James Hansen replies to the deceitful IBD editorial:
The latest swift-boating (unless there is a new one among seven
unanswered calls on my cell) is the whacko claim that I received
$720,000.00 from George Soros. Here is the real deal, with the order
of things as well as I can remember without wasting even more time
digging into papers and records.Sometime after giving a potentially provocative interview to Sixty
Minutes, but before it aired, I tried to get legal advice on my rights
of free speech. I made two or three attempts to contact people at
Freedom Forum, who I had given permission to use a quote (something
like "in my thirty-some years in the government, I have never seen
anything like the present restrictions on the flow of information from
scientists to the public") on their calendar. I wanted to know where
I could get, preferably inexpensive, legal advice. Never got a reply.But then I received a call from the President of the Government
Accountability Project (GAP) telling me that I had won the Ridenaur
Award (including a moderate amount of cash -- $10,000 I believe; the
award is named for the guy who exposed the Viet Nam My Lai massacre),
and offering pro bono legal advice. I agreed to accept the latter
(temporarily), signing something to let them represent me (which had
an escape clause that I later exercised).I started to get the feeling that there may be expectations (strings)
coming with the award, and I was concerned that it may create the
appearance that I had spoken out about government censorship for the
sake of the $. So I called the President of GAP, asking how the
nomination process worked and who made the selection. He mentioned
that he either nominated or selected me. So I declined the award, but
I continued to accept pro bono legal advice for a while.The principal thing that they provided was the attached letter to
NASA. This letter shows me why scientists drive 1995 Hondas and
lawyers drive Mercedes. I have a feeling that the reader of that
letter had at least one extra gulp of coffee that morning.
Meanwhile Steinn Sigurðsson investigated the IBD claims himself:
So: Hansen got pro-bono legal advice, and possibly some media advice (though I doubt he needs that, he'll have his own AddressBook of contacts) from GAP, which got some of its funding (about 15%) from OSI, including $100k specifically to assist Science and Engineering whistleblowers. The Soros Foundation, of which OSI is part, spend $400 million in 2006.
One can find all this online in 30 seconds through Google.
Yet IBD considers this a "threat to democracy" because these organizations seek to affect public opinion and "lack transparency".
Do IBD op-ed columns attempt to affect public opinion?
The column was not signed, btw.I thought Investor's Business Daily approved of rich people being allowed to spend their money however they liked?
I should note that an additional seven seconds with Google showed that the Government Accountability Project didn't just reveal their relationship to Hansen, they sent out Press Releases SHOUTING this fact to the world
Contrast this with NewsBusters (part of Media Research Center), who have helped lead the swift boating of Hansen. They sure seem to keep very quiet about the hundreds of thousands of dollars MRC has received from Exxon, don't they?
Update: Robert McClure talked to GAP and OSI:
GAP's president Louis Clark and Rick Piltz, director of GAP's climate science watch program, say they helped Hansen in about February to April of 2006. Their 15-page grant proposal to the Open Society Institute in late July of that year had 15 lines that referred to Hansen, with seven lines recounting what they'd already done for him and two more that said they "remain available to defend Dr. Jim Hansen's job and to offer legal advice upon request." Said Clark:
This is happening because it's much easier to attack the messenger than it is to actually deal with and come to terms with what his message is. Some people have a vested interest in not dealing with the concerns he has raised.
Clark had a minor correction to Hansen's account: Hansen called them about representation after having been told he was nominated for the Ridenaur Award, rather than GAP calling Hansen to offer counsel.
Amy Weil, a spokeswoman for the Open Society Institute, e-mailed to say her institute is non-partisan and has never given any money to Hansen, adding:
However, OSI does support whistleblower protection agencies and we applaud Dr. Hansen for exposing NASA's attempts to silence his call for prompt reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
Care to define "swiftboating"? In my opinion, what happened to Kerry was legitimate, and tough bananas for his jerky past.
Yeah, [Kerry was such a jerk](http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp):
>Kerry earned his Silver Star on 28 February 1969, when he beached his craft and jumped off it with an M-16 rifle in hand to chase and shoot a guerrilla who was running into position to launch a B-40 rocket at Kerry's boat. Contrary to the account quoted above, Kerry did not shoot a "Charlie" who had "fired at the boat and missed," whose "rocket launcher was empty," and who was "already dead or dying" after being "knocked down with a .50 caliber round." Kerry's boat had been hit by a rocket fired by someone else — the guerrilla in question was still armed with a live B-40 and had only been clipped in the leg; when the guerrilla got up to run, Kerry assumed he was getting into position to launch a rocket and shot him
Care to define "swiftboating"
Given the rest of your post, I assume that would be a complete waste of time.
Nice, I see in that piece that not a single shred from his detractors appears.
Besides that, I'm referring to Kerry's B.S. throwing of "his" medals onto the White House lawn, and his lies about Cambodia and the other crap about the raping, pillaging and cutting off of ears etc. What a joke.
Tim, you still have not fully understood how it works!
telling LIES about Kerry s military career: GOOD
telling the TRUTH about the petraeus report: BAD
http://www.democracyarsenal.org/2007/09/fuzzy-numbers-a.html
and in the same way:
Exxon funding "sceptic" global warming messages: GOOD.
Soros, giving money (and much less money than claimed) to a whistleblower organisation, who write a single letter for Hansen (to defend him from a political appointee, who faked his resumee..), while Hansen declines to take money directly from them: BAD.
wow, the term WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING is getting a whole new meaning. was this a concerted action by D. Cheney and Jc?
ps: anyone got some time at hand, to check the right wing blogs that Tim had linked to for some corrections and updates? surely they will NOT let all those FALSE claims stand as they were posted?!?
pps: note to self: if ever forming a political party, make the dimwits your electoral base!
Not to mention that I've lost a lot of respect for Snopes since they came out with this characterization of Reagan's "If you've seen one Redwood, you've seen them all" as a paraphrase. Lame.
Ben said" what happened to Kerry was legitimate, and tough bananas for his jerky past."
How do you know, Ben?
Were you THERE or did you talk to the people who were?
Do you know more about what happened than the Navy officers who investigated and awarded Kerry the Silver Star?
Have you ever been in combat?
Know what it's like to be fired upon?
If so, ever received any commendations for valor?
Tim
I think you have to research that "blast" of courage(pun intended) from the US senate's resident gigolo showed getting outta the boat ( Ok I'm jealous he marries rich gals). From what I recall reading he received a severe reprimand for not following proper procedures in the event of enemy engagement. He actually endangered the lives of his crew by making them sitting ducks to enemy fire..... ie they were stationary in a river surrounded by thick jungle. It's alleged he actually demanded the medal and received it under sufferance.
I thought Exxon has stopped political donations recently thereby allowing Uncle George to take up the slack.
Let's get back to Jimbo
Oh the irony
"Sometime after giving a potentially provocative interview to Sixty Minutes, but before it aired, I tried to get legal advice on my rights of free speech."
So let me get this straight. Jimbo thinks he's getting muzzled but gives audience to 60 mins. He then gets a check for 10G, realizes that it may not look good if he heads off to JPMorgan Chase to deposit it but gets legal and PR advice instead. pro bone of course:-)
Jimbo gave numerous interviews about his so called muzzling, which obviously infers that the administration kneecappers are really like the Marx brothers in drag.
This is hilaroius.
Isn't Jim really just a political operative these days? Really!
Look, the fundamental problem with Kerry/Vietnam was that he wanted it both ways. He wanted us on the right to look at his status as a decorated veteran, but then he also wanted us to ignore his anti-veteran behavior after the fact. Sorry buddy, but it doesn't work that way.
Well, ben, I now know all I need to know about your sense of ethics, honor and fair play.
You don't like what Kerry did after he left the service, therefore it's OK to tell people he obtained his silver star fraudulently?
Wow.
Ben, it was a paraphrase, and a reasonably accurate one. Did you read the link you provided?
(Apologies for participating in the thread hijacking.)
Yes, the administration attempted to silence Hansen, but ultimately failed. I'm sorry you think scientists should shut up and be silenced by political hacks just because your side has no science to speak of. (That is what this is all about, right? If you had scientific reasons to go against Hansen, you'd do that instead of making up stupid conspiracy theories.)
And it's "implies."
He wasn't silenced, Boris. It was a stunt. A nifty politcal stunt by a well armed operative.
He can do what he likes But I'm also perfectly within my rights to judge the horse flesh and figure out the guy is trying to sell me a mule.
And it's not my side by the way. I voted for Clinton and Harry Bronwe as well as Bush in 2000 staying out in 04.
Don't automatically think people support the GOP if they're agaisnt the Dems.
Let me figure out this conspiracy theory. Hansen thinks "Man, I could sure use some of Soros' $$$. I know, I'll pretend that the Bushies are trying to silence me!" So he pretends, then, just as he planned, Soros comes to the rescue (through the GAP) and provides him with legal advice against Hansen's pretend threat. So Hansen is richer by legal advice that he doesn't need because he made up the threat in the first place.
Got it.
If you believe the right wing, the only war crimes that occurred in Vietnam were committed by Kerry.
With regards to Hansen, the apparent outrage is over money Hansen didn't have to spend to defend his true statements. The money he didn't have to spend was somewhere between $0 and $720,000.
I also have to wonder who "packaged" the 22 year old college dropout with a faulty resume and no understanding of science for his transition from political hucksterer to NASA media relations appointee and political hucksterer.
Na Boris:
I think you ended up in the wrong Cul de sac despite using sat nav telling you directions where to go.
Jimbo didn't want to abide by the guidelines governing any large bureaucratic institution like NASA that has rules as to who can talk to the press and about what. Every large instituion has those rules and guidlines by the way.
Jimbo has a big ego and wants to save the world before we go to hell in a basket by april 13 2067(as his model is predicting :-)).
The press of course loves Jimbo and Jimbo loves the press loves the press back by the bucket load.
So Jimbo figures a way of getting around this Guidelines nonsense by publicising how he lives in a "climate of fear" while he's publicising "climate fear".
So he begins to give interviews etc. Uncle George's crew are nothing if not opportunitist as they are taught by the master and offer jimbo all sorts of "assistance".
So no, Jimbo wasn't in it for the 10g. He's in it to move his politcal position.
How come nobody can answer that date problem with Kerry's Honorable Discharge? It was dated 1978, years after he had actually been discharged, but shortly after Carter authorized NEW discharges for protestors who had left the military with less-than-honorable discharges. Kerry knows the truth about the type of discharge he originally received, but he's not telling. It's like he also knew the truth about his college grades, which were worse than W's (so were Gore's), but he kept those records secret in the campaign so his backers could lie about them. What a dork.
If anyone still doesn't know the meaning of "swiftboating", this comment thread provides some excellent examples.
Then why are you making so much of pro bono legal advice in the other thread? It's only of value if the threat s real.
Indeed.
"It's alleged he actually demanded the medal and received it under sufferance."
Funnily enough these allegations didn't surface until a good twenty years later after Kerry had become an outspoken critic of the war and a Democratic politician.
Equally funnily, the people now making those claims (who don't the men who actually served on the same boat as Kerry and whose lives he supposedly endangered) uniformly praised him in formal written reprots at the time.
But hey we can't all heroicly defend the skies of Texas from the Mexican air force.
JC - bullpucky.
Hansen did not say that approval per se was bad.
He was saying that the approval process was being used to muzzle scientists and in its place push bad science claims from the administration, to a degree that he had never experienced before.
He had a child - and I use that word carefully - making decisions about what he could say about science (not politics) and about what the public was going to learn about the science that government scientists were doing, and that child was muzzling science and altering findings, and Hansen stood up and said, 'this is wrong.' He refused to let the administration hide or misrepresent his and other scientists' work - and that was the right thing for him to do. It was the right thing whether or not you or I agree with his position.
So let me get this straight. Jimbo thinks he's getting muzzled but gives audience to 60 mins. He then gets a check for 10G, realizes that it may not look good if he heads off to JPMorgan Chase to deposit it but gets legal and PR advice instead. pro bone of course:-) .... This is hilaroius.
so you find it hilarious, that he got legal counsel?
is this "hilarious" on the same scale, that the "Hansen got 700000 from Soros" claim?
Jimbo didn't want to abide by the guidelines governing any large bureaucratic institution like NASA that has rules as to who can talk to the press and about what. Every large instituion has those rules and guidlines by the way.
are you talking about those typical limits, that people doing BASIC RESEARCH have while talking about their work?
do you support the whistleblower organisation or the political appointee, trying to muzzle him?
"Ben, it was a paraphrase, and a reasonably accurate one. Did you read the link you provided?"
A pretty biased paraphrase. What Reagan said was so short it did not need paraphrasing, unless they were trying to make him look bad.
Do you guys all believe that the documents Dan Rather presented to derail Bush were not obvious fakes?
Please think of trolls like ben as being ammo bait.
If you stop and pick it up, the sniper trolls assassinate the comment thread.
In the name of all that's good and sane, there really are "people" who don't merit a response.
I just wanted to point out that Jim Hansen's name is not "Jimbo", and that "Swiftboating" is the general term for highly organized character assassination. Also, there is nothing "Hilarious" about seeking legal advice, unless of course you find constitutional rights humorous.
Even if Jim Hansen is a terrible person, he is still a great scientist. Since his detractors have a difficult time mounting serious critiques of his group's work, they resort to petty personal insults. Post some serious critique, or go home.
So let me get this straight.
Soros funds a foundation.
That foundation gives $720,000 total to watchdog organizations, including $100,000 to GAP.
GAP offers $10,000 to Hansen, which he declines.
GAP also offer legal representation to Hansen, which he accepts to the tune of one letter.
One frickin' legal letter.
And somehow, people are jumping in condemning Hansen, rather than the guys who claim this shows that Soros bought Hansen for $720,000.
Don't these guys care about their honor and intergrity?
Ben tactics compendium thus far:
IOW: can we stop the thread hijacking?
Thank you everyone, in advance, for your help.
Best,
D
Just trying to make the comments more interesting. Yeah, it's a hijack, but the Hansen thing is pretty much dead, as proven by Tim. That's why I come here. Is there really anything else that can be said about it? Not really.
The Kerry thing is not a hijack thing, since the term "swift boating" was used. Then I said that I wasn't that keen on Snopes anymore (Snopes used by Tim to defend Kerry) because of that lame bit on Reagan. Some of you folks thought that was OK, so now I'm trying to see if those same folks believe that the Dan Rather documents were not really fake. That will tell me something. Seems reasonable, no?
Just as an FYI, Gore graduated cum laude in government - the equivalent of an A- average. Mostly due to an exceptional senior year and lots of projects whereby he replaced his earlier bad grades.
W, on the other hand, graduated with between a C and a C+
Also, Gore's SATs were substantially higher than W's. Now that all the old lies are being resurrected.
What Gore and W did post undergrad is not comparable. Gore worked, enlisted, did combat journalism, came back, took part time courses in law and theology, worked as a journalist, dropped out to run for congress, won a seat. His grades at Vanderbilt - essentially auditing - were all incompletes.
W went to grad school and got an MA. but only their undergrad years are comparable. W's first years were better - belying their reputations, Gore was more of a partier than W, some of his fellow students say he smoked pot almost every day his freshmen and sophomore years.
