Pharyngula

Must be flooded for the East Coast lunch hour - the page keeps crashing on me. :(

Posted by: Carlie | November 7, 2007 12:21 PM

same here on the lefty coasty

Posted by: garth | November 7, 2007 12:31 PM

blinded by the science.

I read all three sites regularly (here, Bad Astronomy and ClimateAudit). Steve McI is not a right wing toady, as your lead-in would have us believe. In fact his politics, which he keeps separate from the science content on his blog, lean decidedly liberal.

The point here is an ideological one. Climate Change must be bad, humans must have caused it... just isn't supported by the evidence. That the right wing(nut) blogfactors are crazy about it is certainly upsetting, but long term the truth will out.

robert

Posted by: Robert L | November 7, 2007 12:54 PM

The point here is an ideological one. Climate Change must be bad, humans must have caused it... just isn't supported by the evidence.

Oh, then all this stuff that I keep reading in peer reviewed journals and that I and a few friends of mine report on... is just bunk?.. an entire profession is totally incompetent?

Because this is what Steve Milloy is telling you. If you use a little bit of intelligence and realise that science is highly competitive, where being right is everything, you would recognise Steve Milloy for what he is: a nitpicking dick head who trumpets small errors as major failings (come on, is a minor error in the North American temperature record that significant when viewed with all the other data?).

Posted by: laserboy | November 7, 2007 1:24 PM

Incidentally, on his blog, Milloy is claiming ideologues are "suppressing" the voting for CA. That's an interesting claim, with no evidence whatsoever. I just posted about this. If you had any doubts about Milloy's veracity, well, there you go.

Posted by: Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer | November 7, 2007 1:33 PM

laserboy:
.. an entire profession is totally incompetent?

No. Just a few well placed individual who have an ideological axe to grind. (Hansen, Mann, Scheider et al)

Please note: in my post above I made no mention of Milloy. I in no way support him or his endeavours.

I do support Steve McIntyre and his quest to get to the meat of the climate change data. McIntyre does go out and collect real data. Plus he checks published results. When he finds errors he points them out, when he finds the results support the conclusions he lets you know.

In a word is is doing "science".

robert

Posted by: Robert L | November 7, 2007 2:07 PM

Well I get my cranks mixed up, I meant McIntyre as well.

So your contention is that three people are enough to magically suppress all the evidence that the current warming trend and its consequences are a load of bunk?

Because those are the only two conclusions you can make based on McIntyre's "science." Either (a) a smal number of scientists can somehow magically prevent the publication of results that don't support their theory (something I know is not true because I have reported on many results that show results that were contrary to the then current understanding) or (b) every climatologist is incompetent and can't see the truth before their very eyes (yet you and a bunch of other unqualified onlookers can).

Posted by: laserboy | November 7, 2007 2:33 PM

My sense is that McIntyre's objectives are rather more modest. He begins with the premise that if we are going to base public policy on "the science" the science should be subject to examination.

He then, along with a group of rather intelligent commentors, takes particular, but influential, pieces of the science and looks closely at them. For example, the Mann Hockey stick, much loved by the IPCC, was subjected to a bit of testing and various flaws in the data and the algo were exposed. (The algo will apparently turn any set of data into a hockey stick.)

Hansen's data was examined and Hansen had to admit tohaving made several errors the effect of which was to place warmest years in the 1990s when, in fact, they should have been in the 1930s. Hansen has acknowledged this error.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist or a "denialist" to want to get the science right. Especially when panicked governments are proposing to spend enormous sums of money on things like CO2 abatement which a) may not work, b) may be attacking a problem which is not actually at the root of climate change, c) maybe a more expensive alternative than some of the others on offer.

Asking serious questions and looking closely at the data (where available - a number of climate scientists are very coy indeed when it comes to archiving their data) is precisely the opposite of stupidity. But it does sometimes conflict with the "consensus" and the rush to judgment the politicians and bureaucrats who actually write the IPCC report seem so intent upon.

