Via Skeptical Science, Peter Sinclair's video on the evidence for man-made global warming.
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You know that whole "climategate" nonsense was settled, right? It was a ginned-up controversy with no merit, and the evidence still supports the conclusion of anthropogenic global warming.
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A very frequent whinge from climate change denialists is that the big bad environmental industrial complex is suppressing any dissent from the pre-approved party line. This is never accompanied by any actual evidence beyond an occasional anecdote.
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The National Journal has released its annual survey of Congressional members on their views of climate science. When asked: "Do you think it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made pollution?," of the 38 Democratic members of Congress interviewed, 98…
Ideas that were once championed by evolutionists are no longer valid, much like the false science behind man-made global warming. Students deserve the truth.
That's from a guy running for school board in Wisconsin. Pharyngula has the details.
Hello, guys!
I missed you! Coming up to four figures, eh? I took the time to read the "epic thread" where Grima O (#989) was torn to pieces. Ouch. It was almost as if the unsceptics enjoyed tormenting the poor guy.
Would anybody like to help me with a letter I'm writing? Current draft below. Any suggestions for improvements?
Greg Clark MP,
Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
Hose of Commons,
London SW1A 0AA
Dear Mr. Clark,
I am writing to recommend a rethink on government policy on climate change if the Conservatives win the election.
As you will know, there is great scepticism in the public over the Anthropogenic Global Warming hypothesis and there is a substantial minority of qualified scientists who challenge it. The science is not settled.
As the evidence of Global Warming (in temperature, ice cover and sea level) continues to defy the apocalyptic predictions, the case grows against vast expenditure to combat a mythical threat.
I recommend that, upon assuming office, you take advice on pass/fail criteria for the AGW hypothesis and, in the event that the hypothesis is refuted, make swingeing cuts to the public monies being squandered on a nonexistent threat. It will take political courage to question the prevailing groupthink, but the bulk of the electorate, seeing no apocalypse, will endorse your wisdom in safeguarding the public purse.
Yours sincerely,
---------
Marcel, I know you would phrase it differently, but you're probably not the best person to suggest alternative texts.
you need someone to remind you that your tactic's are failing and you need to reassess your aGW strategy
The question is, why would he listen to someone who is among the stupidest and most dishonest people he has ever encountered?
1000 TM, congratulations!
Spotty, not good enough. I like carrots but your offerings have been shown to be turds and not worth bothering with.
Trolls are like sunspot and Brent are moral criminals.
for the retard, ("rotten" ice) from his link.
'Thinner ice breaks up more easily under fierce winds that can howl relentlessly for weeks.'
'Ice that seems a safe bet on a cold day is suddenly high-risk when a wicked wind comes out of nowhere, or sea currents eat away at the ice pack unseen'
'A blinding storm that shook the hamlet for days sent tremors rippling through kilometres of ice.'
'By the time the gale subsided, the gash had opened up into a gaping wound of black water, stretching as far as the eye could see. The floe edge had eroded to just 2 km from shore.'
'Powerful winds blowing across the ice pack shatter it, move the floes for many kilometres and stir warm and cold layers of the sea.'
'n the old days, the first snows fell for two or three weeks without much wind, forming a firm base that resisted later storms, Akoaksion says. Now, wind is almost constant, blowing snow across the ice.'
Welcome back Brent. How long until you fly off the handle and leave again?
pssst, akerz, the retard thinks your a bloke.
Brent,
Again. for the umprteenth time, where is your evidence for saying this:
*there is a substantial minority of qualified scientists who challenge it. The science is not settled*.
What do mean by 'qualified'? Please elaborate. Do you mean having a PhD in any academic field? Do you mean the number of publications and citations on the Web of Science? Or, as I believe, do you mean any crackpot with any letters after their names who support the contrarian view?
Do you know what the word 'qualifed' means anyway? The problem with people like you and Sunspot is that they think anyone is qualified if their views agree with yours.
If you are actually referring to those with strong publication records who are actual climate scientists, then your 'substantial minority' becmes an 'insubstantially small fraction'. And even if you lump in other Earth and life scientists, such as myself, then the actual number of very qualified individuals supporting your perspective is very small.
The problem with you is that IMHO you do not give a damn about the truth, as elusive as that is in science, but instead you, like many of thge denialati, are using science as a tool to promote your own political right wing (or liberatarian) world view. There is abundant evidence for this but you and your kind just do not like it being told. Many of the people you list as 'qualified scientists' have willingly allowed their names to be used by conservativbe think tanks or astroturf lobbying groups. If these people had a shred of integrity they would distance themselves from these corporate-funded groups with an axe to grind. But they are so ideologically driven themselves that they are quite content to appear as adjunct scholars, fellows etc. with these think tanks. And yet we are supposed to believe for a nansecond that they are honest brokers just trying to get at the truth?
You really make me laugh. Every time I read one of your posts, I cringe at the vacuity of your arguments. You do not understand even basic science, that is obvious, but you certainly have strong political beliefs. So it is f*** to the former and push for the latter.
Why do you persist? Do you really think most of us here give a damn what an obscure nobody like you really thinks about science and the world? I fully realize that public opinion is swaying towards the "let the planet go to hell in a handbasket" approach, but this is only because of the bottomless pockets and slick PR campaigns of the anti-environmental lobby who are desperate to ensure that we 'stay the course' in order to ensure short-term profit returns are maximized for the privileged few. This will be a pyrrhic victory, I can tell you that. Few 'qualified' scientists, if truth be told, would deny that humans are pushing natural systems towards a critical threshold beyond which conditions will be dire. As I said the other day, I am sure that the profit merchants of denial must be doing high fives when they see how the public goes along for the ride when they are bombarded enough with brazen anti-scientific propoganda. Feel proud Brent - you are one of the 'useful idiots' out there who wants to believe in the tooth fairy. Its too bad that there will be a heavy price to pay down the road.
stop.
Spotty, have you [taken to](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) referring to your self in the 3rd person?
Hi, John! Fly off the handle, you say? Like you did at Bishop Hill in the 'Global Sea Ice Normal' thread? "...lying...", "...saddest thing about you lot...", "lying and misrepresentation"
And the Bishop calmly wrote to you, "John, if you want to vent please do it somewhere else."
Sunspot, I'm enjoying reading you remonstrate with these penpushers about their utter lack of action. In Britain we're highly influenced by an old comedy team called Monty Python. In one of their films, a bunch of penpushers rushed to save the hero from a terrible death and upon arriving gave him their congratulations, went into a huddle, took a vote, gave him a round of applause. That was the extent of their 'action'. The Germans have a lovely expression for penpushers: 'Trestuhlpiloten': three-legged stool pilots.
Kind makes you wonder: if they really believed in carbon-death, wouldn't they DO something about it individually? Only Bernard J has actually... taken... action.
Marcel: how about you try reduced respiration.
Just for an hour or two, see how it goes...
Brent @ 1011:
>their utter lack of action
Liar.
Brent, I was wondering why you were on a rant about pen pushers. Why is he (Brent) so fixated with pen pushers. Then it twigged, Brent is either a student or a Manufacturing Engineer.I guess spotty's assumption about who we are and what we do might have nailed you instead of us.
Back in the day when I was a student, then latter as a graduate I remember pangs of self doubt and lack of efficacy. Hang in there Brent, you'll get through it. Though you might feel better sooner if you start listening to those little pangs of guilt and move away from the trolling dishonest and dishonorable dark side.
Brent you've chucked a sobbing wobbly and left this site three times now. Each time we've mocked you until you've returned claiming a new agenda. I'll let the fair minded readers of this site and Bishop Hill make up their own mind as to which one of us is the complete failure and intellectual bankrupt.
>*I'll let the fair minded readers of this site and Bishop Hill make up their own mind*
I note John was the one to link back to let readers decide. Brent seems to feel the need to interpret the facts for others.
Brent, I'd recommend saving yourself the cost of the stamp and not sending Mr. Clark your letter.
It reads like a hundred others from thinly disguised energy industry astroturf lobby groups and other egregiously misinformed cranks who believe their self-perceived "cleverness" somehow trumps reality.
Jeff (1008):
Jeff, I fully understand that through your lens you see sceptics like me as gratuitous spoilers, as anti-environmentalists. When I wrote that there were intelligent, educated, sincere people on both sides I had people like you in mind.
I recall being on a protest march against hare coursing (a barbaric bloodsport we have in England) at their annual event, the Waterloo Cup. One of the supporters, a nice looking switched-on looking guy approached us and enquired, "Just what do you people GET from trying to spoil others' legitimate enjoyment." Through his lens, our protest was mere spoiling.
I happen to believe that the gross waste of resources on this AGW panic is sucking valuable resource away from useful, productive, essential environmental work. And, at the same time, saddling national budgets with unaffordable debt, and also will result in damaging rises in energy costs to individuals and to wealth-creating industries.
I believe energy is good; is one of the foundations of our advanced culture. You personally benefit from this, and quite rightly. Good luck to you.
You asked for some names of qualified scientists who challenge the orthodoxy. When we name such people you dismiss them as unworthy. But there ARE such people in the minority. Names such as Soon, Corbyn, Spencer, Dyson, Svensmark, Lindzen come to mind. Some are more combative than others, but these - and others - dare to say that the hypothesis is open to question. In your corner we can name Hansen, Mann, Jones, Briffa and many more. And they are a majority. But the science is not settled, as the recent volte-face at London's Science Museum confirms.
The Guardian's George Monbiot wrote in 2006: "Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid as holocaust denial." Please tell me if you think such a statement is worthy, or accurate, or what?
Chek (1016): "...thinly disguised energy industry astroturf lobby groups."
No mate. Citizen. With the right to address my elected representatives, same as you have.
Brent #1017 - the key point about the scientists you praise for their rejection of the orthodoxy is their lack of scientific evidence for that rejection. Which leaves you with a bit of a problem, in that said scentists have as much evidence on their side as holocaust denialists.
Oh, look, we have 'nice Brent' today.
Dave R (1012): You say that "utter lack of action" is a lie.
Question for you:
"Have you personally taken any steps whatsoever to reduce your carbon footprint by a significant amount? If so, please give some indication in kWh per annum, litres of vehicle fuel per annum, and aircraft passenger-miles."
Also, given that two of us here have invested in solar energy, Dave: "Have you, or anybody in your circle, taken any concrete steps to exploit renewable energy?"
The expression 'penpushers' does not denigrate people who make their living from information in one form or another; it denigrates those who call for concrete action but take none themselves, especially when they have the capacity to do so.
Brent at 1018 said:
"No mate. Citizen. With the right to unthinkingly parrot received talking points to my elected representatives, same as you have".
There, fixed that for you.
I'm sure that's what you meant to say.
Brent @ 1017:
>sceptics like me
You are [not a sceptic](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/feb/22/climate-change-s…).