Gore cleaned up his act at 20. W at 40. That's the main difference between them.
Dano:
I think the hard truth is, we can only set a good example, and post germane things, and basically pretend the trolls' plus their repliers' posts aren't even there.
Beyond that, if you check out Pharyngula, PZ Meyers has decent links to Firefox plug-ins that implement killfiles. He has one that kills people on his blog, but there are others that individual users use. I can't imagine I'd miss anything if everything JC posted from now on was display:none.
I believe the technological solution should involve Greasemonkey scripts. If done carefully, they would work on safari for os x too, via Creammonkey.
Dunno how we script/implement things on IE7 though. Perhaps VB or for freeware, the old applescript-like "Frontier 5.0" which was cross platform Classic Macintosh and Windows 98 and up.
FF killfile plug-ins?!? I need to visit PDQ.
And thanks, Ben, for admitting you hijacked the thread.
Best,
D
ben, you are really making yourself look bad here. Do you think that because you don't like what Kerry did after his service in Vietnam, it is OK to lie about Kerry's service record? Please answer, because it looks to me like your moral compass is broken.
Tim,
IIRC, Ben is a libertarian leaning towards Randroid, i.e. no moral compass was installed on delivery.
"ben, you are really making yourself look bad here. Do you think that because you don't like what Kerry did after his service in Vietnam, it is OK to lie about Kerry's service record?"
No, I do not think that it is OK to lie about anyone. Not ever.
Actually, the "not ever" thing is too rigid, as there are obvious exceptions to the "never lie" thing, in extreme situations that rarely occur. In American/Western political/scientific discourse this essentially never happens. E.g. someone is going to shoot me in the face if I don't lie about another person, etc.
SAUDAÃÃES LITERÃRIAS DE PORTUGAL.
HAVE A NICE WEEK-END
Ben sez ...
But earlier, he said ...
Why did you say that the swiftboating of Kerry was legitimate, then? Don't tell me you bought into that boatload of lies, please. You can't be that gullible, can you?
And, yes, it appears that the Rather documents are not genuine. What does one have to do with the other?
A simple question ben:
Haven't your lies hurt the country enough?
As for looking bad, the only thing that is known with certainty is that someone is lying about Kerry.
Something that also looks certain, is that Kerry is one of them.
"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared -- seared -- in me."
He's talking about Nixon, but Nixon wasn't president yet. Some memory. That, and it certainly wasn't the Khmer Rouge acting with the Vietnamese, they hated each other.
Read closely. He didn't say they were working together.
As far as which President he's talking about, your quote snippet (I'm tempted to say "quote mine") doesn't say. Nixon had been elected by Christmas, 1968 and was in office four weeks later, so as far as memory lapses go, it ain't a big one even if you're right.
But what's your point? What if Kerry misspoke, or even lied outright?
Why the deflection from the Swiftboat lies?
For someone who declares "it is never right to lie about someone", you seem awfully interested in deflecting criticism of the swiftboat lies to criticism of unrelated behavior by Kerry instead.
Despite your previous comment about lying, your post is much more in the spirit of this:
Ben,
The issue is you and your ever-shifting rationalizations, not anyone else. Why posters here continues to engage you is beyond me - there is certainly no substance to your second-hand slime, just the typical vileness and hatred of your stripe. Into the grease(monkey) pit you go, and no more amnesties.
Oh Mndean, there's plenty of vileness and hatred going around, even on this board, in all directions. I see no objections here when it's directed at GWB. That's the nature of politics and political discussion, like it or not.
And nobody has convinced me yet that the swift boat veterens were lying about Kerry. The only thing that is conclusive is that there is disagreement about what happened. Short of Kerry releasing his records, we'll never really know. I'm sure you all would defend Bush if this sort of thing happened to him. Oh wait, none of you did.
I would, but it didn't. Rather, after all, got his ass kicked out of CBS (and is now suing for a large sum).
He was denounced, not defended, by his employer.
The fact that the swiftboaters are lying is quite easy to verify. You're saying, in essence, that you don't care, because ...
IBD may have wildly exagerated the Soros-Hansen link.
No such questions exist about the Heinz-Kerry-Hansen pay out of $250,000.
Here's a snip from the publicity page of the Heinz Foundation website
"James Hansen
7th Annual Heinz Award Recipient Read/View Acceptance
Dr. James Hansen receives the Heinz Award in the Environment for his exemplary leadership in the critical and often-contentious debate over the threat of global climate change."
Lindzen accepts 10 g's from Exxon and he's an "oil industry stooge" but Hansen pockets a cool 250 large for an "environmental award" from Heinz-Kerry and he's your hero.
The word hypocrisy doesn't really do this kind of duplicitous thinking justice.
Lance, bet it was a whole lot easier to find out about Hansen's Heinz award that it was to find out about Lindzen's Exxon money. Thats the difference. Lindzen is ashamed to say where he got his funding. So are people like Tim Ball, Tom Harris and Pat Michaels. Why do you think that is?
PS. Has anyone noticed how Newsbusters Noel Sheppard overuses the term "disgraceful"? It occurs in at least 50% of his posts.
Err Lance, Senator John Heinz was a Republican. Are you trying to tell us that Hansen is working for the Republicans because he got a Heinz award?
Plus, Hansen was working, then he got an award. He wasn't working to get the Heinz award.
Really, CNS/NewsMax believers are so lame.
Best,
D
ben, it sure is telling the way you keep trying to change the subject to Bush, or Reagan, or things that Kerry did after his service ended. I quoted a good summary of what happened with the Silver Star. What, precisely, is wrong with it? You are acting just like the people who insist that the Rather forgeries are genuine.
I work at NASA and have been involved with press releases ... what occurred with Hansen is normal and has been for years -- and is NOT the "censorship" it is portrayed to be.
You are always supposed to inform the news office prior to interviews, then inform them when it has been completed. That's their JOB. They are responsible for dealing with the press.
Having a staffer present for onsite interviews is utterly normal for everyone. Doesn't happen all the time, usually according to the press office work-load more than anything else.
Hansen had given over 1400 interviews, including 15 the month he claimed he was being "censored", but was ignoring his employers policy and got called on it.
If it had been me, I would have been expected to get fired or at least called to the woodshed. But it would never be me, since I recognize rules apply to me. They are not burdensome.
But Hansen seems to think rules don't apply to him.
Then to take legal and media advice from a political group is astounding. This is so outside the pale of normalcy at NASA and science in general, it cannot be minimized.
I've had arguments with press people over the phrasing of press releases. It usually revolves around them not understanding the science, or trying to fulfill their mission to write them at the 6th grade level, etc.
But Hansen seems to want people to think he's being censored.
And, by the way, his science is NOT good. The code he uses to process temperature data is now being audited after being found by amateurs to contain substantial errors. So far, it has been reported to contain hundreds of arbitrary "adjustments" which tend to reinforce warming trends.
And look at the sites reporting the raw data to begin with (what a joke -- major fraud):
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/weather_stations/
Study the photos of the weather sites reporting those temperatures going into Hansen's dubious sw ...
Dano:
The other thing is, if we "collect" these points and periodically (preferably link to a refutation of or) refute them, that's not the same as engaging the trolls. Or so I tell my conscience.
Study the photos of the weather sites reporting those temperatures going into Hansen's dubious sw
Ooooh! Ooooh! Two new indicators serendipitously discovered in one comment!
Eureeeeeka!!
Twofer.
Best,
D
Tim, Dano, et al.:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4107http://userscripts.org/scripts/…
That's the killfile script, and it is greasemonkey, so perhaps it can be adapted to safari creammonkey some day.
Pay attention to the warning about someone hacking the script site. Basically, you need to go over the scripts before installing. It's believed all the bad scripts are gone and no more hacking has occurred, but better safe than sorry.
Marion:
Got it. I understand. I'm currently experiencing impatience with the tiresome whack-a-mole.
Society has moved away from the 2% of fraidy-cat white males who have chosen their identity as enviro-haters. We can either stroke their no-further-developed-than-adolescent-boy egos or practice ignorage.
Surely on occasion we can amuse ourselves at their expense, but our energy can be directed toward whack-a-moling the losers who wish to drag society down. Best to discuss solutions and whack-a-mole the fraidy cats on that ground than whack-a-mole the fraidy cats on old, tired ground.
Best,
D
ddtruy33:
A. We have only your word you work at NASA. And no idea in what capacity - janitor would be my placement for you.
B. George Deutsch not only worked at NASA, but got to order others around - people like James Hansen. So a good question here is, are you another lying, phony hack, feloniously stealing the taxpayers money under false pretenses, as he did?
C. The GAP is not a political group. It's in no way partisan. No whistleblower would be excluded for being a Republican, a conservative, anything you wish to name. Indeed, by saying what you are, you are implying that to be a Republican is to be a Nazi, and to be in any other party is to take initiative and have your own moral compass. Is that the goal?
D. The Ridenhour Award is hardly partisan, either. Ridenhour, an infantryman. helicopter gunner, and later journalist (and the only person at the Princeton version of the Milgram experiment who refused to administer "learning" shocks) was not a partisan hack. We don't even have a record of his voting patterns then. The president at the time he exposed the Song My (My Lai 4) massacre was Democrat Lyndon Johnson.
E. Therefore, I hereby raise you to useless lying troll status.
I tell you, it's like spraying for roaches in a restaurant - a never-ending and distasteful battle. And once you fall behind, you're overrun with vermin.
>I tell you, it's like spraying for roaches in a >restaurant - a never-ending and distasteful battle. >And once you fall behind, you're overrun with vermin.
In the end, they don't matter. Reality ultimately wins.
It's sufficient to state it; let them scurry.
If you want to win a $250,000 award, you must first:
1) Rise to the top of your field
2) Make forceful statements asserting your position when it isn't popular to do so.
3) Draw the attention and support of a US Senator.
4) Have history prove your projections to be astonishingly correct, while that of your detractors crash and burn.
5) 13 short years after you first impressed the late US senator, you are presented with an award in his Honor.
Eplogue:
3 years later reluctantly endorse John Kerry. Who else was he going to endorse? Bush?
Since you work for NASA, it's safe to presume you'll be going up in orbit soon to photograph those pesky satellites whose temp data correlates so nicely with that awful ground station data, right?
Have a nice journey - and, hey, forget your spacesuit!
This is all you need to know about Hansen. He long ago crossed over from scientist to politician. The problem is he is still masquerading as a scientist.
In March of 2004, James Hanses wrote in Scientific American,
...Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue and energy sources such as synfuels, shale oil and and tar sands were receiving strong consideration. Now, however, the need is for demonstrating objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions.
Note that he says that only now he is trying to be objective. That means he was not being objective until now. He was intentionally trying to manipulate the public. That should have been the end of him right there and then. A scientist should NEVER MANIPULATE ANYTHING. HE MUST ALWAYS BE OBJECTIVE.
When can you believe someone who admits he was lying to you in the past when he only admits it after the fact?
On the other side, comparing the supposed lack of transparency of Hansen recieving insignificant legal and PR assistance, we have this relevation:
> audited ... substantial errors
Ah, yes, the CA line. And you claim to work at NASA, eh?
The self-appointed auditors have a definition for "substantial" -- it means "not significant but we want you to think it's really big." Like teenage boys, really.
Prediction? Hansen hasn't even described past measurements correctly.
A few weeks ago, he had to revise the claim that 9 of the top 10 warmest years occurred in the last 12 years. This had been a key plank used to promote policy change.
Turns out the data had been mishandled. Once an amateur pointed it out (after 100s of hours of legwork, paper-reading, and number-crunching), the results had to be revised now showing 4 of the 10 hottest years were back in the 1930s, 5 of them before World War II.
Why endorse Kerry? That is very odd for a scientist to do. The more public he is, the more compelling the reason not too be compromised. $250,000 appears to be the trade-in value for a Ph.D. 'cause he sure isn't working in that realm anymore.
"The only thing that is conclusive is that there is disagreement about what happened."
So why do you choose to believe the version that ties in to your political prejudices.
Tell me in what other context would you accept informal statements made decades after an event as more reliable than the formal written accounts made at the time?
You work at NASA and you confuse global temps with US temps? It seems you are more qualified to be a right wing blogger.
ddtruy33 writes,
Except that the 9 of 10 refers to global temps and 4 of ten refers to temps in the lower 48 states of the US.
This is proof that ddtruy33 is an idiot. If he truly works for NASA, it is probably as a lab rat.
There are 3 things certain in life: taxes, death and that when you mention James Hansen anywhere on the web, all the nut cases in the world will suddenly appear on the scene.
deedee we know that between showing you got the biggest whatevers juttin out there, it is hard to remember that the US is not the world. 9 out of the 12 warmest years where. Globally or just the US. Wanna guess, you got a 50% chance of being right
Having played a key role in finding the error in the GISS procedure, I think I know a lot more about it that you do, and the truth is, that ain't the way it happened. You can read CA for the rest, but then again you have.
And deedee you really should stick to ballet and leave the science to Dexter.
Accusing others of playing politics has got to be the ultimate pot/kettle conundrum. However, it does imply that the person making the accusation has political beliefs founded on deception.
OK, going back to my earlier statements. I don't think that John Kerry deserved to have lies spread about himself, that's not what I meant, ever. All I meant was that I thought the allegations were true, and so he deserved to have them exposed.
Now, they may not be true, but nobody has proven anything about them one way or another. Either way, they should have been scrutinized because Kerry touted his service record as qualifications for his presidency during time of war.
I think Bush and Kerry are both a couple of nits who should release their service records.
Ben,
Kerry has released his service records, extensively. What may or may not have been redacted, was redacted by the U.S. Navy, not by Kerry.
For Bush, there are gaps you could fly an F104 through. We have these reconstructions of destroyed memos that do, nonetheless, agree with the testimony of the parties involved.
The global data has not yet been adjusted to reflect the latest correction to US dataset contribution.
----------------
Historical studies find a 40 year cycle to climate scares.
"MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age"
- New York Times, Sep 18, 1924
"America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-year Rise"
- New York Times, March 27, 1933
"Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate is Changing: A Major Cooling is Widely Considered to be Inevitable"
- New York Times, May 21, 1975
"Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming"
- New York Times, Dec 27, 2005
And then there is Time Magazine's June 24, 1974 article showing the alarming growth in Arctic snow and ice coverage...
There have been 4 climate scare cycles in the last 110 years, swinging back and forth between global warming and cooling with a ~40 year cycle. That's just the claim -- what the climate has been doing is much less clear.
When evaluating the claims, the public has to consider facts, the behavior and demeanor of the people advocating the current scare, and the fact the press has misrepresented it at least 3 times previously.
Keep in mind, the climate is always changing. Making it government policy to halt change is a mighty obligation indeed.
Note the banning of CFC's in the 1980's to protect the "ozone hole". Now, today, Nature publishes a report that ozone chemistry is not at all what it was thought, they have no idea what is going on, if anything. How many billions wasted over flawed science?
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/449382a.html
"As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change."
"Reconstructions of destroyed memos," eh?
"Reconstructions of destroyed memos," eh?
