Eric Raymond (the one responsible for the botched analysis of the stolen CRU code) responds to my post on Essex and McKitrick's error in treating missing values as zeroes in a spreadsheet:
The error described is so stupid that I have trouble believing a statistician actually made it. Whether McKittrick understood thermodynamics or not is red herring; even somebody with my non-specialist knowledge of statistics alone would have known better, let alone a pro like him. The most plausible theory I can think of is that the spreadsheet was expressing temperatures as deviation from mean, that the "zeroes" actually pegged missing observations to that mean, and that the author misunderstood McKittrick's response.
Raymond clung to his theory even after a commenter pointed out that I included a link to the spreadsheet and that you could easily check that they counted missing values as zeroes.
He also uncritically accepted David Bellamy's story that the BBC cancelled his show when he came out as a global warming denier, even though Bellamy's TV career ended in 1994 and he didn't deny global warming until 2004. This too, was pointed out by a commenter, but Raymond did not change his position.
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My feeling is that ESR is so beholden to his anarchocapitalist dogma (one of their tenets being that global warming is a Marxist NWO plot) that he's more than happy to overlook the flaws in the denialists' "arguments".
In short, his views are dictated by his ideology, not reality.
Back when I was an active linux advocate I followed Raymond's blog and read Cathedral and the Bazaar etc. He is a fairly adept if not brilliant programmer, but outside his area of expertise (even within the constraints of IT) he is wrong far more often than he's right. When it comes to politics he is a true ideologue. Facts matter not if they are contrary to his preferred view of reality, which is why I stopped taking him seriously.
Come on. The man can barely tell Farenheit from Celsius. What do you expect?
Yes, these folks practice an extreme form of selection bias to avoid cognitive dissonance and invalidating their chosen self-identity.
Sort of like making excuses to distract away from buyer's remorse when realizing you purchased a lemon.
Best,
D
Since I don't see a link in Tim's post, here's [Raymond's comment](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1503&cpage=1#comment-243950).
That looks like an old post from 2004. Where does Raymond make this credulous response?
From the linked excel spreadsheet at Data::M27, the actual formula for RMS for Dec 80 is this:
=(0.1*((273.15+K27)^2+(273.15+J27)^2+(273.15+I27)^2+(273.15+H27)^2+(273.15+G27)^2+(273.15+F27)^2+(273.15+E27)^2+(273.15+D27)^2+(273.15+C27)^2+(273.15+B27)^2))^0.5-273.15
As far as a formula for "RMS" goes, this one assumes 10 non-missing values, and a "mean" of 0 celcius, both assumptions unsupported by the data.
Cell D27 is blank, so there is no difference in the RMS result of 5.9 whether or not you punch in 0 or not, which demonstrates Excel's default of treating a blank as a zero. If you punch in the RMS value of 5.9 into the missing value however, the RMS rises to 6.5, which demonstrates that the RMS isn't really an RMS.
Excel is a poor tool for a so-called pro to use.
ESR, when asked to support his position that (in essence) there was a scientific consensus on global cooling in the 1970s, rather than just some noise that made it into the popular press:
:)
Oops, left the link out. I've added it to my post.
Looking at the data is funny to notice that treating the much more-frequent missing data in the latter part of the dataset as 0C could be viewed as a âtrickâ that âcreates a declineâ, or "hides the incline".
Since O Celsius is just a convention, we can get whatever trend we want by choosing an appropriate temperature for missing values.
If we choose 0 Kelvin, we'll get a very steep decline.
The care in converting to Kelvin - necessary to make the RMS independent of the size of units - is in striking contrast to McKitrick's other famous treatment of temperature scales.
Well Nick Barnes, you would expect him to come up with new errors from time to time, instead of just reusing the old ones. It might just be that he learned his temperature scale lesson :)
Yep. Converting to Kelvin hides the trick of assigning 0C to missing data. If we chose the mean, as the 'M' in 'RMS' implies, we might get a trend similar to the arithmetic mean
Moving from an interval (degC) to ratio scale (degK) doesn't make the measure independent of the size of the unit (degK vs DegR). To get something dimensionless you'd divide by the mean and get something like the Coefficient of Variation. Though if you do that, you do need to work in a ratio/absolute scale like Kelvin.
Eric is famous for the cathedral vs bazaar software engineering paradigm. Unfortunately his call for use of the bazaar method has led to more buggy and bloated software rather than concise clean working software
the stupid, it hurts.
you get famous among denialists pretty fast these days.
and the more nonsense you post, the more they like it.
this is really strange to watch: every right-winger with some half baked education (like a nearly finished high school diploma, or some relative having seen a university from the inside) immediately attracts a massive amount of followers (the majority of whom dropped out of primary school).
these will accept basically everything said by their "educated leaders" as the gospel truth, and assume that it is the cutting edge of science.
weird times.
http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them-the-code
"right-winger" above was obviously the wrong term to use here. but i guess you got the concept anyway...
i ll try to get some sleep...
ESR highlights some problems we haven't addressed adequately - he should-have-been-accountable. It is this conceptual/factual denialism that is the intellectual version of suicide bombing, except the guy can blow himself up over and over again, because he can neglect that he is already dead.
I suspect we may get ever more of this, as more and more denialists know very well they have lost the war, terrorism will be the method of choice. I don't think we know how to counter this in an effective way, it seems we haven't even measures to safely protect us from getting diverted/drawn down to denialist levels.
As for open source paradigms, I suspect that the romanticism inherent in the bazaar idea has hurt the movement severely in recent years because of lack of discipline, scalability and accountability. Like ESR's thinking, it seems to work very well as long as the problems are small or ill-posed enough. But don't try to start him on something as complex as AGW.
To paraphrase Colbert, the reason facts don't change Raymond's (or any denialist's) mind is because the facts have a well-known AGW bias, and the facts are all in on the global leftist world government conspiracy, and the facts get all their funding from Soros.
Wake up, people!!!1!
That's really not true. There's a lot of complex and very functional open source software out there. The vast majority of websites in the world run on open source RDBMS products. Apple's Safari browser is built on an open source foundation, and I'm sure you've heard of Firefox. Python's been open source from the beginning and is widely used, among many, many places, at Google. About half of the world's websites run on an open source operating system and open source web browser (linux + apache).
I could go on for a very, very long time. Your claims about lack of discipline, scalability, and accountability aren't supported by the facts.
I don't read SNRatio at #17 as criticising open source generally, but rather overuse of the "bazaar" idea. A lot of open source is much more coordinated than that analogy suggests - including Safari (managed by Apple) and Python (relatively centralised leadership).
dhogaza: I might be wrong, but I think most of those open source projects are still directed by a central authority. Safari/Webkit for instance, uses Apple engineers to direct the features and integration, while the community is focussed more on improving standards compliance, security and stability. I think the relative success of many of these parented projects is because of the hybrid nature of directed development and open source support.
This brings to my mind a´n old punk song called "Jesus was a Russian carrier rocket", I don't know why. Whats up with the apparent DoS in realclimate?
dhogaza, Danny Yee, Left_Wing_Fox:
Speaking of central authorities and benevolent dictatorships and stuff, ESR once criticized Linus for his, um, leadership style in the Linux project:
> [...] When you were in college, did you ever meet bright kids who graduated top of their class in high-school and then floundered freshman year in college because they had never learned how to study? It's a common trap. A friend of mine calls it "the curse of the gifted" -- a tendency to lean on your native ability too much, because you've always been rewarded for doing that and self-discipline would take actual work.
> [...] "Your tendency to undervalue modularization and code-sharing is one symptom. Another is your refusal to use systematic version-control or release-engineering practices. To you, these things seem mostly like overhead and a way of needlessly complicating your life. [...] That success predisposes you to relatively sloppy tactics like splitting drivers before you ought to and using your inbox as a patch queue."
Well, Linus did go on to create the git version-control system, though I don't remember him accepting ESR's "code sharing" idea for device drivers. And last I know, the Linux project is still going strong while ESR is now reduced to 'analysing' stolen code.
dhogaza: I'm afraid I have to agree with Left_Wing_Fox on this one.
Many of the most successful "open-source" projects, whether called that or not, had some core group that exercised editorial & architectural control, and sometimes another layer of "lieutenants" that handled specific pieces.
The core group for any given project might be 1 person, more commonly at least 2, maybe up to 6-ish, plus potentially large numbers of other contributors. Core groups sometimes change over time, sometimes not.
Open-source computing goes back at least to ~1952, with John von Neumann giving away his computer plans, leading to all the *IAC machines. I guess, one might even go back to David Wheeler (world's first CMPSC PhD), who invented the subroutine ~1950, which let people contribute to a shared library. That happened in computer centers all over, and since commerical software barely existed, much of a computer center's libraries were user-contributed.
In the 1950s and 1960s, open source primarily worked through computer-vendor-specific users' groups, i.e., it was considered good to get something on the "DECUS tape". IBM even ran some open-source efforts, like HASP, where the key people were Tom Simpson + 1-2 other IBMers., but there were a handful of key others at user sites (including the Asst. Director of our computer center) who contributed code, prioritized changes, looked at code from others.
A few more examples:
1970s: Bell Labs UNIX: Thompson+Ritchie, key help from a half dozen others like Kernighan, Johnson, Feldman, etc, and contributions from many others, listened to in various degrees. In the early 1970s, UNIX inside Bell labs was *totally* open source: anyone could do anything ... but most people wanting to make serious changes learned to talk with ken+dennis first if it were anything they cared about.
Linux: Linus & lieutenants.
Apache: small group, now bigger and with more structure, but many projects.
Python: Guido van Rossum
You must remember why also Linus created git, which was a dispute with the writer of the old VCS they were using. The general idea is that anyone can contribute code, but the initiator of the project (and anyone he assigns trust to) decides if it gets in. If a piece of code is so valuable to a contributor, he can branch the code and make his own version under the same terms as the initiator of the project. So dhogaza is actually right, even if it doesn't work that way in most cases (mostly because the forks are for specialized purposes). At least that's how it worked when I was involved.
Yes, you're right, I'm objecting to this (again):
I guess if you accept that ESR's definition of "open source paradigms" is the paradigm accepted by the open source community, you'd be right, but experience tells us it isn't.
I've never even read the damned essay and I've been making my living working with open source software for eleven years now.
Yes, of course. I understand now that by "open source paradigms" what was meant "ESR's philosophy of software development", not "how successful open source projects are organized in practice".
How many people involved in large-scale open source projects ever bought into ESR's worldview?
I was just thinking that as I started reading your post. My first "open source" (we said "public domain" back then) contribution was TECO-8 for PS/8 (later OS/8) back in um 1970 I think. High school.
A science museum I was associated with ponied up the $200 for the first release on RK05 to educational institutions. I still have a listing here with my handwritten notes regarding changes to the terminal driver - I couldn't stand the MULTICS-derived half-duplex style line editing (ie. axc##bc) and implemented the normal DEC line editing, ^C, etc conventions for local use.
Yes, of course, again I misinterpreted the post as claiming that real live open source paradigms as expressed in real live successful open source projects have failed.
I don't think ESR has written anything large, has he? Doesn't seem like the kind of guy who'd be easy to work with. In his mind "meritocracy" seems to mean "those with the biggest guns win".
ESR's romanticism may have been attractive up to a certain segment of the free software community in the mid '90s, but I and my friends saw him more as a rabble-rousing loon more than any sort of visionary, though I was one of the few to reject him totally out of hand. I have a practical mind and I didn't see any practical benefits to his bazaar vision - it's been true since time immemorial that a de facto or de jure head is needed for big projects, which is why forks tend to be specialized to the needs of the few.