>Names such as Soon, Corbyn, Spencer, Dyson, Svensmark, Lindzen come to mind.
So, a small number of cranks and contrarians. That does not refute Jeff's point -- it confirms it.
>But the science is not settled
Straw man.
Brent @ 1018:
>Have you personally taken any steps whatsoever to reduce your carbon footprint by a significant amount?
[Asked and answered](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
Guthrie (1019): Do you accept that there are scientists working on the idea that solar activity may be an important driver of climate?
Shorter Brent @ 1025:
_I have no response to the [arguments already made](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) which show the recent global warming was not caused by the sun. However, I'm going to continue to insinuate that it was._
Dave R: I get you.
My impertinent question is an ad hominem irrelevancy, then?
Methinks the slippery customer doth evade too much.
At least Phil Jones had the decency to write, "Why should I give you my data? You'll only try to find something wrong with it."
Come on, Davey Boy. You're anonymous here. Tell us you've bought a bike, take your holidays in your own country, and insulated your house. We can't come round your house to check, can we?
And round the goldfish bowl he goes again.
Oh, look, we have 'nasty Brent' at 1027. That was a quick.
Now, how long before he flounces off again?
Let's have some context on Brent's Monbiot chop'n paste shall we:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/sep/21/comment.georgemonbi…
Brent, please explain how in your own mind you imagine what Monbiot said supports your 'nothing to do so do nothing' position?
You'll like this, guys.
The Catlin Arctic Survey, as they plod along the polecap, are moaning that they're having a hard time with temperatures of -45C. Guy on WUWT writes: "Strange, DMI records Arctic Polar Temperature as only -23 degC for last weekend!"
I've got shares in Catlin Group. These tossers are on their annual jolly at MY EXPENSE! D'oh!
Brent and sunspot,
Is there anything that would convince you of the reality of AGW? If so, what, specifically? Do you reject the IPCC report in its entirety? If not, which portions do you accept and which do you reject, and on what basis? If you are proposing alternative explanations for observed phenomena, are you willing to put your foot solidly down and say "I contend X provides a better explanation because of Y and Z evidence"?
Thanks.
>*The expression 'penpushers' does not denigrate people who make their living from information in one form or another; it denigrates those who call for concrete action but take none themselves, especially when they have the capacity to do so.*
What is he on about? Does Brent think he can redefine terms without anyone noticing? And why did he bother? What a potty case.
Brent,
As I expected: your 'list' is scraping the barrel. Corbyn has virtually no peer-reviewed publications. Spencer has made anti-environmental comments and is an expert with the George Marshall Institute and he also writes for TCS, funded in part by Exxon-Mobil. Ditto Soon, who only has 34 published articles in the Wos in more than 15 years. Svensmark's work has been heavily criticized and he has only 37 articles in more than 20 years. Hardly luminaries. Lindzen has connections going way back to the fossil-fuel lobby and various conservative think tanks.
The truth is that IMHO all of your 'experts' are either pseudos or have connections to industries with a vested interest in denial. They are all 'out'. Your post only reinforced what I said in my last one. Thanks for confirming what I already knew.
Given that there are actually very few independent and statured scientists batting on the denial side of the field, it is little wonder that the same rag-tag bunch of pseudos constantly crop up in media reports. The usual suspects. This is because the commerical elites propping many of these people up have trouble scraping the barrel in finding scientists with lengthy publication records who are actual experts in climate science. So whe generally end up with a motley crew of mostly mediocre scientists who have become celebrities due to their stance against AGW. Look at Soon. He has his own lengthy Wikipedia page and he has but 34 articles with 664 citations in his career and an h-factor of 14. The entry for ecologist David Tilman is shorter than Soon's, and yet he has 185 articles with 22,000 plus citations in hsi career and an h-factor of 81. Heck, my publication and citation record is miles ahead of Soon's, but the difference is is that he is a contrarian and I am not. Contrarians are feted by the media. Why? Because there are do damned few of them.
Your troble, Brent, as is the same with many of the dupes of the corporate propaganda machine, is that you just cannot understand what the fuss is about what you preceive as gradual, incipient chanmge on natural ecosystems. I agree with you that hare-coursing is a barbaric bloodsport, and I appreciate why this registers with many people (and rightfully so). But when it comes to climate, you stick your finger to the wind and say, 'so what?' Humans have only evolved to what we perceive as instantaneous threats or actions to our immediate welfare. As I have said before, this might be a bear at the mouth of a cave, a smilodon or a lion crossing our path ahead, a severe storm, etc. We have not evolved to be able to deal with wht we instinctively feel are gradual threats that are not actually registered as threats as all. This may be our undoing.
Essentially, it is not hard to take the public along for a ride, even if that ride is largely based on lies and propaganda. Many people are anxious to believe that we can have our cake and eat it. That we can continue along the same lines as we have for the past 50 years and that everything will be just fine. The truth is that this is an illusion. The planet cannot withstand another century of plundering of natural capital as occurred in the last one. It cannot withstand humanity continuing to tamper with complex adaptive systems and equally complex biogeochemical cycles. The consequences of business-as-usual will be dire. Against this background, we have those who frankly could not give a s*&# about what will happen 20 years down the road. Their priority is fiscal expediency now. As if these people were not bad enough, they are quite content to take much of humanity down the drain with them. And they will use whatever means they can to ensure the chances of this happening are high. It depresses me to see ordinary people like you clinging to the words of a few shills, and, behind the scenes, the powerful vested interests who are pulling the strings. But does it surprise me? Not at all. Selling denial is easy. But the longer term consequences of denial are likely to be profound.
Hasis (1030): Thanks for the expanded Monbiot quote.
I think it's fair to paraphrase it as "Since the science on AGW is settled, it is as mendacious - even as evil - to deny this historical fact as it is to deny that other one. Even worse, because we have the opportunity to take action on this unfolding tragedy. And all this jaw-jaw is getting us nowhere."
If the science were actually settled, he'd have a point, including the point about the Dave R school of hypocrisy.
Shorter Dave: "words speak louder than actions."
Guys. I know it's a bit 'below the belt' to ask about your personal responses to this apocalypse (as you see it). It's rather like saying to the kiddies: "Right, let's rig up a digital camera and trigger. When Santa comes calling we'll take a snap." You can imagine the kids saying, "Whoa, hang on there, Dad. We believe, sure we do, but that's taking it a bit too far."
All this over a lousy fraction of a degree on a thermometer. Future generations will laugh at our gullibility and cry at the extinctions on our watch. They will curse us for having chopped down orang utang habitat in order to plant biofuels.
Shorter Brent @ 1035:
_My opposition to mainstream science is based on nothing at all other than faith. Have some more ad hominem._
Brent:
So you were lying when you said the glacial recession was "usual". Thanks for letting us know.
Longer Brent @ 1035:
"Is there anything that would convince you of the reality of AGW?" -- __No.__
"Do you reject the IPCC report in its entirety? -- __Yes. *swims round bowl* No. *swims round bowl* Yes. etc...__
"If not, which portions do you accept" -- __All of it, when called on my claims.__
"and which do you reject," -- __All of it, the rest of the time.__
"and on what basis?" -- __Faith.__
"are you willing to put your foot solidly down and say "I contend X provides a better explanation because of Y and Z evidence"?" -- __No.__
SC (Salty Current) (1032): Thanks for a concise straight question.
Yes, given that we're talking about Global Warming, if what I consider to be an authoritative measure of temperature shows warming then I'll cease to be a sceptic. Specifically, if the annual average GISS temperature anomaly twice exceeds 0.75C in the next 20 years. If this happens in the next five, then so much the clearer.
As for the IPCC reports, well they're big documents and a vast amount of good work (not that I am in any position to judge most of it). So, in my homespun layman's way, I focus on the Hockey Stick, a picture which 'says a thousand words', namely that late 20th century temperatures are unprecedented. Now, I have reason to believe that there was a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age, along with a Roman Optimum, and that Mannâs hockey stick fails to represent them. If they did occur on a worldwide (not local) scale then the word âunprecedentedâ is false.
You suggested a reply along the lines of: "I contend X provides a better explanation because of Y and Z evidence"?
I contend that solar activity provides a better explanation because of evidence of sunspot/temperature correlation over the past several centuries and evidence that CO2 is a lag-indicator of temperature rather than a prime driver.
P.S., I have greater confidence in the satellite data from UAH and RSS than in the land-based record, not least because the GISS series is tainted by Hansen. He was a keynote speaker at the July 1988 Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources chaired by Sen. Wirth of Colorado. When Hansen spoke he was visibly perspiring. Wirth is quoted as saying in 2007, âwhat we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows inside the room⦠so that the air conditioning wasnât working ⦠so when the hearing occurred, there wasnât only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot.â
But even so, now that there is such scrutiny of the GISS dataset, Iâll go along with that as the key criterion.
>So whe generally end up with a motley crew of mostly mediocre scientists who have become celebrities due to their stance against AGW. Look at Soon. He has his own lengthy Wikipedia page and he has but 34 articles with 664 citations in his career and an h-factor of 14. The entry for ecologist David Tilman is shorter than Soon's, and yet he has 185 articles with 22,000 plus citations in hsi career and an h-factor of 81. Heck, my publication and citation record is miles ahead of Soon's, but the difference is is that he is a contrarian and I am not. Contrarians are feted by the media. Why? Because there are do damned few of them.
I enjoyed reading that, thanks Jeff :)
Brent, I am a recent graduate who has had full time employment for 9 months and lives in rented accommodation with 5 other blokes. This doesn't provide much opportunity to take the steps I want (first thing I'd do when I buy my own place is install solar water heaters). I'm under no illusions, my personal actions will make an infinitessimal difference... but they should save me money in the long run.
So due to my circumstances I'm restricted to just driving a small car and buying as little imported produce as possible. Does not doing more make me a hypocrite?
Apologies, that comment above is of course directed at Sunspot.
Stu (1040): No, of course your current inability to make a large cut in your carbon footprint doesn't make you a hypocrite. Your stated intention to do so when practicable marks you out as a man of honour, like Bernard J, and I salute you.
Brent,
Future generations will cry for a number of reasons; doing nothing to deal with AGW will be one of them.
Protecting wildlife habitat while altering climate and chemical cycles is a no-brainer. I am a population ecologist and I can tell you that the current warming - if it continues unabated - will drive as much of a nail through biodiversity as direct elimination of their habitat will. Besies, one will exacerbate the other. Humans have already fragmented manyb of the planet's natural ecosystems. Now we are expecting species to adapt by relocating into areas that may be clear of suitable habitat for them. This may have been less of a challenge for them 10,000 years ago, when humans were a minor planetary force. But now we are the most dominant biological force in the history of the planet. We are trying to take over most of primary production and freshwater flows. And we are now altering cycles of water, nitrogen, carbon and phosphrus that operate over huge scales. I have no idea, given the size of the human footprint, why so many people have trouble with the idea that we can influence climate. We can - and are.
