly yearly average of 0.526 °C is exceeded before 1 Jan 2020 according to HADCRUT, you will pay $100 (USD) into a charity of my choosing and you will declare that mainstream climate science as it stood in 2009 was broadly correct in assessing the role of CO2.

with a 2nd bet taking us to 2030.

I'm a bit concerned that HADCRUT3 might soon be replaced by HADCRUT4, but we agreed on "HADCRUT", didn't we? All the same, I won't take the easy option: will there be a means of estimating what HADCRUT3 would have been once HADCRUT4 takes over?

Posted by: TrueSceptic | January 17, 2012 10:48 AM

Is anyone here claiming that humanity has suffered a “net harm” by the emission of CO2 to date? Lotharsson- people around the world have clearly benefitted because humanity emitted CO2. It is only in your and a few others views that the US owes a debt to some other country because of it CO2 emissions.

Please- try to make a case for even one significant country where you think the US owes a debt. In virtually every instance, countries have not educated their population and built the proper infrastructure to protect their citizens and develop their societies. That was not due to the US, but due to their failure to prepare. Had they built infrastructure, far fewer people there would be getting harmed by severe weather events. This will continue to be true in the future. Even if you are correct, and cAGW occurs, these societies will be damaged because they didn’t build infrastructure in the past, and they are unlikely to do so in the near future. Sorry, not my or the US problem to fix.

As for Australia- it is the laws passed to control emissions there are a joke. It may be a good way to raise revenue for the government, but it is doing nothing to impact the world’s climate.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 11:17 AM

Wow--How have people benefitted from the emission of CO2 to date? Do you really need a few of these things pointed out to you? Food production, distribution and preservation would not have been possible to support the world’s population without CO2 having been emitted. All the benefits of electricity that society benefitted form would not have been possible without emissions. The list of net benefits is long and obvious.

WOW—I notice you have not made a case for any major country to be owed a debt by the US due to AGW. Do you believe that sea level would stay where it is, near its historic low levels over the last 500 M years if it was not for the human impact? That is sure a leap of faith unsupported by history and science.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 11:45 AM

Food production

Food isn't grown from CO2 production.

distribution

Nope, that was transport. And the famines we have are not because we can't grow the food but because we can't distribute it.

and preservation

Nope, not CO2 either. You don't use dry ice to preserve food.

All the benefits of electricity

Electricity isn't CO2.

I notice you seem to believe that CO2 is some sort of miracle pixie dust, the sole cause of all goodness. I'm afraid we don't USE CO2 production for these things. CO2 is a waste product of transport and 19th-century technology for energy production. But they're not the cause of them.

Posted by: Wow | January 17, 2012 11:49 AM

Wow,

But... but... but... pokerplyer is an AEROSPACE ENJINIR!!!!!!!111111

Since an aerospace engineer is a kind of scientist, and clearly all scientists are infallible gods, except when they aren't, therefore, well, therefore.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 17, 2012 11:53 AM

Interesting how some of the foolish posters here respond.

Frank wrote 1. Climate models are wrong and global warming is a scam! My response- No, I wrote that general circulation models were not designed for government policy making and have insufficient accuracy to be suitable for being used for that purpose. I never wrote global warming is a scam. Why do you lie? 2. And, even if climate models are right, global warming may not be catastrophic! My response- That is a correct statement. A warmer world will benefit humanity in many ways. There is no reliable evidence that it is actually harmful to humanity overall, or for the US specifically overall. 3. And even if global warming may be catastrophic, climate legislation will not help! My response- Actually just another lie since I never wrote that. Do people at this site frequently lie about the comments of others? 4. And even if climate legislation will help, I refuse to support it, because it's the poor nations' fault that they can't handle climate change! My response- Actually just another lie since I never wrote that. Do people at this site frequently lie about the comments of others or is it just Frank?

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 12:27 PM

So transport will not work unless it emits CO2???? You can't preserve food unless it's with CO2!?! You can't grow food unless without producing extra CO2!!!

Wow, are YOU dumb!

Posted by: Wow | January 17, 2012 12:36 PM

"if CO2 had not been emitted over the last 50 years?"

Sorry, do you believe that tractors run on CO2?

Posted by: Wow | January 17, 2012 1:00 PM

I believe that you are either too stupid to have a reasonable exchange with, or are just acting that way.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 1:09 PM

After your prior nonsense comments, you want me to give you links to articles about GCMs? Try looking up the outputs of the fourth version of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4). If you get to the point of exchanging something meaningful, I would try to educate you on GCM's

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 1:17 PM

wow-why don't you start with explaining how humans would have generated power over the last 100 years if CO2 had not been released before you try more complex concepts.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 1:45 PM

ianam- Are you of the opinion that humans releasing CO2 has been a net harm to our society up to this point in history? I am tryinng to understand your rant. It becomes difficult when you use descriptions such as dimwitted sociopathic libertarian.

I may be dimwitted, probably not sociopathic, but do generally perfer people to have power vs. government. Is that bad in your view, or do you believe a larger government is necessarily better?

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 2:49 PM

It is unfortunate that some people like ianam are incapable of having a meaningful exchange of views.

Dimwitted, would be to ignore the benefits that have resulted from the emission of CO2 up to this point in human history.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 3:27 PM

Continuing on the theme of "good riddance" that pokerplyer brings to mind (if only he would leave, sigh), Keith Kloor tosses in the towel on blogging for free. Sort of.

Good riddance.

Posted by: dhogaza | January 17, 2012 3:51 PM

Please reread the comments from Richard Simons, dhogaza, ianam, Frank, and wow, and point out anything written that makes any sense about their concern over the release of CO2.

Nothing that they have written addressed any relevant issue or point.

I have correctly pointed out that sea level is not rising at an alarming rate and it is rising much slower than was predicted by those who claimed AGW would be a problem. There is no evidence that the rate is accelerating. Yes, it is possible that it could accelerate in the future, but there is no reliable data to point to that as probable.

I have also pointed out that CO2 released to date has had a beneficial impact on society. I did this to demonstrate that nations such as India are not owed anything from other countries because other countries have emitted CO2 historically. Not a single coherent comment refuted this simple point. Nobody provided a rationale argument as to why any significant nation would be owed something by the US due to AGW.

I have also pointed out that the key to preparation for the future climate is the prudent planning for, and construction of; proper infrastructure. It is the responsibility of individual nations to do this to protect their citizens. It is not the duty of US citizens to pay higher taxes to help build infrastructure in Pakistan. People are generally harmed by bad weather when infrastructure is not constructed of maintained. If India (as an example) does not build proper infrastructure, its citizens will be harmed by weather regardless of whether AGW is real or not. Once again no coherent response.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 17, 2012 5:07 PM

no coherent response

So where's your "coherent response" to bill, Lotharsson, marco, Richard Simmons, Bernard J and others who blow your "oceanic pH levels dropping by 0.3 units is trivial" argument out of the water? Time to stump up with your "evidence" or admit you are talking out of your ar$e.