As for ESR's politics, he just seemed to be another form of the libertarian gun nut species I've lived around all my life. Which probably made it easier to reject his philosophy.
This is why I never read his famous essay. When I heard about him - "Eric Raymond's an interesting guy with interesting ideas" - the part I ran into first was the RW/gun/nuttery stuff and I was so turned off I didn't bother reading his ideas about software development.
Yes, indeed. Without it, open source projects would look like Anthony Watts' blog.
What has made open source software work, IMO, boils down to economics. Cheap hardware and connectivity makes distributed development much more practical, and the economic barrier to entry very low.
When I first learned to write software, I was lucky to have camel-nosed my way into an independent learning environment at a science museum that ponied up $18,000 dollars (1969 dollars, mind you) for a largish PDP-8 (disk, DECTapes, 12K words of core - 4K was standard so 12K was a lot, believe me, etc) for about a half dozen of us to learn programming on. We had full use of it, 24/7/365, it was ours to do with as we pleased.
Later when friends and I started a software company, our PDP-11 system ran us probably near 100K (though our third-party "washing machine" 200MB disk was given us in exchange for writing device drivers for it, the DEC equivalent cost $36K), and when the VAX 11/780 was introduced, that cost us about $350,000.
I'm typing this on my macbook pro that cost me $1450 (refurb) 20 months ago, and my DSL line costs me peanuts. I do all my development on it (with a small linux machine for testing in that environment).
I stopped reading after "(the one responsible for the botched analysis of the stolen CRU code)" since of course it was you who botched things up.
Have you no shame?
I stopped reading
It's funny how many denialists think that refusing to read things makes them sound tough-minded and principled.
> since of course it was you who botched things up.
I love the way that global warming inactivists are now trying to give the impression that their assertions are somehow self-evident. "Of course", "it is commonly known", and all that.
Next they'll be turning their bullcrap assertions into Axioms à la Ayn Rand.
I looked at ESRs first thread and despite screaming "proves fraud!" he didn't even know what the code was working on. That's fairly botched up in my book.
>*I stopped reading after "(the one responsible for the botched analysis of the stolen CRU code)" since of course it was you who botched things up. Have you no shame?*
William Wallace often demonstrates how to argue when one has no point.
Completely off topic, but I need to point out a major revision of my Wegman/Rapp post.
This passage describes some of the changes and additions:
Software issues are more people issues than anything else, and those really haven't changed ... for a long time...
Computing power, storage, and networking improvements keep changing the tradeoffs. For example, in the 1970s, distributed development was really difficult, given networking limitations. We couldn't even do it much at Bell Labs between different locations. In the early UNIX days, a "release" was when you drove to Murray Hill, NJ, got on ken's machine, and made a tape of what was there. Life got better with uucp.
For amusement to see how old a lot of modern software wisdom is, people occasionally still ask me to open the time capsule and bring out 2 talks, one from 1977 and one from 1982, both of which were fairly popular as ACM National Lectures (although still behind that indefatigable old lady who carried a nanosecond cable around with her.)
When I gave that pair for BSDCon a few years ago, at the end, Andy Koening leapt up and said "I heard the original talk and we haven't improved one bit!"
I said" Wrong. Computers are faster."
Of course, one of the messages in the talks was that programming methodologies and the people using them had to fit together. I'm always amused when some new (or old) fad pops up and people try to shoe-horn it into inappropriate circumstances.
One of my rare complaints with Fred Brooks' ~1975 Mythical Man-Month was the emphasis on Chief Programmer Teams. These may (or may not) have worked fine when you happened to have a Harlan Mills or equivalent around to be the Chief. Even at Bell Labs (25,000 people at that point), we had very few folks with the right mix of skills to do that, which hinted that most places might not have any. The "build good tools for programmers, make it easy to share, adapt to the team" approach was a lot more applicable.
USENIX had scanned in the slides I used, but the sysadm sent me email looking for the Powerpoint. Feeling old, I had to gently explain there was a time Before Powerpoint.
From what I can tell, ESR would prefer believing that every group creating global temperature analyses are either amazingly incompetent, or all in on the "fraud" that he believes CRU has committed. Even Spencer and UAH.
Yep, he's immune to the evidence.
Yes, indeed.
And if the phone company couldn't do it ...
Now you get young CS graduates in Cyprus with a DSL line and a linux machine offering to help out. That kind of distributed development was beyond really difficult back in the 1970s. But it takes structure and leadership to make it work.
38 DC,
But surely a common source was always a possible answer, and didn't you suggest that, but were unable to find that source?
The question remains as to why Rapp didn't simply cite that source, and instead threatened to sue you.
Regardless of the truth of the matter, Rapp comes over as unnecessarily unpleasant.
I assume Bradley is the B in MBH98/99 and [this](http://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/paleo/html/) is the text you refer to?
Yeah, I overreached. I guess you can see me reconsidering in comments and revision.
Funny thing I was thinking about Bradley, but Briffa's link to the chapter 10 text went down with the rest of CRU. However, I fished it out of the Google cache today. When I realized I should backtrack, I was determined to find the source, at least for the opening passage on tree-rings.
I'd be interested in what you think of how they changed Bradley. Seems to me that's not on.
Anyway, I'd rather get it right than hold to a speculative position. And of course there's more to this story.
Nor what language it was in, as I recall.
MartinM, oh yeah, forgot that, he thought it was FORTRAN.
I think ESR is reasonably intelligent, but his performance after latching onto "ClimateGate" is less than stellar. I wouldn't expect a whole lot from someone outside the field, but ESR seems to be going out of his way to make asinine comments.
Ever since I found out what a charlie foxtrot Fetchmail actually was under his "leadership", I've wondered how Raymond (I don't think he deserves his TLA (a la rms, dmr, gls, ken) anymore) could be considered competent as a leading light of the hacker community. The way he's treated the Jargon File seems to bear this out -- the very existence of the "chaff" page, for example (obsolete usages, some of which date back to the very first MIT editions), or his heavily slanted comments on hacker politics in particular. I used to think that he was at least a decent enough historian, but I'm not sure I even believe that anymore.
To keep this thread clean, and since comments are closed on the Rapp thread @ Deep Climate, maybe Tim might offer a new thread for community effort (if Deep Climate doesn't want to).
Here's the Google Books entry.
Here's the Springerlink web page, which allows download of the Front Matter of Rapp's book, and the Back Matter, which includes a number of "interesting" references in the bibliography. If there is a such a thread, identifying such might be a useful service.
re: #46
It isn't an issue of intelligence, since various other kinds of reasons can totally overpower normal scientific thinking. If people recall the APS Petition, 206 people signed that silly thing, of whom very few get paid for anti-science. Almost all were PhD physicists, many with serious peer-reviewed publications, and some quite distinguished.
Given that any of them could read, say, Archer's "Global Warming - UndeOof course, they only got .45% of the APS' 47,000 members, which hints at the idea that most APS folks knew better.
@dhogaza et al:
I think many of the most important points have been made by others here. My underlying point, which I should have made more clear, was exactly the contrast between the many succesful large open source projects and problematic romanticism inherent in the bazaar idea. I think this is important: If we look at the areas where open source has so far not been so succesful as many of us wish, I think we will often find too much 'bazaarism' in the approaches. At least it seems so to me.
This does not mean that ESR's ideas can not be bery useful, in particular for smaller projects, but also as correctives in more coordinated larger efforts. There is, though, a difference between basic priciples and correctives.
I think ESR's gone off the deep end, to wit:
"You are not going to wish away the fact that these people have already been caught lying to the public, committing financial fraud against their grant sponsors, conspiring to violate FOIA, cherry-picking and distorting the data, plain making shit up, and subverting the peer-review process to suppress valid criticisms of their work. They are frauds and criminals, and by defending them you are an accessory after the fact."
He's looking at the CRU hack through his anarchocapitalist eyes, and seeing what he wants to see. Never mind the real evidence doesn't support his hyperbole above.
That's really how most open source software efforts work. In SourceForge, for example, only members of the project have control over the codebase, etc. (I've been an OSS developer myself.)
Now, in OSS, people who are not members of the core team can look at the code and they can change it. They can also submit patches. (Or they can ask to be members.) You can submit patches to most SF-hosted projects. Whether patches are accepted and included is another matter, but even projects as big as Linux operate in this manner.
That's what you can't do with proprietary (Cathedral-based) software.
The issue of why only a tiny portion of all open-source projects are successful would take a while to analyze.
Yes, I understand your point - now - and agree entirely.
> by defending them you are an accessory after the fact.
-- ESR
I guess "judge nullification" is a position consistent with his other beliefs. I wonder if he means to be police and executioner, having already been jury and judge?
Many software projects aren't that successful whether they are called
open source or not. Likewise, in some circles "open source" = good, proprietary = bad, and thus is just plain silly, especially to us old folks.
For example, consider the IBM linked for S/360 mainframes in the late 1960s?
Proprietary? Yes.
On the other hand, source code was availble within the contraints of the times, and I once encountered a bug, found the offending code, and sent in a bug report with the fix, which did happen. That was about 1970.
I mentioned HASP, which to some extent was a guerilla effort inside IBM, somewhat on conflict with a more official IBM product. It got serious development work from the user community, it even enshrined our computer center's asst director in at least one song, and Ibm even paid for the beer busts at SHARE meetings. I discovered a bug on that one as well (by crashing our mainframe, unfortunately and that indeed got fixed faster.)
Regardless of the label on a software project, what matters is the extent to which whoever actually makes the decisions listens to feedback, and the quality of their judgement. Sometimes it us all too easy for some models to
lead to rampant creeping featurism.
Finally, people forget that open source volunteer efforts work very well for some things, but simply don't for others. I've worked with many third-party software vendors over the years, and in some cases there are good volunteer open source equivalents, but for others that is just hard to imagine.
#48 Comments are open again, see comment below.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/open_thread_37.php#comment-2156…
Hank @54:
Raymond ~= Judge Dredd? Yeah, that seems like a fair comparison.
I read an article once (written by China Mieville, if that makes any difference) discussing libertarian seasteading efforts, particularly as it relates to the Freedom Ship project. Mieville noted that while it was supposed to be a libertarian society, the ship captain's word would be absolute, coming to the conclusion that libertarianism is fundamentally authoritarian in conception.
I don't think Mieville took the thought quite far enough, but he's on to something -- after all, libertarianism in its most vocal form is essentially "get off my lawn" as a political principle. One thing I've noticed about people in that region of the political spectrum, though, is that their principles are focused incredibly on extreme compartmentalization; if your rights are being fulfilled, then the effects of your actions on outside systems are essentially null. If this was true, then pollution would be largely irrelevant, only a matter for the creator of the pollution to deal with and no one else's business. Taken to its logical extreme, this goes a long way towards explaining why a libertarian such as Raymond would be anti-AGW.
Such are the dangers of Aristotelian thinking -- if you tie yourself to a principle with no empirical inquiry, you're going to wind up in some pretty strange places.
Well, large-scale, successful open source projects typically aren't volunteer efforts these days. Key team members are typically working on employer time, with volunteers adding value (often a great deal of value).
This kind of blend of professional and skilled volunteer is quite typical in many fields. Agencies like the US Forest Service and US Fish and Wildlife, conservation NGOs, and university researchers depend quite heavily on knowledgeable volunteers to leverage their available professionals for all sorts of wildlife and botanical survey work, just to give one example. Just in ornithology you've got christmas bird counts (109 years and counting), breeding bird surveys, MAPS point counts, raptor migration monitoring, etc etc etc.
re: #58
Yes, of course, and of course, the combinations are even more complicated than that.