CA is about dissent and discovery: which is why it is an excellent science blog.

Posted by: Jay Currie | November 7, 2007 3:14 PM

Impressive logic. Steve Milloy endorses it, so it's right-wing and "hackery". A sort of reverse argument from authority. Have you no shame?

Laserboy, Peer review is no guarantee of infallibility at the best of times, and sometimes the system fails. To rely solely on peer review is another argument from authority. I respect peer review too, but not over evidence I've seen myself.

Most of the stuff you read in peer reviewed and other journals is an elaboration on one of three arguments:
- climate is changing and so is CO2, and correlation implies causation;
- our computer models are able to simulate something looking like real weather by assuming CO2 plus 3x positive H2O feedbacks and fitting some poorly understood parameterisations, we can't think of any other possible drivers large enough, therefore there are no other possible drivers and it is impossible to simulate weather without a CO2 effect;
- such a rise has never happened before, all those past interstadials were a lot smaller or more local than we previously thought, and because such a large CO2 rise has also never happened before, the one must cause the other. We know this because two dozen trees in North America grew a lot recently, and this tells us the mean global temperature anomaly a thousand years ago to an accuracy of better than half a degree.

They're not worded quite like that, of course, but that's essentially "the evidence". Climatologists do a lot of good work trying to understand the climate, but the important point is that they don't yet understand it. They have a hypothesis with some evidence in its favour, and some against which they can so far more or less explain away. Everything else is politics and salesmanship.

The point about the most recent of the several US temperature corrections is not its size, or whether it refutes the overall conclusion of rising global temperatures (which virtually no one at CA doubts, anyway), but the poor standard of software quality control involved in its calculation. I've looked at the code Hansen used and it's abysmal; full of dead code snippets and crude hacks. This is, if you believe the hype, the most important issue facing mankind. Why are we basing world-shaking trillion-dollar decisions on data produced by such amateurish buggy code? The issue is not the bugs found, but what other bugs and errors might be in there that we haven't found because nobody has looked. This stuff ought to be done by professional software engineers to high if not the highest levels of quality control. NASA have a policy to do so, it ought to have been followed. Hansen may be a good climatologist, but he is neither statistician nor software engineer, and it shows.

To someone who doesn't know the subject, the Discovery Institute's output looks scientific, plausible, and authoritative. When you know more, you can see that they're clever people bent on manipulating the evidence to reach their pre-decided conclusion. What if such an organisation were to gain a position of eminence and authority with political support, whether of the White House or the United Nations? (And what else are you fighting for here, if not to prevent exactly that?) What if they were able to use that influence to invade and subvert universities? What if other scientists who knew little biology assumed it was valid, and those biologists who quite rightly protested were labelled deniers? Do you think such a travesty is impossible? That it could take a court case to get the Dover school board policy to be chucked out, that a Presidential candidate could declare their preference for creationism to be taught in science classrooms, with some possibility of it happening? I don't.

I don't really expect anyone arguing against CA to be persuaded by anything that could be fitted into a comment here. If you think climate change is important, then it is worth devoting some time to learn about it, and it is worth seeking out the best of the counter arguments to be sure for yourself that they're wrong, in the same way that you look at the IDers and construct technical explanations of exactly where their errors lie. You can't just say "it's creationism and therefore is wrong" or "eminent biologists say it's wrong in journals reviewed by other like-minded biologists and therefore it must be" because you'll just be accused of having closed minds and following the dogma uncritically. Unscientific! There is no other way to judge for sure than to look at and challenge the evidence and arguments themselves.

So if you're going to insist on debunking CA, do it properly!

Posted by: A2 | November 7, 2007 3:22 PM

Wow. These guys are boring and whiney babies.

Reason enough to vote against that "science" blog.

Posted by: Stevie_C | November 7, 2007 3:49 PM

Laserboy, Peer review is no guarantee of infallibility at the best of times, and sometimes the system fails. To rely solely on peer review is another argument from authority. I respect peer review too, but not over evidence I've seen myself.