Posted by: SteveC | January 17, 2012 5:33 PM

Pontifical nonsense from the latest Dunning-Kruger poster boy who cannot distinguish weather from climate, and holds blinkered selfishness to be the supreme human virtue.

It is you who has not demonstrated that he has even managed to comprehend the most basic of arguments, you who cannot distinguish between a trend and noisy fluctuations, you who has over-inflated your credentials - such as they are - like some ridiculous bedraggled little peacock and then backed down the moment you realised someone might be in a position to call you on them, you who believes that your dreary hubris somehow trumps the facts painstakingly assembled by those who actually possess qualifications and expertise in these fields, and you who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary assembled by those who actually know what they're talking about, simply re-asserts his original position regardless.

In short, you are the apotheosis of everything that is wrong with the entire Denier camp.

Oh, and your conception of foreign policy is a species of nationalist sociopathy, but, sadly, that's now so common in the US that it's barely noteworthy.

You, sir, are a joke.

Posted by: bill | January 17, 2012 5:54 PM

I am very willing to have an exchange on the topic of “ocean acidification”, I think only bernard posted a reasonable response.

I gave you a link to information about it. I take it you did not read the material there.

I have also pointed out that CO2 released to date has had a beneficial impact on society. I did this to demonstrate that nations such as India are not owed anything from other countries because other countries have emitted CO2 historically.

You still refuse to acknowledge that, of major countries, Australia, the US and Canada are by far the largest producers on a per capita basis. Why should Indians, who each produce 1/10 of what you produce, have to pay for the damage you cause?
Are you still of the rather bizarre opinion that all the problems of increased CO2 and higher temperatures can be fixed by engineering massive structures? Do you really believe that events such as severe heatwaves in the Moscow area and the southern US can be ameliorated by air conditioning? In your society, does no-one ever go outside or try to grow crops?

Posted by: Richard Simons | January 17, 2012 8:08 PM

pokerply at 368

I have also pointed out that CO2 released to date has had a beneficial impact on society. I did this to demonstrate that nations such as India are not owed anything from other countries because other countries have emitted CO2 historically.

This is not how anyone with a scrap of ethics would see the issue.

Thalidomide ... was found to act as an effective tranquilizer and painkiller, and was proclaimed a "wonder drug" for insomnia, coughs, colds and headaches. It was also found to be an effective antiemetic that has an inhibitory effect on morning sickness, so thousands of pregnant women took the drug to relieve their symptoms.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than 10,000 children in 46 countries were born with deformities, such as phocomelia, as a consequence of thalidomide use.

So pp - should those children be compensated? After all their mothers benefited from the treatment of their morning sickness.

We could also discuss asbestos, tobacco etc.

We could also discuss how many of the poorer nations were free to develop their infrastructure during the period of the industrial revolution. Almost all of them were colonies of the West up until very recently. They were exploited for cheap labor and resources .

India is a case in point. Under British rule its standard of living actually fell. India was displaced as the premier supplier of cotton goods by acts of the British Parliament which banned the import of Indian cotton goods.

Not much has changed - a fair chunk of CO2 emissions in the third world is for manufacture of goods for Western consumers.

I do not expect pp to know much more about history than he knows about anything else - which is not much.

In any event the argument is a side issue at best. pp only raises it because he believes that it will appeal to bigots in the denialati.

In a few years when the scale of the AGW problem smacks the population in the West between the eyes, the wealthy nations will be falling over themselves to fund the end of fossil fuel burning, deforestation etc. in the less developed world.

Posted by: MikeH | January 17, 2012 9:51 PM

PP, You obviously either didn't look up "light enhanced calcification" as I suggested or you didn't understand what you found. You continue to suggest that the diurnal cycle of pH changes is physiologically insignificant for calcifiers when it's well demonstrated that it does have significant effects. As Richard Simons pointed out, corals "adapt" to these changes by growing a lot less at night when pH drops.

So what makes me so sure the projected acidification is a problem?... several lines of evidence. 1. Geologic history- The oceans have acidified before in times of high CO2. These generally were not good times for reef builders. Modern corals essentially disappeared for about 15 million years and nearly went extinct at one point.

1. Growth experiments- They show pretty consistently that the impacts of reducing pH are strongly negative for a broad range of calcifiers including corals. The organisms that aren't negatively affected tend to be those that calcify internally or are fertilized by bicarbonate. Shifting the species contribution in a community either by fertilizing one group or inhibiting the growth of another tends to have a destabilizing effect- both cases are usually bad.

2. Field measurements- Growth rates of massive corals in Australia, Bermuda, and Belize have all been documented to be declining in recent decades. There are lots of possible factors that could be influencing this change, but it is consistent with what's expected due to acidification.

3. Chemistry and Biochemistry- The current understanding of the biochemical mechanism of calcification in corals tells us that reducing the pH should make calcification less favorable.

4. 10 years of personal frustration trying to grow corals in an aquarium with a pH of 7.8- The CO2 concentration inside a modern house is enough to drive the pH of an aquarium down into the upper 7 range. For 10 years I've been unable to get a pH above 7.8 in mine. As long as I maintain high carbonate alkalinity, that's not a problem. However, as soon as I let the alkalinity drop, growth of my corals stops. Unfortunately the oceans don't have someone to maintain alkalinity for them like I do in my tanks.

Posted by: Mike G | January 17, 2012 10:41 PM

Pokerplyer, if you live in a place with a lot of rain, I sincerely wish you will get a neighbour who installs a very efficient drainage system in, on and around his house, with all the drained water going directly onto your property. Surely he can't be blamed, by your own argumentation, for causing you extra expenses to get rid of that extra water. You should just have installed better infrastructure to start out with. Right?

Posted by: Marco | January 18, 2012 1:47 AM

John McLean has apparently turned up in comments at The Reckoning thread to complain how "churlish" he finds the article and indicate that "Shortly I’ll be posting an extended comment about what happened in 2011". Should be fascinating ;-)

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 18, 2012 3:13 AM

Lotharsson.

Perhaps you could ask McLean what satellite data has to do with the global temperature in 1956...

At least it did prompt me to investigate whether the UAH MSU data for December was now available.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 18, 2012 7:20 AM

Irrelevant. A distraction so that you can avoid questions of science asked above.

It's also irrelevant to the idea that people have benefitted from the release of CO2.