Do you recall Jeremy Allison & Samba? (hired by SGI to support that). XFS (Irix => Linux)? etc. You might recall that I used to be Chief Scientist @ SGI, and although I was both one of the MIPS architects and managed the original ports of IRIX to MIPS, in the mid-to-late 1990s I tried very hard to get a Linux-based business built there, as well as trying to figure out which software had to be be proprietary, which should be spun off into separate companies, which should be open-sourced and then left alone, and which should be open-sourced with SGI effort continuing. Getting XFS out there wasn't easy, and I was never able to get the hardware side to adopt the right business models, sad to say. I did help talk software people out of doing "our own
However, beating the drums for appropriate use of Linux when it could be used was interesting. [In SGI's case, there were machine configurations and usages where IRIX did things that were simply years away in Linux, even if we'd put all of our developers working on it. I used to use Clayton Christensen's book in internal lectures to try to get people to understand how to handle such product transitions/coexistence.]
Probably the most amusing Linux-related incident is relevant to this blog, since it occurred in Australia.
I was down in Canberra, had a meeting with Andrew Tridgell & co, and then was over at a place I'd visited a few times before, the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), to brief them on developments.
They complained to me that we weren't shipping them systems from the US with Linux pre-installed, but shipped them to Oz, where Linux was then installed, which took longer.
I explained that the US Federal government at that time thought that since Linux had some crypto code, it was a "weapon", or something like that, and that although it had been started by a Finnish student, and was on websites all over the world, we weren't allowed to ship it to sites in other countries, especially potential bad guys like DSD in Australia.
Everyone had a good laugh at that, because of course:
- they knew, and
- I knew, and
- they knew I knew (I've been inside Ft Meade on occasion, which they knew, and at that point I could speak enough of the jargon that they knew I wasn't totally unfamiliar with this turf),
that DSD had a long history of being very, very close with the US National Security Agency. I.e., it's one of the few places that might have traded *serious* crypto code for years with the NSA ....
but we couldn't ship them Linux :-)
Fortunately, that rule got changed, as it was one of the sillier ones. But at least the visit was good for a laugh.
Brian X wrote, ...libertarianism is fundamentally authoritarian in conception...
Most precisely, most variants of libertarianism are crypto-feudalist in nature.
Right. And the proponents all seem to think they'll be anointed members of the ruling class, in the mistaken belief that these arise through some sort of meritocracy with merit being defined in such a way that they're among the most meritorious.
Sod, I don't know whether you are the originator or not of the expression "the stupid, it hurts", but boy oh boy it is so useful when talking Essex and McKittrick. After reading their "article" (and no people, I won't link to it, let it die the death deserved) concerning the supposed lack of physics to determine the appropriate formula for a global temperature (ie statistics), I found stupid all around.
May I claim you as the author in subsequent use of this expression, or if you aren't the author, do you know who is?
All the best for Xmas hols everyone, even those for which sod's expression applies, and keep pressure on your government to do more and faster with respect to emissions reduction.
Can I add a simple but (I hope) effective meme to this debateâ¦
How Much is Global Warming Denial Worth?
$1120 Million Per Day
Why?
Well in a recent article in the Economist magazine (about peak oil) there was this:
âThe IEA reckons that co-ordinated action to restrict the increase in global temperatures to 2ºC will restrict global demand for oil to 89m b/d in 2030, compared with 105m b/d if no action is taken.â
So there is a difference of 16million b/d (that is Barrels Per Day) so given the cost of a barrel is currently around $70, so you can see that it represents $1120 million dollars per day in difference. So event mitigating the supply a bit â by obfuscating the science and promoting uncertainty is worth $millions per day.
Thatâs why denial has been so well funded.
http://anarchist606.blogspot.com/ 2009/ 12/ how-much-is-global-warming-denial-worth.html
If the IEA thinks that there is any hope of pumping 105 million barrels per day in 2030, they're a bigger bunch of idiots than most deniers are.
I'd like to see their breakdown for where it's all going to come from...
BTW, a great article by Peter Gleick about the real climate change "hoaxers"...
Link:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail??blogid=104&entry_id=…
FRIENDS FRIENDS , I NEED A FAVOUR FROM YOU, AS YOU ALL NO GLOBAL WARMING
HAS BECOMING A VERY DANGER ISSUE IN LIFE COMING AHEAD,SO AS A SMALLL
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DEEPENDRA CHAUAHAN
Donald Oats -- Google:
Results: about 1,030,000 for "the stupid, it hurts"
Results: about 1,230,000 for "The stupid, it burns"
PS, click 'Image Search' and you'll find overlap.
Tim,
No post for 4 days! The arguments move on, unlike you.
Here is Anarchist606's link
Dave Andrews:
So hackergate has passed? Perhaps most countries now realize the importance that can be placed on emails just like Australians already had.
There appears to be a recalcitrant ice build up in the north, in total denial of global warming.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=12&fd=09&fy=1999&s…
This anarchist behavior by the ice will eventually see the demise of cap and fade.
What?? You mean winter's happening [AGAIN](http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png) this year?
The NSIDC says the ice edge is now at or slightly beyond its average location, with two notable exceptions: Hudson Bay and the Barents Sea.
[Fatso](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…).
Buy a clue, and check the [link](http://i46.tinypic.com/i4gth5.jpg) Gaz provided.
What do you think that it means?
El Gordo:
[So?](http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/)
There's a lot of open water in those two locations that isn't usually there. So much so, that sea ice extent is
accroding to the NSIDC.
That's just in case anyone happened on this blog and thought for a moment you weren't spouting your usual disingenuous crap.
I would like to repeat [Gaz's observation](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…) that Fatso might sound credible, and somewhat knowledgable, but scratch the surface and all he says is revealed as garbage.
[Eli](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/russian_analysis_confirms_20th…)makes a similar observation about cohenite, the 'laywer'.
Look carefully, dear lurkers, and then look again, if you are ever told by a scientifically untrained 'sceptic' that they have evidence that the thousands of climate experts are wrong. Guaranteed, it'll be shit, smoke and mirrors.
Ice growth in the Barents Sea slowed because of a high pressure over Siberia and a low pressure in the North Atlantic.
Warm air and water pushed the ice edge north out of the Barents Sea into the central Arctic, but I don't know why Hudson Bay is warmer than usual. Might be an AGW signal, although this seems most unlikely.
It's more than 2-sigmas below the 1979-2000 average and close to hitting the 2007-2008 extent again.
Remember the 2007-2008 followed the extreme minimum of summer 2007, and we're almost at the same extent now despite the 2009 minimum being much higher than 2007.
IJIS also shows us just about tied for the minimum extent on this date.
Which means that the winter freeze has been moving along much, much more slowly than after the 2007 minimum.
Warm air and water could be static in which case it wouldn't push the ice anywhere, which indicates your reading comprehension skills are lacking.
However let's assume you mean warm winds and warm currents ...
And of course, warmer arctic temperatures have led to years of loss of multi-year ice which has been replaced by first-year, winter-only ice makes it much easier to break it up and push it around.
Earlier this year Woods Hole put out a press release: Surprising return of the North Atlantic Circulation Pump.
The conveyer belt stopped for eight years and nobody told us! What about the ice age that would descend upon Britain if the pump stopped? Didn't happen.
The scientists noted 'that the increased liquid and frozen freshwater flux into the Labrador Sea was probably tied to the large export of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean that contributed to the record minimum in sea-ice extent observed in the summer of 2007.
Ironically, the disappearance of Arctic sea ice, which has been linked to global warming, may have help trigger the return of deep wintertime (water sinking) to the North Atlantic.'
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=282&cid=54366&ct=162
el Gordo,
I find your posts so utterly vacuous that I usually refuse to respond to them. You package your lightweight intelletuality with convoluted verbiage, obviously in a feeble attempt to give the impression that you know what you are talking about.
Your latest howler is your (thankfully) brief discussion of the North Atlantic conveyor. You wrote, *The conveyer belt stopped for eight years and nobody told us! What about the ice age that would descend upon Britain if the pump stopped? Didn't happen*.
I have said this innumerable times, but it has not apparently sunk in with many of the denialati (includes you, chubby one). Read this and let it sink in: changes in largely deterministic systems do not manifest themselves on system properties and processes instantaneously. Got that? Read it again and again. Your problem, like many (= most) of the lay denialati is that they are programmed to think in time scales that relate to their own human experience. They cannot envisage time lags, and certainly lags that occur over many hundreds or thousands of years. Vast changes in system properties as a result of the likely meteorite impact at the end of ther Cretaceous period did drive the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, but it is likely that this event took up to 20,000 years to be played out. And in terms of geological time scales, this is even a relatively short span.
Yet I constantly read crap spewed out by the denialati and who somehow believe that trends in large scale regional or global systems that function in profoundly deterministic ways can be eludicated in 5-10 years. This is because humans are evolutionarily programmed to respond to what we perceive as rapid change: long-term changes we perceive as gradul do nbot register. Most scientists can appreciate this; el chubbo and his ilk cannot, so they dredge up the same puerile crap here and elsewhere. The 'warming stopped in 1998' is one such example; another is to try and correlate annual global surface temperatures over the past 10 years with atmospheric C02 levels over the same time. The denialists have been repeating both refrains *ad naueseum* lately. The el Gordo comes up with the latest obfuscation.
The fact is that humans are imposing perterbations of the planet's energy balance (e.g. forcing climate) that are leading to uneven but rapid warming across much of the biosphere. These effects are being played out in time scales that probably exceed the effects of other forcings in many millions of years. The effects of these forcings on broader biotic and abiotic process will vary in time and space, and it is this that concerns the scientific community.
For an educated man you write an awful lot of nonsense.
fatso,
Please tell me where the nonsense lies in my last post. I wait with baited breath. I repeat: you are clueless. You have no understanding whatsoever of the importance of spatial and temporal scales with respect to the functioning of complex adaptive systems or of human-induced global changes. You write in here with your various quips and snippets, many gleaned from astroturf groups with an axe to grind.
As an ecologist I am well versed in the understanding the difference between stochastic and deterministic processes and of time lags. Most of the time I let infantile posts like many of yours slip through without a riposte. But then you make the absurd remark suggesting that an instantaneous ice age should have descended on Britain if the Atlantic conveyor were to shut down. A clueless comment; it deserved a response.
My advice to you is to take your gibberish elsewhere. There are scientists who contribute here, you know, and we all can see through your vacuous posts. Note how most of those contributing here take your posts apart. This should tell you something.
El Gordo:
So we can add that to the list of stuff you don't know.
JH @ 83 asks....
"Please tell me where the nonsense lies in my last post"
Jeff, If I may:
First, you say this....
"changes in largely deterministic systems do not manifest themselves on system properties and processes instantaneously"
Fair enough. You continue with this..
"Your problem, like many (= most) of the lay denialati is that they are programmed to think in time scales that relate to their own human experience."
"They cannot envisage time lags, and certainly lags that occur over many hundreds or thousands of years."
Ahh yes. Herein lies the nonsense.
Nonsense, because in your arrogant, egotistical condescending little way, you believe that "denialati" are programmed this way. Yet, it is this same arrogant, egotistical,condescending little way of yours that blinds you.
Isn't it the alarmists that are saying how little time we have to act?
Isn't it the alarmist that are saying we are running out of time?
Isn't it Dr. Pachauri who recently said we have seven years left for a Global Climate target?