Posted by: ben
"...that do, nonetheless, agree with the testimony of the parties involved."
The global data was immediately updated to reflect the change. When plotted on a graph, the change is imperceptible and doesn't affect any of the global "hottest years" rankings. You can go to the gistemp website and look for yourself.
And regarding the Ozone work, they're rethinking the chemistry of ozone destruction, not the involvement of CFCs:
"Overwhelming evidence still suggests that anthropogenic emissions of CFCs and halons are the reason for the ozone loss. But we would be on much firmer ground if we could write down the correct chemical reactions."
Wow! A popular magazine's article is proof that science is all hooey!
Too bad for you that World Wide Weekly is no longer sold in supermarkets. You major source of scientific knowledge is harder to find now. Take comfort, though, they're still publishing online.
This article by Hansen is worth reading, appropriately titled:
"Swift Boating, Stealth Budgeting, & Unitary Executives."
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/worldwatch_nov2006.pdf
Even talks about the "emphasis on extreme scenarios" quote. And yet that little chestnut is still making the rounds. Why is that?
Hansen got busted, now he is throwing a hissy fit.
Famous anti-Bush and extreme liberal Soros clearly enabled Hansen for POLITICAL REASONS based on a radical leftists agenda.
Science was the last thing on any of these peoples minds.
Hansen is an ACTIVIST first, scientist second.
He never came forward that he was accepting any help from Soros money.
He witheld that until he was busted. He would never have volunteered that freely.
I would like to remind the discussants that Kerry's presence in Vietnam and the acts of heroism he carried out there (if any), were part of a criminal aggressive war.
Heads up guys, [incoming freepers](http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1903958/posts).
Did you know that Mary Rosh [was a freeper](http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a39a2c3e40462.htm)?
The Swift Boat vets brought facts into the 2004 election to dispute Kerry's accounts of his actions in vietnam, since Kerry was using his Vietnam war experience in his bid for office. Some facts are disputed, but most of the Swift Boat vets' claims about how Kerry got his medals turned out to be true.
OTOH an attempt to tarnish Bush's military record was presented by CBS' Dan Rather in Sept 2004, and was quickly exposed as a fraud based on a transparent forgery of a memo. So if you want to claim someone is making an accurate but hurtful allegation, call it "SwiftBoating".
If you want to claim that someone is making up a lie about you based on phony evidence, call it "MaryMapes-ing".
Yes, Patrick, "MaryMapes-ing". I love it. You know, I'm not a religious person, but it is so easy for me to tell the difference between the Pharisees and the decent few. For one thing, the decent few usually have about 30 IQ points on the typical Pharisee. But the real difference is that they just behave decently. That doesn't mean that they are always right. However, they are trying to be right and that gives them a huge advantage over Pharisees who are just trying to extend one form of dominance or another.
The excitable little weasels who feel the need to defend the Pharisees at all costs, what's the matter with them? I'm not entirely sure but part of it in many cases must be a lack of intelligence. This naturally leads to timidity and fear. The feeling of being one of the sheeple following a major Pharisee must be comforting.
A perfect example of the difference can be seen by comparing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz8KiA-YMt8
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UERzOB2CWQg&mode=related&search=
Richard Lindzen vs. Brenda Ekwurzel. [Sorry, not a fair fight.]
At any rate, here's a little scorecard for you:
Pharisees: George Soros, Jimbo Hansen, Al Gore, Sid Blumenthal, Dan Rather.
Decent folks: Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen, David Gelernter, K. C. Johnson.
Here's my take on Jim Hansen.
I think Hansen has been a decent scientist overall. He has worked intelligently on improving the IPCC models, which subsequently lowered the estimates on the present centuries warming. He also figured out that soot in the atmosphere is acting, as a substantial warming agent and it is not just CO2 causing the problem. So Hansen has done some mighty good work in his field and is at the top of the heap in his area of expertise. Only a dumbo wouldn't recognize Hansen's contribution
However his frequent attempt at influencing the political process makes him a political operative as well. The problem he has is that his role as a government worker and political operative doesn't work, nor does policy wonk and senior scientist.
If any of you people think this guy has ever been muzzled in some way please show evidence that anyone has ever, ever attempted to prevent his scientific papers from being published. Even one will do.
Getting on 60 minutes and talking about the latest weather forecast is not friggen science. I only wish Hansen knew the difference. He gets paid to do science and offer up his research. The government, any government has a right to tell loose cannons to keep their mouth shut and work through the correct channels and be out there in the public forum offering up opinions they may actually know nothing about when it come to policy
It is not Hansen's job in his current position to offer policy suggestions. His job is to offer the science to help formulate policy. Policy is an entirely different issue, which Hansen can't distinguish.
Policy experts such as economists are the people who have the expertise to figure policy response.
The criticism that Hansen doesn't respect the person he reports to is irrelevant, especially when Hansen's research is not being affected in terms of getting published.
Hansen appears to be several things. He's a great scientist, a hot head and politically active. All these things came together and allowed Uncles George's "Opportunist Institute" to try an assist Hansen so as to score politically and embarrass administration. It appears that Jim was wise to this by no t accepting the 10G, but he did put himself in a position of taking political sides while he's a civil servant which is the wrong thing to do.
work through the correct channels and NOT be out there in the public forum offering up
I blame Tim, not Jim. Tim, you wicked troll murderer! Now we all must suffer.
And don't question me. I have a Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine for my work doing string theory on the Akashik plane.
"The Swift Boat vets brought facts into the 2004 election..."
Right, who could doubt the veracity of people who now claim they falsified performance reports and commendations for bravery back in the 1960's.
Policy experts such as economists are the people who have the expertise to figure policy response.
Jc, your post started somewhat alright, but you lost it (at least) with that sentence.
why on earth should an economist be better in advicing climate policy, than a climate scientist???
foreign policy? ask economic experts! (looks like that is what we re seeing in Iraq today..)
If any of you people think this guy has ever been muzzled in some way please show evidence that anyone has ever, ever attempted to prevent his scientific papers from being published. Even one will do.
massive move of goal post.
being muzzled vs. stopping him from publishing scientific papers.
the science has been out for quite some time. the problem is, that we have NOT acted on it. same with low consumption cars, solar energy ...
It is not Hansen's job in his current position to offer policy suggestions. His job is to offer the science to help formulate policy. Policy is an entirely different issue, which Hansen can't distinguish.
you might want to take a look at the current MASSIVE movement of bringing ETHICS to every scientists training. getting your results APPLIED and spreading the word about it OUTSIDE scientific papers is another important point of science training these days.
check some random university curricula and you will see that Hansen is giving a rather perfect example of what a scientist is supposed to do today.
Yup. Vermin overrunning the place. Greasemonkey getting a lot of exercise today.
Sod
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
"why on earth should an economist be better in advicing climate policy, than a climate scientist???"
It's not the job of a Climate physicist to tell policy makers how to figure out the response. The scientists are there to explain the science and the parmeters.
They know shit F all about the tax policy, the incentives and the whole kit and caboodle that goes with figuring out the response required. Hansen thinks he ought to insinuate himself into this mix when its really not his field of competency.
"massive move of goal post."
No , it's not. That just you being disingenuous. It has all to do with it.
The guy has given more than 1400 interviews and discussions with the media. If he feels muzzled the reason may be because he is possibly being asked to do his regular job rather than moonlight.
"the science has been out for quite some time. the problem is, that we have NOT acted on it. same with low consumption cars, solar energy ..."
Bullshit. We haven't. That's just your personal preferences showing up in that you think we ought to be doing more at this point in time than what we have. I'm not going into that.
Hansen's endorsemsnt of Kerry in 04 was a disgrace for a public funded scientist. He's on the government pay roll. If he wanted to do that he should have resigned his position.
Yea, right some muzzzling. The guy endorses Kerry and cries he's been muzzled. Who the hell is he kidding?
Here you go JC, from the [GAP report](http://ent.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=trac…)
>In December 2005, Hansen presented a lecture on the importance of reducing emissions at the American Geophysical Union and also announced on ABC News that data showed 2005 to be the "warmest year on record." Subsequently, the NASA PAO told Hansen that there had been a "storm of anger at headquarters" and threatened him with "dire consequences" if he kept making similar remarks.140 According to GISS press officer Leslie McCarthy, George Deutsch rejected an interview request for Hansen from NPR, "the most liberal" media outlet, because it would undermine his job of "mak[ing] the President look good."
Here you go JC, from the GAP report
but Tim, the only people allowed to talk to the mass media about the climate are politically appointed press staff and economists. only they know about taxes and stuff!
The fun and games at CA continue. In their latest escapade Steve concludes that Hansen's adjustment for Russian statements understates the amount of warming (introduces a cooling bias)
http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2007/09/mcintyre-discovers-global-warmin…
Sod, You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
nice claim. now all you have to do is to show that it is true!
It's not the job of a Climate physicist to tell policy makers how to figure out the response. The scientists are there to explain the science and the parmeters.
yes. and as politicians spend the majority of their time, reading articles in scientific papers. so they will jump to immediate action!
or are there some economists involved? translating scientific articles into tax policy?
They know shit F all about the tax policy, the incentives and the whole kit and caboodle that goes with figuring out the response required. Hansen thinks he ought to insinuate himself into this mix when its really not his field of competency.
i am rather unaware of any attempts by Hansen to write detailed tax laws. could some economist with more understanding on the subject post some links please?
No , it's not. That just you being disingenuous. It has all to do with it.
again: being muzzled is NOT the same, as being kept from publishing scientific articles.
Bullshit. We haven't. That's just your personal preferences showing up in that you think we ought to be doing more at this point in time than what we have. I'm not going into that.
okay. so you think i am wrong, by claiming that not enough action was taken in the past.
so you imply, that TOO MUCH has been done?
we have done TOO MUCH to preserve climate in the past?!?
as we have done basically nothing, you would have preferred some support for an INCREASE in CO2 output?
we have done TOO MUCH to reduce consumption of cars?!?
TOO MUCH has been done to support solar energy?!?
are you insane?
Sorry Dr. Hansen, but your 'fudged' data points and completely bogus claim that 1998 was the warmest year on record are only further proof of your agenda. Your data points are flawed, so your study and your conclusions are flawed. You are a biased hack supported by Soros - I could care less how you try to 'spin' your results or your funding.
Your refusal to provide your methods for others to reproduce is another scientific no-no - or are you going to claim that scientific findings should not be presented in a manner that would allow others to verify or debunk your work?
I spent 10 years generating and objectively analyzing scientific data, and I find your methods and reporting seriously flawed.
http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/art…
As for the the 'swift-boating' allegation and John Kerry, I defy ANYONE to explain how a 3 month tour in Vietnam that earns someone 3 purple hearts without a day in the infirmary can be called anything other than a medal seeking self promoter who joined the military solely to advance his own delusion to be the next JFK.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3827/is_200408/ai_n9456810
Kerry is a piece of garbage who fled when his fellow swift boaters came under attack during the Bay Hap incident. Then he got his 3rd purple heart for a self infilcted wound and returned home to call his fellow service Vietnam vets war criminals and baby killers.
Oh, and 35 years leader he calls our soldiers too stupid and lazy to succeed in school so they 'got stuck' in Iraq.
Soros, financing the Ukrainian Revolution: GOOD.
Something Captain Unelected would never do. He doesn't need to, after all. Erm... he did it anyway.
Anti-veteran?
Do you confuse anti-war with anti-veteran? Is telling his fellow veterans "we've been sent to kill & die for no good reason" anti-veteran?
He was scheduled for retreat anyway. He didn't need to be specifically fired.
Wrong question. Right question: Why endorse Anyone But Bush? Obvious answer: Because the Republican War on Science had gone on long enough. Do you really expect a scientist to stay silent about this???
George Deutsch has said that the job of NASA or anyone at NASA is to "make the President look good". For this alone he must be fired and should have been fired long ago.
Just to state the obvious: I don't need to know anything about Hansen to come to this conclusion; Hansen is irrelevant for it. It is also irrelevant who happens to be President.
No. He calls Fearless Flightsuit stupid and lazy because he went to war with the army Sgt. Rummy wanted, rather than with the army Gen. Shinseki wanted. He deplores the situation that those who can't afford an education elsewhere* have no alternative but to join the army, which defeats the whole purpose of a volunteer army. He deplores the fact that there are working poor in the USA, even working poor with three jobs -- you don't get that elsewhere in the First World.
Isn't that obvious?
* "Afford an education". Tsss. Yet another bizarre characteristic of the USA.
But I digress. You have changed the topic. In fact, you changed it several times within your comment. You started with once again confusing the contiguous 48 states of the USA, some of which were the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, with the whole world. Scroll up a few comments in the improbable event that you want to learn.
G, you seem to be extraordinarily gullible. Do you believe everything you see on some non-scientist's blog? Hansen has published his data, his algorithms and released the source code. There was a mistake in the data, but it made no noticeable difference to the global temperature record and 1998 is still much warmer than 1934. You haven't ever looked at the GISS temperature site, have you?
Oops, the arrow was supposed to be an asterisk.
Jc,
Can we get this clear once and for all? NASA attempted to muzzle Hansen and failed, so evidence that he gave 1400 interviews or was on 60 minutes is not evidence that they did not attempt to muzzle him. Verstehen Sie?
It's called being a private citizen and exercising your first amendment freedoms. What, you think that because Hansen is a government scientist he can't give interviews on a topic on which he is a leading expert? So the only climate scientists who can speak out are the "skeptics" like Patrick Michaels--the guy who erases lines on graphs and actually hides his funding?
For someone who doesn't believe that the administration attempted to muzzle Hansen, you sure seem like you agree with such an action.
From what I've read most (not all) posters here do not watch c-span. Well I do I watched the hearings and saw and heard several government scientists tell their story of the Bush Administration re-writing their reports. Changing the facts that the scientists found.
I've met a few scientists in my life and have found most just want their research work published-most want to be honest and most know they will never be rich. But if they are apolitical appointee of the Bush adminstration then I know they will lie. >.<
I've yet to see anything come out of this administration that came close to the truth. The stench of lies and cover ups from all parts of the Bush Adminstration permiates from every corner. They stole 55,000 pieces of unclassified papers from the National Archives and hide them from the public view. They think they can rewrite history and scientific findings.
And as for Kerry-one of his crew mates came to my town in the fall of 2004 and told us what really happened and he wasn't one of the men who appeared on TV and he wasn't paid to come talk to us. Yes Kerry was swiftboated just like McCain and Max Clelland.
The best way to get people to look away is to point at someone else and accuse them of what you are and did. Bush was a coward during the Nam years and he's still a coward and will always be a coward.
There's lies and then there's damn lies.
E-mail from the Union of Concerned Scientists. It was dated
9/28/2007
Dear ______
Congress has given final approval to a bill that will significantly improve the drug review process at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and hold the FDA more accountable, protecting us from unsafe drugs. Thanks in part to your calls and letters, the law includes transparency language that will shine a light on the FDA drug approval process. By opening up the drug review process and documents to public scrutiny, the manipulation of research results becomes much more apparent and thus easier to counteract.