You want 100% unequivocal proof for AGW and, equally importantly, for its effects. Sorry to disappoint you, but by the time we get that, if we ever do, we will be staring down the barrel of the gun which is seconds from firing. It will be well past the point of no return. Too late.
We are not talking abvout a fraction of a degree on a thermometer. We are talking about rates of change that are much more than that in different regions. Asymmetrical warming with higher latitudes experiencing changes that are probably unprecedented in millions of years. I am guessing that you would consider a mean surface temperature rise of 2 degrees C over the next 50-100 years as trivial. Given that some areas will warm much more than this, natural systems and the species that make them up would not experience them as trivial. The extremes would fall well outside of this range. A mean 2 C rise in the space of a century over the entire Earth is a change that is occurring in the blink of an evolutionary eye. You will be hard pressed to find any terrestrial or marine ecologists who would disagree. You might mention Willie Soon again - but he is not an ecologist (as his appalling articles on Polar bears, Baltimore orioles and other areas in ecology testifies). And, besides, it is highly likely that temperatures will go beyond a rise of 2 C and into the 3-5 C range over the coming century. This change would be a catastrophe for nature. Its a simple as that. I do not even want to think about the environmental consequences - they would be horrific.
So what you, as a layman, is saying, is that pretty much the entire community of ecologists - working in systems and evolutionary ecology - are wrong. In spite of the years we have spent in our fields, you imply that we cannot understand the systems we are working on, and that you and a few shills in other fields know better.
Again, if this is your view of the world, then I pity you. Obviously your views are driven by some inherent faith and not by science.
Shorter Brent @ 1039:
_if the annual average GISS temperature anomaly twice exceeds 0.75C in the next 20 years I'll move the goalposts again._
_As for the IPCC reports, well they're big documents and I have nothing at all with which to dispute them so I'll just wave my hands around._
_I contend that solar activity provides a better explanation although I am unable to produce anything at all to counter the [evidence](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) [already](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) [provided](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) on this thread which shows that solar activity is not the cause of the recent global warming._
Jeff Harvey (1043): You say âGiven that some areas will warm much more than thisâ¦â, the 'this' being +2C.
Well, itâs good to have a prophet among us.
You say: âObviously your views are driven by some inherent faith and not by science.â
Well, as I wrote to Salty Current, I prefer to see theories confirmed or refuted by observation. This is part of something called Scientific Method.
Or in your parlance, âOh Lord, gimme a SIGN!â
Jeff, itâs bloody cold here. Tell the truth now: have you got the heating on?
Shorter Brent @ 1045:
_I prefer to see theories confirmed or refuted by observation. Unless it's a theory that I don't like, then I don't want to know that it's been confirmed by observation, so I'm not going to watch the video at the top of this page or read the evidence to which I've been directed repeatedly._
Dave R: So you're telling me that because the theory has already been confirmed by observation in the last few years, there is no merit in further observation? Because, presumably, the GISS record will inevitably show the rises we discussed?
Another prophet.
Have you noticed that Truthmachine has gone quiet since I called him Marcel Kincaid? Well, at least he had the decency to be embarrassed. By the way, Dave, how's the Hummer?
Brent @ 1047:
>So you're telling me that [...] there is no merit in further observation?
I didn't say anything like that you liar.
>presumably, the GISS record will inevitably show the rises we discussed?
There is no reason at all to think that it won't unless CO2 emissions are reduced.
>Another prophet.
Science enables us to [make predictions](http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2011.html). To morons like you who reject science, that may well look like prophecy.
>Have you noticed that Truthmachine has gone quiet
No. It might come as a shock to you but we are not all waiting here 24 hours a day to respond to your idiocy.
Brent,
You claim to support the "scientific method" (sorry to rain on your parade, but I do not believe this for a second for the simple reason that you do not understand 'the scientific method' as it applies to systems). Your limited grasp of science means that you support 'the scientific method' in those instances where you can understand it (e.g. a few simple linear process) but you dismiss it where you cannot (e.g. complex systems and non-linear processes). You make vacuous non-empircal quips about 'fractions of a degree' without frankly having a clue about this means. I wonder why any of us here bother with you. It is like speaking to a brick wall.
To play the devil's advocate, why then are you opposed to hare coursing? There is little scientific evidence that it decimates the hare population, given its scale. Is not your position an emotive one? You see, you can identify individual instances where your 'concern troll' phenotype kicks into gear, but when it comes to human assaults across the biosphere that you are unable to perceive, you downplay or ignore them. We already know in The Netherlands that climate warming is seriously disrupting ecological netowrk webs. More specifically, uneven latitudinal warming is playing havoc with the breeding biology of univoltine birds such as the pied flycatcher. This is because the birds are leaving their overwintering grounds in Africa at the same time as they usually do in early spring, because temperature regimes in central Africa have been largely unaffected by warming (it is in higher latitudes that there is concern). The birds also use astronomical cues during migration and not temperature-related cues. As they migrate into northern Europe, they are experiencing temperatures that have risen signficantly over the past 30 years. Far faster than they can adapt, as it turns out. This is because of a complex interplay involving sexual selection and the peak of food abundance on their breeding grounds (e.g. caterpillars). The birds are being forced to adjust their egg laying dates earlier and earlier in response to warming because their caterpillar prey are emerging from winter diapause earlier and earlier due the the rpaid onset of warmer spring temperatures. You see, Brent, warming, as I said before, is not simply a matter of a 'few degrees'. In some areas, winters will be much wamrer, whereas in others summers may be warmer. Nighttime minimums may increase. All of these changes affect species life-cycles. Forty years ago, the male flycatchers would arrive on theior breeding grounds first followed several weeks later by the females. The males would engage in conflicts over nesting territories and securing mates, and the females would lay their first broods as soon as these processes were 'sorted out'. These broods would coincide with peak caterpillar baundance, meaning a well synchronized multitrophic interaction. Since the advent of warming, the entire cycles involving the birds, caterpillars an d food plants have been thrown out of sync. The females have been forced to mature eggs and to lay their broods earlier and earlier to time brood rearing with peak caterpillar abundance. They have been pushed to their physiological limits now and peak caterpillar abundance has become desynchronized with the production of offspring by the flycatchers: in other words, the caterpillars are already past their peak when the birds need them to feed their progeny. This is reducing per capita fitness per brood and unsurprisingly the species is declining over much of its range now.
Given that few ecologists are explicitly working in this area, this research is likely to represent the tip of an iceberg. Ecology is an immense field and that are not really that many of us, and we are examining a lot of different stuff. If humans are responsible for the current warming, and there is plenty of evidence that we are, then are you not concerned with scenarios like this being played out on a vast ecological canvas? You get irate over hare coursing but where is your indignation over species declines driven by phenological changes brought about by potential AGW? Or are you happy to believe that the warming may not be attributable to human actions therefore the loss of huge numbers of species and populations is perfectly acceptable so long as it is due indirectly to human actions and cannot be indisputably traced directly? Ecologist Daniel Janzen once correctly observed that the ultimate extinction is the extinction of species interactions. Lose one species of tree in the raniforest, and you lose tens or perhaps even hundreds of species that interacted closley with that tree species.
The evidence is that the temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming 50 to 100 years. You are saying, "let us wait until it happens and then worry about it". Sorry, pal, then its too late. You basically insult those who are trying to predict the consequences of the gloabl experiment that humans are conducting by calling them 'prophets' when the same people predicted as far back as the 1950s that if humans kept pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmopshere then this was likely to lead to a warming climate at some point. I suppose you'd dismiss scientists such as Keeling as 'prophets' when the truth is that their predictions are being borne out.
Is there anything that would convince you of the reality of AGW? If so, what, specifically?
Sigh. In Brent's first post here (as amended by his second post), he wrote
Now he writes
Your questions are of a sort that one would ask of people acting in good faith; it is pointless to ask them of bad faith moral criminal trolls like Brent and sunspot.
Have you noticed that Truthmachine has gone quiet since I called him Marcel Kincaid?
There's no post in which you did that, cretin. In #1001, you wrote,
Marcel, I know you would phrase it differently, but you're probably not the best person to suggest alternative texts.
I posted after that, in #1002 and #1004. You again mentioned Marcel in #1011. Here I am posting again, a mere 4.5 hours later.
Regardless of whether I am Marcel, you are stupid, dishonest, and vile, a genuinely evil person, as is sunspot. That is all I have to say to you anymore.
There is no reason at all to think that it won't unless CO2 emissions are reduced.
Dave R, by responding to Brent's future tense question you are playing his game, which is "I'm a reasonable sceptic who believes in the scientific method and bases his beliefs on evidence, so I will wait and see if the evidence comes in that demonstrates global warming". No matter how overwhelming the existing evidence, Brent will always fall back on that and pretend that he is the reasonable one and we're all "alarmists" who are accepting AGW on faith.
I suppose you'd dismiss scientists such as Keeling as 'prophets' when the truth is that their predictions are being borne out.
Of course he will. When it comes to AGW, Brent conveniently doesn't believe in or understand prediction -- that is, inference from evidence. This frog will wait and see if the water boils. Even then, he will seek other explanations for the bubbles, and will point out that boiling is a natural process and it has boiled before, and ask in all feigned sincerity if it is the rapidity or intensity of the boiling that has us so concerned this time.
Does not doing more make me a hypocrite?
Why even play the troll's ad hominem game, Stu? Even if you were the CEO of ExxonMobil, that wouldn't alter the reality of AGW. Actually, your recognition of its reality would be a good thing.
All this over a lousy fraction of a degree on a thermometer.
Brent is as evil as any Holocaust denier.
@sunspot
... wind ... wind ... wind ...
I said "read and comprehend", not quote mine. Here are some relevant bits you left out:
See, it's the thinning of the ice caused by warming that makes the winds so very destructive.
You wrote Maybe you should ask the locals why the sea ice is in the condition it is, things always seem to be omitted. ... and omit you did:
Such omission is intentional; it is evil.
Putting aside for the moment Brent's persistent employment of strawmen in an effort to realize an argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy, in the interest of comity, may I suggest the following compromise:
Brent, you evidently sincerely believe your rhetorical efforts are imbued with the apex of reason and wit, while those with whom you contest are thoroughly convinced you are totally witless.
I am willing to concede that we split the difference evenly down the middle.
@lb,
Why yes. In half, as it were.
An eminently sensible compromise, LB.
And so were all agreed that Brent and his Bishop-banging buddies are half-wits.
It may be a slight over-estimation, but in the interests of consensus, hurrah!