Most of the stuff you read in peer reviewed and other journals is an elaboration on one of three arguments:
- climate is changing and so is CO2, and correlation implies causation;
- our computer models are able to simulate something looking like real weather by assuming CO2 plus 3x positive H2O feedbacks and fitting some poorly understood parameterisations, we can't think of any other possible drivers large enough, therefore there are no other possible drivers and it is impossible to simulate weather without a CO2 effect;
- such a rise has never happened before, all those past interstadials were a lot smaller or more local than we previously thought, and because such a large CO2 rise has also never happened before, the one must cause the other. We know this because two dozen trees in North America grew a lot recently, and this tells us the mean global temperature anomaly a thousand years ago to an accuracy of better than half a degree.

yeah, because no one else has ever measured tree ring data before or since Mann... oh wait

Title: Rapid tree growth with respect to the last 400 years in response to climate warming, northeastern Tibetan Plateau
Author(s): Gou XH (Gou, Xiaohua), Chen FH (Chen, Fahu), Jacoby G (Jacoby, Gordon), Cook E (Cook, Edward), Yang MX (Yang, Meixue), Peng HF (Peng, Hanfeng), Zhang Y (Zhang, Yong)
Source: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY 27 (11): 1497-1503 SEP 2007

Title: Exorcising the 'segment length curse': Summer temperature reconstruction since AD 1640 using non-detrended stable carbon isotope ratios from pine trees in northern Finland
Author(s): Gagen M (Gagen, Mary), McCarroll D (McCarroll, Danny), Loader NJ (Loader, Nell J.), Robertson L (Robertson, Lain), Jalkanen R (Jalkanen, Risto), Anchukaitis KJ (Anchukaitis, Kevin J.)
Source: HOLOCENE 17 (4): 435-446 MAY 2007

Title: Solar and climate imprint differences in tree ring width from Brazil and Chile
Author(s): Rigozo NR (Rigozo, Nivaor Rodolfo), Nordemann DJR (Roger Nordemann, Daniel Jean), Echer E (Echer, Ezequiel), da Silva HE (da Silva, Heitor Evangelista), Echer MPD (Echer, Mariza Pereira de Souza), Prestes A (Prestes, Alan)
Source: JOURNAL OF ATMOSPHERIC AND SOLAR-TERRESTRIAL PHYSICS 69 (4-5): 449-458 APR 2007

Would that be three articles published this year alone. My word, who knew that one valley could stretch so far, or that Mann was psychic and could publish his results before the data was obtained.

So considering that little factoid was a straight lie, why would anything else you write on this particular subject be at all believable? Do you even know why researchers chose to focus on CO₂? I'll give you a hint, its called "infrared absorption." If that hint isn't enough then you also don't understand how insulation works, so you might as well stop living in a house.

I've looked at the code Hansen used and it's abysmal; full of dead code snippets and crude hacks. This is, if you believe the hype, the most important issue facing mankind. Why are we basing world-shaking trillion-dollar decisions on data produced by such amateurish buggy code? The issue is not the bugs found, but what other bugs and errors might be in there that we haven't found because nobody has looked. This stuff ought to be done by professional software engineers to high if not the highest levels of quality control.

Then of course there is the matter of code. McIntyre found a bug in the code... and it altered a few years data by a small amount... hold the phone... oh wait, don't hold the phone. I happen to do a fair bit of numerical work, and guess what my code is a tangled nest of old dried up crunchy bits combined with new fast bits and... yes... bugs. All scientific code is like this, it is developed by graduate students and post-docs who are more interested in getting code that works, rather than elegance or efficiency (we like efficiency if the code won't execute in the time it takes to get a cup of coffee, we try to make it faster). I expect there to be bugs in all scientific code, there will always be bugs in scientific code. Worse, in code developed by professional software engineers, the bugs will be harder to find because they don't actually understand the physical system they are trying to extract the statistical data from.
The point is that most bugs (in scientific code) work in such a way as to reduce accuracy (as in the case McIntyre found) but not reverse the conclusions drawn from that data. It happens, stop patting yourselves on the back and get over it already.

