The S Fred award

Here is a quirky video about global warming I thought you might find interesting:

http://peoplegeek.wordpress.com/2007/01/06/global-warming-a-clear-and-p…

Why vis, such self recognition. Keep it up and you might get nominated.

Such smugness indeed -- and we're all so damn proud of it despite the deniers who keep making it so damn easy!

To have an equivalent award to my lot (the anti-AGW crowd) is fair enough but I'd suggest that people that are not widely known outside of the protagonists on the blogs such as Wills Eschenhach shouldn't be contenders, as the whole point is the reach of the argument into the mainstream.

The fat ninnie, Al Gore, is obviously a front runner for my side and clearly Monckton would be a front runner for your lot.

Strawman alert! Imagine a world where supporting a scientific consensus is neither giant alarm nor denial of the science. Oh wait, that would be this one. Oh woe is us to be in the middle.

Pat Michaels trying to convince the public that climate change is a good thing.

Ah, yes: Jack reminds us of the power of pretty words to persuade.

The fatty Algore, who invented the Internets so that lonely denialists can have a voice, surely is frowning at the power of The Google, despite the fact that The Google doesn't have a 'wisdom' button, thus confusing many. Speaking of needing a wisdom button,

If your dream man willis is so influential, Jack, he'll take the ethical high ground and publish the corrections to the record, so the robed priests scientists can correct their erroneous trajectory. Else it's so much Googling and bandwidth expenditure at character assassination sites.

Best,

D

Nice one, Dano. In typical fashion you completely miss the point of what I was saying. I was in no way defending or supporting either side for getting it wrong. I was pointing out that Willis is hardly well known enough to be the type of nominee who could be awarded such an 'accolade'.

Your second paragraph is risible in its use of 'ethical high ground'. Oh! The irony. The delusion.

Actually, Jack, a lovely Merlot was working it's wiles on my fingers and I could have done a better job in making my point, which didn't have much - if anything - to do with you personally.

It combined running with two things in your comment: the typical dichotomous, polarized argumentation typically found in certain ideological stances and the 'Algore/Michaelmoore is fat' meme. Combining this with my 'The Google needs a wisdom button' meme, we have two memes**.

These two memes are convenient to explain the spread of the condition that leads to the award.

We can, BTW, find the tension of the Googler thinking their conclusions are better than folk who do the work for a living on this very site.

Best,

D

** It could be said that the spoken word works best here and out loud this is memememe for short.

It helps us to consider that this sounds like the fat lady...er...warming up to sing, dunnit?

Jack, of course, gets it wrong. The S Fred is about the side of the argument that a) gets it wrong, b) gets it wrong in ways that are so wrong they are beyond not even wrong and c) reacts badly when told how wrong they are. There is also a certain ethical argument to this as anyone who viewed the Willis and Pat show could tell you.

"so wrong they are beyond not even wrong"

Is that the same as "not even not even wrong"?

Or would the latter mean something else: that they are "not quite not even wrong"? Or perhaps that they are "just wrong"?

It seems that any way you look at it, the statement would still be true.

Eli Rabett: why are you claiming credit over at the Quiggin blog for the very cogent contribution by Richard Tol to the sensitivity analyis thread?

Not that I know of.

Well, for sure not. Tol said:
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All scenarios of the World Bank, UN, IPCC and who not have population growth slowing substantially in a few decades from now. Total economic growth would slow too, and probably per capita economic growth would slow with aging. This would reduce the growth rate of energy use; only in a handful of scenarios, this is dominated by a switch to coal as the main energy source.

And then the spectral window of carbon dioxide saturates.

So, if you stop looking at the temperature scenarios of the IPCC, and start looking at their first derivatives, you will find that these decades are the ones with the most rapid change.

You would need to assume massive methane or carbon dioxide releases to reverse this.
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I replied:
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Richard Tol said:

"And then the spectral window of carbon dioxide saturates."

The spectral window for carbon dioxide is already saturated, which is why the response is logarithmic and not linear or higher (water vapor response to a linear increase in other forcings).

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CO2 absorption is already saturated. Nothing new about that, just seemed to me Tol was saying it was not.

I nominate "Environmental Geology" - for obvious reasons.

> CO2 absorption is already saturated
I thought the bands are not saturated at low pressure/high elevation where IR can escape into space, only in the lower troposphere?

God. Clear winner IMO.

Hank, you can always find some distance over which an absorption is not saturated, so in one sense this is not very interesting. OTOH there are interesting things that happen with pressure broadening, and finally, most importantly, if the CO2 mixing ratio increases higher in the troposphere, the net effect is to increase the volume of the atmosphere in which greenhouse warming is effective. Put this together with the fact that you also increase water vapor concentrations there, and strange and bad things happen, like you wet the stratosphere, which decreases O3 because of HOx cycles. In short you don't have a simple linear issue.

Nexus, first you publish Monckton, now you nominate God for the S. Fred. Having looked at the carrot bill for the bunnies this month I ask where does one sign up and what enlistment bonus are they offering? Curious (and needy) Rabetts need to know.

All,

I've got a gret nominee. How about Jason Lee Steorts, deputy managing editor of the National Review for his June, 5, 2006 howler Scare of the Century (a cover story no less)? First, he starts off by having the nerve to accuse global warming "alarmists" of being morally and professionally negligent (i.e. of going "reprehensibly too far") for raising concerns over polar ice-cap mass loss and sea-level rise. Having made such an in-your-face accusation, he proceeds to defend it with a piece that was riddled with basic errors including misquotes, sloppy research, and even ignorance of basic high school physics (e.g. the ideal gas and the Clausius Clapyron relationship). To top it all off, shortly thereafter his own primary source regarding remote sensing of ice-mass buildup in Antarctica (Curt Davis) issued a press release saying that Steorts was full of it and had completely misunderstood, and misused his research. Yes, the man was publicly repudiated by his own damn source. To top it off, he then turned on Davis in a NR follow-up piece claiming that Davis had been in error himself about Antarctic ice-mass and presented some numbers of his own... only to have Davis point out to the world that he hadn't even gotten the density of ice and snow correct, and had thus botched a simple math problem.

And yet... the article stands as a NR cover story that was widely circulated all over the internet last year and is still being cited by all and sundry on the Far-Right.

Surely this ought to be good for some kind of prize?....

If your description is even close to accurate, Scott, I think Steorts is a acategory all by himself -- and we therefore nedd a whole new award for him.

Might I suggest the "Fred Flintstone Award"?