Wasn't it Al Gore who recently stated summer polar ice may vanish in 5 to 7 years?
Isn't Al Gore's new book "Our Choice", a plan to solve the climate crisis....in our lifetime?
Isn't the amount of time we have been acurately measuring the climate, as you said "in terms of geological time scales"....."a relatively short span"?
Isn't it ironic how "scientists" on this site are constantly accusing "denialati" of calling Al Gore fat, yet it is you who insists on using words like "fatso" and "chubby one" in an attempt to make a point?
Wasn't it Dr Hansen who recently say...
"We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world"?
Didn't Al Gore, in his movie AIT, say the following...
"we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tailspin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced."
Where's the time scale Jeff? Oh wait, here it is in your own words....
"These effects are being played out in time scales that probably exceed the effects of other forcings in many millions of years"
Notice the word "probably" there jeff? You use it because you are "programmed to think in time scales that relate to" your "own human experience".
Ironic isn't it? You accuse "denialati" of thinking the way you do.
Nonsense.
Look up "El Gordo" at wordref.com.
Then show us where Al Gore has ever said "I'm fat".
Subtle (sic) difference going right over Betula's head, as necessary.
Shorter Betula:
James Hansen says we should stop global warming now so that it won't become a problem in the future! This shows that he's being short-sighted!
Hmmm, what are you trying to catch, Jeff, and with what did you bait your breath? :)
(sorry, pet peeve, it's "bated breath").
I suspect that distribution of the sea ice is related to the Arctic Dipole, an imbalance between pressure over Siberia and that over northern North America. When the Dipole is in effect, there's unusually high pressure over the North American Arctic, and low pressure over the Eurasian Arctic. Ergo, winds from North America over the Arctic Ocean to Siberia. (I'm not a climatologist, my source on this is Jeff Masters, who is, and who cites his sources.)
Yes, and Jeff Masters also points out that the dipole's a recent phenomena thought to be a symptom of changes in climate and sea ice extent.
Betula:
I think you would do yourself a service if you tried to find reasonable interpretations of the various statements you cite, and check whether they are much at variance with what Jeff writes.
One really big problem, is that we don't know if we may already be past the point where we could have gotten away with relatively minor damages. With the highest CO2 sensitivities compatible with observations, we probably are. But it may take a few hundred years to know for sure. Relative to specific goals, like limiting the estimated warming to 2 degrees, it may be meaningful to talk about only a few years spare time. I'm personally not too fond of that kind of talk, because it is open to all kinds of wrong interpretations, and instead of a relatively rational discussion about risk management, we tend to get all sorts of quarrels about aspects that are not really crucial to the real issues.
Mira dhogza,
It just so happens, I speak spanish.
El Gordo can also be tranlated as "the big one".
Since Al Gore thinks of himself as the big one, and alarmists consider him to be the big one, perhaps the difference isn't as subtle as you would think.
On another note, Al Gore did briefly discuss his weight loss on "The View".
Perhaps we should refer to him as el gordo flaco...
I know. You have to look it up.
dhogza.
Strike that. Let's go with...
Al Gordo flaco.
Tim,
I've followed the link to [Quadrant](http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/12/skeptics-in-wond…), which cites a letter from Essex to Henninger at the WSJ.
This is even worse than I thought. Can Essex really be a Professor of Mathematics? What does that make E&M's claims about averages?
(In case anyone is in doubt, I'm saying that mistakes and ignorance are not plausible excuses. Essex is a fraud and a disgrace.)
For your amusement, here are some bits from Essex.
Nope. I know what flaco means. And el gordo is commonly translated as the fat man. We're good with that ...
Captain El (Fatso) Gordo, of the S.S. *Exxon*BusinessAsUsual, being too drunk to read his charts, surrenders the helm to First Mate Betula (Dumb as a Stump) Tortuosa, retiring to his cabin. FM Tortuosa, noticing the ship is on a collision course with Climate Reef, decides no course correction is necessary as course intersection with Climate Reef will naturally induce a similar change in ship momentum. FM Tortuosa anticipates with glee the bonus he will accrue for saving time and fuel.
Eight bells and all is well.
Flatula,
Common usage in Spanish for 'the big one' would be 'el grande'. No native speaker would consider your ersatz translation as meaningful.
Tu eres Pendejo. As in, 'one who plucks a hair from his nether regions and purports it to be a salient fact'.
LB @ 96
Meanwhile....
http://www.terradaily.com/news/terradaily-05zze.html
LB @ 97
Meanwhile....
http://www.ctspanish.com/christmas/lottery.htm
So you find another ersatz translation that fails to transmit the native idiomatic nuance. I am so impressed.
Keep it up and your pubes are gonna be bald. Then how will you keep the family jewels warm when global cooling arrives?
It's not ersatz, but it's no more pertinent to common usage than "fat tuesday" is to everyday usage of "fat" in english.
Though the way the spanish celebrate while listening to the results of El Gordo - lots of cava or sidre etc - I'm sure a few of them end up fatter than before even if they don't win.
LB @ 100
"Then how will you keep the family jewels warm when global cooling arrives?"
Oil Heat.
OT re the translation of "El Gordo".
I first heard it used in Sydney nearly 40 years ago. A successful Spanish-origin businessman bought himself a racehorse which he named 'El Gordo'. Unlike our friendly correspondent's efforts on this blog, the horse enjoyed a very successful racing career.
When asked about the name, his owner explained that it was Spanish for 'The Fat One'. When asked why, he coyly expanded to the size of his own figure.
So there you have it, Betula. Straight from the horse's mouth.
It is really lovely of you all to talk about me, I don't get this attention anywhere else.
Back to the science. Woods Hole is quite a respected organisation in scientific circles, so I can't figure out why Jeff is so uptight. Wasn't Roger Revel working at Woods Hole when he reinvented AGW.
Shorta Flatula,
>Al Gore is fat. And the science is Alarmist!
Shorter el gordo,
>Lets keep distracting from [the science](http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png).
FWIW El Gordo is a lottery in Spain run at the New Years/Christmas season. It is particularly "fat" with money.
Eli wins the jackpot. Just for the record I'm slim and attractive.
Roger Revelle was working at Scripps, not Woods Hole, when he came up with the idea that the oceans couldn't absorb the extra CO2 generated by humanity. He wrote a paper with Hans Suess to this effect.
It's the Revelle Factor.
Jeff Harvey,
"They cannot envisage time lags, and certainly lags that occur over many hundreds or thousands of years."
And you apparently can comprehend such time lags? I have to agree with el gordo that you spout an awful lot of nonsense.
dhogaza @ 90
"the dipole's a recent phenomena"...
Sorry, it's a recent phenomenon, or alternatively, the dipoles are recent phenomena. One of my pet peeves.
Yes, that's what I was referring to - the day on which they announce the winners on TV and radio have become something of a national holiday for some, lots of partying, etc. Kind of a weird thing to watch on TV (we watched a bit when I was in Spain for a 10 weeks a couple of winters ago).
For example ...
It's The Fat One (not fat man in this case because it's a "thing" not person). The fat lottery.
Fine, another datum to add to my data on pet peeves :)
Don't worry Hal9000, I'm sure dhogaza was deliberately bating you.
Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras (Carnival en Español) is the day all not so good Catholics lard it up with all things fleshy before fasting and penitence during Lent. Tambien.
[Dave Anndrews](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…).
dhogaza @ 88, I think he baited his breath with that dead horse el gordo's been flogging ...
Sim @106..
Sim. The graph you linked shows the average ice over a time scale of 21 years, 1979-2000.
When I saw this,I couldn't help but think of Jeff's words @ 81...
"Your problem, like many (= most) of the lay denialati is that they are programmed to think in time scales that relate to their own human experience. They cannot envisage time lags, and certainly lags that occur over many hundreds or thousands of years."
21 years is hardly a large time scale is it sim? Of course it is significant enough to post because it' a scale that relates to your lifetime. Correct?
Thanks Jeff.
In addition, isn't it true that Antartic sea ice over the past 30 years has shown a slight increase? Of course it is.
This might be a problem for scientists if it weren't for the fact that this doesn't contradict scientific predictions in any way.
dhogza,
"This might be a problem for scientists if it weren't for the fact that this doesn't contradict scientific predictions in any way."
So if the Antarctic ice extent were to decrease, due to some warming effect, this would be a problem for scientists?
And if a Global cooling trend were to occur, this wouldn't be looked at as a good thing, but more like a problem for scientists?
Exactly.
Why don't you go off and do a little research as to what scientists studying antarctic have to say about what's happening in antarctica rather than flinging your ignorance through the monkey cage?
If a *statistically significant*, i.e, long-term global cooling trend were to occur, then scientists would, of course, have to look for some cooling forcing that more than makes up for the positive CO2 forcing that has been the primary driver behind current warming.
It wouldn't change anything we know about the physics of CO2 at all. That's what denialists universally ignore.
Of course, there is no statistically significant cooling trend, just the same kind of wiggles we've seen in the past, the same kind of wiggles we see in individual model runs, the same kind of wiggles you see if you overlay autocorrelated random noise on a known trend, etc.
Nothing at all surprising to anyone with oh, I don't know, a decent undergraduate science background which includes an introduction to statistical analysis.
Would anyone like to respond to Betula's non-sequitur hypothetical strawman?
I take Raymond's word for the armed part. As for "dangerous":
-- Alexander Pope
Chris O'Neil:
Yes, I responded by killfiling Betula years ago.
Dhogaza...
"Why don't you go off and do a little research as to what scientists studying antarctic have to say about what's happening in antarctica rather than flinging your ignorance through the monkey cage?"
The question still remains...
"So if the Antarctic ice extent were to decrease, due to some warming effect, this would be a problem for scientists?"
Since scientist want to explain the increased ice extent on warming.....wouldn't it be a problem for them if the ice extent were to decrease due to warming?
Warming = more ice. Warming = less ice.
Cooling = more ice. Cooling = less ice
I suppose if we really needed to we could explain away anything, as long as it doesn't become a problem for the scientists.
"scientists would, of course, have to look for some cooling forcing that more than makes up for the positive CO2 forcing that has been the primary driver behind current warming."
Dhogaza, I believe you mean't to say "that MAY be the primary driver behind current warming."
It's not even worth pissing on Betula any more.
Betula is expert in the [P.T. Barnum](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-deception/#ArtBooChaSelDec) Theory of Science.
"It's not even worth pissing on Betula any more."
Dhogaza, my advice to you is to be careful. It is a well known fact that a low volume of urine directly increases Kidney stone risk.
It is also a known fact that Global Warming increases the risk of kidney stones.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080714172158.htm
So you have two things going against you.
"Betula is expert in the P.T. Barnum Theory of Science."
LB,
Ironic how you of all people would mention P.T. Barnum. A sucker really is born every minute...
http://agw-heretic.blogspot.com/2007/05/pt-barnum-would-have-loved-carb…
Betula seems to want to ignore scientific statements on Antarctica's unique situation (increased water vapor + ozone hole)so as to create a false dichotomy.
Betula writes,
>*Sim. The graph you linked shows the average ice over a time scale of 21 years, 1979-2000 [...] 21 years is hardly a large time scale is it sim? Of course it is significant enough to post because it' a scale that relates to your lifetime. Correct?*
Its a significant enough time because a significant reduction in sea ice has occurred [(30 percent reduction)](http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SeaIce/page3.php).
Jeff's correct that the full implication of this significant imbalance will not be full felt for thousands of years. But lots of significant impacts are [already resulting](http://www.physorg.com/news180039688.html).