To someone who doesn't know the subject, the Discovery Institute's output looks scientific, plausible, and authoritative. When you know more, you can see that they're clever people bent on manipulating the evidence to reach their pre-decided conclusion. What if such an organisation were to gain a position of eminence and authority with political support, whether of the White House or the United Nations? (And what else are you fighting for here, if not to prevent exactly that?) What if they were able to use that influence to invade and subvert universities? What if other scientists who knew little biology assumed it was valid, and those biologists who quite rightly protested were labelled deniers? Do you think such a travesty is impossible? That it could take a court case to get the Dover school board policy to be chucked out, that a Presidential candidate could declare their preference for creationism to be taught in science classrooms, with some possibility of it happening? I don't.

Oh look another conspiracy theory... gosh were all really impressed down here I can tell you.

So if you're going to insist on debunking CA, do it properly!

Well since you asked. Here is another nice piece of (oh no, don't trust it, because a blog is obviously much more reliable) peer reviewed literature on the supposed divergence between instrument and proxy records....

Title: A matter of divergence: Tracking recent warming at hemispheric scales using tree ring data Author(s): Wilson R (Wilson, R.), D'Arrigo R (D'Arrigo, R.), Buckley B (Buckley, B.), Buntgen U (Buentgen, U.), Esper J (Esper, J.), Frank D (Frank, D.), Luckman B (Luckman, B.), Payette S (Payette, S.), Vose R (Vose, R.), Youngblut D (Youngblut, D.) Source: JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-ATMOSPHERES 112 (D17): Art. No. D17103 SEP 11 2007

Abstract: No current tree ring (TR) based reconstruction of extratropical Northern Hemisphere (ENH) temperatures that extends into the 1990s captures the full range of late 20th century warming observed in the instrumental record. Over recent decades, a divergence between cooler reconstructed and warmer instrumental large-scale temperatures is observed. We hypothesize that this problem is partly related to the fact that some of the constituent chronologies used for previous reconstructions show divergence against local temperatures in the recent period. In this study, we compiled TR data and published local/regional reconstructions that show no divergence against local temperatures. These data have not been included in other large-scale temperature reconstructions. Utilizing this data set, we developed a new, completely independent reconstruction of ENH annual temperatures (1750-2000). This record is not meant to replace existing reconstructions but allows some degree of independent validation of these earlier studies as well as demonstrating that TR data can better model recent warming at large scales when careful selection of constituent chronologies is made at the local scale. Although the new series tracks the increase in ENH annual temperatures over the last few decades better than any existing reconstruction, it still slightly under predicts values in the post-1988 period. We finally discuss possible reasons why it is so difficult to model post-mid-1980s warming, provide some possible alternative approaches with regards to the instrumental target and detail several recommendations that should be followed in future large-scale reconstruction attempts that may result in more robust temperature estimates.

Yeah... it looks like the divergence isn't quite what McIntyre made it out to be is it...
Well, adding another lie to this list won't hurt you at all will it?

Posted by: laserboy | November 7, 2007 4:29 PM

My (PZ-endorsed) blog Creek Running North has a comfortable lead in the Best of the 2501-3500 category, but a really rather hateful freeper-type is now in second place and gaining. The very worthwhile blog Driftglass is a close third. If people wanted to go over there and throw either of us some votes today, that'd be much appreciated.

Posted by: Chris Clarke | November 7, 2007 4:34 PM

Hey CA fans.

We don't care.

All your whining, pouting and insults aren't going to get us to vote for CA.

Cut your losses. Your only making me want to make sure I vote daily for BA.

And PZ's blog would kick CA's ass if PZ wanted the votes.

So go bitch at CA, where none of us will notice.