Posted by: Wow | January 18, 2012 7:42 AM

Bill-writes a comment with zero substance

Chris O’neil writes- “Near "historic low" meaning a mere 400 feet above the actual low.” Chris- to be fair you might have been writing about some specific place where that occurred, but you would be completely wrong if writing about sea levels overall. Sea level does fluctuate more on a local basis that it does globally. Since links get delayed here I won’t post one, but look up the Exxon –Vail sea level curve. It will demonstrate that sea level globally was NOT 400 feet higher than today and that it is near the historic lows. The main and undisputable point I am making is that regardless of human actions the trend is for sea levels to rise. Yes it is possible that human caused warming will increase the rate of rise, but there is no reliable evidence that it is happening. The best data is the satilette records and they show a very modest 1 foot per century. The alarmist models that predicted a higher rate of rise have been demonstrated to be wrong

Richard Simons wrote- “You still refuse to acknowledge that, of major countries, Australia, the US and Canada are by far the largest producers on a per capita basis. Why should Indians, who each produce 1/10 of what you produce, have to pay for the damage you cause?”

My response- Your argument is based on the idea that India is damaged due to more CO2 and we have nothing to tell us that is true at all much less what the so called damage might be. Also, per capita emissions standards are only one measure. Should India get some special aid due to having an unsupportable population growth? I don’t think they should.

Richard the damage to both people and property due to the annual bad weather in India is overwhelmingly caused by the fact that they have never built the infrastructure necessary to prepare for and protect their citizens and property from bad weather. Have you ever been to India? I was there recently and the new airport got flooded when it rained. This was completely due to poor planning. If India built proper storm drainage systems and flood retention facilities there would not be the damage they currently see from their annual storms. The fact that they fail in this is not a problem for outside nations to pay to address. It really doesn’t get fixed today largely due to the massive corruption in the culture. In summary, IF the climate changes in India due to AGW and becomes either somewhat drier or wetter the local population will continue to be harmed unless their government builds the proper infrastructure to prepare. The cost of infrastructure that prepares for AGW is very little different from infrastructure that doesn’t prepare. Not building it or doing it badly leads to humans suffering harms.

Richard, proper planning absolutely does lessen the harms that come about due to bad weather and it generally is not massive structures. In Texas, (where I happen to have a home) it was a dry summer. The issue would have been much less severe if Texans had done a better job of making the water retention areas deeper to store more water. Every summer in Texas, people complain that the local manmade lakes get warm and algae grow due to the shallow depth. It was not considered a “problem” because the area averages 31 inches a year of rain. In a year when TX gets 2o inches it becomes an issue. Moscow had a hot summer. It was not caused by AGW. Yes, the harms of a hot summer would have been much less if they had prepared for that potential.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 18, 2012 10:36 AM

porkieplyer:

Chris O’neil writes- “Near "historic low" meaning a mere 400 feet above the actual low.” Chris- to be fair you might have been writing about some specific place where that occurred, but you would be completely wrong if writing about sea levels overall.

You are totally, utterly wrong.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 18, 2012 11:39 AM

Pokerplyer, you are so wrong about sea level it isn't even funny. This chart from NASA shows the history of sea level since the LGM. Notice the legend on the left? 120 meters is 393 feet, dude.

Posted by: Rattus Norvegicus | January 18, 2012 2:01 PM

Rattus

You raise a valid point. I am looking at the long term data from the Exxon sea level curve had not looked at what was posted by Nasa. I have to admit that I am skeptical of information posted at the Nasa site since Hansen is behind what they post and my prior comment shows how alarmist and propaganda spreading he is. I will look into the source data for the Nasa curve. Look up the curve I referenced.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 18, 2012 2:21 PM

s/our understanding of aerospace/your understanding of aerospace/

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 18, 2012 2:36 PM

Frank- Since you have demonstrated that you lie and can’t have a reasonable exchange there seems to be no point in trying. Grow up and try to address real issues and facts. How many times do you believe each GCM was run to account for the variability you describe? Do 1 to 5 runs account for such variability? Does taking the results form only the 5th run make sense? Does averaging the results of completely different models make sense?

Do you think all mitigation actions make sense?

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 18, 2012 3:58 PM

Bill-writes a comment with zero substance

bill wrote a comment with plenty of substance, that you ignored completely. I also actually read the information at the link you'd posted, which must stand as proxy for what you think. There's no evidence that you have had the courtesy to do the reverse.

Mike G also wrote a comment with plenty of substance; you argued the toss - absurdly - about sea level, and ignored the whole pH/ocean-chemistry thing; then announced that virtually no-one had raised substantive issues. And yet you're still right, apparently!

Oh, and James Hansen is probably causing NASA to lie about sea levels! Did he get them to fake the moon landing, too?

It's very, very hard to believe you're acting in good faith in all this.

And I think we're all entitled to know - what kind of bean-counter/administrative position did you really have as an 'aerospace engineer'? Telling the truth is good for you, you know.

Finally, you really, really don't understand the point Marco was making. Climate/weather trend/noise - what's up with that? That's the reason you wanted to make that ridiculous bet that introduced us to you in the first place.

Posted by: bill | January 18, 2012 6:16 PM

pokerplyer writes, in the very first sentence of his reply,

Frank- Since you have demonstrated that you lie

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!! pokerplyer tries to divert attention away from his own porkies by claiming -- with zero evidence whatsoever -- that I somehow lie.

pokerplyer, the liar is you, and I think you know that full well. Go spread your "I am an aerospace engineer" lies somewhere else where people are more gullible.

  * * *

And I must also point out this:

No, I wrote that general circulation models were not designed for government policy making

So let's see. Pokerplyer is faced with the incontrovertible conclusion from climate models that we need to stop carbon emissions Real Soon Now.

What can he do to ignore this conclusion?

Why of course -- claim that the climate models don't fulfill some vague bullshit 'standard' that pokerplyer himself made up just a minute ago! Claim that climate models are inadequate "for government policy making", which can mean whatever pokerplyer wants it to mean.

Yet another hallmark of one who's well aware that he's a lying liar.

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 18, 2012 6:24 PM

Your argument is based on the idea that India is damaged due to more CO2 and we have nothing to tell us that is true...

Of course, it's easy to tell yourself (and others) that "we have nothing" when you flat-out deny that we have something.

You don't even show any knowledge of a bunch of large negative impacts of climate change when you talk about damage being down to poorly planned infrastructure, and you imply that those other negative impacts simply do not exist. Every time you re-assert this argument, especially after others have given you some pointers to investigate, you reveal your determined ignorance.

For example, this is spectacularly wrong:

The cost of infrastructure that prepares for AGW is very little different from infrastructure that doesn’t prepare.

As others have pointed out, how do you prepare infrastructure to handle crops that won't pollinate, or to store water that simply doesn't precipitate in the first place?

Regarding climate mitigation actions vs. adaptation actions, it all depends upon the merits of the specific action being considered.