This legislative victory is crucial to public health and safety. Last year, when UCS surveyed nearly 1,000 FDA scientists, one in five reported that they had been asked by their supervisors to provide the public, the news media, and government officials "incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading information." When the unbiased research of qualified scientists was suppressed and distorted, flawed data led the FDA to approve drugs such as Vioxx, Avandia, and Ketek, which later proved to be harmful.
This bill requires that the views of drug reviewers are heard and not suppressed or ignored. In addition, the bill also protects scientists' right to publish their research, another way to safeguard the scientific integrity of FDA scientists and their work. Unfortunately the bill doesn't go far enough to restrict conflicts of interest on FDA advisory panels. Nonetheless, the new law will improve the FDA's drug review process and set the stage for similar reforms at other federal agencies.
Transparency is the cornerstone of scientific integrity--it's vital to the work of the FDA and all federal agencies to ensure that the work of scientists is not manipulated.
We will closely monitor the FDA's performance, tracking whether the public gets full access to the information they need. And we will again rely on your support as we continue to push for similar reforms at other federal agencies where science has been politicized and scientists have been intimidated.
UCS surveys have revealed similar problems at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But as long as scientists and citizens continue to play an active role in the fight to ensure scientific integrity and transparency, I am confident we will prevail.
Thank you for your continued dedication to scientific integrity and all you do to help UCS work for a healthy environment and a safer world.
Sincerely,
Michael Halpern
National Field Organizer
Scientific Integrity Program
If you want the web link to the UCS GO FISH!
Tim Lambert, perhaps you would care to examine some of the data points used in this experiment.
http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
Can you honestly tell me that this technique of collecting data points is sound?
Can you also argue for Dr Hansen's initial refusal to post his methods, which required REVERSE ENGINEERING to come up with the results? This is not how a published scientific study is released for peer review.
Any serious analysis follows a Standard Operating Procedures that must be followed TO THE LETTER. If you have bad data points, you do not simply 'use' them, or 'adjust' them, or toss out those data points. You throw out your ENTIRE study and repeat it. This was clearly NOT done in Mr Hansen's study.
Have you ever worked in a scientifc lab (not a computer science lab)? I spent 10 years of my life analyzing data in a lab environment - and there is no way I can justify Dr Hansen's errors. It is worse than 'sloppy science' It is flat out deceitful science.
As for his 'mistake' in the data, it is being passed off as some 'Y2K' glitch - which only highlights the ineptness of the study and the neglect to properly analyze the data he was using for legitimacy.
Are YOU so gullible that you believe a 'Y2K glitch' is an acceptable reason for a misrepresentation of a study performed for NASA and the GISS? I expect more form such accredited organizations.
As for your claim of my beleiving a non-scientist blogger, I refer you to Stephen McIntyre and Anthony Watts - who are the people who identified the innaccuracies in Dr Hansens work (and McIntyre also had a hand in debunking Mann's hockey stick theory').
I'm just wondering. Seeing as most US economists endorsed Kerry rather than Bush in the ')4 election, does that make them tools of foreign domination (or whatever the crank right bugbear is today)?
I'm particularly worried that the 500,000 comment award may go to someone who earned it by their opposition to science in this forum. Maybe that's why the counter is going so slowly no (I can just see some of the HIV denialists, anti-vaccination cranks, or anti-evolution warriors getting the nod). Shall we start a comment-focused round of whatever at the '500,000th comment' thread?
G,
You're a couple months behind the denial cycle. Microsite issues do not appear to effect trends once homogeneity adjustments are made. Moreover, the satellite temperature record matches extremely well with the GISS analysis. Finally, observations of the physical climate--mass glacier balance, thermal expansion of the oceans, migratory patterns, borehole measurements--all reinforce the surface temperature record.
In case you didn't notice, the real world is not a lab.
blueinmo
You obviously suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome, and you should seek help. The scientists I know do NOT believe in the global warming hype. True, they are not climatologists - but they do realize that temperature fluctations have been the norm throughout the earth's history and all of them agree that there is no way you could quantify what is naturally occurring and what is being caused by man.
All of them (myself included) do believe that we should be better stewards of our environment and that all measures to lessen our impact on the planet should be considered and/or implemented.
The problem with all of that is that the 'left' (for lack of a better term) seeks to use TAXATION as a means to institute these changes. This is where the resistance to comply comes in.
As for the 55,000 pages of documents missing form the National Archives, the only person who has been found guilty of stealing from the National Archives is one Sandy 'socks' Berger. Your BDS assumption that 'Bush stole the documents' only serves to highlight the level of BDS you suffer from.
In reality, these documents have not been 'stolen'. The majority of them have been reclassified as secret. This started under Clinton, and yes, has continued under the Bush administration. Surprise, surprise we are at war and some documents regarding our surveillance and infiltration techniques have been re-classified.
I simply do not see anything sinister here.
As for the FDA supervisors 'pressuring' scinetists to release inaccurate data - I can say with almost complete certainty that this is simply a result of our system of approving drugs. This is more than likely (actually MUCH more than likely) a result corporate pressure, not government pressure.
There is a flawed policy regarding drug approval - but it is at the corporate level - not the government level. I know this from first hand experience.
As for Kerry, there are many people who served with John Kerry, but there are more people who question his service than applaud his service. Those who do applaud his service were directly under him. The majority of those who served WITH Kerry (not under) all have similar opinions of his service record. I commend Kerry's underlings for supporting him, but so many more who served with Kerry do not tell the same story.
...and you cannot seriously tell me that you believe 3 purple hearts in 3 months with zero days in the infirmary doesn't at least raise a warning flag to you.
Come on, now! Put aside your blue colored glasses for a minute. Why has he refused to release his full military records?
Kerry enlisted in 1966 for a 6 year commitment, and should have been dischared in 1972, correct? So, whjy is his discharge dated 1978? Why is there no record of Kerry's naval record from 1972-1978? The answer my blue deluded friend is that Kerry received an other than honorable discharge, and it was Jimmah Carter who finally gave him an honorable discharge in 1978.
Open your eyes and connect the dots.
Boris, you have OBVIOUSLY never worked in a lab, or had to follow a Standard Operating Procedure.
You admit that some of the data points are bad. This DEMANDS that you toss your entire study and perform it again! You cannot re-use you flawed data points by 'adjusting' them or tossing them out. You need to generate good data points. If you have even ONE flawed data point, you need to re-do your study. You do not just pick and choose your data points. You need to use them all, and they all need to be valid. This is defined by your SOP.
This isn't even debateable. You toss the study. It is flawed. You reacquire data points and perform it again. In this case, it would take years. End of story.
jc dear, Hansen's contribution to climate modeling is not working on IPCC models. He and his colleagues at GISS created one of the first GCMs (by the way the code for that has always been public) the results of which were one of the motivating factors in creating the IPCC. Further they have maintained and improved that model, and the results have been discussed in all the IPCC reports.
It would be useful if you ditched the rhetorical tricks at the door
You admit that some of the data points are bad. This DEMANDS that you toss your entire study and perform it again! You cannot re-use you flawed data points by 'adjusting' them or tossing them out. You need to generate good data points. If you have even ONE flawed data point, you need to re-do your study. You do not just pick and choose your data points. You need to use them all, and they all need to be valid. This is defined by your SOP.
This isn't even debateable. You toss the study. It is flawed. You reacquire data points and perform it again. In this case, it would take years. End of story.
yes. let s just wait 100 years. sounds like a GREAT idea!
And you have obviously never visited the real world. Historical climate data was not collected in a perfect manner. Your solution is to throw all the data away. And you call this inability to deal with real world uncertainty "science."
I'm sorry reality so differs from your political worldview.
Perhaps you should start www.purpleheartaudit.org. Me, I'm not going to go back and question the severity of the wounds of our veterans. I consider that extremely disrespectful, especially when it's done simply because you have differing political views.
Exactly my point. The data itself is imperfect. Therefore it is not reliable for any meaningful conclusion.
What the ice core data does show is that warming PRECEDED co2 concentration increase. What this means is that warming causes an increase in co2 concentrations, not the other way around - which is exactly the bogus assesment we are being sold.
To be more accurate, we simply do not have the data points needed to assess our impact on the global climate.
As I said before, I'm all for lessening our impact on it's own merits - but the anthrocentric global warming BS being shoved down our throats and the taxation being proposed to accomplish this are seriously disturbing revelations.
As for tossing out the data, that is the nature of a scientific assessment. I've had to re-perform many experiments based on a bad data point or two - even if I could 'explain away' the bad data point(s). In the end though, the analysis was invalid, and it needed to be re-done.
Yeah, it sucks - but that is the nature of the beast. You must follow sound scientific procedure. Dr Hansen did not. Therefore, his conclusions are suspect.
To be more honest about his analysis, these are some seriously flawed data points that bring into question the validity of all the data points. There is no way a scientist can just 'accept' this data - even with the known flaws.
What other flawed data points are unknown? This is not a controlled experiment. This is a mish-mash of questionable data that some grand conclusion is based on. In other words, it is junk science.
Eli Says:
Further they have maintained and improved that model, and the results have been discussed in all the IPCC reports.
Obviously referring to my comment where I say:
He has worked intelligently on improving the IPCC models, which subsequently lowered the estimates on the present centuries warming.
Which sounds vageuly similar but he then says:
It would be useful if you ditched the rhetorical tricks at the door
Eli, Please stop wasting time pretending you disagree with me by agreeing with me and get back to writing your opus on the falsification of Popper. The world is waiting
JC sez sumthin' 'orrible:
Well, no, it doesn't, and that's the entire point.
An employee of the federal government has the right to speak as a private citizen as he or she damn well pleases. You can't represent yourself as speaking *officially* without approval, but privately, yes, you can.
You said the words yourself: "offering opinions". That's protected speech, sorry.
Of course, specific circumstances - national security, classified information, etc - can trump one's right to speak as a private citizen, but merely being a federal employee does not.
G:
I suspect G's something like a lab tech, not a working scientist.
G - *all* data is imperfect, that's what error bounds are all about. You're essentially arguing that all data must be tossed therefore no science can be done, ever. In the lab, or outside the lab.
In this case, we can't toss the data and regenerate it. Unless you know of a time machine that the rest of the world is unaware of, I suppose. Given that we can't regenerate it, we must do the best we can with what we have.
Essentially you're saying "we have to pretend the past doesn't exist and ... therefore ... be happy, do nothing!"
G says "You admit that some of the data points are bad. This DEMANDS that you toss your entire study and perform it again!"
All data is bad. That is why there is statistics. If you are looking for prefection you need to be in math. If you didn't know that you have never taken a real science class. Then again you are obviously just a lying freeper.
G, you are in pickle juice dirt territory here. Perharps pickle juice china dirt. You don't have to know what that means to know what it means.
Hansen has evolved into a political hack.
Wasn't he Al Gore's science adviser on "An Inconvenient Truth?"
Also, his computer models were used 30-some years ago to trumpet Global Cooling.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070919/NATI…
He has become an embarrassment to NASA, and should be fired.
His discredited hockey stick graph was used to spawn all the hoopla today, including Gore's discredited movie. You know, the graph from his model which left out the medieval warming period? The one that produced a hockey stick when fed random data?
Leading climatologists are all turning to the theory of the sun as primary regulator of global climate variations, by regulating high energy gamma rays that cause low cloud formation. Read, "The chilling Stars," for a primer.
Political climatologists like Hansen will eventually go the way of Keynes.
Oh, and anyone who listens to anything coming from The Union of Communist Scientists needs his head examined. Be sure whatever they say, the opposite is true.
When you make a logical error this large, it explains a whole lot.
Boris, what was incorrect by the statement?
Another lie about Hansen ...
The right wingnuts are getting desperate, I suppose that's the silver lining here. They've run out of what little science they could muster and all they've got now is the swiftboat tactics.
re 115. Parody, right? Please say yes...
Man, this is better than TV. Swiftboating Kerry and Hansen.
Can we get the Lancet studies into the mix? Who wants popcorn?
G said
McIntyre? You mean the guy who, in his 'debunking' of Mann's hockey stick, used degrees where the program called for radians? This is like using metres instead of miles.
I agree with the other respondents: if you think you throw out all the data if there is a problem with one point you have clearly never done any research and have not understood the role of statistics.
You imply you have thought about this. In your view, what data points are still needed to be able to start assessing our impact on the global climate?
BG wrote
Can you give a link to a serious attempt at recreating global temperatures that clearly shows the 'Medieval Warm Period' because all I've been able to find points to it not having been a global phenomenon?
BG wonders why 'warming causes an increase in co2 concentrations, not the other way around' is referred to as a logical error.
As far as is known, the end of each Ice Age was started by changes in the Earth's orbit (Milankovitch cycles). Once warming started, it was amplified by CO2 being released from oceans. That does not rule out the possibility that increasing atmospheric CO2 could cause global warming. In fact, based on theoretical physics and chemistry an increase in global temperatures has been predicted as a consequence of increased CO2 for more than a century and for the past few decades the evidence has been coming in to support the prediction.
Lee, I don't think BG's comment was a parody. If it was a parody, every single statement would have been wrong, but he managed to include one correct statement (Hansen was one of the science advisers for Gore.)
Richard, it was McIntyre's coauthor, McKitrick, who made the degrees/radians oopsie.
"Policy experts" like to talk about imaginary concepts like "Carbon intensity" as if the climate cares. Hansen has every right to recommend scenarios that he feels accomplishes the mandate of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which we all signed and ratified. The "policies" that Hansen has recommended hardly require an advanced degree in economics. He favors reducing non-CO2 forcings as rapidly as possible because those are easiest. Phasing out coal power plants that don't utilize CCS is necessity since there is no way to achieve said mandate without this step. A gradually increasing price on emissions to make it all possible. Those are not complicated policy recommendations. They are excruciatingly obvious.
Hansen has the constitutional right to endorse anyone who he feels like. To suggest that he doesn't because he is a government employee is the true disgrace. He has every right, as does every government employee.
And Hansen did not conduct "1400 interviews." That is nonsense from Rep. Darrel Issa who said he got it from "google." I'd like someone to tell me how Google knows how many "interviews" someone has done. They don't. What you can do is search Google News for references to James Hansen. Searching for some combination of James Hansen's name and Global Warming returned about 1400 hits in the entire Google News database up to February 2007. That means that he had been referenced in 1400 articles in that database. In addition, many of the articles are repeats of the same stories taken off of the news wire.
If you limited the search from the date of the 60 minutes interview to February 2007, you got about 400 references. If you do these searches now, you get more references because more news outlets have been retroactively added to google's news archive.
Hey, did you read about the auditors who caught the petroleum industry cheating the government of millions of dollars?
G "I spent 10 years generating and objectively analyzing scientific data, and I find your [Hansen's] methods and reporting seriously flawed."
Not just analyzing, mind you, but "objectively analyzing".
Wow. I'm so impressed -- humbled, actually.
I wonder what G would think of ddtruy33's statements if he "objectively analyzed" them:
ddtruy33: "I work at NASA and have been involved with press releases ... And, by the way, his [Hansen's] science is NOT good."
"Not good". Now there's an objective statement.
Yes indeed.
What would wingnuts like ddtruy33 be saying, if the corrections to the temperature measurements had raised them a hundredth of a degree?