Posted by: Stevie_C | November 7, 2007 5:04 PM

Using prejudicial adjectives like "cranks" and "magically suppress" can hardly be considered as appropriate language or criticism of any worth whatsoever when readers can see for themselves that instead of "three people" as you comment it's thousands of highly qualified scientists who are refuting the false AGW political propaganda. Unlike your attempts here to "suppress" any consideration of the refuting evidence by the readers in this blog, the Climate Audit participants and the scientists insisting upon application of the scientific method to the exceptional claims of AGW proponents invite open discussion AND open research by independent investigators. Everytime you belittle such open and honest efforts to ask for the data and openly investigate the merits and demerits of the AGW related works, you inevitably cause people to wonder what it is you are so afraid of that you must hide it from public view and discourage people from seeing and asking questions about. Of course, most people are naturally suspicious of efforts to deny freedom of thought and speech.

Oh my god, I just got chills down my spine.

Does this not sound exactly like what an IDer or 9/11 troother would say? It's all about "waah! you're mean! stop calling me names! i'm being supressed!" Seriously, replace all the Global Warming verbage in there with evolution verbage, and you've got a typical creationist response. Throw in a few "9/11"s and "controlled demolitions", and you've got a Loose Change fan's petty reply.

Attention D. Patterson, Jay Robertson, Robert L, etc: the reason we ridicule your position and label you cranks is because you deserve it. You, and any other denialist you side with, exhibit every quality and characteristic of a bunch of intellectually dishonest hacks.

Posted by: Shnakepup | November 7, 2007 5:16 PM

Laserboy

(sarcasm) What, other people do temperature reconstructions from trees? No! Never! Really? (/sarcasm)

Yes, we are well aware of other reconstructions. Look down the index on the left hand side of climateaudit and you will find discussions on them. You will also find discussions on borehole temperature reconstructions, ice core d18O reconstuctions, ocean sediment SST reconstructions etc. etc.

However, the examples you give are irrelevant to the issue Steve Mc is discussing. There is a world of difference between post-1600 and pre-1600 reconstructions. Read the NAS panel report and you'll find out why.

BTW, Steve recreated the MBH98 in around 6kb of R code, and most of that was comments, and marshalling of data from files. If that is difficult and complex in your book - okay. The problems in MBH98 weren't bugs, as confirmed by the ex-president of the American Statistical Association Ed Wegman, they were fundamental flaws in the design and implementation of the study, and constituted bad science. But I'm sure you have some insight that Ed overlooked.

Posted by: Spence | November 7, 2007 5:23 PM

laserboy, I don't mean to kill the party but you are missing the point by a large margin on the post you're replying to (whoever is).
No matter what subject you're discussing, logical fallacies should be avoided in any reasoning dispute. You have missed the point with the first statement you made: Paleoclimate studies in general are not in question. In fact, many tree-ring studies actually contradict the premise that you are fighting for (the recently discovered Ababneh 2006, for example). The fact that other individuals have studied tree-rings alone does not validate one particular study. To my knowledge the audit audience are not largely disputing a small amount of temperature rise. Especially not with Mann's studies. Several authorities have identified Mann's methodologies as flawed. Regardless of if Mann's conclusion is correct, it does not validate a substantially flawed methodology.
It is true that CO2 is a prime candidate for reason for warming. However, forming a conclusion based upon causual relationship alone does not necessarily explain the observations fully, especially when it is so difficult to model climate change and we admit that we are not fully aware of all climate-driving forces on the planet. This neither affirms nor denies the premise, but arbitrarily tossing a possibility out and claiming victory is not necessarily professional. I think you're vastly oversimplifying the scenario.
The fact that a small amount of error is encountered with anyone's code isn't an excuse to use it anyway, especially when the errors are so clearly identified. Auditors like McIntyre have offered to help the authors fix their codes so that an honest conclusion can be drawn. By saying this it seems you understand that some errors are encountered; and they are not all small mistakes. If I remember correctly, the Y2K error rendered the new warmest year somewhere in the 1930s and it has been demonstrated that Mann and his close associates seem to be the only group capable of getting a steep temperature incline even from the strip-bark trees that it was recommended that he shouldn't use in the first place. The fact that small errors occur isn't the problem; it is the fact that once they are identified the authors refuse to correct them or even reveal their methodology. It would make your argument stronger to state how you feel this behavior is acceptable.