Btw, "Brent" - you're not that Delingpole moron in web-drag ... are you?
I'm confused, Brent. You acknowledge that you're "not in any position to judge" most of the IPCC report and even present yourself as a layman and not a scientific expert. You also claim that you "prefer to see theories confirmed or refuted by observation."
But then you put forth criteria for hypothetically accepting the reality of AGW and for believing in your sunspot notion without adducing any scientific support. The scientific method requires that those intervening in a scientific discussion have the knowledge/expertise to recognize relevant evidence and reject irrelevant evidence, to know how to analyze the relevant evidence, what it means in terms of systems and mechanisms, and which predictions can and can't be made from it. The "homespun layman" like yourself simply lacks such expertise. Now, a capable person can possibly learn how to understand what's being said by scientists in one or another field and potentially challenge it, but only on the basis of scientific evidence - as found in the peer-reviewed literature in the relevant fields - and not, of course, some arbitrary notions. So where in the peer-reviewed literature do you find the necessary support for your chosen criteria and "hypothesis" and justification for ignoring or dismissing all of the other and contradictory evidence? This is what I meant by "specifically." (Please note that you have to present the data as the scientists have, and if you challenge their analysis you should only do so on the basis of other peer-reviewed articles, showing how they're relevant; you can't give the data or the conclusions your own spin as you've admitted that you're unqualified to do so.) For you as a layman who admittedly doesn't understand a good deal of the science to proclaim that you're unconvinced or "skeptical" is scientifically meaningless. Repeating the statements of others from outside the peer-reviewed scientific literature is equally meaningless. Ignoring or rejecting a vast amount of evidence which you have no scientific basis to refute is plainly dishonest.
One other question: Do you follow the same procedure in other areas of science - evolution, say?
Brent returns to orbit the goldfish bowl, despite his claim to have left. Yet again. John called it first.
And in what would be an embarrassment for most people, he returns with exactly the same "test" for AGW that he showed mild signs of vaguely understanding was flawed, way back in the 100's. (And almost the entire remainder of his subsequent comments are goldfish orbits as well.)
Brent also says
...thus proving that he has as tenuous a grasp on reality and logic as sunspot. Or perhaps he is merely self-delusional. Or finds enjoyment in watching others insist on fallacies. (Other hypotheses may also fit the evidence.)
Brent, please describe how you have determined the extent of "our lack of action". Did you implore a deity to grant you this information? Did you tap your highly developed powers of ESP? Did you hack into our computers and think that they contained a complete audit of our relevant "actions" (or even that they were our ONLY computers)? Did you employ covert physical surveillance methods, private sector or government? Inquiring minds want to know.
Or did you once more assume the first conclusion that came to mind was the only possibility, i.e. in this case that no-one takes any "action" without reporting it to you?
No need to answer that, I guess. It's obvious to most of us.
Shorter Brent 1: existing assessments of the hypothesis don't exist.
Shorter Brent 2: apropos Shorter Brent 1, the hypothesis fails.
It's the metaphorical equivalent of the ostrich thinking that a threat not seen does not exist.
I participated early on in this thread, and then departed when the temperature rose too high. I just came back and bounced around this huge thread, reading parts in detail and skipping other parts. I must say, I am disturbed by one element of this discussion: the abuse heaped upon Brent. I am not defending Brent's position, but he does seem to have maintained a civil demeanor throughout (perhaps I missed a bad spot, though). I find the verbal abuse heaped upon Brent distasteful. If AGW theory is, for you, just a team that you belong to, and you want to spend your time saying "Rah! Rah! Sis boom bah!" for the Good Guys and saying nasty things about the bad guys, well, that's your right -- but having the right to do something doesn't make it right. If you want to be an asshole, that's your choice. But why would anybody want to be an asshole? You disagree with Brent -- I do too. So what? You're frustrated that he doesn't accept sound reasoning. So what? Do you seriously believe that rationalism always triumphs over irrationalism? A brief look at the world around you will quickly disabuse you of that idealistic belief.
There's been lots of moaning and groaning these days about the lack of civil discussion. Most people agree that this is a problem. Yet here we are, the side of rationalism and reason, treating Brent as if we were Neanderthals attacking an intruder into "our" territory. Is not "concern troll" a euphemism for "somebody who politely disagrees with me"? If so, and if we desire civil discussion, then why would anybody ever use that term?
Wouldn't this thread be boring if it consisted solely of people who embrace the IPCC reports? If the commentators here were of the same caliber as the correspondents at RealClimate, we could indeed have some very interesting discussions, but few of us are up to that high standard. So what do you want -- a nice homey place where we can all congratulate each other on our logical rectitude? Or a place where there's polite but serious disagreement, a place where our beliefs are tested against criticisms?
Yes, Brent is wrong, and he may well be playing a game, but he seems to me to be a true rara avis: a denialist who is fairly reasonable. He represents an endangered species -- do we really want to drive that species to extinction?
Have you ever spent time on a denialist blog? Try out some of them -- those people are truly vicious. If you deviate from the party line in any manner, they turn on you like piranhas, and they're most definitely NOT civil. Do we want to be like them?
I am disturbed by one element of this discussion: the abuse heaped upon Brent.
You're a pathetic tone troll.
I am not defending Brent's position, but he does seem to have maintained a civil demeanor throughout (perhaps I missed a bad spot, though).
And rather dim.
Do we want to be like them?
We're not like them, fool: we don't lie and fabricate, we aren't anti-science, we aren't actively endangering our planet.
Erasmussimo,
yes yo missed sme tings.
Brent has been polite. He has politely, and repeatedly, insinuated that climate scientists are committing fraud. He has politely, and repeatedly, cast aspersions on the motives of those who disagree with him. He has politely, and repeatedly, made pronouncements of certainty - on chaos, for example, and self-similarity, and the sources of our knowledge - and when shown to be wrong, has responded with nothing more than dismissal of those who showed it - and then circled back to the exact same false statements a couple hundred posts later.
And he has politely said here that he is open to learning and respects at least some of the people he is arguing with - wile simultaneously on other blogs crowing about his victories here, and spreading dismissive insults and lies about the people he is arguing with here.
I could go on, but this is enough. Others in this thread have said close to what you're saying here - and they have changed their mind when, after several hundred posts, it became clear that Brent is simpler a more polite version of the same denialist 'they;re committing fraud" gang of rioters with pitchforks.
@truth machine,
Erasmussimo is a good guy - he is simply one more person noticing Brent's polite facade.
I just posted an explanation of why that is a facade - it seems to be in moderation right now.
Yes, Brent is wrong, and he may well be playing a game, but he seems to me to be a true rara avis: a denialist who is fairly reasonable. He represents an endangered species -- do we really want to drive that species to extinction?
I skipped that part. Yes, the world would be far better off without Brent's sort of active evil. You are apparently incapable of grasping what he has done here, but those who have been here all along and observed and interacted with his array of tactics get it all too well.
Erasmussimo is a good guy
He is good in ways -- certainly on scientific substance -- but that post is very bad in many ways, and was not about scientific substance.
he is simply one more person noticing Brent's polite facade
No, it's not nearly that simple. He is looking shallowly at form and ignoring substance, and he pompously and wrongheadly lectured, with a strong ad hominem bent, likening people who tell the truth and make valid arguments to people who lie and make invalid arguments simply because they share an emotional aspect (as he shallowly evaluates it).
Calling people trolls is not simply about disagreeing with them -- that's an egregious lie, or a sort of denialism about the ethics of human behavior.
If you want to be an asshole, that's your choice. But why would anybody want to be an asshole?
Well, you seem to have your reasons; your kind of pompous lecturing is certainly being one. But pointing out the dishonesty and intentional manipulation of people like Brent and sunshine and displaying contempt for same is not.
sunshinesunspot
TM, I can vouch for Erasmussimo but I think he's absolutely wrong when he says "I am disturbed by one element of this discussion: the abuse heaped upon Brent."
Brent is not copping "abuse" (as little as it is) because of his position. He's been copping it because he's a troll who says one thing here, and then exact opposite elsewhere. He came into this thread under false pretences and lied to us about his motives.
Let me assure you that Brent is not "a denialist who is fairly reasonable". Reasonable people do not feel "fury at the obscene fra*d that is AGW." They do not compose songs that describe AGW as a "lie" and a "hoax".
Brent is only here because his arrogance leads him to think that he knows The Truth about AGW, and that if he fakes a reasonable persona to worm his way in here and asks a whole lot of "clever" questions our "rotten edifice" (his words) will come crumbling down. Then he intended to retire back to Watts, Climate Audit and Bishop Hill where he has an extensive history of extreme denialist comments to boast about his victory.
Alas, he failed to even make an indent here and he has left us for good thrice, only to return each time. He has even tried trolling in another thread under a different name (the comment in question was deleted quickly, but not before being noted by Jakerman and myself).
His arrogance and ego means he can never leave until he's extracted some kind of "win" from us, something he can tell his buddies about.
Having been completely shown up he is now resorting to attacking our lifestyles as hypocritical, because he knows how we all live. This is the last resort of a scoundrel.
Frankly, I think Brent's gotten it easy.
LB and Lee,
That would be the 'fair and balanced' resolution. I concur.
I can vouch for Erasmussimo
It doesn't work that way, and it isn't necessary. You can't vouch for his good sense or rationality or good behavior in re the substance of that post, which is the only thing I addressed. I'm well aware that he's sensible about the science, but that's not what he wrote about. What he did was attack people here who have been engaged in this exchange over the three weeks he's been absent from it -- in much the same way that he attacked when he left. If he favors a certain way to interact with Brent that's his business, but he's being an ass when he criticizes others on how they are doing so when it's clear that he has paid so little attention to Brent's behavior or is incapable of evaluating it.
P.S.
I really have to wonder what sort of response he expected from that sort of slam. I have seen this sort of thing so many times over my decades on the net, and the pompous tone lecturers seem genuinely taken aback when people don't respond with "Oh, sorry, we now see the error of our ways and will conform our behavior to your preferred mode."
Erasmussimo makes some valid points, his best point is consistent with my reckoning that we are wasting our time if we think Brent is responsive to the evidence and argument we present.
For the record Erasmussimo is off target on a few points:
>*Is not "concern troll" a euphemism for "somebody who politely disagrees with me"?*
Yes, "concern troll" Is not a euphemism for "somebody who politely disagrees with me.
A concern troll is [completely different](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/20/152515/151/294/571262).
I also agree with Lee that Erasmussimo called this wrong in others ways as well, namely Brent has not been polite. He has been [dishonest and dishonorable](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…). Perhaps these were the bits that Erasmussimo skimmed over.
Do you seriously believe that rationalism always triumphs over irrationalism? ... Yet here we are, the side of rationalism and reason, treating Brent as if we were Neanderthals attacking an intruder into "our" territory.