No, it does not all depend on that. You are as ignorant of risk mitigation as you are of whole swathes of climate science. For one thing, you have to assess the whole picture - especially when impacts are non-linear and actions have a cumulative effect; for another you can't assess the merits if you deny the impacts in the first place, and for a third you have to account for uncertainty ranges in your assessment - and uncertainty is most definitely not friendly to your argument, even though you imply it is.

Does it make sense to implement an expensive action that will have a minimal impact?

Well, even if you consider that a suitable decision making framework (and your framework implies complete information and zero uncertainty - which you're not going to get for just about anything in the real world), you have to accurately assess the impact in order to determine that it's "minimal".

You have demonstrated repeatedly that you are badly underestimating the impacts. Your (presumably cut & pasted) assessment of the US shifting away from coal-fired electricity generation is a classic example of this. It does not - for example - even try to assess the cost of the impacts avoided; merely tries to paint the avoided impacts as "minimal" by calculating temperature reductions. As the holder of a Finance Masters degree, have you ever wondered why the people supplying your "logic" left out this crucial bit? Ever wondered why you position it as a cost-benefit analysis when the benefit is not measured? (And that's before we point out the non-linearity of negative impacts and note that the benefit is therefore non-linear too.)

No?

Then perhaps you should consider that despite your Masters degree you don't have - or refuse to apply - the skills to determine when you are being led up the garden path in this particular field.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 18, 2012 6:41 PM

Frank-since YOU have been proven that YOU lied regarding statements I have written YOU are a demonstrated liar. That is a simple fact that even you should be able to understand. The fact that I am a degreed engineer who has worked in the aerospace industry for over 25 years is also a fact, whether you like it or not.

You have either wrongly analyzed the outputs of GCMs or have read someone else’s analysis to makes the foolish conclusion that you wrote: “the incontrovertible conclusion from climate models that we need to stop carbon emissions Real Soon Now”

Frank draws conclusions from models that can’t reliably determine what nations world will get more or less rainfall much less what the difference might be. A model that was appropriate for government policy making would be able to reliably predict whether a nation would benefit or potentially be harmed by the predicted climate change.

Frank advocates the use of a modeling where the outputs of multiple models (all of unknown accuracy, but they can‘t all be right, and possibly none are close to right) are averaged and government policy decisions are supposed to be based on this.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 18, 2012 7:05 PM

I looked it up and while I couldn't find the IF directly (wiki is offline today) the number of cites per article is abysmally low, will under 1.

Posted by: Rattus Norvegicus | January 18, 2012 7:12 PM

Lotharsson

You wrote-“For example, this is spectacularly wrong: The cost of infrastructure that prepares for AGW is very little different from infrastructure that doesn’t prepare.”

My response- Please point out examples of infrastructure that you believe becomes significantly more expensive to construct in order to prepare for climate change that could occur over a 25 to 30 years.

You wrote about crops that will not pollinate due to a temperature rise, but that is just silly. The temperature change would be gradual and farmers would adjust what they are growing, as they always have; as conditions change. Some areas would become more productive for certain crops while others become less productive. On balance a warmer climate results in greater plant growth.

Regarding evaluating mitigation actions individually based on the merit of the proposed action, you write about the cost of the harms avoided. I agree with your process. In the specific example I showed about Hansen’s shutting down all US coal fired power plants, the proposed action would have cost a huge sum and would have had virtually no impact on the climate, so no harm was avoided. I agree, let’s evaluate a potential harms that can be avoided and implement only those mitigation actions that seem to make sense.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 18, 2012 7:31 PM

Lotharsson:

Your (presumably cut & pasted) assessment

Posted by: Richard Simons | January 18, 2012 7:39 PM

The entire case of AGW is built on the outputs of the models ... corroborated by multiple lines of evidence happening in the real world.

Corrected/clarified that point for you porkyplayer.

Posted by: chek | January 18, 2012 7:52 PM

Richard-What are you referencing of mine?

Last paragraph of #423. Compare to comment #14 by Sisko.

Posted by: Richard Simons | January 18, 2012 8:02 PM

Richard

I seriously doubt the claim that

“Rice yields in SE Asia have already suffered because of too high temperatures at pollination.”

I tried to look it up but the only reference I could find was Wikipedia and could not read it. I doubt that the real issue was the temperature change to date caused by AGW. It is possible that a hot year reduced yields. Farmers are very practiced in adapting by adjusting when and what they plant.

Richard- The entire case foundation of AGW IS built on the outputs of the models. It is the models that have described the “feared” potential future conditions.

Posted by: pokerplyer | January 18, 2012 8:37 PM

porkieplyer probably wants information about sea level from a science denial website before he thinks it's not a scam. OK, here it is:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/01/sea-level-rise-jumpy-after-last-ice-age/

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 18, 2012 9:26 PM

I seriously doubt the claim that “Rice yields in SE Asia have already suffered because of too high temperatures at pollination.”

Here we report that annual mean maximum and minimum temperatures have increased by 0.35°C and 1.13°C, respectively, for the period 1979–2003 and a close linkage between rice grain yield and mean minimum temperature during the dry cropping season (January to April). Grain yield declined by 10% for each 1°C increase in growing-season minimum temperature in the dry season, whereas the effect of maximum temperature on crop yield was insignificant. This report provides a direct evidence of decreased rice yields from increased nighttime temperature associated with global warming.

and I saw other likely papers that I did not bother to check.

entire case foundation of AGW IS built on the outputs of the models.

Is 'models' a dirty word, then? Data on temperatures from ground-based weather stations, satellite data showing changes in temperature and a disparity between incoming and outgoing radiation, data on ice sheets, glaciers, the polewards spread of over 250 organisms, dates of river and lake freeze-up and thawing, flowering dates, sea level change and borehole data all indicate that Earth is warming. There are also several different lines of evidence that clearly show that the increase in atmospheric CO2 comes from human activity, and the link between CO2 and the greenhouse effect has been established for over 100 years. To summarily dismiss all of this shows massive ignorance. Sign up for the course.

Posted by: Richard Simons | January 18, 2012 9:38 PM

entire case foundation of AGW IS built on the outputs of the models

From NASA - Climate change: How do we know and not a model to be seen.

Posted by: MikeH | January 18, 2012 9:55 PM

I just want to say that Scientific American has for the past couple of years been putting out at least one daily story on climate change and sometimes it will publish three or four on the same day. The reporting does not for the vast majority of the stories indulge in the false balance narrative. This has been increasingly enraging the deniers.

Most of those stories do not make the front page or stay for only a day or so. By my reckoning Scientific American still has some prestige among layman. The deniers definitely know this and always appear with a stupidity or two in the comments section. If anyone is interested in the stories and countering the morons I suggest getting the RSS for the site.