I'm a bit confused at how you went about "debunking CA" by citing sources that CA has made no comment about. I mean no offense by this, but if you don't even know what McIntyre has said, how are you going to disprove it by randomly posting work that has nothing to do with his research? Why are so many people spontaneously forgetting the definition of the word "audit"?

Posted by: Anthony R | November 7, 2007 5:25 PM

laserboy:

One article limited to "northeastern Tibetan Plateau" supposedly supports your case. It's hard to tell since you didn't mention any of the findings of the article. And let me guess: when someone provides evidence of a MWP in a region of similar size, you don't accept it as evidence of a global phenomenon, do you?

One limited to "northern Finland." Same problems as above.

One concerning Brazil and Chile, and this one includes SOLAR effects on tree rings, to. And same problems as above.

And finally, we have an article for which you do present some information - Wilson et al (2007)! And surely you do realize that CA has discussed it here http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1834 - not that Wilson et al was able to find any hockey sticks, either. In other words, Wilson's findings are a stark contrast to those of Mann et al (1998) and not supportive of his conclusions. Wilson et al finds temps in the late 20th century approaching those of the late 1700s.

Oops.

Posted by: Michael Jankowski | November 7, 2007 5:28 PM

So, Shnakepup...Why is this site competing in the SCIENCE category again? It seems more like a BELIEVER site to me. You use the term DENIER like the Holy Roman Inquisition used the term HERETIC when they threatened to burn Galileo at then stake over his belief that Earth orbits the Sun, rather than visa-versa. Do you worship regularly at the Church of Gaia?
Cheers.....theoldhogger

Posted by: Wm. L. Hyde | November 7, 2007 5:40 PM

You use the term DENIER like the Holy Roman Inquisition used the term HERETIC when they threatened to burn Galileo at then stake over his belief that Earth orbits the Sun, rather than visa-versa.

Yep, because accepting that humans are causing Global Warming is just like a belief in a geocentric universe!

And please, learn some html, HONESTLY. I hate it when people think that the only way to EMPHASIZE a word is to put it in ALL CAPS. Cheers yourself. :)

Posted by: Shnakepup | November 7, 2007 5:45 PM

Why do you think accepting humans are causing Global Warming is incompatible with belief that the historical temperature reconstructions contain serious errors?

Ah, I see. You're only concerned about the temperature reconstructions. So, you accept that humans are causing global climate change?

I don't have a problem with the data possibly being wrong. As you're implying, the data could be innaccurate, but the earth could still be warming up do to human activity. That's not the issue here. I'm just pissed off that you guys always affect this whole wide-eyed, innocent, "well, i'm just asking questions" attitude, when it obvious to us that you have an ideological agenda.

Posted by: Shnakepup | November 7, 2007 5:58 PM

Didn't answer the question, did he? Typical.

Posted by: Stevie_C | November 7, 2007 6:10 PM

It exists to give ammunition to denialist.
Ah, and there we have another example of the appeal to motive. Keep up the good work, by demonstrating these fallacies on this website, it makes them easier to spot on "anti-science" websites.

MBH98 gives ammunition to the "denialist" by being so wrong. If they hadn't drawn conclusions for which their study provided no support, there would be no contention.

Posted by: Spence | November 7, 2007 6:19 PM

Pointing out an appeal to motive argument would be a valid counterargument in a high school forensics setting.

Sadly for CA's flying monkeys, however, this is not high school. Motive is completely relevant when someone is working in the scientific field, the political field, or the legal field.

All of which fields are relevant to climate change denialism.

Posted by: Chris Clarke | November 7, 2007 6:36 PM

Of course humans are causing the warming. We build cities. We pave roads. We burn forests. We turn grassland into farmland and water it. We spew CO2, Methane and pollution into the air. It all affects weather and so therefore it all affects climate. The pollution in the air moderates the GHG effects. The stuff that gets on the ground makes it absorb more heat and it melts ice and snow. The oceans absorb and release CO2.