Sim @ 137
"But lots of significant impacts are already resulting."
Sim, thanks for the great link attached to that statement.
Wow, imagine studying the coastal erosion for 2 years....how's that for a time scale Sim?
And how many years has the coastline been eroding?
Something else about that link that you may have missed Sim. Not once was AGW ever mentioned.
But guess what was.....
"The team attached temperature sensors to the buoy mooring lines to monitor seawater temperatures, which have been warming in recent summers due to increased solar radiation, he said."
Increased Solar Radiation?
Thanks Sim.
wildlifer @130...
"Betula seems to want to ignore scientific statements on Antarctica's unique situation (increased water vapor + ozone hole)so as to create a false dichotomy."
Wildlifer, are you suggesting that warmer atmospheric and oceanic conditions aren't contibuting to more sea ice in Antactica?
Are you saying warming doesn't equal more ice?
Betual @132,
Your cherry pick was obvious, especially what you left out!
>*The problem is caused by several factors, including increased erosion along the Alaskan coastline due to longer ice-free summer conditions and warmer seawater bathing the coast, Anderson said. The third potential factor is that the longer the sea ice is detached from the coastline, the further out to sea the sea-ice edge will be.*
As was your lack of anything to say about the presentation of evidence of the significance of sea ice reduction.
Betula your obvious tactic to to deny the evidence exists, then when you pushed that to the limit, deny that the evidence is sufficient.
However the weight of evidence stands in contradiction to your ill informed subjective judgement.
Sims @ 134
"Your cherry pick was obvious"......"As was your lack of anything to say about the presentation of evidence of the significance of sea ice reduction."
Sims, in the article you linked, please show me the reason given for the decline in sea ice....
Oh wait, here it is...
"seawater temperatures, which have been warming in recent summers due to increased solar radiation"
That's one hell of a cherry I picked Sim. In fact, it's big enough to make a nice humble cherry pie..... baked just for you.
Betula, taking one line out of context rarely give you a full picture.
For example, are submerged ocean bouys reading more solar radition due to lower ocean albedo (due to ice loss) which his a positive feedback? Have you read their paper, or do you stop when you read a scrap that can be used to confirm your prejudice?
Here quote from a [study that looked at that question](http://assets.panda.org/downloads/final_climateimpact_22apr08.pdf):
>*The immediate cause of the extreme low in September 2007 was an unusually strong high pressure centre over the central Arctic Ocean and a strong low over Siberia, which allowed lots of solar heat through the high pressure centre and also pumped warm air from the south between the high and the low (NSIDC, 2007).*
So warm high pressures bring clearer skies!
>*However, this is not thought to be the only factor contributing to the record minimum (Kerr, 2007).*
>*There is evidence that some feedback effects are already occurring, and the events of summer 2007 are of particular concern in this respect. The extreme low in sea ice extent and thickness in summer 2007 resulted in more absorption of solar radiation, causing autumn freeze-up to progress slowly (NSIDC 2007). The winter 2007/2008 maximum of sea ice was slightly more than in recent years, but still below the 1979-2000 average. Because an unprecedented percentage of
the ice is now thin new ice, experts believe that it is almost certain that sea ice extent in the summer of 2008 will also be well below average (NSDIC 2008).*
>*we are likely very near a threshold in which absorption of solar radiation during summer will limit ice growth during autumn and winter, thus leading to a substantial increase in surface air temperatures over the Arctic Ocean*
Your cherry pick included ignoring the [first link](http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/SeaIce/page3.php) which included a 30 year chart of Arctic Sea Ice Extents. That chart is in direct contradiction to [trends in solar activity](http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming…).
Premature pronouncements of victory most often just look foolish. So I'm glad you've got that pie handy.
Sim,
That Pie that was baked for you, was also made by you. Now you're baking another one.
The fact remains. Nowhere in your baked pie link does the article mention Anthropogenic Global warming. They don't mention it because they can't prove it.
A Two year of study of erosion, combined with sea ice data that has been accumulated over a 30 year time scale, is like having your cherry pie in the oven for 1/1000 of a second and claiming it is overcooked.
Well it tastes pretty good to me.
Betula (137), they don't mention that falling off a 100-foot cliff without the aid of a parachute or a rope is likely to hurt either. Nor can I find any mention of poffertjes, so perhaps they don't exist either.
Betula, glad you liked your pie.
30 years of ice data shows a significant drop 33%. A drop of that has feedback consequences. And radiative imbalances ensure that the Artic will lose more ice. Current trends suggest and Arctic free of summer sea ice this century. The author of the study (Robert Anderson) also warned that this is projected in a couple of decades.
The press release of the report on erosion didn't mention climate change, some things are too obvious. I like that you takes this a evidence that its because they couldn't prove it!
You made me smile with that. The study was documenting the rate of coast erosion. Were you perhaps looking for radiative forcing figures? Or radiative physics? Have some more pie!
Given that we know global warming in unequivocal, and we know that enhanced greenhouse warming has disproportionate effects in high latitudes. And we have [overwhelming evidence for AGW](http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-happened-to-the-evidence-for-man-m…), then what does this study of erosion show?
It shows that:
1) the longer the sea ice is absent, the more erosion;
2) the longer the sea ice is absent the warmer the ocean can get;
3) the further the ice retreat, the larger the waves and the more the erosions.
They have determined that fundamentally the temperature of the Arctic ocean dictates the rate of erosion of these previously frozen coasts.
Sim,
I would never turn down a slice of your pie. Will you be making apple soon?
http://apocalypsecakes.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/global-warming-hot-appl…
A few things while we're waiting for that to cook...
You said..
The press release of the report on erosion didn't mention climate change, some things are too obvious. I like that you takes this a evidence that its because they couldn't prove it!
Actually, I never metioned climate change, the climate is always changing. What I mentioned was AGW...
"The fact remains. Nowhere in your baked pie link does the article mention Anthropogenic Global warming"
And then you add this ingredient...
"You made me smile with that. The study was documenting the rate of coast erosion. Were you perhaps looking for radiative forcing figures?"
Sim....um, the study was documenting the rate of coastal erosion AND THE CAUSES. I don't see AGW being mentioned as a possible cause. Please show me where it states that.
Look, it's your pie and you can make it the way you want. The more humble your ingredients, the better the taste as far as I'm concerned.
I'll leave you with a question...
How many years has the coastline in Alaska been eroding?
Steve,
Steve @ 138
"Nor can I find any mention of poffertjes, so perhaps they don't exist either."
Longer Steve....
The best way to prove AGW is already having an affect on coastal erosion is to provide an article that avoids mentioning AGW. This also proves the existence of Pofferjes.
Betula, Your denial is classic,
>*the study was documenting the rate of coastal erosion AND THE CAUSES. I don't see AGW being mentioned as a possible cause. Please show me where it states that.*
Some things are too obvious! (Again).
Read my last post, especially the bit about temperature being the fundamental cause. Then go back and re read all the evidence that you just ignored about AGW. Then have another slice of your home made pie!
Alternatively keep ignoring the evidence that we present, your pie might go to waste if you stared facing evidence!
At least you kept me smiling!
:)
Shorter Betula,
Every paper has to prove AGW for AGW to be supported by evidence. And none of the papers informing [this document](http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg2.htm) prove AGW, hence they cannot prove AGW!.
And thus I refuse to acknowledge [other papers](http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-happened-to-the-evidence-for-man-m…) that provide [evidence for the 'A'](http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm) in AGW.
Betula queries:
No, I'm saying you're taking a single factor out of context of the sum of the operating physics so as to score juvenile rhetorical points.
Sim
Smiling is a good thing.
I'm smiling myself right now as I am off to Mt. Snow in Vt for 3 days to enjoy some skiing and snowboarding with my 10 year old son....
Hold off on the pie until I get back....you too jakerman!
http://mountsnow.com/snowreport.php
Shorter Betula,
If I close my eyes, the world disappears!
Thanks Betula,
Don't eat too much!
Well, that was a fascinating contribution from Betula. From it, I've learnt that warming oceans are nothing to do with AGW. Perhaps warming is caused by NGC (natural global cooling)?
In honour, I christen a new word 'betulant' - a childish illogic when faced by science one doesn't like.
For sea ice extent? I think it is. Annual mean sea ice extent series don't have the same noise as temperature series.
Even for temperature series, I think 21-year trends would be much better than 11-year ones. For example, this graph shows a 25-year central moving average of sea surface temperatures (the series in red.)
It turns out that new research has shown that Al Gore is fat really is a good argument against global warming.
*[Deleted because it's off topic]*
@el gordo: I wouldn't count on that. Temperature trends can be seen in a decadal scale. Quick, which was warmer: The 1990-1999 decade or the 2000-2009 decade?
I wonder why el gordo his making a [random post](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/open_thread_37.php#comment-2172…) in this thread rather than in the open thread where they belong?
El gordo, are you trying to distance yourself from your crap [weather fetish](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/open_thread_37.php#comment-2172…) and [arrogant certainty](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/willis_eschenbach_caught_lying…)?
Your record of bogus post is pretty long el gordo, why not try and stay on topic and keep at least one thread clean of your inconsistancies. How about a new years resolution where you aim for one thread you can be proud of.
Concise Betulant: The best way to avoid answering the question is to try to make others' responses mean somethying they didn't. If that fails, just make sh!t up. Of course, if instead of deliberately imputing something from the report that Sim linked to you had bothered to do just a few minutes googling, you would have found that the report Sim linked to referred to the fact that Assoc Prof Anderson had presented findings of his team's reasearch at the American Geophys Union conference in December 2009. The brief for his presentations says:
"The Arctic's changing climate: Improving the forecast
Monday, 14 December 1300h
The Arctic, perhaps more than any region on Earth, is feeling the impacts of climate change. But how can scientists better forecast the future of this vulnerable region? New computer modeling techniques and observational tools are enabling scientists to better understand the extent to which the Arctic environment is changing ... Models are also revealing that changes to gas hydrates will likely spur a greater-than-previously-expected release of methane into the atmosphere, perhaps further accelerating warming. Observations, in the form of time-lapse photography vividly show the frantic pace at which portions of the northern coastline of Alaska are crumbling awayâup to 30 meters per yearâdue to a "triple whammy" of declining sea ice, warming seawater, and increased wave activity."
So the fact that the report didn't specifically mention climate change is irrelevant, and the point you try to make from that is thereby worthless.
I have recorded all that I have to say as [Sound Science leading to Pollution free Progress](http://briansintegratedknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/12/sound-science-lea…)
Shamberlame @154
"So the fact that the report didn't specifically mention climate change is irrelevant, and the point you try to make from that is thereby worthless."
Lamey, I never mentioned climate change.
So your imaginary point about a non existing worthless point I made is irrelevant.....and worthless.
What are you guys picking on esr for misunderstanding the statistics behind rms? No one can understand Richard M. Stallman via any method.
betula @ 140:
"Sim....um, the study was documenting the rate of coastal erosion AND THE CAUSES. I don't see AGW being mentioned as a possible cause. Please show me where it states that."
Shamberlame @154
"So the fact that the report didn't specifically mention climate change is irrelevant, and the point you try to make from that is thereby worthless."
betula to Shamberlame, @ 156:
"Lamey, I never mentioned climate change."
What is your issue, betula?
LEE @ 158...
I noticed how you managed to use "shamberlame" twice and "Lamey" once without refering to the use of "Betulant" at all. Very convenient you old sly boots Lee....