Ah, to paraphrase Steve Pastis about our visiting crocs, they are proud members of Mora Fora Meea, a fraternity dedicated to the destruction of every one but them. The crocodiles are our blogging neighbors. Stupid, slow and barely articulate, these particular crocodiles are a disgrace to their species.
I presume that all those gazing in horror at the surface stations shown at surfacestations.org are in favor of a federal takeover of the substandard ones and full funding through the US government of the entire network. Then again, it is Saturday Night.
Hoggsie
Hansen is the biggest media hound to ever receive a government paycheck.
He's had around 1400 interactions with the media and gets published whenever he has something to say.
He cavorts around endorsing political candidates becoming science advisor to some.
You and Hansen are suffering from delusional paranoria if you believe in the muzzling story.
Pretty soon Jim is going to be looking outside his window for the dreaded black helicopters. Will you at least promsie to let us know when it happens to you? We/I want to help.
Eli:
Are you a climate scientist or just someone who pretends you are.
Close enough. Chemical physicist by trade.
As a scientist myself, I cannot imagine any serious scientist making such a statement. All data is flawed to some extent, and this is even more so for data that is not collected in a laboratory under carefully controlled conditions, but out in the real world. There are robust, well validated statistical methods for identifying sources of error and bias and calculating their impact on the conclusions.
The insistence that data must be discarded if it is not absolutely flawless is not science at all, but a denialist rationalization--since no data is absolutely flawless, it is always possible to find some excuse to discard conclusions that you do not like. Real scientists have to go beyond "It's flawed, so I don't have to consider it," and delve into the quantitative business of determining what the actual impact of the inevitable "flaws" is on a study's conclusions.
G wrote:
This is itself an excellent example of "Swift-boating," because anybody who has bothered to look into the issue even superficially knows that it is a bald-faced lie. In fact, Hansen never claimed that 1998 was the warmest US year on record even before the recent minor correct. Here is what he wrote in his 2001 paper, well before the correction:
Moreover, even after the corrections, 1998 is still warmer than any previous year on record in terms of global temperature.
This is all on record and easy to find. So you have to wonder about the motivation of anybody who continues to repeat such a transparent lie.
It's not close enough, Eli. I have a buddy who's a Phd in chemical engineering from MIT and doesn't profess to know about the science as much as you allude you allude. Get yourself the requiste credentials and then come back and tell us it is more than "close enough".
It's like an accoutant calling themselves an economist.... Really!
This is getting quite tiresome. I don't know why I bother, really, except that I have two small children, so I'm stubborn as all hell.
Ahem....You're repeated mention of 1400 interviews is irrelevant to Hansen's claim that the administration attempted to muzzle him. It would be like saying "no one attempted to rob Bill Gates, he's had billions of dollars for years and he still has billions." That means squat. Do you understand how foolish this repetition of yours is now? Not to mention what cce pointed out about the 1400 number. And you want to be our auditor?
Denialists infesting this thread - countless. Denialists infesting Pat Michaels thread - none to be found. Now why is that - could it be that they don't want to talk about Michaels?
Is it irresponsible to speculate?
It's irresponsible NOT to!
Of course it is fooolish, boris. You are, I mean. That's because you can't deny the fact the guy is pulling a fast one and you're enabling this fraud.
Has it ever entered your brain that being muzzled actually may mean that and the circumstantial evidence offered suggest otherwise?
If you dont'like the evidence, don't comment.
mndean
Do you smoke it or inject it?
That has to be the funniest comment I read in a while.... I think. What does it mean exactly?
Just say no, Ok.
I can't think of a single President who doesn't beat Hansen in that regard.
I'm glad we have JC. He reinforces the notion that rightwingnuts are inveterate liars.
Even Ben distances himself from JC in an earlier thread, and Ben's about as stubborn a rightwingnut as one can find here.
And of course ...
It has been pointed out earlier that 1400 hundred returns on a google search string have been documented.
It was pointed out that this is not the number of interactions Hansen has had with the media.
JC, if your claim were true over the period of time claimed, we'd be seeing him several times a week giving media interviews.
Which is simply false.
Support your claim with real data, please. Doing so might teach you something about science. Show us a source for Hansen's having 1400 "media interactions".
Actually your statement is immediately suspect because it doesn't say "N interactions over T Time". No one who is serious would state the stat in a way that makes it impossible to determine how often he interacts with the media.
JC, would you mind if I publish your posts in various other places where wafflers think deniers might have something serious to say? Your posts are among the best that show how your personal beliefs overwhelm reality that I know of, other than public figures like Inhofe.
Tim Lambert
I visited the "http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=9883", someone there made mention "...I noticed there was a Deltoid trackback in here somewhere; now it's gone. As much distaste as I harbor for Tim Lambert, I think it's probably a better move to acknowledge that he's commented." by Slartibartfast
I was curious as to what you may have wrote as it's a gleeful site now that think they nailed Hansen"
I didn't comment as they appear to send attack dogs if you disagree or probably just delete it.
Hoggise
Are you "suffering" the same affliction Dean is? Can i just repeat something that may sink in. Hansen is even endorsing poltical candidates from his current throne at NASA.
He has as much credibility about this muzzling caper as Bill Clinton had when he "truthfully" told us he never had sex with that woman. You still believie him? Say it ain't so.
rich, I just linked to Goldstein from [this post](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/investors_business_daily_has_a…). There was a trackback there for a few minutes, but then it was deleted.
He responded [with this](http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=9883#comment-252958):
>I think my last paragraph most certainly does mean something!
>Why is it that when people on the left can't be bothered to think through what they read, they are allowed to blithely dismiss arguments as nonsensical or "gibberish"? I mean, do they really think that simply pretending toward intelligence grants them some? And why in the world would this flip idiot brand me as "anti-science"? Does he know me? Know any of my positions? Did he arrive at that conclusion using some sort of method he'd like to share?
Hey mea culpa. His writing is so opaque, who can tell what his positions are?
thanks Tim,
that clarifies things a bit, I can see that there appears to be a lot of back slapping over there with a lot of "doesn't mean anything" comments in attempts to show how smart they are, quite funny, try reading happyfeet (on second thought, don't - a waste of time)
trrll
Have you LOOKED at some of the temperature monitoring sites? Are you actually trying to tell me that you would accept temperature data from a site that is located next to am air conditioning exhaust vent?
Just look at some of these sites.
http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
Caan you honestly tell me that the data generated at these sites is NOT influenced by the exhaust vents, burn barrels, or even on asphalt?
So, you have the data points themselves being flawed, the original analysis being flawed, and yet you somehow think the conclusions drawn can be legitimate?
I am appalled by the notion being espoused by you and others that 'all data is flawed - but screw it let's just use it anyways'.
Have you ever followed a SOP? I would guess that you have developed a few - and you should know that data points cannot be 'picked and chosen' or 'corrected'. Your SOP defines your data gathering and your analysis. If you have flawed data points - your analysis is flawed and should not be used.
Now I would love to just 'explain away' a bad data point and ignore it - but that is not acceptable scientific procedure. I must re-run my experiment.
Now for others:
I am not advocating trying to go back in time to generate new data points for 1998. I am saying that they need to correct their temperature monitoring stations and gather new data starting from the point at which their data points are corrected. If there is truly 'global warming' - then the new and improved data points will reflect that.
Regardless, the data will not show the REASON for an increase in warming. It will simply show a trend of warming.
I'm not even arguing against warming. The earth goes thru naturally occuring cycles of warming and cooling. This would be true if there was no life on earth at all.
All lab workers are supposed to be 'objective analysts'. If you cannot be objective, you need to find another career. I can't imagine why anyone would be offended by someone who strives for objectivity (unless of course, you have your own agenda and are threatened by objectivity).
I don't have an 'agenda' here other than analyzing the data and the conclusions drawn from that data.
Much to the contrary, it is those trumpeting anthocentric global warming and advocating taxation as the solution who have the agenda.
I have yet to see even mildly convincing data that would lead me to believe that human activity is a significant factor in global temperatures. Indeed, even Mars is experiencing warming - but I suppose those who are convinced that man is at fault will explain that away as warming due to the two Rovers that we sent up.
Eli Rabett said: "I presume that all those gazing in horror at the surface stations shown at surfacestations.org are in favor of a federal takeover of the substandard ones and full funding through the US government of the entire network."
Actually, I think what they might favor is "Shock and Awe": bomb the bejesus out of the non-compliant stations. (It worked in Iraq, right?)
I can hear them now: "Adjust for this, Hansen, you $&%@*&!%$$!"
We've been through the difference between muzzling someone and attempting to muzzle someone. Congratulations on refuting a claim that no one has made.
As for muzzling scientists, the same stuff has been going on at NOAA and the dept. of commerce:
http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1107
But you want to assume that Hansen is lying and a fraud based on exactly zero evidence. Float those beliefs on a faith-based forum, because they won't fly here.
Well G wanna put up the dough, or just moan. And oh yeah you need to send a boatload of that dough back to 1880, besides which the results are the same
JC dearest a chemical engineer is not a chemical physicist. Eli does not push oil thru a refinery. You are flailing from ignorance again. Let us just put it this way, most of what I do professionally is gas phase spectroscopy, dynamics and kinetics of small molecules. Get the point yet.
G the GCMs show the REASON for the trend, increasing GHG concentrations, and models have pretty much got the right order of magnitude since the year dot (~1900)
Is G convincing anybody except himself that he is not a full blown idiot?
Jc? Care to comment? After all, idiots should stick together. Jc, the great Libertarian who won't defend freedom of speech, because he disagrees with the speaker. Voltaire is spitting on you from beyond the grave, hypocrite.
Stay strong!
JC said "It's [chemical physics is] not close enough, Eli. I have a buddy who's a Phd in chemical engineering from MIT and doesn't profess to know about the science as much as you allude you allude."
Oh, is this the "My buddy is smarter than your buddy" game?
That's my favorite, next to Global Warming Bingo, which Rip van Winkle (G) wants us to play above.
I have a buddy who has a PhD from every other department at MIT, is on the faculty at all the Ivy league schools, has 3 Nobel Prizes (in chemistry, physics and literature), just discovered the "meaning of life" (which has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in Energy $ Environment), and who thinks global warming is hogwash -- though he does not like to brag and does not pretend to know everything there is to know about ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
So there, Eli.
jb says "So there, Eli."
Can you give us links to this peer reviewed research, I would be very interested as I have not yet found a single piece of peer reviewed research showing global warming as hogwash. I am not saying "put up or shut up" just "put up" to substantiate your comments
richCares - JB is just showing how stupid JC's "my friend's smarter than your friend's" arugment from authority is.
G - for someone to have no agenda, who claims to be science-literate, who claims to have extensive lab experience ... you sure do an excellent job of trolling with some of the lowest-level right wingnut lies about climate science.
If you're as smart as you want us to think you are, you can figure out these lies yourself. There's really no point in anyone here answering you. Buy a textbook on climate science, read Real Climate, etc.
dhogaza, thanks, I suspected that as it did appear humorous, but I really would like some denialist to quote peer reviewed research from their viewpoint
then I finally realized, they don't know what "peer reviewed" means, that puts them at a severe disadvantage, we need a way to even the paying field for them, something other than "laughing" at them.
If I could compensate for the effect of the air conditioning exhaust vent, certainly. Most such biases will average out, anyway.
Perfect data and perfect analysis does not exist. Yet legitimate, valid conclusions are drawn all of the time in the presence of error. It is not scientific to merely point at a flaw as an excuse for discarding conclusions that you don't like. With real world data, you can always kind some kind of a flaw, if you look hard enough, so that's just a cheap shot, not science. The science is in showing whether the impact of the inevitable flaws can alter the conclusions.
A lot of error is simply going to average out, because different stations are going to be imperfect in different ways. A constant bias, if recognized, can simply be subtracted out. So you would need to show that the existing methods of calibrating stations and correcting for biases are not doing the job. More importantly, we aren't actually all that interested in the absolute temperature at any particular location; we are interested in how the temperature is changing over time. So we we don't have to worry about any "flaw" that merely imposes a constant bias--to make a case for the conclusions being a consequence of the flaws, you would need to establish that the "flaw" is changing over time, and that data from "flawed" stations shows a different trend over time than data from stations without "flaws." If you actually want to make a scientific case, rather than merely a rhetorical one, you can start by showing that the trends over time of the "badly sited" stations, after applying the existing corrections for known biases, are different from the "well sited" stations. This is just basic science.
ddtruy33 says" Hansen had given over 1400 interviews, including 15 the month he claimed he was being "censored", but was ignoring his employers policy and got called on it."
as that is more than 3.8 interviews per day, Unlikely!
1400 / 365 = 3.8 is foolish and they don't even know how foolish this statement is.
Stop shouting and calm down.
Whenever warming happens for reasons unrelated to CO2, for example because of the various cycles of the Earth's orbit, axial tilt and whatnot, the warming oceans and permafrost soils release CO2 because gases dissolve better in cold water than in warm water.
This has been the usual case in the history of the Earth.
But right now, we have an increase in CO2 for reasons unrelated to warming: we simply burn stuff. What happens when CO2 increases for reasons other than warming?
We have a few such cases in the geological record, for example about 66 million years ago, when massive flood basalt eruptions blew lots of CO2 into the air, or 55 million years ago, when lots of methane clathrate deposits on the sea floor discharged. What happens in such cases?
Warming.
And what happens when CO2 decreases for reasons other than cooling? We've had that some 700 million years ago, when silicate lava on the continents weathered, taking up CO2 from the air. It got colder, resulting in the "Snowball Earth" episodes. We've also had it about 15 million years ago, when the Tibetan Plateau was raised above the tree line and started weathering on a grand scale. This made the current series of ice ages possible.
Don't act as if you could escape from the fact that CO2 absorbs infrared.
Hansen was also the basis of a story in the Washinton Post that warns of an impending ICE AGE within 50 years ... back in 1971, when we were in a global cooling scare.
The headline was " U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming" (July 9, 1971), and was based on a paper appearing in the journal Science that same day.
It warned readers that "... we could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts..."
The scientist quoted was S. I. Rasool, who reported coming to the chilling conclusions based on a new computer program developed by his colleague at NASA, JIM HANSEN ...
It gets better: the Washinton Post writer contacted a top scientist in the Nixon administration (Gordon MacDonald), who said "... the findings are consistent with estimates I and others have made."
The maps published in the 70s showing the worrisome increase in Arctic ice coverage look a lot like the maps today showing the worrisome decrease.
A story about polar bear populations growing enough that locals are looking to increase hunting quotas:
http://nnsl.com/northern-news-services/stories/papers/sep17_07bear.html
Reconciling with other press stories that report PROJECTIONS of extinction in 50+ years makes one wonder.
JB
Don't be silly.
Eli was mouthing off about his credentials implying he knows all there is to know about AGW. In this case ignorance is not bliss. There are people smarter than he is from the science field who don't profess to know enough about AGW to speak as an expert.
A good analogy is the GP to the heart specialist or a urologist. A GP doesn't know enough about the subject and therfore sends the patient to the expert.
Eli is just blowing a trumpet not realizing it is a kiddies toy he's got in his mouth.