Except for a very few people, nobody's debating that.

So then the question is what to do about it. Well, how accurate is the information? Who's creating it? Who's replicating it? Why isn't it archived? Why are climate guys trying to do software design? Or statistics? If I want my car fixed I go to a good mechanic, if I want open heart surgery I go to a heart surgeon.

Nobody's trying to get you to vote for anything it doesn't look like. Maybe you should go take a look at a site for yourself and see if it's political or not or has bad science or not.

If somebody wants to doublecheck the statistics in a key methodolgy, or verify an algoritm does what it says it does, what the heck is anyone's beef they have some bizarre ID paranoid delusion conspiracy theory or are a bunch of right-wing nutjobs unless they go check for themselves?

Gee, some people are being very rude here.

Posted by: Melvin Jones | November 7, 2007 6:41 PM

Sadly for CA's flying monkeys, however, this is not high school. Motive is completely relevant when someone is working in the scientific field, the political field, or the legal field.
The quote from wikipedia that I included doesn't say appeal to motive is invalid. But it is invalid when not supported by evidence. The fact that an argument has been made itself is insufficient evidence of motive.

So what is your evidence of our motives? Or do you not believe in evidence-based reasoning? (e.g., "I say so, therefore it is correct")

That said, you don't need ad hominem circumstantial when you have ad hominem abusive with your high flying monkeys.

Posted by: Spence | November 7, 2007 6:48 PM

Spence: Yeah, use the blockquote tag to format quotes like that.

Also, on the appeal to motive fallacy, I have to point to Chris Clarke's comment above. This isn't a purely logical debate; motive is extremely relevant in controversial issues. Especially in issues where it's not uncommon for misinformation to be used liberally for the goal of swaying public opinion. In the AGW debate, certain parties have a vested interest in AGW being wrong.

I'll go ahead and check out CA and see if you're right. You're claiming that nobody there denies AGW, correct? If so, then I apologize for being rude, because we would then be on the same side.

Posted by: Shnakepup | November 7, 2007 7:04 PM

I'll go ahead and check out CA and see if you're right. You're claiming that nobody there denies AGW, correct

Clearly, Steve has no control (or rather limited control, without censorship accusations going nuts) over commenters at his blog. Some are thoughtful, considerate, objective. Some aren't. Just like any other blog. Steve severely limits certain topics (politics, religion, any discussion of thermodynamics or fraud) because they descend into petty bunfights. The unthreaded posts are there to remove the dross from the main threads, and tend to contain the wackiest arguments, so avoid those as well.

I have no issue with appeals to motive where appropriate, but they should be supported by evidence.

Posted by: Spence | November 7, 2007 7:10 PM

you don't need ad hominem circumstantial when you have ad hominem abusive

Again: this is not high school. An unflattering characterization of a person doesn't weaken an argument if it's arguably true.

And neither is failure to drop everything to argue an important topic with a partisan evidence that one is uninterested in evidence. It's just that I'm not really interested in giving you that much of my time.

Flagging abuse of forensics fetishes in a political-scientific context is a slam-dunk, though. Not much investment needed. And that's more for the others in the thread at this point than for you, as it looks like the point's lost on you.

Hope the rest of your day goes well, though.

Posted by: Chris Clarke | November 7, 2007 7:29 PM

Hansen's data was examined and Hansen had to admit tohaving made several errors the effect of which was to place warmest years in the 1990s when, in fact, they should have been in the 1930s. Hansen has acknowledged this error.

Yes, except that the 1930s were warmer in the 48 contiguous states of the USA. (Keyword: Dust Bowl.) Globally, the 1990s were much warmer than the 1930s. When the data point in question was corrected, the change to the global curve was microscopic.

And the hockey stick... fuck the hockey stick, fuck Mann, and look. Make sure you read all the fine print.