The fact is Lee (you see how I refer to you as Lee when you don't resort to "Betulant" like Lamey), it is impossible for me to make a worthless point about the article not mentioning climate change, particularly if I never mentioned climate change.
Climate is always changing Lee, it always has and it always will.
Scary, isn't it?
It is when humans exacerbate it to the extent that they endanger the future coherence of their own society, and the ecosystems that support it.
Notice how Betula focuses exclusively on style and completely misses the fact that Lee was pointing out her hypocracy and lies.
If, you know, anyone was reading this thread who wasn't convinced one way or the other already.
MR...
Wow, I didn't realize the Genus of a tree was gender specific.
Anyway, please give me an example of my hypocrisy and lies, but before you do, please answer this question...
Do you think there is a difference between the terms Global Warming, Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change?
betula, are you really trying to argue your way out of this by claiming that GW, or AGW, is not climate change? Really?
Lee...
Argue my way out of what?
Are you telling me that all global warming is the same as anthropogenic global warming?
Are you telling me that all climate change is caused by man?
Are you telling me that possible means does?
Are you telling me that if means when?
Are you telling me that most likely means is?
Are you telling me that might means will?
Are you telling me that cold is warm and down is up and a peace prize means sending more people to war and a movie means a peace prize and a loss is a win and spending creates saving and not being endangered means endangered?
"Do you think there is a difference between the terms Global Warming, Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change?"
They're used synonymously by most people. If there were any difference, I'd think that "global warming" is a fact, "Anthropogenic Global Warming" the best explanation, and "Climate Change" a diversionary label to distract from what needs be done.
...and some people are just dishonest.
Betula is claiming that when he said 'AGW' he didn't mention climate change.
This allows him to continue being obnoxious as a strategy to avoid responding to the substance of thecriticisms he is forced so unfairly to endure.
Man....
Lee, Michael Ralston, Antoni, this is exactly what Betula is doing. He is insisting that Assoc Prof Anderson's repeated mentioning of "climate change" in his research is not synonymous with (and is therefore not the same as) Anthropogenic Global Warming. His Flatulence then decrees that since neither Assoc Prof Anderson himself nor the articles about his research had specifically written "AGW" (rather than "Climate change") this convincingly demonstrates that neither Assoc Prof Anderson nor his research team can prove that the aforementioned erosion of the Arctic Ocean coastline can be attributed to AGW.
This is all rather smacks of "6th form smart-arse" to me, and so rather than waste even 5 milliseconds of my ever-decreasing lifespan on such banal, asinine pedantry, I put Betula on killfile :-)
Lamey..
"this convincingly demonstrates that neither Assoc Prof Anderson nor his research team can prove that the aforementioned erosion of the Arctic Ocean coastline can be attributed to AGW."
You're correct. They can't.
Betula,
Aforementioned erosion is, however, strong evidence of AGW.
Go ahead and deny it. You'll be wrong.
The proper word isn't "betula" anyway, it's 'almah, which doesn't mean what they think it means...
LB @169
"Aforementioned erosion is, however, strong evidence of AGW."
LB, there is a possibility that my neighbor may go skiing next week. If he does, he will most likely break his leg.
Here's the evidence:
http://www.weather.com/outlook/recreation/ski/trailmap/802006
BrianX @ 170..
For someone who considers himself to be knowledgable about food and has been known to make beer, you really are clueless aren't you.
Let me help you. Here's a good recipe for some Birch Beer:
Scroll down a bit...
http://www.hortsource.com/birch_trees.htm
And Brian, don't worry, you will have plenty of ingredients to make your beer...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070905151422.htm
Latin isn't the only language that has a word approximately like "betula", you know. But if the reference (it's actually more properly spelled "bethulah", but "betula" would be an appropriate alternate form) went over your head, there's no point in explaining it anyway. Let's just say I was testing you with a dog whistle and you didn't hear it.
And frankly that's kind of a sad article... not that the birch is not an interesting tree, but the aspen, as a colonial organism, is rather more so.
BrianX @173
"Let's just say I was testing you with a dog whistle and you didn't hear it."
BrainX thinks humans can hear dog whistles because he can.... it doesn't get much better than that.
I see that betula has stopped even pretending to be discussing the science.
Betula writes:
>*BrainX thinks humans can hear dog whistles [...] it doesn't get much better than that.*
For you perhaps Betual, but that is evidence that you're running on empty.
The Logic of Lee @125...
What I'm trying to figure out is, why would Betula respond to unscientific remarks directed at him without discussing science?
More logical Lee...
When Betula points out the flaw in the logic of my unscientific insult, how can he do it without using science?
The Final Logic of Lee..
Each of my 4 comments on this post are about Betula and have nothing to do with science. With that said, I feel it is important for people to realize Betula is unwilling to discuss the science behind my obsession with him.
@176...
Sim uses selective editing and experiences an epiphany:
All this time, it's been dog whistles I've been hearing...
I love this one. It's the denialist equivalent of saying "Well, if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys around today?"
The UK government have an expert on 'winter cold' and her future is looking very busy. Dr Yvonne Doyle said its looking grim.
'You are talking about at least 30,000 more deaths than a mild winter. But it could be a lot higher. It could exceed what has been recorded in the past.' From memory last year's cruel UK winter killed 40,000 more than average.
Mojib Latif has reconfirmed to the Daily mail that the next 20 to 30 years will be cooler.
el gordo writes:
>*Mojib Latif has reconfirmed to the Daily mail...*
This is dishonst code for Mojib Latif has just had the same [bogus misrepresentations](http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610#p/u/7/khikoh3sJg8) made of his claims. And el gordo's ugly fetish for that means that he rehashes it at 'reconfirmation'.
Your dishonest practice is just as ugly this year el gordo.
People have always been dying, therefore war can't kill people ...
Brilliant!
So, El Fathead, what do you think that Australia's summer weather means in the context of your comment?
Consider today's Bureau of Metorology warnings for [South Australia](http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDS20244.shtml) (or [here](http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDS20292.shtml)), for [Western Australia](http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/wrap_fwo.pl?IDW30000.txt), for [NSW](http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/wrap_fwo.pl?IDN22000.txt), for [Victoria](http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDV22000.shtml), and for [Tasmania](http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/wrap_fwo.pl?IDT31100.txt).
Yeah, real cold...
Janet
Mojib Latif told the Mail on Sunday that winters like this will be more common over the coming decades.
'A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to three cycles - perhaps as much as 50 percent.'
He is talking about the AQ/NAO and PDO.
'They have now gone in reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.'
It is a quote from Mojib given to the Mail yesterday and his words have legitimacy.
BJ
It's warm summer weather, but Mojib is talking about climate. Remember, 30 years is regarded as climate.
el gordo (185): "It's warm summer weather, but Mojib is talking about climate. Remember, 30 years is regarded as climate"
So why the f**k are you blathering about the northern hemisphere winter (180)?
My point exactly. So what has the [cold weather in Europe](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…) to do with anything?
John @179
"It's the denialist equivalent of saying "Well, if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys around today?"
John compares this statement to that of saying climate has always changed and always will.
So let's examine the logic of this comparison...
Obviously, a monkey has evolved into a monkey, and we have evolved into humans from a common ancestor. And we know that evolution is always occuring and always will, much like "climate change is always occuring and always will"...
Anyone who denies this, is an evolution denialist.
So a proper comparison would be more like this:
John, your worry about "climate change" is the same as an alarmist worrying about evolution.
Of course that would be ridiculous, unless we changed the meaning of the word evolution and gave it a stigma. That's right, we could all fear evolution and it's future consequences.
I can see one of the headlines now:
"John is evidence that evolution is happening and we must act now to stop it"
I am happy to see my prediction of the mail article asbeing the next thing the denialists use for their arguments, is correct. Interestingly they seem to pick on Latif most, whilst ignoring that he agrees with the consensus, yet they seem to be ignoring Gray and Tsonis.
Anyone know what Tsonis' problem is?
dhogaza @ 182
"People have always been dying, therefore war can't kill people"
I love this one.
Here again we have a statement that is supposed to point out how ridiculous this statement is...
"Climate is always changing Lee, it always has and it always will."
So let's use dhogaza's logic and compare... here's what dhogaza is saying:
People die from natural causes and people die from man caused war, just as people die from naturally occuring climate change and people die from man caused climate change.
So in Dhogaza's mind, not worrying about the term "climate change", is equivalent to not worrying about the term "war".
A few problems with dhogaza's logic:
1. War deaths can be proven to be caused by war, and don't in any way insinuate death by natural causes.
2. Climate change deaths insinuate natural causes, and can't in any way prove death caused by man.
So while the term "war" is not interchangable with natural cause death, dhogaza compares it with the term "climate change", which he is using without any distinction between natural and man made causes.
If we were all to think like dhogaza, that is, without distinguishing between nautural and man caused deaths, than we would be seeing a lot more headlines like this:
"People who served in WW11 are dying at a rate of 5000 a day, this is evidence that the war hasn't ended".
Brilliant!
Betula makes a strong case for devolution; the theory that the comfort and security of modern life is producing humans of decreasing rationality and inquisitiveness.
It's alarming the pace that Betula is descending from dumb to dumber. What will happen to poor Betula when he becomes so stupid he forgets how to breathe?
"True 'tis a pity, and Pity 'tis 'tis true!"
Betula,
Your post at # 188 is a pile of blithering crap. It is clear evidence that you have not a scintilla of scientific acumen.
Evolutionary processes occur over variable time scales and are dependent on a wide range of parameters including generation time, the genetic composition of populations, levels of genetic mixing amongst populations, the rate of mutation, etc. Evolution via natural selection generally improves the survival and fitness of certain genotypes that in the longer term become fixed in populations until other mutations confer further adaptive benefits to other genotypes. Deleterious mutations are generally purged and adaptive mutations selected for if they provide individuals of that genotype with a competitive edge over conspecifics (and thus higher lifetime reproductive success). Some of these mutations become fixed in populations; there are many such examples. Immense genetic variation amongst populations has been observed because, some genotypes have higher fitness under some conditions whereas other genotypes have higher fitness under other conditions. This enables species to respond to dynamic local changes in the environment, and explains why there is often so much phenotypic variation amongst populations of species with broad geogrpahic ranges (this is espeically true in plants). However, some species exhibit little phenotypic variation under the same conditions, indicating that their are similarities in the conditions to which they are adapted in different areas of their range.
In very long time frames, the genetic isolation of populations and local adaptation to a specific set of conditions can lead to reproductive isolation and eventually speciation. In this sense local phenotypes have become so adapted to local conditions that their fitness is maximized by selectively reproducing with similar phenotypes. Over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years this can produce quite different species that are related but reproductively isolated. The bottom line is that this form of evolution that leads to speciation via reproductive isolation clearly has fitness related adavantages.
Climate on the other hand, is also scale-dependent but at the global scale require significant forcings to push the system out of equlibrium. Changes in climate forcing are not necessarily beneficial, at least in terms of their effects on ecosystems and their biodiversity. Moreover, climate does change with time, but more significantly in deep time, much less so in shallow time given its level of large-scale short-term determinism. The kinds of temporal changes being generated at both local and global spatial scales at present far exceeds that which would naturally occur without some singificant external forcing. That significant force is anthropogenic.
Your posts are, to be honest, a profound embarassment. I have been too busy of late to respond to some of the contrarian gibberish that appears on this site, but your last posting is so utterly appalling that I could not resist a response.
luminous beauty,
Well said.