Thanks

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 18, 2012 9:57 PM

porkieplyer:

...look up the Exxon –Vail sea level curve...

Lotharson:

That would be a non-peer-reviewed reconstruction over the last 500 MILLION years, right?

There are actually Exxon-Vail curves that show much lower sea levels in the past as well as the "first order" curve that doesn't.

Of course, porkieplyer is in denial of reality, and cannot see the evidence that confronts his denial.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 18, 2012 10:05 PM

you can learn if you are willing

Snort.

Posted by: ianam | January 19, 2012 3:29 AM

satellite data

Which require models (a dirty word, apparently) to transform into temperature.

Mind you, you need a model (thermal expansion of solids and liquids) to turn a mercury/alcohol thermometer reading into temperature.

Posted by: Wow | January 19, 2012 5:27 AM

@ 436 jerryg Blazingly off-topic. :)

For an answer to your question and for more information on vaccines and vaccine deniers etc. have a look at http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/

People there routinely check impact figures and I am sure would be happy to help you.

P.S. Your relation is probably being conned.

Posted by: jrkrideau | January 19, 2012 9:29 AM

Thanks Composer99.

Pokerplyer writes this:

The fact that I am a degreed engineer who has worked in the aerospace industry for over 25 years is also a fact,

but he could have fooled me.

Hahah. :) Indeed, if "pokerplyer" didn't explicitly state "I am an aerospace engineer", then given the 'wisdom' he's shown to us, we could've easily mistaken him for a generic blathering idiot... :-B

-- frank

Posted by: frank -- Decoding SwiftHack | January 19, 2012 10:12 AM

Kevin Anderson: The Brutal Logic of Climate Change mp3, 13MB, Radio Ecoshock.

"The future is impossible" says Dr. Kevin Anderson, former Director of UK's top climate research institute, the Tyndall Centre. Speech in London lays out our awful tilt toward an unlivable climate. Followed by discussion with Washington's Dr. William Calvin.

Posted by: Scribe | January 19, 2012 10:35 PM

So if I understand the lecture linked to in post #469 we have no hope of holding it down below 2c and even 4c looks like a dream so in short we are fucked. If I am wrong tell me.

All that we can do is advocacy for drastic reductions that will keep that hole from getting deeper and registering protest with deniers so that future generations will not think we were all perfect idiots.

What do ideologues like Poker Player think will happen to the reputation of libertarianism when it becomes clear to even the dullest dullard that Libertarianism and its allies played a crucial role in inducing suffering?

Posted by: Trent1492 | January 20, 2012 1:59 PM

Anderson's forthcoming paper 'Are Climate Scientists the Most Dangerous Climate Sceptics' (see the presentation with slides I linked to immediately above, at about 33'20") should be a doozy!...

Posted by: bill | January 20, 2012 7:39 PM

What do ideologues like Poker Player think will happen to the reputation of libertarianism when it becomes clear to even the dullest dullard that Libertarianism and its allies played a crucial role in inducing suffering?

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. People favorable to libertarianism base their beliefs on ideology, not on libertarianism's track record, which is abysmal and horrific -- look at how deregulation led to the U.S. financial meltdown that has left 49 million Americans in poverty and another 97 million in the "low income" category. You assume an understanding of cause and effect that most people, many of whom are a lot higher on the bell curve than the the dullest dullard, do not have ... else Barack Obama and the leading Republican candidate would not be nearly neck-and-neck in U.S. presidential polls. If people understood the consequences of libertarian and right wing policies and principles, they not only would not be voting for these people, they would be putting their necks under the guillotine.

Posted by: ianam | January 21, 2012 2:34 AM

People who really want to avoid scary authoritarian states ought to be doing there damnedest to bring about real change now within the framework of our existing liberal societies.

But no: we offer them carbon markets - they don't want carbon markets. All right then, it'll have to be a tax (actually a market price, but anyway...) - the sky is falling! The sky is falling! Won't someone think of the children?! We point out that the earlier we make the transition the cheaper it's going to be, and the less impact it will have on all those things they hold most precious (i.e themselves.) No, no no - it's nothing, or nothing! What did that supreme idiot's father say? 'The American way of life is not negotiable'? Substitute your national affluent white male elite of choice, and that's the Way of The West.

Instead we'll get to run the experiment until things are so bad that even the thickhead Right cannot deny reality anymore; in which case they will doubtlessly ditch the whole 'Libuuurty' PR spin and the democratic trappings and attempt to establish themselves as our overlords in earnest. After all, it's their rightful place; it'll be for our own good!

Frankly, at that point the non-idiots will have a far more pressing moral case for being the regulators of austerity - for a start, their more egalitarian and evidence-based strategies might actually work - but, sadly, history tends to follow the 'shit floats' rule and the dropkicks who rule then are most likely to be the heirs of the self-same dropkicks who rule now.

I've said it before: do nothing about this issue, and in retrospect by about 2050 contemporary China will seem like an unattainable paradise, let alone those decadent liberal democracies that effectively barbequed the planet...

Hey, wait; that's the good result! You wanna see the alternative where even the autocrats (idiot or otherwise) can't hold it together anymore, try Sierra Leone...

Posted by: bill | January 21, 2012 4:38 AM

Amanda, none of that background is required. pokerplyer's argument implies that we need not be concerned about large meteors striking the Earth, or anything else that has ever occurred before, because extant species made it here despite them. In engineering, it's like saying that we don't have to be concerned about anything going wrong because things have gone wrong before. Since the Hindenburg is in our memories, we need not be concerned about building and boarding an exact replica of the Hindenburg. pokerply is unreachable because of his inability or unwillingness to critically evaluate the logic of his arguments ... certainly when it would threaten his ideological commitments.

Posted by: ianam | January 23, 2012 5:52 PM

Couple of news items of possible interest for folks here

• Study plugs gap in global warming puzzle by Rachel Sullivan ABC science news online - Monday, 23 January 2012.

• [Arctic Ocean freshwater bulge detected] (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16657122) via BBC world news online.

There's an article on the bad Astronomy blog discussing the fact that 2011 was teh ninth hottest year -and hottest La Nina yera according toa comment there - as well but I'm not sure how many links I'm allowed in a comment somight add that separately.

Posted by: StevoR | January 24, 2012 7:44 AM

Looking at this from another angle I also wonder when the most recent “Top Ten Coldest Year” was and what that Coldest Top Ten Years list looks like?

Depends which data set you want to use and how far back it goes - and if you can do some simple calculations. For example, here is GISS LOTI. From a quick look at that, if you use "Jan-Dec" as your "annual average", then (possibly incorrectly) it appears that 1917 was the last of the "Top Ten Coldest Years".

There's also GISS dTs, HadCrut in various forms, etc.