- climate is changing and so is CO2, and correlation implies causation;

Ignorance is strength, eh?

Shine infrared on CO₂ and watch what happens.

- our computer models are able to simulate something looking like real weather

Now please don't tell me you don't know the difference between climate and weather.

- such a rise has never happened before, all those past interstadials were a lot smaller or more local than we previously thought, and because such a large CO2 rise has also never happened before, the one must cause the other.

While rare, it has occasionally happened that CO₂ increased or decreased for reasons unrelated to temperature -- and then caused the temperature to rise or fall. Off the top of my head: the main phase of the eruptions of the Deccan Traps some 66 million years ago; the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum; the late Miocene to late Pliocene cooling that so nicely correlates to the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau above the treeline -- when silicates weather, they take CO₂ out of the atmosphere; a similar but much larger case of weathering that made the "Snowball Earth" episodes possible.

We know this because two dozen trees in North America grew a lot recently

"Two dozen" my ass. "North America" my ass.

You are making the diagnostic mistake of a crank: you believe everyone is as ignorant as you.

As someone who enjoys living in the freedom and comforts of modern civilization, I would prefer not to see these destroyed to protect against AGW.

So would you rather evacuate the 150 million inhabitants of Bangladesh?

Besides, I don't think much of "the freedom and comforts of modern civilization" is going to get compromised. Have a short look at European gas prices, for example.

The AGW theorists claim that this CO2 effect is amplified by positive feedbacks, mainly from the consequent increase in water vapour. However, the feedbacks are complicated and poorly understood.

Not as poorly as you seem to think. We know what the climate is like at 500 ppm CO₂ -- we had that some 15 million years ago.

they posit a large lag due to ocean heat capacity (except the sea is not warming any more that it was pre-industrial, witness sea level rise)

Almost all of the sea-level rise of the last 2000 years happened within the 20th century. If you like, I can give you the citation tomorrow.

Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | November 7, 2007 8:17 PM

Re #57

AR2's arguments that you counter here were quite weak, and easily countered. However you do make errors which I would like to correct so you can make a stronger case next time:

And the hockey stick... fuck the hockey stick, fuck Mann, and look. Make sure you read all the fine print.

In essence, you have said "fuck Mann, fuck the Hockey Stick" and then linked to a graph of... Mann's hockey stick.

I fully agree with countering weak arguments, but to counter weak arguments with weak arguments simply prolongs the debate. Always cut to the chase and use your strongest argument. The mistake I've highlighted here isn't the only mistake you make either. Perhaps it would be wiser to leave the counter arguments to those with a better understanding of climate science?

Posted by: Spence | November 7, 2007 9:07 PM

#51 -- "You're claiming that nobody there denies AGW, correct? If so, then I apologize for being rude, because we would then be on the same side."

Your comment begs the question of AGW. The question is not AGW. The question is whether climate science can reliably detect AGW.

Try going into AR4 WGI Chapter 8, and Chapter 8 Supplementary, and look at the Figures showing the errors inherent in GCMs. Figure S8.14, for example, shows that the ensemble average error in surface heat flux ranges is about (+/-)10 W/m^2, with individual GCMs registering much larger errors. This error is already 4x larger than the entire excess forcing from all the AGHGs entering the atmosphere since the beginning of the 20th century.

Figure S8.7 shows the ensemble average error in OLR is easily (+/-)2.5 W/m^2, with individual models easily 5x that.

Figure 8.2 in Chapter 8 shows that the annual error in surface temperature is about (+/-)1 C for the ensemble average of 23 GCM realizations and probably averages (+/-)2.5 C for individual GCMs.

Given an _annual_ error range of 2 C (at best), how is it possible to claim that one can even resolve a _centennial_ increase of 0.7 C, much less assign that unresolvable increase to a specific cause?

Asserting or denying AGW is not the issue. The issue is this: given the huge and objectively undeniable uncertainties, how can anyone claim both to have scientific integrity and to have detected an unresolvable effect.

Posted by: Pat Frank | November 7, 2007 10:49 PM