I'm struck by the contradiction. Here we are, being all so irrational (by pointing out various truths, both about the science and about behavior), and yet that implies that we think that rationalism always triumphs over irrationalism? Aside from the contradiction it's a bizarre and silly charge.
Next to sunspot's, Erasmussimo's post is the most irrational I've seen here since James's. (I see Brent's posts more devious than irrational, although many of his arguments are certainly irrational.)
What John said.
...an assertion for which there is almost no evidence, and against which there is plenty. One might be tempted to speculate that Brent's politeness on this point was a mask for an outright falsehood on this matter. (Whether he lies to himself or not - as well as to other readers - is an open question).
I'm not seeing it myself, perhaps because I pay little attention to the veneer of politeness he overlays on his unreasonableness - and more to the broad evidence of unreasonableness itself.
Your call for "civility" is fine when debating those who are reasonable - but it plays into the hands of those who use this tactic precisely to distract from the unreasonableness (and in many cases underlying nastiness) of their own positions. You can see this dynamic at work in the US mainstream media (e.g. "Anti-torture advocates are shrill" [subtext: therefore we don't have to pay attention to them]).
And yes, Erasmussimo, you missed some bad spots (for example).
his best point is consistent with my reckoning that we are wasting our time if we think Brent is responsive to the evidence and argument we present
Well, he is certainly right that rationality does not always triumph over irrationality -- duh -- but I don't think that he made your point or anything like it; to the contrary, he seems to argue that we risk extinguishing reasonable denialists if we aren't civil toward them -- or something; his argument is actually a bit hard to make out. (He seems to claim that we're too incompetent to have interesting discussions in the absence of trolls, for one thing.) He seems to confuse rationality and reason with being polite -- it seems to be based on a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent, along the lines that people who are irrational and unreasonable, like those at denialist blogs, are truly vicious, so if you're vicious -- or even just rude -- then you're irrational and unreasonable. He talks about "verbal abuse" and "saying nasty things about the bad guys" as that were all that has been done, with no context, no explanation, no reason. OTOH, he seems fine with calling people "assholes" based on his serious inattention to detail.
a place where our beliefs are tested against criticisms
I wonder if Erasmussimo will live by that, or if his beliefs are impervious to the criticisms they have received here. Of course, as he said, rationality does not always prevail against irrationality -- especially when human ego is involved.
You are apparently unaware that politeness implies truth.
...he has politely said here that he is open to learning...
It's amusing to go back to [#49](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), where James said "Erasmussino has me right, the rest wrong" and "I am open to being educated on that point". Yeah, right.
You are apparently unaware that politeness implies truth.
Oops, it was Lee who mentioned Brent's politeness -- and then pointed out his disingenuousness. I mistakenly thought that Erasmussimo had said it to imply that Brent is "reasonable". Mea culpa.
Wow, I'm surprised at the volume of reaction to my post. Truth Machine has a great many nasty things to say about my post; after reading his comments several times, I think it pointless to respond to anger with reason. However, I do wish to correct a misconception in one of Truth Machine's posts:
What he did was attack people here who have been engaged in this exchange over the three weeks he's been absent from it
This is a common mistake: interpreting an attack on ideas that one embraces as an attack on oneself. In the first paragraph I use second person plural only in the context of the subjunctive mood. It's a hypothetical, not a declarative. The distinction may seem minor to sloppy users of English, but that little word "if" really does change everything, even though it is just two letters. In later paragraphs, I use second person plural -- clearly, that's not an attack on an individual. I'm attacking an attitude, an approach, not any individual.
I am grateful to those who have pointed out Brent's behavior outside of this blog -- I was quite unaware of that, and the revelation casts Brent in an entirely new light. If Brent is indeed carrying on a charade, then verbal denunciation is appropriate.
Nevertheless, I'll make the futile suggestion that we concentrate our attention on ideas rather than people. Other than what you have read here, none of you know anything about my character, intelligence, or education -- and those topics are utterly irrelevant to anything that goes on here. Neither do any of us know anything about Brent other than his postings here and elsewhere. Besides, who cares whether Erasmussimo or Brent is a saintly philanthropist an orphan-raping litterbug? What matters are the ideas. If Brent tells a lie, don't bother calling him a liar, attack the lie itself. Keep your eye on the ball -- the lie, not the person. If Brent's post is illogical, don't call him stupid, call his arguments stupid. Metaphorically, your arguments are like gunshots; don't use a blunderbuss and splatter everything with random buckshot; use a rifle and send one bullet right through the forehead.
Truth Machine has a great many nasty things to say about my post
It's called "criticism", and it's valid.
after reading his comments several times, I think it pointless to respond to anger with reason.
A typical copout of the intellectually dishonest. My responses were reasoned, and the imputation of anger is simply ad hominem.
interpreting an attack on ideas that one embraces as an attack on oneself.
Sure, right, calling people assholes is an attack on ideas. Whatever. Have a nice dishonest life.
I wish I was open to learning these things.
;-)
Group hug!
Take a trip through my arguments on this thread and see how well they track your "eye on the ball" idea, at least at the start of interaction with anyone.
Because I agree that it's a fine principle you espouse...right up to the point where someone abuses your civility or leverages it against the interests of others - as Brent has so capably done here.
Which is all well and good, unless your enemy's strategy includes cluttering up the battlefield with dead bodies and forcing you to spend massive numbers of bullets.
Once you determine that a commenter is habitually dishonest, particularly in claims as to motive or being "open to learn", that they repeat the same debunked arguments despite having previously shown signs of vague understanding how they are wrong, and ultimately are working to damage the "commons" rather than build it - then "eye on the ball" allows them to continue that damage. At that point you need to shift tactics because you have a troll (or worse) who loves it when you insist on civility and focusing on the argument, not the pattern of behaviour.
use a rifle and send one bullet right through the forehead
This is an amusing fantasy metaphor (actually a category mistake) coming from someone who himself notes that rationality does not always triumph over irrationality. Why doesn't it? Because a) arguments don't have foreheads and b) valid arguments only sway people who are committed to intellectual honesty, to knowing what's true rather than defending their egos or interests.
call his arguments stupid
Ok, your argument is stupid. Did that convince you? No? Perhaps because "call his arguments stupid" is stupid -- it isn't any sort of argument at all. OTOH, pointing to the evidence that someone is a liar is valid, and if the evidence supports it, pointing out that someone is therefore a liar is valid ... and it has social and psychological consequences that simply refuting an argument does not.
Truth Machine, I wrote this:
If you want to be an asshole, that's your choice. But why would anybody want to be an asshole?
and you interpreted it as follows:
Sure, right, calling people assholes is an attack on ideas. Whatever. Have a nice dishonest life.
Do you see how you misread a subjunctive statement as a declarative one?
Lotharsson, you seem to view those who disagree with you as your enemies. If they are, why bother arguing with them -- just hunt them down and kill them. That's what you do with enemies, right?
You're never going to convince deniers of anything. Ten years from now, when the mountain of supporting evidence has reached Himalayan proportions, they'll still be denying. Twenty years from now, they'll grudgingly shut up, but they will still refuse to accept it. So there's no point in attempting to convince them. The reason to dispute them is for the benefit of the onlookers. You want to demonstrate to onlookers that you are reasonable and Brent is not. But when you run amok against Brent, you make yourself look like a Neanderthal. When you display anger, you convince onlookers that you don't have reason on your side and anger is your last resort.
Brent is providing a benefit to this blog: he provides the perfect straight man for you to demolish. He repeats discredited arguments and you get to discredit them again for the benefit of onlookers. Don't get mad, don't refer to your previous arguments, just copy and paste them into a new post.
If you really do have reason on your side (which you do), then it should be easy to take a supremely confident tone and treat Brent as a foil against which you can demonstrate the truth of your position.
Do you see how you misread a subjunctive statement as a declarative one?
I see that you're a BSer.
If you want to be an intellectually dishonest douchebag that's your choice. But why would anybody want to be intellectually dishonest douchebag?
Don't misread my subjunctive statement as being about anyone here, heh heh.
Lotharsson, you seem to view those who disagree with you as your enemies. If they are, why bother arguing with them -- just hunt them down and kill them. That's what you do with enemies, right?
People who took you for a rational person may be having second thoughts.
You're never going to convince deniers of anything.
Not even the reasonable ones?
But when you run amok against Brent, you make yourself look like a Neanderthal.
I suppose that's subjunctive. In which case it's ok, because no one here has "run amok" or made themselves look like a Neanderthal (except maybe sunspot).
When you display anger, you convince onlookers that you don't have reason on your side and anger is your last resort.
I dispute this claim, Can you provide scientific studies supporting it? Why do you believe all onlookers are so irrational? Or are you simply projecting your own illogical conclusions?
If you really do have reason on your side (which you do), then it should be easy to take a supremely confident tone and treat Brent as a foil against which you can demonstrate the truth of your position.
That's been done here, repeatedly. If you aren't a fatuous gasbag who hasn't paid much attention, then you already know that. (Note the subjunctive form, which immunizes me from any charge of being uncivil.)
twoofy looking back over your diatribe's the words "narcissistic wacko" describes you to perfection :)
Our Neandertal has arrived.
No, read it again. It was you that brought up the firearms metaphor, and I was merely continuing it. I used "bullets" as the same metaphor as you did - i.e. debunking of ideas, thus leading to "dead bodies" (of ideas). I applied "enemies" NOT to those who DISAGREE with me but to those who damage the ability of this commons to function. The distinction is crucial.a
(Yes, it's an awkward and potentially confusing delineation in the context of your metaphor, and I apologise for not spending time trying to make it cleaner - because I mistakenly thought it was clear enough.)
Precisely!
And the reason to call out trolls is for the benefit of the commons whose functioning allows onlookers to even reach the point where they might be benefited. Trolls want to shut the commons down, and being civil in the face of their tactics won't stop them achieving that.
And if they are achieving that, I'm not that concerned that "tone" will turn away onlookers - because very very few will remain at that stage anyway.
New metaphor! How exactly have I "run amok against Brent"?
No, he's not (note the present tense). That may have been the case for (maybe) the first couple of hundred comments or so - and feel free to audit how I responded to him back then...but it's decidedly not the case once the thread grows long enough that (even you) won't bother to read it (and fills up with rebunking of already-debunked arguments).
I'm not sure this applies to me on this thread. Do you have a quote that you interpret as me "displaying anger"? Or is it a generic charge without reference to a specific commenter?
Does the effect of this perceived anger vary depending on how much cool, calm and rational debunking has gone on prior to the perceived expression of anger? (I note that you have skipped reading large portions of this thread, so you may be arguing from a flawed data set.)
Put it another way. Are you seriously asserting that there exist a significant number of "non-denialist onlookers" who:
(a) wade through much cool, calm and rational debunking...