Yes, dd456, that does make me wonder. Kind of like wondering about how anyone can freeze to death when I'm nice and toasty, or how polar bears can go extinct when we still have zoos. Or how you are make an argument ad Time magazine cobaggery from 1971! Read some other stories on this blog about what getting "Rasooled" means.
Illuminous beauty says:
Is G convincing anybody except himself that he is not a full blown idiot?I
IJc? Care to comment? After all, idiots should stick together. Jc, the great Libertarian who won't defend freedom of speech, because he disagrees with the speaker. Voltaire is spitting on you from beyond the grave, hypocrite.I
Voltaire would agree with me and thank me for the effort, LB. You don't even realize or understand the meaning of free speech. Hansen's doing a con job As he appeared as muzzled as a dog gorging on raw meat. The self-important twit is behaving like a loose cannon that thinks organizational procedures ought not to apply to someone as important as he is. He should feel free to scare the kids any time he feels like it.
Example.
Every large investment bank has stock analysts. It would be unthinkable and firing offense if a senior executive gave a diverging opinion on a stock to the public without at least discussing it with the management and getting clearance to do so. Getting the boot for not following procedure in this case is NOT a reduction in anyone's free speech rights.
This is just silly talk.
Pink Punk has it right, agent 456.
Polar bears can go extinct and become a pest at the same time in the AGW world we live in.
Add it to the warmlist as:
Polar bears face both extinction and massive explosion in numbers.
Here's the warmlist:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
And your analogy sucks Pinko punk. It makes no sense at all. It's bizarre really.
Again with this? How embarrassing.
JC: "Don't be silly."
I wasn't.
"Eli was mouthing off about his credentials implying he knows all there is to know about AGW."
Perhaps you can direct me to the post by Rabett above implies that "he knows all there is to know about AGW."
"Eli is just blowing a trumpet not realizing it is a kiddies toy he's got in his mouth."
If anyone is blowing anything, it is you -- hot air.
Rabett does not need to impress people with his credentials. What he has written on his blog on climate related subjects speaks for itself.
Here's a smattering:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/06/continuing-our-series.html
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2006/05/parsing-greenhouse-gas-driven-sea.ht…
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2007/07/temperature-anonymice-gave-eli-new.h…
This kind of organized guilt-by-association character assassination, made famous by Joe McCarthy, more than justifies the use of the term "swiftboating."
Just for the record, let's summarize what actually happened:
1. A paper, written by somebody else, not Hansen, thanked Hansen, not for a climate model, but for a program to do some basic physics calculations.
2. The paper did not actually predict an ice age, but it did suggest that if particulate pollution in the atmosphere got several times worse (and if other factors, like CO2, stayed the same), and this were sustained for several years, that it could produce a degree of cooling sufficient to trigger an ice age.
3. This was picked up by a newspaper, that published a sensationalistic article claiming that we were facing an ice age.
4. Now, we have an organized campaign to discredit a researcher, by claiming that he was the "source" of the newspaper article--much like attributing the conclusion of a paper to Texas Instruments because one of the authors on a paper used a TI calculator.
Note that it obviously took some research to build this chain of guilt-by-association, and the people who did so clearly went to some difficulty to obscure the actual facts (and the same article used a similar guilt-by-association deception to falsely imply that Hansen received three-quarters of a million dollars from Soros). So this was not some kind of accident or misunderstanding, but deliberate dishonesty. Somebody is going to quite a bit of trouble to attempt to discredit Hansen. And probably getting paid to do so.
Perhaps you can direct me to the post by Rabett above implies that "he knows all there is to know about AGW.
How's this:
Let us just put it this way, most of what I do professionally is gas phase spectroscopy, dynamics and kinetics of small molecules. Get the point yet.
JB
Wow! I would say nuke engineering is that too, hey?
No offense, I would expect Eli to have published a few papers on climate science if as he implies he knows the stuff. I don't mean his blog either. Is there?
trrll, you really shouldn't clarify this for believers of debunked right wing talking points, their intellectual level can't handle it. they are born with very large hands, so that they can cover their eyes and ears at the same time when you give them accurate information. calling them stupid is not an insult, but a factual description. they are not even aware that we know all those stupid talking points.
JC:
That post most certainly does not claim he knows "all there is to know about AGW".
That's simply a gross exaggeration on your part. Anyone here can see that.
Rabett's statement indicates that his area of expertise is directly relevant to climate science, which it is.
Anyone who knows anything about the science of the earth's atmosphere (a critical part of climate science) knows that it deals with "gas phase spectroscopy, dynamics and kinetics of small molecules".
The latter group obviously does not include yourself.
Jc: For what its worth, I have read Eli's posts for a long time. They are always well founded in science and explain things quite well. He knows his stuff. If you don't like you can go over his stuff and point out the errors.
But I did like this quote from you There are people smarter than he is from the science field who don't profess to know enough about AGW to speak as an expert.
If I can just reword it a bit There are people less smart than he is from the science denial field who do profess to know enough about AGW to speak as an expert.
Regards,
JC (John Cross)
If I might suggest a reordering of priorities ... before going to Eli's excellent site, I would appreciate it if Jc would learn a few html tags other than "b." Specifically, Jc, let me point you to "blockquote."
It goes like this:
When you do this, it makes clear which words are yours, and which are someone else's.
Why is this important? To avoid causing cognitive dissonance among your readers.
Please don't take this personally, Jc, but your history of comments had led me to the impression that you are not, perhaps, the sharpest blade in the box. Kind of a butter knife among the straight razors, if you get my drift. Imagine, if you will, my surprise when I came upon this:
Now, granted, there was a mishmash of context before and after that passage that would have enabled me to parse the whole comment had I read it carefully, but there was nothing in its format to set those words apart from the posting commenter's. For a few dizzying moments, I had to consider the possibility that Jc, of all people, knew from gas phase spectroscopy. Then I went upstream a little bit, realized that the confusing bit was a quote from Eli, and I was back where I started. So, please, please, Jc, help us out. At least use quotation marks.
John Cross is aptly illustrating Dano's rule:
"when anyone, anywhere says anything that doesn't agree with a small minority's ideology, marginalize them."
Best,
D
also Jc's unerringly idiotic snarky endorsement of 162 in 166:
"A story about polar bear populations growing enough that locals are looking to increase hunting quotas: [link omitted]
Reconciling with other press stories that report PROJECTIONS of extinction in 50+ years makes one wonder.
Posted by: dd456 | October 1, 2007 3:48 AM"
---
Apparently none of all y'all deniers have heard of subpopulations or local ecosystems. That polar bear population is on the northeast coast of Canada, an area which is a "convergent ice ecosystem." See, even though arctic sea ice cover is declining dramatically, the remaining ice tends to get blown to the NE coast of Canada and to Greenland, so the ice there is relatively less impacted. And that is precisely where the local polar bear subpopulation (notice the prefix 'sub') are doing well. Bears in divergent ice ecosystems are expected to be much more severely impacted, much sooner, by declining sea ice - and a growing subpopulation right at the least impacted local convergent ice ecosystem does not contradict that.
http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/09/polar_bears_disappear.h…
Further - this is a hunted and managed bear population. The bear harvest has been set for decades to keep the population in check so as to minimize bear-human problems. This means that hunting is used to intentionally keep the population below natural carrying capacity. An increase in numbers for a subpopulation already well below carrying caapaity does NOT tell us anything about whether the natural carrying capacity is increasing or decreasing. It is entirely possible that ice loss is causing a decline in how many bears the region COULD carry, while at the same time an artificially low population of bears is climbing in numbers toward the new lower carrying capacity. But again, this only applies to that one subpopulation in that one convergent ice ecosystem.
hm. two completely contradicting article, citing the same guy:
IQALUIT - Climate change is not hurting polar bear populations in the Davis Strait area of Nunavut, according to Dr. Mitch Taylor, manager of wildlife research and a polar bear biologist with the GN's Department of Environment.
http://nnsl.com/northern-news-services/stories/papers/sep17_07bear.html
and:
Nunavut researchers looked for the missing bears this summer. They found some, says Mitch Taylor, Nunavut's director of wildlife research, but not nearly as many as hunters hoped. And not enough to justify the number of bears currently being shot.
http://www.nunatsiaq.com/news/nunavut/70928_544.html
Dear ddtruy33,
You claimed that you work for NASA - What is your scientific expertise? Many of your claims are clearly wrong. I strongly suggest that you read the post by David MarjanoviÄ. He explains the issue with great clarity. The book "The Discovery of Global Warming" is also a very good source. With respect to Dr. Hansen, reasonable people may agree or disagree with how he deals with the media. Similarly, many scientists may disagree with some aspects of his research - this is the way science works. However, I do not know any serious scientists who will say that Hansen's science is "no good".
G.
John Cross:
Thanks for all the lessons. To summarize what i will be taking home with me from the lecture:
1. you think Eli is a climate scientist because you think he is.
2.You're a lecturing little boor.
3. You know a little computer language which you think maks you appear intelligent.
Thanks. hat about confrims what i have always thought of your comments.
Dano again proves that smoking illict drugs has about the same effect and injecting.
Gelbstoff writes
Well, if he actually works for NASA, then he knows that his statement that
is false, making him a liar. ddtruy33 says that "I work at NASA and have been involved with press releases." Could he be the guy in charge of censoring Hansen's press releases?
On the other hand, maybe he doesn't work at NASA at all. Which would also make him a liar.
I love Deltoid; it's such a troll magnet. You couldn't make this stuff up. I particularly like comment #179, in which the writer demonstrates that:
1. He can't spell.
2. He can't punctuate.
1. He can't count.
Nick:
What I love about Deltoid is Lambert of course. He brings up great topics that seem to flush out the angry, intolerant lefties from their burrows as well as those who don't have much to say other than demonstrate they would be great proof readers working for law firms at 10 buck an hour + 1/2lunch. You fall in the last category. Please remember that there is a reason the lawyer is earning 400 bucks an hour while you're earning 10 bucks as a proofreader in some dingy area in the middle of the floor without natural light. The big guy has the corner office.
Please check my typos..
Good point.
I'd also like to point out that the guy who was denying scientist interviews for political reasons at the Dept. of Commerce is named Chuck Fuqua. No point, just wanted to share that.
Jc: What! I could make $10 an hour proof reading! It sure beats my $6.50 job at McDondalds! At McDondalds I also have to clean out the washrooms, but in another month they give me a brush!!
Regards,
JC
Jc: if you want to pay me to proof-read your comments, my rates at work start at £70/hour and go up steeply from there. Forget "bucks" - I won't touch new contracts in flabby banana-republic currencies such as USD. Once burned, twice shy.
But feeding trolls like you isn't work, it's a labour of love. I put in ten minutes from time to time, pro bono publico.
Nick Barnes wrote:
I love Deltoid; it's such a troll magnet. You couldn't make this stuff up. I particularly like comment #179, in which the writer demonstrates that [...] He can't count.
In the troll's defense, he did manage to count as high as 2. It was only when he tried to work with larger numbers that he ran into difficulties.
John:
Please take the advice with all the best intentions. You have oversold yourself at $6.5 an hour. Aim lower and you'll be happier.
Nick:
Stg 70 an hour. Wow! I'm impressed. You must be one those bigshots or something.
Jc: Perhaps you are right. But I think that leaves me only one place I can go - where do you work?
And with that, I have engaged in enough mud slinging (fun though it is to act 12 again). And, Tim please feel free to disemvowel me in order to return this form to something resembling the topic!
Regards,
John
I would also submit merrily to disemvowelling at the whim of our Great Leader.
John and Nick,
You are confused. The key to getting disemvowelled here is not to be abusive or off topic. Just disagree with Tim. Works for me...
Then why did you apologize for being abusive after Tim recently disemvowelled you?
Are you like Larry Craig, trying to back out of a guilty plea a bit late?
Eli recommends self disemvowelment.
jc y r t f ln, t f cntrl n ttlly nts. G d hd n cv n dn't cm t gn. dmn wll mn t! y n yr scmmng slm bckts c a g t hll.
Ah, that feels good!
dhogaza, it's called sarcasm. You started the namecalling by referring to me as a liar, a ho and a f***ing whore. I replied and called you a nitwit. Tim disemvowelled me. I sent him an email and asked him why. He told me that it was because I had questioned him in the past. You tell me which is more abusive. Nitwit or fucking whore?
thy'r bnch f dcks.
(qck! qck!)
Boris, nice. I expected you to say something like:
"Yawn"
"This again"
or
"How boring"
Way to mix it up!
Eli, I think Tim disemvowels more effectively. You left an 'a'.
Bring on the disemvowelling fork!
Or is it more of a spoon?
Or a corkscrew?
Or like one of those cherry-stoning devices?
Thanks.
BTW, I'm with you on the "fucking whore" thing. dhogaza went over the line on that one and deserved to be desemvoweled.
"You tell me which is more abusive. Nitwit or fucking whore?"
In your case, hoggsie, definitely nitwit as it's closer to the truth. A male slut is a good thing.
By the way stop behaving like big cry baby, emailing the owner if he decides he doesn't like one of your posts. You over sized big mary,
These comments are getting a bit sophomoric and have diluted the discussion of an important issue.
So, ddtruy33,are you still out there? Are you really a NASA person?
Gelbstoff
Hitler. Gotta put this thread out of its misery.
ELi says:
"Gotta put this thread out of its misery."
Yea professor. seeing you were one of the first out the gate with the scorn and abuse. Two things:
Is that how you act on campus, and
would you allow the same abuse on you blog.
Great form, professor Eli.
By the way, this was pretty priceless:
"He also figured out that soot in the atmosphere is acting, as a substantial warming agent and it is not just CO2 causing the problem."
Ho ho ho. indeed. Wonder what Jack Chick pamphlet the trolls learn their KLIMAT SIENS from?
Marian, you silly twat. It's a fact about Hansens work. That's one of the things he discovered.
Any reason you find that comment unusual?
I think trying to invoke the fascist so-called Godwin's law is EXACTLY like something Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany in the 1930s during the Nazi period of World War II and the holocaust would have done!
Some behavior from a so-called science doctor!
I apologize for calling you guys a bunch of ducks.
Thanks Boris.
JC, Marion is amused because "soot in the atmosphere is acting, as a substantial warming agent" is not a fact. Soot in the atmosphere causes cooling.
"What I love about Deltoid is Lambert of course. He brings up great topics that seem to flush out the angry, intolerant lefties from their burrows"
The proof of this, of course, is the first comment of the thread.
Tim:
Really?
Not if he's correct.
http://www.geotimes.org/aug07/article.html?id=WebExtra080307.html
I thought the question of it's behaviour wasn't questioned and understood it to be warming agent which was associated with Hansen.
And here's me thinking the science was settled. I wonder if Eli could comment on these findings seeing he's a resident gas guru.
Eli,
did you know about these experiments sggesting that soot at different elevations have varying degrees of behavioural charcteristics and it could change the status of current modeling.
Marian? How about you Mr. Amusued.
jc:
Regarding the article on soot and warming
1--this is a regional phenomena, not global.
2--the effect is not related to the effect aerosols have in reducing net insolation that early GCMs missed.
3--In science, a single experiment is not convincing.