You have hit the nail on the head. Betula appears to draw a correlation between climate (in)stability and (de)volution. In other words, his logic is that, if climate naturally changes all of the time (good or bad), then this is just what happens with evolution (it is good or bad). But climate forcings do not have to be natural, even if a dolt like Betula says it is so. Natural selection cannot, by definition, be a bad thing because genotypes with lower fitness will be purged in time.
The fact is that climate changes can be highly deleterious to nature (at least to biodiversity and humanity) whereas, by definition evolution benefits certain genotypes. In other words it is a form of adaptive progression. Moreover, humans ARE forcing climate. The human fingerprint is all over the current episode, given the level of forcing required to shift such a determimistic system out of equilibrium in such a short time.
As I said, Betula is spewing blithering, infantile crap. But this kind of logic is typical of the denialati.
>So in Dhogaza's mind, not worrying about the term "climate change", is equivalent to not worrying about the term "war".
Betula is a mentalist of unparalleled ability!
At least since Carnac the Magnificent.
Jeff Harvey...
You are a classic.
Your blind rage has disabled your ability to read and decipher content. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
First, was John comparing someones thoughts on climate change to that of evolution with this statement?...
"It's the denialist equivalent of saying "Well, if we came from monkeys why are there still monkeys around today?"
Of course he was.
Now, did I point out how ridiculous this statement was by using an equally ridiculous statement?..
"John, your worry about "climate change" is the same as an alarmist worrying about evolution."
Of course I did.
And how do we now I mean't this to be ridiculous?...
"Of course that would be ridiculous"
And what did I add to that?
"unless we change the meaning of the word evolution and give it a stigma."
So John, I hope this little walk through the comment has helped you, unless you change the meaning of evolution to mean "man made evolution" without including the "man made part"....thus giving it a stigma.
You see JH, the term "climate change" doesn't distinguish between man made and natural climate change, and if it does, please explain to me where it does. Climate change can be used for whatever you want it to be used for....
In the meantime, I have yet to hear someone explain how my original comment is wrong...
"Climate is always changing Lee, it always has and it always will."
Yes LB,
This...
"People have always been dying, therefore war can't kill people"
In response to this...
"Climate is always changing Lee, it always has and it always will."
Equals this...
"So in Dhogaza's mind, not worrying about the term "climate change", is equivalent to not worrying about the term "war"."
Obviously Betula is unfamiliar with formal logic.
Or common sense.
Dhogaza,
I have described what you consider to be formal logic @190...
If we were all to think like dhogaza, that is, without distinguishing between natural and man caused deaths, then we would be seeing a lot more headlines like this:
"People who served in WW11 are dying at a rate of 5000 a day, this is evidence that the war hasn't ended".
Obviously, LB's common sense is a strong ally of your formal logic, only with a slight twist...
5000 marines died on the first day of fighting at Iwo Jima, this is evidence that 5000 more will die today.
Or basic reading comprehension.
Jeff Harvey:
Strictly speaking, natural selection could be a "bad" thing - if the metric you're using to define good or bad isn't based on survival/reproductive fitness. Retroviruses come to mind - if judged on the metric of human health, evolution here is downright evil. Of course, this judgement has no scientific basis whatsoever and involves special pleading, placing our own subjective values as absolutes, but given those (faulty) premises, the conclusion does follow.
I suspect the same could be true in some cases with climate inactivists, particularly those motivated by economic libertarianism. If your metric for determining good or bad doesn't relate to anything natural but is instead based on the short-term rate of economic growth, you're naturally going to see policies that slow growth as bad, while policies that ignore the problem and prescribe more growth are good. There's still no scientific reason to select that subjective criterion over the more appropriate naturalistic ones, but if one does, the conclusion still follows. There is a fallacy involved if you step from "policy that ignores the problem is good" to "ignoring the problem is good / there is no problem", though.
The interesting bit is the second part of that step, in both climate and evolution: How do you go from disliking the consequence of a theory (which you could dispute by producing an alternate policy response, say) to disputing the validity of the theory? As a psychologist-in-training, this is an area I'd love to research, though I admit I currently lack the background to begin.
Yes, Betula, climate changes. That change is bounded. Within any given epoch - geological, evolutionary, or culture-evolutionary epoch, the climate variability was not unlimited - it was within certain limits.
We are diving outside of the climate boundaries within which our species and culture evolved, and within which the species and ecosystems that provide so many of our essential service evolved.
The speed of my car always changes, too. But if my accelerator got stuck, and I found myself doing 85 and climbing on a road designed for a maximum of 55, with no way to slow down, that fact that my speed often varies would be of very little comfort.
Now, betula, do you have something substantive to say, or just more attempts at sounding profound by way of meaningless sound bites?
Guthrie @ 189:
The Guardian [quotes him](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/11/climate-change-global…) as denouncing the Mail's disinformation.
Lee,
Thank you for admitting that climate always changes. Now that wasn't so scary was it people?
It's amazing how far I had to go to get to this point....a war and the entire evolutionary process.
With that said, let me now go back to my point about distinguishing between man-made climate change and natural climate change, both of which fit under the catagory of climate change...
Lee,
When using the term climate change, how do you distinguish between that which is man made and that which is natural within the same term?
Betula:
"When using the term climate change, how do you distinguish between that which is man made and that which is natural within the same term?"
I refer you to the various IPCC reports - where the effing science is very clearly laid out for you. Not that I expect the actual science will make any difference to you.
The MDOs over the last 30 years have caused half the warming, according to Latif. The other 50 percent is presumably derived from a particular trace gas.
But we are not confident that is accurate because most of the AGW warming signal, according to NOAA, NASA and CRU, is coming out of Russia.
Evolution doesn't prove natural selection, but natural selection proves evolution.
Shorter [El Gordo.](http://www.sense.net/~blaine/funstuff/images/cart.jpg)
Great pic LB.
Here's one for you.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42260
LB @206
Classic picture.
Not only is it the symbol of the Democrat party here in the U.S., it is the best description of the current administration that I have seen to date. This one will be passed on.
Thanks.
Betula,
You realize, of course, the boxes on the cart contain the moribund remains of the Republic Party elephant.
This is for you:
[Betula's Amazing Card Trick](http://www.sense.net/~blaine/funstuff/trick.html)
Enjoy!
"You realize, of course, the boxes on the cart contain the moribund remains of the Republic Party elephant."
LB,
That's an even better analogy...
The Democrats believe the Republicans are to blame for weighing them down, even when they are in control of the cart....you're on fire today!
Now, I'm sure this is where Lee comes in like @175 and says to you..... "I see that [LB] has stopped even pretending to be discussing the science."
The California Current is bearing down and the Humboldt Current is in reverse.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/enso.shtml
It is easy to see why BOM are confident about El Nino.
>*Now, I'm sure this is where Lee comes in like @175 and says to you..... "I see that [LB] has stopped even pretending to be discussing the science."*
The science isn't your strong point is it Betula.
Betula,
Read what I have said again. Climate does change within certain natural boundries determined by scale. At large scales, it is highly deterministic and any changes that knock it out of equlibrium require some kind of forcing. This forcing can be natural if it is significant enough. But all of the evidence suggests that there are no natural forcings large enough to account for the quite signifciant changes observed since the 1980s.
Given the fact that we are dealing in shallow time (e.g. one or two human generations, which is nothing in gelogical time), the current changes in climate at regional (more stochastic) and global (more deterministic) scales are large enough that some forcing must be accounting for them. That forcing, according to the most reliable empirical evidence, is anthropogenic. By repeatedly blathering on about change being the norm, you overlook the fact that change *within certain boundaries* is the norm; beyond specific thresholds it is not the norm. You might also argue that the loss of tropical forests is the norm as we know that the area of the globe covered by tropical wet forests has changed (grown and shrunk) over many millenia depending on regional and local climate regimes. We now also know that humans have felled about 50% of the world's tropical forests in the past century or so, and using your absurd logic, one could say there is nothing to worry about because we know that the area of forest cover has changed in the past. But of course this is nonsense because we know that the primary driver of forest loss in recent decades has been due to human actions. In other words, change is the norm within certain thresholds, but beyond these change is not the norm and we have to look for alternative explanations.
Betula, given your comic-book level discussion here, I would be interested to know what scientific qualifications that you possess. I do not expect much in this regard.
Betula's bithering reminds me of the paraphrased quote:
>Guy in the street tells highly trained scientist in the field where he is wrong.
Jeff,
Your post @214 was highly readable and informative. Glad you're back!
Does Betula have a strong point, and if so, what is it?
I suppose having a head denser than depleted uranium would be useful in certain sports, like american football, but other than that ...
JH,
Your concern is that significant changes over a short time are not normal. Because the changes are so sudden, they are beyond the scope of natural forcings, therefore must be caused by man.
These changes are taking place rapidly and therefore we have very little time act on putting policies in place to stop the damage that is being done now, and damage that may be done in the future.
Is that about right?
I find this interesting, since it was you who said the following @81...
"Vast changes in system properties as a result of the likely meteorite impact at the end of ther Cretaceous period did drive the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, but it is likely that this event took up to 20,000 years to be played out. And in terms of geological time scales, this is even a relatively short span."
You used this point against "denialists", claiming they are "programmed to think in time scales that relate to their own human experience"....."and who somehow believe that trends in large scale regional or global systems that function in profoundly deterministic ways can be eludicated in 5-10 years" (by the way, that's elucidated).
So it took 20,000 years, a relatively short time span, for vast changes in system properties to drive mass extincion, yet here you are claiming we only have a few years to act, because of "quite signifciant changes observed since the 1980s."
JH, if 20,000 years is a relatively short time span, what do you call 30 years? Who was it you said was "programmed to think in time scales that relate to their own human experience"?
In addition, I note @182 you say a significant external force is driving climate change and .... "That significant force is anthropogenic."
Could you explain to me what percent of that force is anthropogenic and what percent is natural?
This relates to my unanswered question to Lee @203.... "When using the term climate change, how do you distinguish between that which is man made and that which is natural within the same term?"
Of course, the answer is.... you can't.
So I find it funny when you state "the significant force is anthropogenic." First of all, what percent "is" anthropogenic and secondly, where did you get the word "is" from? Was this derived from some form of "most-likely" or "probably"?
As far as my education, unlike Al Gore, I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Forestry and over 30 years experience in the field of Arborculture while licensed in 2 states.
I was also an engineer officer with the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as the HQ Commandant for the 2000 marines of the 26th MAU(SOC), since changed to MEU.
By the way, you might want to take up this subject with an ecologists who feels the same about this as I do...
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/11/biodiversity-and-climate-change/
"Guy in the street tells highly trained scientist in the field where he is wrong."
No. Guy in the street tells YOU he's cold.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-m…
"depleted uranium would be useful in certain sports, like american football, but other than that ..."
You mean until Copenhagen...
"uranium will benefit from Copenhagen"
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/oil-uranium-to-r…
"No. Guy in the street tells YOU he's cold."
Not so much. [Guy in the newsroom makes stuff up, misrepresents scientist](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/11/climate-change-global…).
By the way, you do know the difference between weather and climate, don't you?
I should add that i'm not exactly surprised. the mail is the UK equivalent of the weekly world news, except with fewer facts and more racism.
high points include the headline "Abortion hope after 'gay genes' finding", and spearheading the anti-MMR stupidity.
"No. Guy in the street tells YOU he's cold." - Betula
You sure must have a serious case of splinters from scraping the bottom of that barrel of denial.
What about the places that are currently "warmer" than usual?:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20100106b.html
Ligne @221
"By the way, you do know the difference between weather and climate, don't you?"
Sure I do, the problem is with the man in the street who is more concerned about frostbite.