You've got to be careful with this kind of thinking - the "top N hottest years" is a poor way to determine trend, and denialists like to pretend that it's a good way ("it's been cooling since 1998", etc.) But for some people that subscribe to that kind of logic pointing out the Top 10 Coldest Years might be mildly thought-provoking.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 24, 2012 9:34 AM

" Can folks here confirm that please? "

There's a nice graphic here on NOAA's State of the Climate Report. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2011/13

Posted by: adelady | January 24, 2012 8:52 PM

DeSmogBlog just had a post today about how the Institute for Public Affairs basically manufactures all the talking points that get repeated in our beloved Australian and other papers:

This analysis shows that the Institute of Public Affairs, an Australian neoliberal think tank, has used its access to the media as a news source to influence the public discussion on climate change in Australia. The rhetorical vision expressed by the IPA is one of hostility towards climate scientists and the scientific consensus on climate change; the IPA’s hostility is based on its opposition to proposed government regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Posted by: V. infernalis | January 25, 2012 2:53 AM

Good Lord, are you lot still here? Look, I have tried to break the news to you gently but you force me to repeat myself - it's over! - finished! - everyone's gone home, you're on your own! - no-one believes any of that global warming stuff anymore! Not your fault, you did try but perhaps its items like this that spoiled your party:

"Multiple indicators show global temperatures headed down this month, and fast" and "The new Dr. Ryan Maue reanalysis based global temperature anomalies has declined dramatically this month – almost a full degree Celsius!"

Cor, who'da thunk it?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/26/what-in-the-world-is-going-on-with-global-temperatures/#more-55473

Still, I know your lives must be feeling rather empty without an 'end-of-the-world-is-nigh' scenario and as usual I am eager to help:

"Scientists are trying to find a way to protect Earth from the giant rocks which travel around the Milky Way."[...] "The project though is a little late as a chunk of rock 400 times the City of London is set to hurtle closer than a rock of its size has in a very long time. The asteroid labelled ‘(433) Eros’ measures 19 by 8 by 8 miles and is set to pass by next week. Despite its massive size, the cosmic rock shouldn’t be too cause too much of a threat as it is on a circular path far outside the moon's orbit. A smaller bus-sized asteroid is also set to pass extremely close to Earth today. The asteroid 2012 BX34, will pass within 36,750 miles of Earth at about 3:30 p.m. Friday, tweeted astronomers with NASA's Asteroid Watch program.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2092626/Europe-developing-asteroid-shield-But-won-t-time-19-mile-wide-monster-hurtling-past-Earth-week.html#ixzz1kez5M84Q

Don't say I don't try to help because you are ever in my thoughts!

Posted by: David Duff | January 27, 2012 7:15 AM

are you lot still here?

It's that broken record again.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 27, 2012 8:26 AM

On more interesting matters and relevant to 488, I wonder how Lord Lawson and his team of practiced liars are getting on? Will we find out today who funds them?

Posted by: lord_sidcup | January 27, 2012 9:12 AM

To be honest, Chek, I am never very enthused by people who toss the words "liars, shysters and cheats" around whilst grappling with a genuine difference of opinion on a scientific matter. And for what it's worth (not much, I suspect, in your case) Watts and McIntyre frequently make efforts to remind their commenters to avoid 'ad hominems' and insults. Can't say I have seen much of that over here!

Posted by: David Duff | January 27, 2012 10:01 AM

duffer the puffer said:

And for what it's worth (not much, I suspect, in your case) Watts and McIntyre frequently make efforts to remind their commenters to avoid 'ad hominems' and insults. Can't say I have seen much of that over here!

There are very few ad hominem comments found in Deltoid (except from liars like duffer the puffer) because it is not an ad hominem comment when one calls some one who consistently lies, cheats and uses other dishonest means to try and deny well accepted climate science a liar, cheat or denier.

duffer the puffer's ability to understand the intricacies of the English language seems to be as low as his scientific ability, and no, that is not an ad hominem.

Posted by: Ian Forrester | January 27, 2012 10:29 AM

So would your apparently beloved phrase "liars, shysters and cheats" include each and every one of these?

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Whose views are summed up thus: "Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence."

Posted by: David Duff | January 27, 2012 3:07 PM

duffer the puffer asked:

So would your apparently beloved phrase "liars, shysters and cheats" include each and every one of these?

Yes, everyone on that list falls into the "liars, shysters and cheats" description, which anyone who has even a little bit of knowledge of science would know. The fact that you cannot see this is more proof that you are ignorant, arrogant and dishonest.

Posted by: Ian Forrester | January 27, 2012 4:06 PM

So would your apparently beloved phrase "liars, shysters and cheats" include each and every one of these?

Either that or willfully ignorant. And there's certainly plenty of lying, shystering and cheating by these folks when their statement is so ideologically driven ... it's not about science, but rather about ignoring science because they don't like what they think are its economic implications. The nature of their statement establishes them as not acting in good faith ... just like you.

Posted by: ianam | January 27, 2012 4:40 PM

And for what it's worth (not much, I suspect, in your case) Watts and McIntyre frequently make efforts to remind their commenters to avoid 'ad hominems' and insults. Can't say I have seen much of that over here!

It isn't worth anything because their commenters are a pack of ignoramuses and liars and their statements are false, whereas over here we know things and tell the truth ... substance over form, matey.

Posted by: ianam | January 27, 2012 4:46 PM

@Duffman

Every one of those people put their name to an article that lied about Kevin Trenberth. It also lied about De Freitas, claiming that he was "factually correct".

So yes. Liars.

Posted by: Dave H | January 27, 2012 7:17 PM

"I honestly don't think anyone can be as stupid and dishonest as you without getting something in return."

Ultra depressing newsflash. Probably not.

I doubt he gets anything out of it other than the satisfaction of displaying to the world that he is wiser, stronger, better - who knows - than the rest of us.

This is what you get when you combine smart aleckry with gullibility - all driven by a need to ignore stuff you really don't want to know.

Posted by: adelady | January 27, 2012 7:32 PM

The Wall Street Journal may not be the best source available for scientific information.

Some enterprising people have done the hard yards and "found" the 'missing' heat. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011GL048794.shtml

Lo and behold, just as missing small change is always found behind the couch cushions, the previously unmeasured heat was found right where everyone said it would be - in the oceans.

If you don't get the full flavour from the abstract of Church et al's paper, it's helpfully first on the agenda and top of the page here http://www.skepticalscience.com/big-picture-global-warming.html

Posted by: adelady | January 27, 2012 11:41 PM

And here was me thinking that Chucky was a faintly entertaining doll given an evil soul through the power of voodoo. Turns out he's just another boring zombie troll.