4--The study even if true, does nothing to enhance or reduce Hansen's standing.
So what was your point?
Mike
Dear JC:
Regarding the soot article, I do not see your point. Perhaps you are getting confused with aerosols. Besides, I think that the effect of soot mentioned in this article is local, and soot does not have the residence time of CO2 or CH4.
Gelbstoff
jc:
Mike says:
Regarding the article on soot and warming
1--this is a regional phenomena, not global.
So, err you're saying there is Asian soot, European soot, Indian soot, Chinese soot. So soot takes on racial characteristics too? :-)
3--In science, a single experiment is not convincing.
Tell that to Marian. She was amused that I thought soot was a warming agent. She was certain in fact. These experiments demonstrate uncertainty and she ought to wipe her amused look off her face.
4--The study even if true, does nothing to enhance or reduce Hansen's standing.
I never said it did. I praised Hansen. Marian picked me up on the fact that I thought it had been Hansen who claimed soot was a warming agent. The science groupie thinks that was a major sin. She also thought I was being silly to make the claim about soot/warming agent.
These experiments show this may in fact be the case.
jc at 214:
re: Reply to point one--playing the racist card, eh. Good rhetoric, poor logic. It would help if you actually read the Nature article. The article states that it is a regional phenomena, and that the chemistry of the soot over the Indian may be unique in comparison to that over the Himalayas. The soot observation is a competing explanation for the warming observed in the Indian subcontinent with global warming. It has potentially distinct policy choices separate from addressing reduction in GG emissions.
re: reply to point two--none given. You therefore support Marion Delgado (a male, I should point out, stop misspelling his name) and Tim Lambert's postion that you were wrong. This was the crux of my original post.
re: reply to point three. More rhetoric, but the logic is that since you conceded point two, your response here is at best evasive.
re: reply to point four. More rhetoric. You are the one suggesting that Hansen included this heating mechanism as an element in GGMs, and implied that he had it wrong. The issue has nothing to do with Hansen's work, but is a well known corollary from the old urban heat island effect working on a larger regional scale that was never anticipated.
My conclusion is that you are ignorant of basic climatology, and mendacious to boot. Good day.
Mike
Two corrections to 215:
GG should be GHG, and GGM should be GCM.
Note to self, wipe glasses before reviewing post, or don't post until after the eye exam.
Mike.
Dear JC,
Your answers to Mike have no substance. What is this non-sense about Asian vs. European soot? If you do not have a valid point, do not try to be funny. The rest of posting 214 makes even less sense. What is the "science groupie"? Oh, and you really need to learn to count. It goes: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This should be enough for today.
Hello Mike, are you a climatologist?
Gelbstoff
Mike says:
" The article states that it is a regional phenomena, and that the chemistry of the soot over the Indian may be unique in comparison to that over the Himalayas"
So err Mike you missed my point? Was that deliberate or was it the eyesight problem?
Here's it is:
Eli, did you know about these experiments sggesting that soot at different elevations have varying degrees of behavioural charcteristics and it could change the status of current modeling.
I was criticsed for two things.
That i had Hansen pegged as a 100% warmer and related to that that I had soot as a warming agent whereas both Tim and Marian had it as a cooler.
Clearly that isn't the case (cooling agent 100% of th time) in so far as this experiment may be indicating.
" Your answers to Mike have no substance. "
Says you
" What is this non-sense about Asian vs. European soot? "
A joke.
" If you do not have a valid point, do not try to be funny."
Why not? You're certaintly not offering a giggle, Mr. Mirthless.
" The rest of posting 214 makes even less sense."
Says you
" What is the "science groupie"? "
Like rock star groupie.
" Oh, and you really need to learn to count. "
I'm not bad actually , but I am very lazy.
" It goes: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This should be enough for today."
Really? They were a copy of Mike's numbered comments. It would have been confusing to renumber them.
"Hello Mike, are you a climatologist?"
I am. i did an economics degree then worked in the financial markets and went to climate science straight from there. I am setting up a website for people to get Phd's in climate science. Would you like one, they're free and you don't have to sit for a test? Just email me and I'll send you the certifaction. I'm doing it so people don't feel left out as everyone is a climate expert these days.
Jc is to Deltoid threads what Agent Smith is to the Matrix. Only far far dumber.
Gelbstoff:
No.
I am primarily a historical plant geographer, and straddle the epistemological space between ecology and climate. My primary tool was pollen analysis, and I have training in geomorphology, systematics, tauphonomy, and climatology.
In my attempt at a Phd, I worked on paleoclimate/paleo ecological reconstruction of the Great Basin, so I grounded myself in boundary layer climatology to develop a transient climate model. That makes me somewhat familiar with GCMs and GISS. One of my advisors was with IPCC.
Marriage, age, and child abruptly ended that, and I am now so far afield from that I look back in nostalgia, and semi-lurk in these blogs. The better expert in this thread is Eli.
Mike
jc at 218.
I note that you read a summary on the web, and possibly not the best summary, of a technical article in Nature. I read the article. Your reasoning and presumptions are wrong on so many levels it is staggering.
I already informed you that the article has nothing to do with GCM, or GISS for that matter. These are the topics at hand, they are what pertain to Hansen's work. It has nothing to do with coal pollution at different elevations above the surface. So calling Eli out was pointless. Note that where the coal is obtained will result in soot with different chemical and physical characteristics.
"That i (sic) had Hansen pegged as a 100% warmer and related to that that I had soot as a warming agent whereas both Tim and Marian (sic) had it as a cooler."
My immediate question--what does it mean when you fish for a bass, and you bring up a boot, that you originally were fishing for the boot?
Hansen's work is not the sum of climatology. For Hansen and GISS alone, soot can be considered a component of aerosol, and primarily has the role of scattering SW radiation. Tim and Marion were correct to call you on this. You can't talk your way out of the fact that you were wrong.
Any well informed person reading this blog would know that had GCMs not modeled the effect of aerosols as such, there would not have been as good an accord of the similations and the empirical, and therefore there would not be as great a sense of fidelity with the future simulations. So, you can't get out of it based on ignorance.
The global significance of aerosols, of which soot may be considered a component, is with scattering of short wave radiation. What the article addresses is a component of the soot over the Indian Ocean possessing unexpected physical properties in that it absorbs short wave radiation. The finding has no impact on the AGHG/global warming hypothesis and GCM modeling, except that rather than absortion and re-radiation at the surface, a portion of the absorbtion and re-radiation occurs in the troposphere. It implies a modest change to the energy budget, quite likely insignficant when levels of magnitude are considered. It is quite an unkempt economist that cannot comprehend this up front, but when you live under a rock maybe basic meterology and physical geography was dropped from your general elective program in high school and college.
You owe Marion, Tim, and Eli an apology; hell, you owe the readers of this blog an apology for the waste of time. That of course assumes that your failure of comprehension is just an outcome of laziness rather than something genetic.
Mike
Dear JC,
I do not feel compelled to be funny. You are providing all the entertainment. And no, there is no substance in your answers. Just one example- when Mike explained to you that the effect of soot was regional, not global, you had no other answer than to try to be funny. On top of that, you may be missing the bigger picture here -that the offending CO2 and soot(part of it) are anthropogenic. For this reason, I can believe that you are an economist. I also understand now your rant in previous postings about scientists not been qualified to make policy. Clearly, I disagree.
The claim that you are also a climatologist appears vaporous. If memory serves me right, you have confused the IPCC with GCM models, chemical engineers with physical chemists, claimed that Hansen does not know the difference between climate and weather etc, and there is that pesky numbering problem...but my apologies if my memory is wrong. Nevertheless, I reject the idea that one has to have a degree or publications to speak intelligently about a subject. This is a common logical fallacy.
I am not a climatologist, just a lowly oceanographer who works on NASA-funded climate-related research. I do not work for NASA anymore, I am now in academia. I do have, however, a couple of graduate degrees including a PhD and a few publications. So, I must pass on your very generous offer to get a PhD from you. But I do thank you!
So, my dear JC, of all your postings, #83 is the most lucid. It is even fairly well-written, although it contains some questionable assertions. Do you care to revisit? Otherwise, I am loosing interest.
Truly yours,
Gelbstoff
"Clearly that isn't the case (cooling agent 100% of th time) in so far as this experiment may be indicating."
Yeah, this was not really news, but congrats on winning another argument that no one was making. You're like 45-3 in those so far.
FWIW, Indian soot is bad shit (actually cow dung or a lot of it is). A major issue is that the Indian poor burn dried cow dung for cooking. Since most cooking is done in enclosed spaces, that does wonders for the lungs of the women who do the cooking and the kids who hang around. Which may be why they call it a brown cloud. OTOH the Indians cannot get the poor to use other fuel because the cow patties are shit cheap
The other strangeness here is that Hansen has been one of Mark Jacobson's big boosters, every since Jacobson in ~2000 pointed out that black carbon would have important climatic effects. jc is copying out of some disinfo blog
To round it out, last time I looked there were still major uncertainties in how black carbon nucleated aerosols, which could even change the sign of the effect.
Gelbstoff
I am not an economist although I majored in economics. However I know enough about the subject as I worked on Wall Street and Australia in macro markets which meant we consumed economic research every day 24/7 as a trader. This type is quite different from academic economics.
The point about soot:
Marrion and then Tim played gotcha but ended up locking in one bracelet.
They argued two things.
1. Soot warms
2. Hansen had soot as a cooler.
Soot is not a warming agent 100% of the time, which is the point I was making in linking that piece. So their inference was incorrect. We can cut and dice it however many times you want but it is not correct.
I did get Hansen's association wrong it seems.
"I also understand now your rant in previous postings about scientists not been qualified to make policy. Clearly, I disagree."
Of course they can... if they care qualified to do so. If they're not qualified they have no business entering the policy debate, as they will screw it up.
Economics is the study of human scarcity/ wants/ satisfaction. It is also the study of trade offs (opportunity cost) that need to be made when there are competing interests at stake.
Cutting the debate down about AGW to its most basic in terms of where the rubber meets the road....... the discussion is basically about the type of insurance policy we should buy to attempt some mitigation. Climate scientists are not qualified to perform these studies. It is not a matter of how smart they are. It is a question of where their expertise lies. That was always my point.
Example:
Say ocean levels are predictied to rise by say 1 foot over the next 90 odd years (it's not a prediction by the way).
What do we do? At face value it seems to we should try to prevent that. However on further analysis we may not reach the same conclusion. Eliminating US Federal Gov insurance relief to coastal areas may do the job all by itself. this of course is predicted on the assumption that the other side of the equation is economic growth as measured by GDP.
We had one attempt with Stern's report and it turned out to be an unmitigated (no pun intended) shambles. Lets hope we have learned from that mistake.
Eli
Thanks for the explanation.
Dear JC,
I agree with your point regarding non-qualified scientists making fine points of policy. However, I doubt that Hansen was making very specific policy suggestion. He, like many including myself are alarmed by the lack of any clear policy to deal with GW. Clearly, the low hanging fruit is the reduction of emissions, which will also bring many other
benefits in terms of health, technology development, increase efficiencies, and perhaps some remedy to international upheaval. I also understand that this low hanging fruit may be poisonous to some economic interests that contribute heavily to the GOP.
I know that your comment about sea level rise is just an example, but is indicative of a fairly narrow view. I will say that I agree that the elimination of federal insurance relief may solve the problem in the USA, but what about all the millions of people in developing countries who live in coastal areas? What about coral reefs, mangrove, fisheries, etc? Are you relocating cities and ports? This is a reason to have scientists in the loop.
And JC, the US is not an economy, is a country, and its citizens are not consumers, they are people, and often the median is more informative than the average. Remember this before you do your next economic analysis and start talking about GDP.
But back to the original point of this discussion. So, Hansen comes to believe that AGW is a big problem -now the consensus of the scientific community. So, he speaks out. What is wrong with that? He strongly believes that the problem is big enough to grant immediate attention, and he had the stature to get it, so he did. Some may argue that scientists should stay out of political issues to avoid the appearance of partiality. However, Hansen did not create the political issue - others did. His endorsement of Kerry (a tactical mistake regardless of W) came long after AGW has been politicized, and Hansen did favor McCain before. Besides, Hansen is in good company when it comes to famous scientists mixing it up with policy and politics.
Now, you may argue that because Hansen is a civil servant he should not speak out. Well he works for NASA, an R&D agency with no policy responsibilities. So why should a NASA scientists refrain from speaking out about a problem that requires a policy solution? A problem that he understood while performing his job! I think that the opposite is the case. If he has not spoken out, he would have been derelict in his duty. Think about this, should a scientist from NIH stay silent in the face of an issue critical to the health of the nation? Now, think even harder, do you think that a NASA scientist who calls for the development of a costly defense system against asteroids will be swifboated?
And I did not know that black soot could be cooling -I am highly skeptical - have to get out of the lab and read more. So many papers, so little time...
Regards,
Gelbstoff.
Jc: "I would expect Eli to have published a few papers on climate science if as he implies he knows the stuff."
Until I know Jc has published a few papers on anything I will conclude he knows nothing.
We have read Jc's oeuvre. It's clear he has strong opinions, and it's clear that he brings them to play on most topics, whether relevant or not. It's also clear that facts are inconvenient, but not an obstacle on the way to the perfect libertarian future. Now we know all that, can we get back to the main topics?
It seems to me that Hansen ranks just before or after Gore, depending on the day, as the enemy for the anti-climate science crowd. It's also clear that these people can hold umpteen contradictory ideas at the same time, share them rapidly, and aren't interested in the truth. This is a situation where Lord Monckton's preferred solution for scientific disputes carries some attractiveness. Sue the bastards, say loudly that they are liars, or ignore them. They aren't presenting facts or rational argument, and won't respond to them.
Stewart:
"It seems to me that Hansen ranks just before or after Gore, depending on the day, as the enemy for the anti-climate science crowd."
Not really, Stewart. Reasonable people can reach the conclusion it may be worth buying some storm insurance with AGW etc. but consider Prince Albert to be a bolivating twat. He always has been. (can one say that about royalty and not be jailed?)
http://www.drudgereport.com/gore.htm
Nice jet looking jet the Prince used on his way to Eygpt obviously to speak about how people ought to change their ways and that AGW is a THE MORAL ISSUE OF THE CENTURY
Can someone help me please?
I can't quite tell from this angle if it is a Global Express, the super Gulfstream 5.5 or the regular Gulfstream 5.
Anyone know? Marian?
JC, what I can't tell from your picture, is who are the people in it. On account of their heads being five blurry pixels high. And even if that is him and the jet is powered by rendered baby seals, so what? How does that change the facts he presented in "An Inconvenient Truth".
Until I know Jc has published a few papers on anything I will conclude he knows nothing.
nice one.
but please do not judge his wisdom. ONLY economist have any right on an oppinion on global warming.
everyone else has to write some peer reviewed articles. and even then, you are not allowed to go public with your results or to advice politicians. that is still for ECONOMISTS only...
Nice jet looking jet the Prince used on his way to Eygpt obviously to speak about how people ought to change their ways and that AGW is a THE MORAL ISSUE OF THE CENTURY
shame on him! how coul Gore dare to make a film on plastic celluloid? he should have been writing stuff with selfmade ink on recycled paper!
hint to Jc:
while trying to safe the word, you are even allowed an occasional trip on a private jet.