(b) yet remain unconvinced...
(c) until "perceived anger" shows up, at which point they...
(d) are convinced your arguments are bogus and maybe the trolls are right?
It seems to me the evidence does not support their existence - and the logic says that if they don't get it at (a) and (b) they aren't "onlookers", they are "denialists".
And if that's the case, your tone argument fails to accord with the facts.
I assert I've been there and done that.
How do you reckon it worked out?
I mistakenly thought it was clear enough.
You were not mistaken. There will always be someone so intellectually inept or dishonest that even the clearest points will be misconstrued.
I applied "enemies" NOT to those who DISAGREE with me but to those who damage the ability of this commons to function
Hunt them down and kill them!
It's remarkable that someone who talks about "acting like a Neanderthal" suggests that is the only response to enemies. Perhaps we should even torture them first to find out where their comrades are hiding.
your tone argument fails to accord with the facts
In essence he asserts that onlookers reason thus: you're wrong if you're angry -- or rather, if you display anger. It's pure ad hominem.
Stu @ 1040, good on ya mate, I do realise that many in here may be doing their bit on a personal level and thats great, however there is some smart cookies in here (& some dipshits) and with a combined effort might investigate ways to completely transform the form of energy supplied to consumers. There are many types of electrical and waterfuel energy sources that have been debunked by corrupt science paid by oil companies ect, a few also seem to have met their maker under suspicious circumstances, I feel that the answer to many of the worlds ailments might be hidden under the carpet. But everyone in here may be to blinkered, to lazy or to narrowminded to look, what could a budget the size of the Manhattan Project do ?
I think I'm in the wrong place, look at the idiots above trying to prove who's got the biggest d ck.
P.S.
A note to "sloppy users of English": one cannot "run amok against" someone. To "run amok" is to murder (or, in broader usage, rampage) indiscriminately. To refer to pointed contempt as running amok is dishonest demagoguery. (Not that I'm referring to any individual as having done this, mind you.)
There are many types of electrical and waterfuel energy sources that have been debunked by corrupt science paid by oil companies ect, a few also seem to have met their maker under suspicious circumstances
I'm sure you will be happy to provide numerous links documenting this.
I feel that the answer to many of the worlds ailments might be hidden under the carpet
Ah, [feelings](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyBcHUe4WeQ).
When you display anger, you convince onlookers that you don't have reason on your side and anger is your last resort.
This sort of argument is also used against "new" or "militant" atheists. [For instance](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/03/ayala_fires_a_shot_across_th…)
PZ Myers asks
If you offend religious believers or show contempt for trolls then it follows that you don't have reason on your side, apparently.
Erasmussimo,
I recently read Scandal & Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy by Marcus Daniel. You should check it out.
Can you really be asking such a question? On this blog? Seriously? So what? You can't appreciate the harm that denialists - paid and unpaid - are doing to generations of humans and other species?
The moaning and groaning? I agree.
No. And frankly, I'm surprised that in such a situation you're concerned about boredom.
A denialist who is fairly reasonable, when presented with the evidence, ceases to be a denialist.
Assuming we're talking about reasonable onlookers, that is a ludicrous statement.
Allow me to amend something:
A denialist who is fairly reasonable, and acting morally, when presented with the evidence, ceases to be a denialist.
It is immoral for a reasonable person to refuse to go where the evidence leads, and to base statements and actions on anything other than the most solid evidence available. The higher the stakes, the more immoral this is. See, for example,
Allen Wood. 2008. "The duty to believe according to the evidence." International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 63: 7â24.
Again, I am surprised at the volume of commentary my posts have triggered. Lotharsson, you raise an interesting point about the value of keeping the commons open. Yes, every board discussion is a small community and the community does have its own interests. How do we ascertain those interests? Brent has his own interests here, and so do you -- how can we objectively determine whose interests should take priority? Of course, the blog owner can establish any interests he pleases, but the owner of this blog seems content to let the community manage itself. Let's suppose that Brent's actual design is to irritate and infuriate those who embrace AGW -- how can you establish that his design is unworthy of acceptance here? You, I, and many others here may find his intentions unworthy, but who are we to declare that he is deserving of verbal abuse for harboring such intentions? Do we own the commons? Does Brent not own any portion of the commons? Remember, this is an intellectual forum, not a physical common ground; dissent provides a valuable counterweight to the majority. I'll concede that Brent's behavior goes beyond simple dissent, but who is to draw the line between honorable dissent and dishonorable pestering? We face this problem all the time with political speech. If the American Nazi Party wants to hold a march, we all find that nastily provocative, but we endorse their right to do so. Would you draw a line and declare that the American Nazi Party is so egregiously offensive that it falls outside the pale of legal protection? If so, you are setting up a slippery slope.
Interestingly, I would argue that Truth Machine is wreaking the most damage to the commons -- his flaming injects lots of anger and no rationalism into the discussions. Yet I see no need to flame back at him -- he discredits himself with his ranting.
And no, I did not intend to apply "when you display anger" directly to you or any other person -- I was declaring a general principle (although I concede that some sloppiness in my phrasing encouraged this impression on your part). You suggest in #1095 that verbal abuse is justified when calm rationalism has failed to convince those you disagree with. But my claim is that you will never convince such people. It's the onlookers that you're aiming at, not Brent. And that logic applies to message #1000 as surely as it does to message #100.
I am asking you to set aside your feelings and be coldly rational about this. Yes, Brent frustrates you. Yes, you have explained and answered over and over, and he just keeps repeating the same falsehoods over and over. You see his behavior as a frustrating refusal to accept reason. I see it as a golden opportunity to directly refute those falsehoods. Every time Brent makes a false claim, he hands you an opportunity to show the onlookers just how wrong he is.
If Brent weren't here, what would onlookers see? A bunch of like-minded people all slapping each other on the back, telling each other how smart they are and how stupid those other people are. What onlooker would learn anything from that? In the ideal situation, a denialist would run through each of the myriad false claims denialists harbor, and somebody here would take the role of teacher, calmly explaining why the claim is false. The onlookers would see the denialist position taken apart piece by piece.
Salty Current, you seem to be arguing that, because denialism is wreaking political harm, we must needs heap verbal abuse upon denialists. My claim is that, because denialism is wreaking political harm, we must be especially rational in dealing with it. Great challenges demand cool heads. When I wrote "So what?", I was not referring to denialism, but to the frustration over Brent being unreasonable. That argument is another expression of my pleading for cool heads over hot words.
Although I do confess that, in light of the revelations of Brent's behavior in other blogs, I must retract my claims regarding his status as an endangered species.
I'm going to start with this, which is what you should have done. These aren't revelations to anyone who has been following this thread. That you fail to appreciate that comments to Brent have been in the specific context of Brent's own behavior is no one's fault but your own, and it was irresponsible for you to show up chastising people in a situation in which you were clearly uninformed. That you then seek to move the discussion to "general principles" is rather silly; if you don't first admit that you were wrong about this case, you can't legitimately use it as an example of anything.
I would say that this community has a very strong interest in honesty and respect for a reasoned evaluation of evidence. I would also say that this community has a moral commitment to seeking to prevent harm to humans and the other species of the planet. Would you not agree that repeated violations of these principles is something to be challenged in strong terms?
Can you be serious? Let's say Brent's intentionally trolling, he should not be treated like a troll?
Oh, knock it off with this "verbal abuse" nonsense.
In a scientific/evidentiary context, what does this even mean?
What do you mean by "dissent"?
Are you joking? I haven't seen anyone so much as call for Brent to be banned from this blog, never mind denying him the right to speak or associate. Please try to get a grip on reality, and understand calling someone out for illogic, willful stupidity, and immorality on a blog for what it is.
This is neither interesting nor accurate. (And by the way, the commons under discussion on this blog is a physical space, which denialists continue to destroy, and we forget that at our peril.)
You haven't been reading.
And there is no such "general principle."
You should try that. Neither you nor bridge-builder-to-nowhere Chris Mooney nor anyone else has presented evidence for these vague claims about effects on reasonable "onlookers." As an expert on social movements, I'll tell you that you're quite simply wrong about this, whatever your personal distaste for plain or strong language.
That is what has been done, over and over and over. So stop saying that. You obviously haven't read the past several hundred posts. It's also an opportunity to point out the immorality of the denialists and the harm they cause, though you don't seem to care about that. These are not mutually exclusive.
Is this really how you see things? Wow. I'm amazed at your lack of appreciation for substantive content.
In the ideal situation, there would be an appreciation of evidence and the methods of science. In the ideal situation denialists wouldn't exist. In the ideal situation Trucast and shills wouldn't be involved. In the ideal situation, corporations wouldn't have such a powerful influence on people that they could be led to deny the evidence in front of them and drive us all over the edge.
Look, that's what's been done - by numerous people, in a variety of tones - over hundreds of posts. Read the thread.
I'm saying it's perfectly legitimate to call them out on what they're doing and how unreasonable and/or immoral it is and to point to its real effects. It's reasonable and legitimate to tell Nazis or anyone else who you think is actively causing harm what you think of them and their actions. Not only is it legitimate, it is often necessary.
Your "pleading for cool heads over hot words" doesn't even make sense, even if it were applicable here, which it is not. Cool heads can produce hot words, and there are times when hot words are fully warranted and, again, necessary and influential. Why don't you try reading some of the writings of some of the most famous political leaders and activists? See if you find any anger or rough language. Again, you have shown no evidence of any invariable negative effect of "hot words" of the sort used here in terms of influence of "onlookers" generally, nor can you. All you've expressed is a personal distaste for strong language. Perhaps the internet isn't the place for you.
Well, Salty Current, your response is loaded with (and extols) anger. On this I suspect we will never agree, so there's no point in my continuing this discussion. I have made my points and you have made yours and I see no reason to butt heads with your or Truth Machine.
. All you've expressed is a personal distaste for strong language. Perhaps the internet isn't the place for you.
No, this topic isn't the place for me. It has become a verbal conflagration, with lots of verbal sturm and drang and no beneficial results. You seem to think that all discussion on the Internet takes this tone; if, so, I remind you that the Internet is a much bigger place than that. It's true that there is a Gresham's Law for Internet discussions, but that only makes places of civil discussion that much more valuable.
Best wishes to all. Perhaps we'll meet in one of the other topics.
OH NOEZ! Even if that's true, it's a very focused anger that I think justified.
Fine by me. Please stop making claims about effects on alleged onlookers that you can't support.
Says you. I've found it an informative thread. And for the record, I was asking Brent substantive questions and seeking real responses at the time you popped in with your ill-informed handwringing about politeness.
Wrong.
Not so, so I don't need any condescending reminders.
You have a notion of civility that I find silly, contrary to basic democratic and scientific principles, and harmful.