Misquoting Trenberth for the 19746th time? Really? Is that the best they can do these days? :/

Posted by: FrankD | January 27, 2012 11:55 PM

Perhaps something from right here on ScienceBlogs would be more appealing. No pesky references to scientific papers.

Can't get the link to work - just copy this text for a search "Two incontrovertible things: Anthropogenic Global Warming is Real, and the Wall Street Journal is Political Rag"

and you'll get there.

Posted by: adelady | January 28, 2012 1:37 AM

It's funny to see people refer to Ivar Giaever, trying to use his Nobelprize to give more credit to their ideas. Reminds me of one Kary Mullis, who is happily used by the HIV/AIDS denial community to gain support for their idea that HIV does not even exist. I'm sure the WSJ will soon publish an Editorial or Opinion Piece in which they will point to the many scientists, including Nobelprize winner Kary Mullis, that believe HIV does not exist. Right, WSJ?

Note that John Nielsen-Gammon also had something to say about the editorial standard at WSJ when it comes to climate change.

Posted by: Marco | January 28, 2012 5:17 AM

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.

Ah, yet another unoriginal troll who doesn't know how to compute a trend.

And isn't aware that 2011 was the warmest La Nina year ever.

And then goes on to conflate annual global average temperatures with Trenberth's e-mail about having insufficient data to balance the radiation budget - apparently unaware despite numerous explanations that Trenberth wasn't implying that the warming trend had stopped.

Better trolls, please!

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 28, 2012 7:38 AM

Dumb:

"The new Dr. Ryan Maue reanalysis based global temperature anomalies has declined dramatically this month – almost a full degree Celsius!" Cor, who'da thunk it?

Not only that, but the world is about to go into the great global cooling period of 2001-2014, the likes of which the world hasn't seen since 1957. We know it's been the longest time in recorded history since a cooling period like that one but that's all about to end, any day now. You'll see. I'm holding my breath.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | January 28, 2012 7:53 AM

Er, Chucky...

these aren't the deltoids you're looking for...

Posted by: MarcusJ | January 28, 2012 8:28 AM

Why do so many fact-denialists not know what an apostrophe means?

Come now; Chucky is not illiterate - his parents were married.

Posted by: bill | January 28, 2012 5:05 PM

Something I saw in today's Weekend Australian that may be of interest. In the editorial "Activists burn national goodwill along with flag" on page 23 :

"As Meryl Tankard Reist, Ian Plimer or Andrew Bolt can attest, the modern illiberal Left seems to care little for free speech unless thatspeech echoes tehri views."

Um .. WHAT!?

Have we done something unfairly nasty to Ian Plimer that I'm unaware of or somehow censrored him from expressig himself?

Really? When?

I must've missed it.

Anyone got a clue what the blazes the Oz is on about there?

Posted by: StevoR | January 29, 2012 7:28 AM

StevoR, it looks like the same gambit the Christian Right uses in the US - they (apparently quite eagerly) claim the mantle of persecution and/or censorship because they get criticised or because they aren't allowed to (say) promote pseudo-science in the school curriculum.

I note that it is said that the ability to make distinctions is a mark of intelligence, and that conflation is a key tool of the sophist.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 29, 2012 8:50 AM

So would your apparently beloved phrase "liars, shysters and cheats" include each and every one of these?

Yes.

Speaking of "liars shyster and cheats", Duff, I haven't forgotten that you abandoned the site after you were unable to tell us why you believed Morner's projections were more accurate even though his observations were wrong.

Isn't it funny that deniers who shriek "there is no consensus!" and "97% of climate scientists is an appeal to authority" are always so quick to post their own appeals to authority. Where's your skepticism Duff?

Posted by: John | January 29, 2012 9:35 PM

Thank you, Mr. Forrester, I will now have even greater pleasure in forwarding your remarks to the gentlemen concerned. They and their lawyers will find it interesting, I should think.

Duff can't argue the science so he starts issuing legal threats to his critics. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

While we are on the subject of dobbing naughty schoolboys, Duff, I wonder if you'll be dobbing in Watts commenter "IAmDigitap" for this masterpiece:

That Tamino character’s obvious lack of grasp of what he thinks is proven by the fact he thought Mike Mann’s math, was real.

DO I N.E.E.D. T.O. S.A.Y. ANYTHING M.O.R.E. about that HICK?

Do I need to REMIND you people, that HE THINKS a TREE: is a TREEMOMETER?

Gentlemen, – and here I’m actually speaking to the mods: just because I point out this clown tried to do such torturous lying through mathematics that I no longer even bother looking for any sense to his WILLFUL FRA*DULENCE

that doesn’t mean, what I’m saying’s irrelevant. THERE ARE PEOPLE COMING HERE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD of the LOON-SPEAK these F.R.A.*.D.S. have BARKED to FLEECE the PEOPLE of the world.

These people are c.r.i.m.i.n.a.l.s. They are CRIMINALS.

Look: I myself went into the two way telecommunications equipment troubleshooting, calibration/repair maintenance etc business: that’s the electronic engineering associated with transmitting electromagnetic energy through the atmosphere: capturing it, and analyizing it for quality, etc.

But my father – who just died a few months ago God bless ‘im – was first, a Chief of Police for a number of years; THEN, he worked for the I.R.S. as an enforcement agent. Bullshitters don’t get far with me. Not if it has to do with the part of the universe mankind’s detected so far.

And this Tamino _ _ _wipe is nothing more, than an ASSISTANT in a FUNDING FRA*D SCAM.

Every single one of us who has worked with instrumentation and mathematics KNOWS; that if WE BROUGHT THAT (TAMINO/MANN/HANSEN/BRIFFA) kind of MATH to OUR BOSS

WE WOULD BE FIRED, and OUR BOSS would TELL OTHERS IN (whatever industry we worked in) THAT THEY SUSPECTED YOU/ME OF B.E.I.N.G. A. F.R.A.*.D.

It’s past unconscionable, it’s CRIMINAL. And we need to see to it that people are fired and/or hung from yard arms. Period.

Sorry for the scathing ad hominum but LOOK AT THAT SO-CALLED ‘ANALYSIS’.

It’s OBVIOUSLY – knowing the OTHER things he SAID HE THINKS IS REAL when it’s OBVIOUS he SHOULD KNOW BETTER:

nothing but SCM scm SC*M.

I would hate it if Duff's campaign to rid the internet of potentially defamatory comments only extended one way. Of course, you - David Duff of Dorset - are a liar, a shyster and a cheat.

Posted by: John | January 29, 2012 9:58 PM

Questions from Tamino for one of the signatories cited by Duff.

Do you think Duff or Rutan himself will have reasonable answers rather than merely repeating debunked claims?

(Note that Tamino's post is riffing off an exchange between Brian Angliss and Rutan where Rutan's first comment (@4)references "data presentation fr@ud". Seems likely that the Rutan graph Tamino cites would fall under that umbrella.)