"How does that change the facts he presented in "An Inconvenient Truth".
The what-climate-change would not pay attention to the argument, unless it is put forward by a person living in a grass hut wearing all cotton clothing and hempen sandals who spreads the message by walking from town to town. We can all imagine for ourselves the respect such a person's arguments would get from the what-climate-change folks.
Read closely above and you'll see that JC doesn't claim to be an economist, only that he majored in economics in College. An undergraduate degree, in other words.
Which may be one reason he doesn't clearly understand many of the concepts he cites when he's saying such nasty things about real economists who post here (Ian Gould, for instance).
Hoggsie
Formal qualifactions in Oz aren't the same as the US. You don't do an undergrad/grad degree to be considered the same way.
"Read closely above and you'll see that JC doesn't claim to be an economist"
Correct. I'm not a professional economist in the formal sense.
"And even if that is him and the jet is powered by rendered baby seals, so what? How does that change the facts he presented in "An Inconvenient Truth"."
Forgetting the science. Forget the fact that he exaggerated the science, introduced pics and film of Katrina for example to showcase his arguemment when people like Chris Landsea have said we don't have the evidence to tie increased atlantic storm activity to AGW. Forget all that.
Prince Albert told his audience in that annoying tone he uses (to para)that AGW is the moral imperative of our era and that we must change our ways.
Changing "our" ways to Prince Albert means he upgrades from a base model Citation 1 to an interncontinental private jet.
He can't even live by the standards he sets for others. This has always beent he case with him.
LOL - who could have known?
Jc. Borat meets Agent Smith. Me, me and more me. You will notice this entire thread is devoted to Jc and parody of Jc, (and thank god for the signature feature else it would be difficult to tell them apart). Still, that seems like an awful lot of credence for such a workaday troll- I'm sure he appreciates the attention, else how to account for his posts? Where's Freud when you need some illicit drugs, or a pop psychologist when you need to deconstruct a windbag?
Never one to take my own advice, I have to comment on the hypocrisy card, which hypocritical right wingers are adept at employing. It turns out if you're rich, like John Edwards, that makes you a hypocrite for making poor and lower middle class's economic hardships a political issue. FDR eat your heart out. It is also the case that though Gore is advocating public policy from which he would not exempt himself, and hence would be worse off- for example, it's fair to say he'd pay more to heat his house and travel if he got his way politically- he's a hypocrite if he has a carbon imprint, no matter the requirements on his time, etc. Matt Drudge, not far from the root of all evil, breaks the grainy courageous photo-journalist taken deep throat photos.
In a right wing nutjobs mind, if you advocate low taxes for the rich, and you are rich yourself and therefore profit from this policy position, that's a-ok. It's also ok for people who devoted their youths to dodging military service, deferment Dick for example, to go on to spend their adult lives ordering young men off to die. But to advocate high taxes on a group that you count yourself a member of- HYPOCRITE! What's the point with these people? Speaking of, I'm in dire need of a beer.
"Jc. Borat meets Agent Smith. Me, me and more me. You will notice this entire thread is devoted to Jc and parody of Jc, (and thank god for the signature feature else it would be difficult to tell them apart)."
If I'm Borat, Major, you must be the huge, naked fat guy running after him.
"Still, that seems like an awful lot of credence for such a workaday troll- I'm sure he appreciates the attention, else how to account for his posts? Where's Freud when you need some illicit drugs, or a pop psychologist when you need to deconstruct a windbag?"
Windbag/ me? The length of your comments defines windbarggery, Mr.Windbag. And here I was being polite by nicely showing you where you goofed up that analysis of the Cal power supply problem. Thanks thankless.
"Never one to take my own advice, I have to comment on the hypocrisy card, which hypocritical right wingers are adept at employing."
Oh yea, the new gold standard in observing hypocrisy. Which is:
"It turns out if you're rich, like John Edwards, that makes you a hypocrite for making poor and lower middle class's economic hardships a political issue."
Except we were talking about Prince Albert. Edwards has his own problems such as making sure no hair is out of place.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AE847UXu3Q
Who ever said Edwards was shallow?
"FDR eat your heart out. It is also the case that though Gore is advocating public policy from which he would not exempt himself, and hence would be worse off- for example, it's fair to say he'd pay more to heat his house and travel if he got his way politically- he's a hypocrite if he has a carbon imprint, no matter the requirements on his time, etc. Matt Drudge, not far from the root of all evil, breaks the grainy courageous photo-journalist taken deep throat photos."
Prince Albert is a hypocrite of the first order. This is a man who tells us, no instructs us that GW is the moral imperative of our era as he's updating his jet to a Gulfstream 5.5. "The moral imperative of our eara" doesn't apply to him.
"In a right wing nutjobs mind, if you advocate low taxes for the rich, and you are rich yourself and therefore profit from this policy position, that's a-ok."
As against leftwing frauds and intellectual freaks that avoid explaining most of taxes are paid by about 15% of the people. Those mega wealthy Dem supporters remain well insulated from the tax bite of course as they benefit through tax-free capital appreciation. Warrren Beuffet is a classic case. Of course Warren wouldn't support a wealth tax, he supports a higher income tax seeing he is relatively "income poor". Berkshire has never paid a dividend allowing compounding to acculmulate at the tax free rate of return. Warren of course would like to see a higher income tax rate. But he never mentions a wealth tax. What bleeding a hypocrite.
Dopey
I have been a professional trader in macro markets for the past few decades. I know economics. Don't be a dope, dopey.
Sorry Jc, you're far more interesting as a phenomenon than a person, and its the phenomenon that I posted to. To the individual, of course you are correct and I should not want to challenge that steel trap of a brain of yours. Speaking of, am still hoping you will share with us your breakthrough in the water distribution business.
Btw, when trying to impersonate a trader, try to avoid describing yourself as a trader in the 'macro markets'. Since I'm no financial instruments are described as 'macro', and since no one in the industry outside of the back office wanna-be community would ever speak that way, it's a dead give away. Now run along and get your shine box.
"Since I'm no financial instruments are described as 'macro', and since no one in the industry outside of the back office wanna-be community would ever speak that way, it's a dead give away."
Don't be silly, major. Currencies and bonds are referered to macro markets., that is unless of course you have redefined them not to be. If you're going to be insulting try to at least not make dumbass errors doing so.
Re the water stuff. I did explain it twice but you were to myopic to "listen" just like you didn't listen to the polite corrrection i offered to your pretty good rant on the cal power situation. Recall? I nicley explained to you that the outta staters weren't going to sell power to Cal below cost. I trying to help you understand the real reasons rather than the stupid explanations you were offering... ie that there must have been some sort of collusion. What part in Dumb and Dumber did you play?
No Jc, they're referred to as fx and bond or interest rate markets respectively. OTOH, there is a classification of trading strategies known as 'Macro' but the name does not come from the type of securities it invests in, but rather due to the underlying signal it is trying to exploit- the hint is in the name fyi. That in practice these tend more to be technical strategies than anything else makes 'macro' one of many misnomers in the field of finance. Next time you want to pretend to be something that you're not, get the jargon straight, and of course recognize that you're in over your head. This last piece of advice is for those with a modicum of pride, so you can happily ignore that bit.
By your statements in the other thread, you assert it is possible to distribute water without pipes and pumping stations. It is this revolutionary concept that I am hoping you will divulge. As for collusion in the California energy markets, your assessment of the situation is typically novel- perhaps you should apprise the three Enron traders who confessed to manipulating the markets or listen to the contemporaneously taped phone conversation in which one trader indicates to a producer that then was a good time to shut down for maintenance *wink*.
And now I'm a fully participating member of the farce. I want my shoes looking like mirrors shine boy.
Major
re your shoes....Do you spit and polish?
This is what you wrote on the other thread about the Cal issue:
"This all meant that power consumption was increasing rapidly and that has all the makings of a problem. The bottom line is that California was not adequately supplied, as indicated by the extent it relied on out of state production and its low reserve ratio, (or the extent to which it threw caution to the wind on Diablo Canyon, which was operating flat out despite erstwhile concerns that it should be run at well below capacity)"
Now you're saying this:
As for collusion in the California energy markets, your assessment of the situation is typically novel- perhaps you should apprise the three Enron traders who confessed to manipulating the markets or listen to the contemporaneously taped phone conversation in which one trader indicates to a producer that then was a good time to shut down for maintenance wink.
The reason it wasn't adequaely sourcing outta state power during peak times was due to the self imposed ceiling. When the cost rose above the ceiling the outta staters couldn't supply the power needs of the state. This is what I have been trying to drum into your thick skull since you wrote the first comment.
Re the water issue:
Don't so thick. Scroll through and you'll see my answer. If you still need help let me know and I'll point to it.
Re Macro markets:
You haven't a clue.
Two quick references to show you that macro trading refers to trading macro markets ie global markets such as currencies and bonds, Mr. Cocksure.
All you had to do is google, Majorjammer. Now thank me for doing the work for you, you ingrate.
Peter Borish is Chairman of the Board of Directors of OneChicago, LLC, the security futures exchange. Mr. Borish is also the CEO of Twinfields Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund focused on the fixed income sector, founded in 2004 by Joseph Niciforo
Institutional Investor Magazine Excerpts
Macro, Macro man
By Riva Atlas
Today [Louis] Bacon reigns over not only Moore Capital but over the most visible, most high-octane area of money management - macro investing. He gained the throne by default, and at a time when the future of the realm is increasingly in doubt. After sharp reversals, Julian Robertson in March shut down Tiger Management; in April it was George Soros' turn to slash the size and scope of his funds. With $9.4 billion under management - $7.6 billion in macro partnerships - Bacon is by far the biggest of the daredevil managers who are still placing big directional bets on stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities at a time when such bold trading has come under withering scrutiny.
Great cite Borat: "Bacon is by far the biggest of the daredevil managers who are still placing big directional bets on stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities at a time when such bold trading has come under withering scrutiny"
Shouldn't that read, "...who are still placing big directional bets on stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and macro investments..."? As I said as if to a wall, macro is a classification of *investment strategies*. 'Macro markets', on the other hand, don't exist outside of Jc land, just like monopolies that aren't ordained by the state, e.g. DeBeers, market manipulation that's on the public record, e.g. Enron's, and water distribution companies that have no choice but to employ pipes and pumping stations. I'm reminded of the Simpson's episode where Homer prances through a world made of chocolate except yours is a waking dream made of nothing outside of your own self-aggrandizing fantasies. Keep up the good work subverting a decent blog.
Jc is historically idiotic, as usual.
California's shortages were happening while there was no ceiling on wholesale prices. Generators were selling on an open hourly spot market, with no ceiling, and gaming that market, and making oodles. There was no ceiling. That was the problem - they could withdraw generating capacity, drive a sharp spike in wholesale prices, and make out like bandits while we suffered shortages - which is what they were doing.
When a wholesale ceiling price was finally applied, removing the incentive to game for higher prices, the power shortages stopped. That fricking day, they stopped. Almost like magic. When they could no longer manipulate the price spikes, it became better for them to sell all their capacity at the quite-profitable ceiling prices or below, than to withhold capacity to manipulate price spikes for the hourly spot market.
the stuff with troll x questioning eli reminds me of when the discussion (RC, rabbett, tamino, etc.) was sidetracked into spectral absorption and emission skepticism, I was asking out of idle curiosity eli about his posted pressure broadening profiles one of which was a Voigt profile (the convolution of a normal distribution such as Doppler broadening produces and a Cauchy distribution like natural broadening or impact pressure broadening exhibit) which I had seen but not remembered what kind of function it was, and a Rautian-Sobelman, of which I hadn't heard. I asked what it meant that the Rautian was better. I think the kind of straight answer you get from the Rabett should highlight why some of us are annoyed by typical denialist vagueness. the question should have been why does the R fit better (that it did is obvious) and not only did Eli mention the germ of why but a later poster robert p even talked about the math of the model.
The pretend scientists like DD and G do not seem to have the basic toolset someone doing science would have - mathematically, I mean - and hence wouldn't know whether the non-denialists know what they're doing. In general (the top tier excluded) modern denialists on climate are physics experts who write like they can't do analysis, on evolution and ecology, biologists who can't grasp statistics, on pollution, e.g. ozone breakdown, etc. chemical effects experts who talk like they don't understand the conditions that control chemical reactions.
The trolls not pretending to be NASA scientists have faith in ideology and economics and certain personalities and regard science and perhaps the historical record as completely mutable. It's the pompous and often bluffing or lying leading the utterly lacking in critical judgment. What makes us so mad is that people are in charge of the research of one of the leading science countries of the world who can't even do math.
I unkilled a couple JCs. Actually, given that rather unfortunate headline on that Geotimes article, that was a natural inference, so my amusement was semi-misplaced. There is abundant evidence for the cooling effects of particulates globally. not one study of one area like this, but hundreds, and over time. But I already knew the denialists had no concept of global vs. local whatsoever. And JC did say soot.
That notwithstanding, the persistent brown clouds are almost becoming a feature of the landscape, and even a local effect like that is worrisome - especially if the region grows. Right offhand, it would suggest that you could convert this (still only conjectured and faintly evidenced and probably exaggerated at best) regional warming into something more normal by altering Chinese coal plants and - if the linked Geotimes article is right, India's cooking habits (in America, it would be wood stoves). I dunno if there are enough diesel engines there, or planned to be, to produce big black soot to add to that, as well.
The kind of large dark soot that will melt snow if you sprinkle it on it in late winter and that normally does not stay in the air long, under certain conditions (my guess would be a lot of strong sunlight regionally) might indeed warm more than it scattered in a giant smog cloud.
Even if the study is right, China and India will have to clean up their act soon and eventually this would become again a non-issue.
And of course, the mitigation policies we advocate don't cede the lungs of humankind to the greedy corporate elites. We're trying to reduce CO2 and CH4, not increase soot. It's the JCs who want the whole world under that brown cloud.
Marion
How deeply invovled are you in trying to revive Soviet science methods?
Hi Marion:
I think addressing the problem is much easier for the Chinese. Likely, 600+ million people are using dung as a fuel source, and a cheap alternative does not appear to be available.
My knowledge of India is cartoonish, but I suspect that the particulates are a problem only during the dry monsoon, and would not have any direct effect on the retreating Himalayan glaciers. I also have a problem with the effect's historical accuracy, since elevated population levels and use of dung as fuel date to the time of the Raj. I think some confirmatory studies will be necessary before implementing a policy of substitution.
Mike
I think trying to invoke the fascist so-called Godwin's law is EXACTLY like something Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany in the 1930s during the Nazi period of World War II and the holocaust would have done!
Some behavior from a so-called science doctor!
I think trying to invoke the fascist so-called Godwin's law is EXACTLY like something Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany in the 1930s during the Nazi period of World War II and the holocaust would have done!
Some behavior from a so-called science doctor!
I think trying to invoke the fascist so-called Godwin's law is EXACTLY like something Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party of Germany in the 1930s during the Nazi period of World War II and the holocaust would have done!
Some behavior from a so-called science doctor!