Again, I am surprised at the volume of commentary my posts have triggered.
As I wrote above,
Also,
The answer is clear.
Hello, gentlemen,
There's a bit of a backlog here, so apologies for a few fleeting comments. I have many practical things to do in the real world.
Jeff Harvey (1043): Thank you for taking so much of your time to explain you reasons for your view that AGW is confirmed. Your words such as âIt will be well past the point of no returnâ are chilling: if sceptics such as me are wrong, then our fossil-fuel burning is indeed buggering up the climate, and drastic reductions are indeed required. If the AGW hypothesis is confirmed, I for one will be yelling, âsod the windmills: nuclear now!â. Not (I hasten to add) because Iâm a big fan of plutonium poisoning, but rather that windmills are as useful a contribution to todayâs civilization as dry-stone-walling.
The knock-on effect of Global Warming you describe is also deeply troubling. If youâre right that â in my words â âa few lousy tenths of a degreeâ are disrupting so badly the pied flycatcherâs hierarchy (this being but one system among a vast number) then you guys are raising the alarm, not being alarmist. Jeff, Iâm not being disingenuous in this question: âWhat is so different about the recent warming compared to previous warming periods such as 1695-1736?â See:
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/JonesMann2004.html
Marcel Kincaid (1050): You compare my suggestion that the UAH MSU figure remaining below the 0.75C peak would be a reasonable white flag for the warmists, and a later suggestion that if the annual GISS twice exceeds that same figure then this sceptic (me) will wave a white flag. And you see some flaw in that logic, or an inconsistency between the two criteria?
Marcel, if it gets consistently warmer then you win, OK? If it doesnât then, oh, I donât know what youâll do. You are so fractious that you fall out with everybody.
As for your statement: âRegardless of whether I am Marcel, you are stupid, dishonest, and vile, a genuinely evil person, as is sunspot,â well Iâll take that as a yes, then.
Luminous Beauty (1056): The mean of âwitâ and âwitlessâ: nice one. I enjoyed that.
Chek (1058): No, Iâm not James Delingpole. Very few of us here dare give their real names, but I am one of them. Chek. (Hurrgh, hurrgh, I nearly made a witty board game reference to your psyuedo â suedo â psue â dammit the false name you skulk under.)
Salty Current (SC) (1059): You raised many points, starting with my admission that I donât have the expertise to assess the entire IPCC oeuvre. This implies that only experts are entitled to a view, or that an examination of its main claims is cannot be conducted without imbibing the whole.
Sorry, I donât agree. Many examples spring to mind, but if some âexpertâ makes claims with a major effect on our lives and our governance then itâs legitimate to check the claimed outcome's outcome. How many full-wits are using the Stefan-Bolzmann Law to predict temperatures. Weâll see how accurate they are. Using the same law to predict the horse racing would be an error of application, saying nothing about the veracity of the S-B Law, and saying plenty about those who learned it and then misused it.
You asked if I followed the same procedure in other areas of science, say on evolution. Again, a pertinent question, SC. Iâm Darwinist. But if a Dawkins or a Jones or a Gould pronounced, âmenâs height has been increasing over recent centuries and will reach a mean of 2010mm by 2100â, I would ridicule them and refuse to be browbeaten by âhuh, weâre experts, little manâ arguments. The likes of Dawkins does NOT use his knowledge of mitochondrial DNA to claim supernatural foresight.
There is so much stunningly wrong with Erasmussimo's post and I don't want to waste my time on addressing it, especially given his blithe ad hominem dismissals of criticism from those he deems "angry", but this one has me nearly falling out of my chair:
Brent has his own interests here, and so do you -- how can we objectively determine whose interests should take priority?
I can see him as a hostage at Kreditbanken, debating whose interests take priority "objectively", the hostages or the robbers. How can we establish that the robbers' design is unworthy of acceptance? Who are we to declare that they deserve to be called thugs for being thugs? And surely life would be so boring without them.
If the AGW hypothesis is confirmed, I for one will be yelling
No, you won't, because it has and you aren't.
you see some flaw in that logic, or an inconsistency between the two criteria?
The point was the consistency over three weeks despite numerous explanations of why your criterion is wrongheaded. See "Goldfish Troll".
if it gets consistently warmer then you win, OK?
It's not a win, sicko.
Lotharsson (1061): Actions v words. No, I donât have secret intelligence on your carbon footprint.
When I ask the assembled brethren about their kWh, their air miles, their mpgâ¦. there is a deafening silence with two honourable exceptions.
A reasonable reply, Lothie, would be if you said, âLook, my personal contribution could only be infinitesimal. Much as I hate it, I am as addicted to energy as the next man; to live without energy is to exit society. Anyway, itâs unfair to imply that only a hermit has a right to believe in AGW. By the way, I drive a Range Rover, refuse to board an aircraft, and have state-of-the-art insulation. Thereâs a slight whiff of hypocrisy in my position, I admit, but life must go on.â
The cringeing squirming silence here suggests lack of true belief. Rather like the French students in May 1968, doing street battle with the cops, de Gaulle flies to Germany to check that the armyâs behind him, petrol bombs, general strike, brink of revolutionâ¦â¦ and then it all stopped because the summer holidays arrived!
None of which affects the veracity or not of AGW, but it helps to know who one is talking to.
How tired am I of this? Quite.
I had previously asked you which parts specifically you objected to. Can you cite the specific claims? I also asked if you could cite the portions you do accept, and explain why. You said it contains much that is good, so I'd like to know what, specifically, you're talking about. Could you provide something like "Portions A, B, and C are beyond me. I accept portions D and E, based on ____, and reject portions F, G, and H, based on _____"? Why is that so difficult?
Of course only experts (those publishing in the peer-reviewed literature in a field) are entitled to render judgment on the validity of scientific conclusions in the literature and be taken seriously. If you want to challenge the validity of scientific findings, you need to do so by citing or producing other scientific literature. Claims concerning the existing science by unqualified laypeople that do not (honestly) base themselves on the science - in the peer-reviewed literature - are indeed, in that state, worthless. This excludes no one; science is undemocratic with regard to arguments, not people. If you understand the subject at a high level and have a challenge to the existing science, by all means write it up and submit it for publication.
No. I have no idea what you mean by "an examination of" its main claims. Again, I asked you to specify which claims you were challenging and on what scientific basis.
Quite a telling sentence, Brent. First, that you put "expert" in quotation marks. Which scientists involved with the IPCC report are you suggesting are not experts in their fields? Second, you have this completely backwards. All scientific claims are subject (and subjected) to intense scientific scrutiny. Potential effects on our lives and governance, how uncomfortable it makes us, corporate losses, etc., are completely irrelevant. I have no idea what you mean by "check the claimed outcome's outcome." If you're suggesting that laypeople can legitimately devise their own criteria for determining scientific validity, you're totally wrong. It's not legitimate for creationists to demand to see a crockoduck or a cat giving birth to a dog, now, is it? Why do you think this legitimate in another context?
You're very confused. This isn't about an individual, whatever that individual's status, making pronouncements. It is about the peer-reviewed literature. Any scientific claims made outside of it that are not based on it are not even worthy of challenge. Those that are published within it - and again, this is true of all findings, analyses, and predictions, regardless of their political implications or appearance of outlandishness to the layperson - are (taking into account, of course, how speculative or tentative the claims are being presented as).
Give examples of scientists in these areas claiming supernatural foresight - doing anything other than making predictions based on existing data and knowledge of the processes involved and showing their work. Who are you talking about? Is it "supernatural foresight" that scientists can predict with great accuracy the timing of eclipses millenia in advance? You need to take into account how the collaborative effort that is science works.
The cringeing squirming silence here suggests lack of true belief.
Ah, yes, cringing and squirming ... just as you declared at another blog that we were nodding our heads ... what remarkable powers of observation you have. Your powers of inference, OTOH, are not so good.
it helps to know who one is talking to
Yes, yes it does.
Previously addressed. The interests of maintaining the functioning commons - and not only for the benefit of "onlookers" - take priority over those who would seriously degrade it.
And I note that YOU are also arguing your own version of interests here - in particular what tone of discourse should be considered acceptable or not - so your whole paragraph comes across with a strong whiff of hypocrisy.
For all your earlier condescension about the finer technical points of grammar, your own level of non-comprehension when it suits you is fascinating. As I already wrote, it's not particularly his perceived intention to irritate and infuriate that I'm objecting to, nor is it his "dissent". Remember "functioning of the commons" and all that?
Oh, and PLEASE quote examples of "verbal abuse" that you object to, or characterise them. Your argument is couched in generalities, and subsequent comments have revealed that I may not understand them the same way you do.
Oh, please! Spend a moment to consider why this slippery slope argument is a terribly poor analogy for what's going on in this thread.
I find that breathtaking. You're objecting when people correctly call Brent out for goldfish trolling in language that you find inappropriately emotional or abusive, but when truth machine does it that's just fine? I'm not sure your grand unified principle of blog discursive ethics quite holds together yet.
No. Read it again. 1095 suggests that your argument relies on assertions for which there is no supporting evidence, NOT that I argue the converse.
And I believe you are also conflating "verbal abuse" with "perceived anger", which is a wider problem with your argument, and which is precisely why I asked you to provide examples from my comments, which you declined. If you're going to make this argument you really need to define what constitutes unacceptable "verbal abuse" in your view and what does not. And then ponder that tone is notoriously difficult to interpret on the Internet. FWIW, I very rarely comment in anger. I don't recall doing so on this thread - not to Brent, not to you.
Interesting assertion, entirely unsupported by evidence or logic. If this unsupported assertion is a response to my (a)-(d) question in #1095, then I see little point discussing this issue.
You, like Brent, are displaying goldfish behaviour. This is exactly the same argument you made before, and which I objected to on specific evidentiary and logical grounds. See: difference between dissent and degrading the commons.
You're objecting when people correctly call Brent out for goldfish trolling in language that you find inappropriately emotional or abusive, but when truth machine does it that's just fine?
It is amusing what knots people tie themselves into when they indulge in fallacious sophistry like "he discredits himself with his ranting". If anyone has poisoned his own well, it is Erasmussimo with his stream of illogic. My saying that Brent is an idiot, a git, a moron, etc. might be abusive, it might offend Erasmussimo's sensibilities, but at least it isn't dripping with fallacy and hypocrisy.
hahaha, you lot are the hopelessly stoopid TROLLS !! self incriminated !!!
'In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response[1] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion' http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4an
hahaha, divide and conquer inflicted on themselves by themselves - MORONIC TROLLS, the brain dead cretins have no intention of looking for solutions, that in itself proves the underlying fact that they don't fear aGW
sunspot,
The title of this thread is "The empirical evidence for man-made global warming". Having failed to establish any meaningful contradictory evidence disputing that thesis, or indeed, present any indication you have actually watched the video presenting the substance of that thesis, you have moronically sought to re-invent yourself as a concern troll under the presumption that any who haven't donned a hair shirt and don't dine exclusively on leaves and twigs are hypocrites. Next, you doubtless will be insisting that we all must denounce Al Gore for being fat.