Dappledwater..
"What about the places that are currently "warmer" than usual?"
The man in the street has been trying to get a flight to one of those warm places, but flights have been delayed due to snow.
By the way dapple,
What is it exactly that you think I deny?
Betula:
"This relates to my unanswered question to Lee @203.... "When using the term climate change, how do you distinguish between that which is man made and that which is natural within the same term?"
Of course, the answer is.... you can't."
Oh, fuck this. Look betula, you lying little fuckfaced twit:
@204:
"
Betula:
...
I refer you to the various IPCC reports - where the effing science is very clearly laid out for you. Not that I expect the actual science will make any difference to you.
Posted by: Lee | January 11, 2010 3:13 PM
---
Look, asshole. When you ask a stupid question, and we show you right where the answer is, and invite you to go see it, you can of course ignore it and retain your ignorance. Hell, I predicted you would ignore it. It's a complex answer, more than one can easily put into a blog response - but it is there, in detail, if you simply had the guts to risk your convenient ignorance and go actually spend some time understanding it
But when you refuse to go look at the answer we provide, and then continue to claim that we - that I - have no answer... that is dishonest, and it is lying about me. And there, I draw the line.
So fuck off.
Ditto.
>"depleted uranium would be useful in certain sports, like american football, but other than that ..."
>You mean until Copenhagen...
>"uranium will benefit from Copenhagen"
Trust Betula to be unable to distinguish between depleted and enriched uranium.
>This relates to my unanswered question to Lee @203.... "When using the term climate change, how do you distinguish between that which is man made and that which is natural within the same term?"
>Of course, the answer is.... you can't
[Si se puede.](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/)
Betula finds it preferable to depend upon [the opinions](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…) of some ill informed fictious [non-person](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…). Is Betual now spokes person for the ill infomed?
Betula seems to demontrate the prerequisites to represent the fraction of the populous that are opinionated, argumentative and willfully ignorant on the topic.
It also seems Betula's tactic for running away from the science.
Lee,
Just because you gave an answer, doesn't mean you answered the question. And swearing doesn't prove you answered the question either.
The fact remains, when using the term climate change, you cannot distinguish between that which is man made and that which is natural, because the definition itself contains both.
The IPCC glossary used to say this back in 95'....
"because of changes in external forcing either for natural reasons or because of human activities. It is generally not possible clearly to make attribution between these
causes."
Of course, that phrasing seems to have disappeared and it now states...
"Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of the atmosphere or in land use."
Unless you use the UNCCC definition, which states:
"climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human
activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods"
So slowly and subtly, the term "climate change" is being changed to mean changes only caused by man, though it's not there yet.
Of course Lee, you already new that.
LB @228..
Which part of "within the same term" did you not understand?
Let me guess...."the"
Honestly, all these attacks and nobody noticed I misspelled "arboriculture" @218?
"Betula finds it preferable to depend upon the opinions of some ill informed fictious non-person"
Jakerman, when have I ever asked for your opinion?
Betula, in response to:
says:
Apparently Betula thinks that his focus on weather, like [Fatso's similar focus](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…), makes a different point about climate than does mine or any other sensible person responding to them. And that somehow this does invalidate the science...
Well, this man/scientist in the street has spent the last few days in nothing but a pair of shorts, sweating in the extreme heat of [10 January](ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/ncc/www/temperature/maxave/daily/colour/…) and [11 January](ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon/home/ncc/www/temperature/maxave/daily/colour/…). I'll ask you the same question that I put to Fatso: what do you think that Australia's summer weather means in the context of your comment?
Betula, thanks for [emphasising](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…) my point:
>*Betula seems to demontrate the prerequisites to represent the fraction of the populous that are opinionated, argumentative and willfully ignorant on the topic. It also seems Betula's tactic for running away from the science.*
Your school-yard come-backs puts you in a legaue...with school boys.
BJ
It hardly matters. We can sit here splitting hairs over weather and climate, but the increased death toll from excessive Australian heat will be insignificant against the NH freeze.
The Brits won't be retiring in Spain anymore and I can confidently predict a mass migration to Oz over the next quarter century.
They will lose faith in AGW and vote with their feet.
Au contraire!
If the coverage of Australia's heat waves in recent years had been over Europe, and if Europe's temperatures had similarly covered Australia, there'd still be many more deaths in Europe. This, for the simple reason that Europe is presently 39 times more populated than Australia.
Of course, although there might be immediate consequences of public perception from the death rates that are observed, in the longer term the subjective impressions of scientifically illiterate people will not stand against simple physical science and its biological consequences.
"[L]os[ing] faith in AGW" will not stop physics, and your "predictions" might be "confident", but as they are themselves based in ideologically-motivated faith, they are as irrelevant to the progress of atmospheric physics as any other pseudoscientific piece of nonsense espoused by the Denialists.
As ever, I will ask you the same questions that I've [asked previously](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/firedoglake_book_salon_on_jame…), although I have little confidence that you'll actually deign to provide substantive answers.
Bernard...
"I'll ask you the same question that I put to Fatso: what do you think that Australia's summer weather means in the context of your comment?"
Easy. If the guy in the street were in Australia, he would tell the scientist he's hot, only it wouldn't be due to weather, it would be "due to global warming".
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6040IE20100105
C'mon Bernard, everyone knows that.
Now...
1. Did you consider the context of the comment I was responding to @215?
"Guy in the street tells highly trained scientist in the field where he is wrong"
Which was a comment directed at this @203....
2."When using the term climate change, how do you distinguish between that which is man made and that which is natural within the same term?"
The answer to #1 is you didn't, because the answer to #2 is you can't.
So perhaps we should rephrase the original question...
Where did highly trained scientist prove to guy in the street that he is wrong?
Bernard, we all know "climate change" is always happening. But now we put a stigma on it to infer man is causing it, even though the definition includes natural causes.
Where it MAY be true that man is influencing part of climate to cause some change, it is impossible to distinguish that part, from the natural, within the stigmatized term climate change.
The goal is to change the meaning over time. It's already being done. Soon, "climate change" will be used to mean changes solely caused by man, and "climate variability" will be used to mean that which is caused naturally, even though they are indistinguishable.
In other words, we will never see "climate variability" in the headlines.
Betula,
>LB @228..
>Which part of "within the same term" did you not understand?
>Let me guess...."the"
Huh?
>The following figure shows changes in climate "forcings" or factors that have contributed to __climate change__ since 1750.
All forcings, natural and anthropogenic, _within the same term._
Is it the intent of your semantic dissembling only to prove you are dumb as a box of rocks? If so, you are succeeding.
So, this is all about a semantic point, Betula? Yes, it is true that 'it got warmer' means the same thing whether the cause is natural variability or anthropogenic forcing. And yes, in that technical report they defined 'climate change' to mean 'anthropogenic climate change.' That seems to be the only meaningful thing you've said in this last wave of posts. So fucking what?! WTF does all this have to do with the science?
The fact is, we CAN parcel out the contributions of natural variability and of anthropogenic forcing, to the observed warming over the last century or so. A whole chunk of AR4 was devoted to exactly that. You seem to be trying to substitute this semantic argument in place of the science, as a way to imply that we can't distinguish those, without having to actually touch the science.
Please stop being so fucking dishonest.
1."So, this is all about a semantic point, Betula?"...."Please stop being so fucking dishonest".
So you don't read a question properly, react with rage, and then call me dishonest because you misunderstood?
A simple "oops" would have been sufficient.
2."WTF does all this have to do with the science?"
If semantics are being used to generically describe anthropogenic global warming via the term "climate change", then it has to do with the science.
Lee, I suppose I could ask you: WTF does Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize have to do with the science, or peace?
The difference is, I have an answer.
"All forcings, natural and anthropogenic, within the same term"
The "box of rocks" has a question for the crushed stone....
Please show me where your figure includes natural internal processes as defined within the term "climate change".
Anyone like to hazard a guess why tropical cyclone activity is at 30 year lows?
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/
>Please show me where your figure includes natural internal processes as defined within the term "climate change".
In the title of the page:
>DATASETS AND IMAGES
Forcings in GISS Climate Model
>>We summarize here forcing data used in the GISS global climate models in recent years
Those 'natural internal processes' are temporal and spacial atmospheric, oceanic, lithospheric and cryospheric energy transfer fluctuations, which are defined by the model outputs. They aren't forcings.
I don't think Betula knows what he is agrguing about. He earlier seemed to argue that [Arctic errosion doesn't prove AGW](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…)- that's a fat strawman, given that errion was provided as a consequence of AGW, the science for AGW comes from other multiple lines of evidence.
Now Betula appears to be arguing that the word "climate change" does not prove AGW, another strawman. Especially given his complaining when [presented with](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/) comparisions of Anthropogenic forcing vs natural forcing.
Betula your semantic sophistry is a transparent game. I don't think you know what you are talking about, hence its not surprising to see you keep running around in circles.
Yet, Betula you seem satisfied with being argumentative and empty.
Betula, "we" haven't put a "stigma" on climate change per se, "we" have recognised the potentially very serious consequences of human-induced global warming that is the basis for referring to a different beast - anthopogenic climate change. You are, as Lee notes, playing with semantics.
Oo, and it was the Republican spin doctor [Frank Luntz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Global_warming) who advised the Shrub administration to employ the term 'climate change' as a way to make the issue appear to be innocuous. The reason the term has such offensive connotations for you now is that although a name change might temporarily have removed the import from the US public's mind, a hothouse rose by any other name stills smells as sweat...
The science doesn't go away just because of a relabelling, no matter that your ideology would that it were otherwise.
Ironically, even Luntz now concedes the serious nature of AGW.
FYI the answer to #1 is "I did", and the answer to #2 is "we can": if you read the scientific literature you would know that climatologists and physicists understand the physics of temperature forcing, and are able to ascribe the relative contributions of each to the best of the current body of knowledge.
And before you say it, don't try the "we don't know everything, therefore we know nothing" argument - unless you wish to demonstrate again to the thread that you would rather put logical fallacy ahead of best understanding...
[Betula refers](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…) to my comment @215:
>*"Guy in the street tells highly trained scientist in the field where he is wrong"*
Betual states that my comment was "*directed at this [@203](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…)*"....
Howevr Betula mistakenly narrowed the focus of my target. My comment was in response to blithering Betulisms such as this:
Betula @188
>*John, your worry about "climate change" is the same as an alarmist worrying about evolution.*
And [your blithering Betulism](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…) about no evidence for a link between Arctic coastal errosion and AGW.
I am pleased my little joke has made you fly into an incoherent, sobbing rage.
Sim @246...
I think I'm actually beginning to feel sorry for you.
If those were your targets, then obviously you are unable to put them in the context of previous and past statements before them.
I am beginning to understand the way in which your logic is defective, and it is a scary thought.
Betula, thanks again (@248) for [re-emphasizing my point](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…). Your empty comments are transparent.
Jakerman @244
"I don't think Betula knows what he is agrguing about. He earlier seemed to argue that Arctic errosion doesn't prove AGW- that's a fat strawman"
and again @244...
"Now Betula appears to be arguing that the word "climate change" does not prove AGW, another strawman"
Jakerman, overuse of the word "strawman" doesn't prove AGW either. In fact, nothing "proves" AGW or the speculated worst case hypotheticals that come with it.
Now that's a hard fact to swallow.
Again Betula is straw baled upon starw. Afraid that I can't over-state the desrciption of starw when describing your tactics.
And Betula [again](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/12/evidence_doesnt_seem_to_change…) re-emphasizes my point, that he is just argumentative and empty.