And if you read the comment itself it reveals a bingo card full of denialist talking points and other interesting claims, including:

...none of the predictions of IPCC since their first report in 1991 have been supported by measured data.

...the planet has cooled after 1998 in spite of the CO2 content increasing.

Modeling is more correctly a branch of Engineering ...

(!)

...To claim that the entire system of atmospheric temperature moderation has been described by the fluctuations of atmospheric CO2 content while excluding the other obvious factors such as atmospheric water vapour content, solar flux and orbital mechanics is just nonsense.

...If we doubled the atmospheric content of CO2, young pine trees would grow at twice the rate and nearly every crop yield would go up 30 to 40%. We, the animals and all land plant life would be healthier if CO2 content were to increase.

...You can easily tell if someone is a true environmentalist, i.e. an advocate for a healthy planet – he is one who is happy to hear the news that the arctic ice content has stabilized.

(Tamino asks Rutan for evidence of this apparent claim...)

If I ever express the urge to do so, please remind me not to place my life in Rutan's hands by traveling in his spacecraft.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 29, 2012 11:09 PM

I actually give him kudos for admitting upfront that he's an anti-government crank instead of pretending ... that he's on some kind of noble mission for scientific truth.

True there (but not on the Angliss post), where he claims "data presentation fr@ud" (without demonstrating it) which seems like an attempt to also claim the mantle of a noble mission for scientific truth. (Claiming that mantle is also the modus operandi of WUWT despite numerous and repeated egregious failures to live up to it, so he's in like-minded company there.)

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 29, 2012 11:42 PM

Another commenter on Tamino's post points out that Rutan's graph claims to be based on full-globe data, yet he dubs it a "summer heat recovery" graph - apparently unaware that (for the portion of the year in question) it is winter recovery for half of globe that he claims to be "analysing".

And I'm still astounded that he discusses "percentage temperature increases" (without using the Kelvin scale) at all. (Imagine how badly such a fundamental mistake could affect materials analysis for a spacecraft...)

The DKE is strong in this one.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 29, 2012 11:52 PM

The above comment was mine.

I don't know what happened there, the box contained my name, but when I posted it, it didn't. Presumably, some sort of keyboard fumble.

Posted by: Amoeba | January 30, 2012 2:28 AM

Whoops, missed A's comment earlier.

Posted by: J Bowers | January 30, 2012 3:48 AM

The following comment has a up/down rating of -57. People who claim that the truth will out are simply wrong. Humanity is irrational and it will result in the demise of civilization. Oh well.

It is usually the case that the best comments on the Mail website having the lowest rating. There is the reason Mail readers are considered a paragons of stupidity here in the UK.

Posted by: lord_sidcup | January 30, 2012 4:27 AM

So, RealClimate has a thread on the IPCC's AR4 attribution determinations. If it's not already been mentioned to Jonas N, perhaps one of the folk who still visit the asylum might direct him to it, and invite him to repeat there his claim that the IPCC "made up" their estimates.

I'm absolutely sure that he won't have the guts to do so...

And whilst he's there he (and all his Denialist buddies) should carefully read Alastair McDonald's delightfully succinct summary of the probability of human contribution to the current global warming trend.

Posted by: Bernard J. | January 30, 2012 7:14 AM

From a first time look at Mail's comments it's actually quite surreal. The most barking mad comments (mostly from Americans about an hour ago) are on the 'best rated' tab with many hundreds of recommends, while the more sensible ones are 'worst rated'... with many hundreds of votes down.

Not sure how static those posts are, but the snapshot I saw was an apt confirmation of the topsy-turvey, la-la land reputation of the Mail and its readers. A 'serious' paper only in the sense that you may find yourself thinking something has gone seriously wrong with the staff and their readership.

And those home made graphs just scream shonky.

Posted by: chek | January 30, 2012 9:25 AM

@ 549 chek

They're organised, and the Mail is the closest thing you'll find to a Tea Party newsletter on this side of the Pond.

Posted by: J Bowers | January 30, 2012 11:29 AM

It is usually the case that the best comments on the Mail website having the lowest rating. There is the reason Mail readers are considered a paragons of stupidity here in the UK.

Here in Santa Barbara, home of the environmental movement, every time there's a press release from UCSB that touches on global warming, there's a horde of denialist comments that are indistinguishable from those in the Daily Mail, and the same is true for the Guardian, Scientific American, or just about any other public comments section. The proportion may be higher than average in the Mail, but you're burying your head in the sand if you think the phenomenon is peculiar to its readers.

Posted by: ianam | January 30, 2012 4:12 PM

Bernard J., we're not supposed to discuss that person or his thread outside of the thread.

Posted by: ianam | January 30, 2012 4:36 PM

Just how would Svensmark justify the claim about 'a lot cooler than now for 50 years or more'?

Perhaps the same way that John McLean justified the claim that 2011 would be cooler than 1956?

;-)

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 30, 2012 10:04 PM

And speaking of that WSJ Op-Ed touted so eagerly by Duff, before apparently running away from critique, Dana has a response up at SkepticalScience.

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 30, 2012 10:23 PM

Yeah, that McLean thing is beautiful. Anyone know if his promised analysis of what happened in 2011 has appeared yet? I predict a discreet no-show; I don't believe any data can be tortured into anything even resembling that prediction.

Posted by: bill | January 30, 2012 10:46 PM

And be sure to read comment #137 on that thread, by Glen Tamblyn - 6-7 pages of specific critique of Burt's claims and slide deck.

Ouch!

Posted by: Lotharsson | January 31, 2012 1:24 AM

Lotharsson, yes I totally agree that #137 by Glen Tamblyn is a must read.

Posted by: JRC | January 31, 2012 3:08 AM

And those home made graphs just scream shonky.

They are GWPF-made. David Rose works for GWPF.

Posted by: Neven | January 31, 2012 8:39 AM

@556/559

The Australian has dutifully re-printed that WSJ Op-Ed today.

Posted by: Shinsko | January 31, 2012 1:45 PM

Meanwhile, across the Tasman, Gareth Renowden's Puppets on a String has borne fruit at the NZ Herald.

C'mon Australia: who's asking about the money that went to "South Asia and Pacific" and for things like translations before Jo Nova's Skeptics Handbook appeared, and Heartland gave away 14,000 copies to US school board presidents?

Posted by: John Mashey | January 31, 2012 7:42 PM

And a little bit more in comments on that Angliss post - #141 by Pythagoras systematically takes apart one of Rutan's key claims, and #148 by Angliss responds further to Rutan, including calling him out for completely ignoring valid critiques and evidence refuting his claims.

Posted by: Lotharsson | February 1, 2012 6:05 AM