Brent may be a half-wit, but he outshines you by a factor of infinity.
LB,
"The empirical evidence for man-made global warming" I don't deny this, I'm not convinced that aGW is the only or predominant cause of GW would more accurate, I am concerned though, and I wouldn't be here if I were not. I have stated before that the aGW pedestal is a good platform to solve many environmental concerns from. I'm sorry that I don't have your narrow-mindedness and small view of the larger picture.
'Next, you doubtless will be insisting that we all must denounce Al Gore for being fat'
Mr Gore has done a fine job of discrediting himself, I need not drive the stake further !
>I'm not convinced that aGW is the only or predominant cause of GW would more accurate...
Yet you cannot forward any other cause that explains the bulk of 20th century warming nor rationally dispute the very robust evidence that anthropogenic causes do explain it very well indeed. It isn't anyone's charge to convince you of matters you are incapable of understanding. Why shouldn't one conclude what you ascribe to Gore is not similarly an empty and meaningless opinion based on ignorance and unreason?
LB, I don't care about convincing you of my position, it doesn't matter and it's my freedom not to follow the flock, being lambasted will not change me nor anybody else. You may have noticed how brittle some of the ego's are in here, it tells me allot about their self-absorbed natures and unwillingness to get on with solution's to aGW, in other words they cannot change their focus of being right to something of progress. You imply that I would not be happy unless everyone converted to a Cro-magnon lifestyle ??? weird how you get that out of my suggesting that the minds in here combine to analyse ways to combat your aGW ??? Do you also find that the arduous task of dealing with non 100% percent believers of aGW is just too much for you to entertain the thought of starting a positive approach to combating aGW ??
Subspot (sic), would mind rephrasing the above in English?
John have you ever had the pleasure to watch a rabbit plague go from feast to famine ? Well thats what Jeff Harvey is basically talking about in human form, to the detriment of all species
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4ba
For some demented reason most in here are only focused on being right, got their heads stuck in a corner and not willing or competent enough to nut out any other possibilities to carbon based energy. Lemmmmmings !
So you admit that that your sweeping generalisation was unfounded. Progress of a kind! But wait, there's more...
Ah well, reports of progress were premature and inaccurate :-(
Funny, I haven't noticed that, because the evidence here (written comments) can equally well support hypotheses that don't refer to "brittle egos" or a focus on a "need to be right", just as it can equally well support hypotheses that don't refer to "unwillingness to get on with solutions to AGW" and the like.
You appear once more to be jumping to conclusions that suit you and then assuming they must be true because you can't or won't think of any alternatives.
Lthrssn = rmblngs f vcs mnd, yr dmb grlfrnd twf wll b n sn cntn yr mndlss nggmnt wth hr. [DNFTT - Tim]
sunspot, you're coming out with primary school taunts with a sprinkling of high school vocabulary now? Wow, that'll really convince people! ;-)
Sunspot (1123) wrote about âa rabbit plague go[ing] from feast to famineâ.
Can we all agree that in vast, complex, chaotic Nature such variations just happen?
In Britain we hear reports of seal populations on a certain island âplummetingâ. And when they go back up there are no reports of âa sudden plague of sealsâ. And, of course, we hear that âscientists say that global warming may be a factorâ (yawn).
The reason I raised the subject of chaos theory was to point out that it can be a wild goose chase to try to explain every variation. Yes, people wrote back and said âwithin a limited envelope, of course there is variation (or âtrajectoryâ) but the envelope has well-defined boundaries." I then questioned whether the boundary conditions of climate are as meaningful as, say, the boundaries to the trajectory of an artillery shell, and donât think I got a good reply.
(Digression: on the theme of politeness, questions such as this are better dealt with by helpful answers than abuse. And when in response to a helpful answer is a further question, well, just patiently continue rather than ranting that the denialisti will ask further questions âtil the cows come home.)
Canât we just say about natural variation that, well, it just varies? And that there is no direct external explanation for a rabbit plague. We shouldnât ask, âwho is responsible for this?â. Extending that idea to a global scale, could it be that mankind now believes itself so powerful that it holds itself accountable for events beyond its influence? Not so long ago, Neptune sent tsunamis. Not so long ago a comet was a warning from God. Have we, in our deep collective psyche, replaced divine agency by our own? This is âhubrisâ.
Weâre talking about a few lousy tenths of a degree. Hummer-Dave (456) advanced a series of learned papers which said, âWe canât explain this variation by solar activityâ. What if âthat-which-is-to-be-explainedâ requires no such explanation other than ânatural variationâ? Put another way, might these few lousy tenths of a degree be a trajectory within the boundaries familiar over millennia?
Chris OâNeill keeps banging on about the Aletsch Glacier which is approaching its historical minimum, and (another prophet) says that although itâs still short of the record, âitâs going toâ. Things vary. Get over it.
Now, Sunspot keeps asking about collective action. What do the unsceptics propose? In #789 I mentioned a Royal Academy of Engineering proposal for meeting the UKâs 80% GHG reduction target. Nobody in the Peopleâs Front of Judea responded. (This is a reference to people whose words speak louder than their actions. I wouldnât dream of calling the unsceptic brethren something as rude as "shit head shinny arse's in here [ ] most of [whom] wouldn't know what the sun felt like on their vitamin D deficient, lilly white, blubbery carcassesâ.) (Sunspot, did you mean to write skinny arses?)
Gentlemen, if you are right, then what do you suggest that our governments do? (Dave R, first sell the Hummer and then give us the benefit of your wisdom. No, correction, selling it wonât do! Dismantle it!)
Questions about specific challenges to the IPCC and support in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, though, are best dealt with by ignoring them, it appears.
*taps on bowl, holding up #1113*
Not exactly, because ultimately everything has a set of causes. The primary issue is that real-world attribution cannot always resolve them, and a secondary issue is that causes may not partition into categories as neatly as humans tend to want them to, but that doesn't mean the causes don't exist.
However most might agree with your statement on the understanding that it is a shorthand for "in the real world these things can't be easily attributed to a small set of clear causes". But even that limited agreement would depend on not falling into the fallacy that concludes that every such event "just happens", and nothing humans do has any influence on it.
Oh, wait, you're already at that point:
No. The reasons are left as a simple exercise for the reader - noting that readers of the key parts of the AR4 will have a distinct advantage over most people here.
No. "Hubris" is illustrated by your unsupported assertions and "logic" that do not concord with the known facts, not by those reporting the scientific case.
Are you by any chance a more-or-less fundamentalist religious follower? Many people who hold those views make the arguments you just made, and in fairly similar ways.
Or, given that you are prone to use religious terms (such as "prophet") to imply that AGW is some sort of faith-based belief ungrounded in reality or science, are you "skeptical" of religion and deities in general - in which case your deity-based argument would appear entirely disingenuous and cynical?
Either way, feel free to argue the scientific evidence for a divine influence on climate. That should prove entertaining :-)
Nope. Not even if you use the word "lousy" to try and minimise them. Or "few tenths" to ignore the warming in the pipeline.
Try reading the IPCC report again - "attribution" is a key study area. Or some of the links that you were referred to way back up the thread. [Aside: the goldfish is strong in this one.]
We are pretty damn sure humans are affecting climate. There have been no serious arguments to the contrary for quite some time now.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." (Yes, that is also a reference, and the subject of that quote seems entirely appropriate here.)
"Unskeptic" denotes someone that claims to be skeptical but isn't, because they don't understand the scientific case they are skeptical of and can't explain plausible and solid reasons for disbelieving it.
Feel free to direct the question to a different group, but speaking for myself I have no desire to discuss what to do about AGW with someone who thinks the science is built on lies and deception - it's just a distraction tactic. (That may be why no-one commented on your earlier comments on this topic.)
Come back and discuss it if your premise changes.
...it could be noted by Erasmussimo that Brent wasn't particularly polite towards the end of that comment, and that he was impolite in a disingenuous fashion (once more):
Maybe this can put to rest the tone concerns based on the fallacy that Brent is "polite"?
Colour me surprised.
Brent @ 1128:
>Dave (456) advanced a series of learned papers which said, âWe canât explain this variation by solar activityâ.
They said solar activity can't explain the __long term trend__, not the variability.
>What if âthat-which-is-to-be-explainedâ requires no such explanation other than ânatural variationâ?
"Natural variation" [cannot cause what we've seen in recent decades](http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/taint-likely/).
Besides which, you'd then have to explain why the CO2 released into the atmosphere had not had the effect that it should have had, based on the long established physics of the greenhouse effect, when observations show that it is having that effect, as explained in the video at the top of this page. Give us your best explanation for this in your next comment, or concede the point.
>unsceptics
[Back around the goldfish bowl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
Brent:
Stop changing the goalposts and stop lying.
Dave R (1132): The link you provided is to the OpenMinds website. Blokey there writes: "covering the interval 1880 through 2006". Yeek! Yes, it has warmed in this 126-year period.
And if we look at the previous 126-year period, it cooled. By the same amount. Yeek! 252 years ago it was as warm in Central England as it is today.
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/HadCET_an.html
There's no such thing as global warming. Keep the Hummer.
Tiny variations in that useful trace-gas, CO2, are no big deal. It's business as usual.
Dave, a bit of global warming would be pretty welcome in these parts. Last summer was lousy, and I've STILL got the heating on. Easter in long-johns? It CAN'T be right! Cancel last message about the Hummer. Please drive it around more. If CO2's as good as you say, a few more PPM might help bring back the glorious summers of yesteryear.
I wondered how folks are doing in the US. A quick check on CNN: "Months Third Blizzard Pounds Northeast", "Shovelling Snow? How to Protect Your Back (and Heart)", "Rare Snow Bears Down on Deep South". Holy mackerel! THAT's where the polar bears got to!"
And look at all these cold-related deaths across the NH:
http://pressexposure.com/Extended_Cold_Weather_Conditions-115076.html
Just found this on CNN: a 2009 poll of 3146 scientists:
"Two questions were key: Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures?
About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second."
"Petroleum geologists and meteorologists were among the biggest doubters, with only 47 percent and 64 percent, respectively, believing in human involvement."
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurve…
Science is settled, eh? Pull the other one. And this survey was before Climategate.
Wow.
Dave R(1133): You deserve an explanation of the term "unsceptic". Here is what Jo Nova wrote when she devised the word:
"Once upon a time, a scientist and a skeptic used to be one and the same thing. Actually, it still is. The motto of The Royal Society â the longest lived scientific association in the world, is Nullius in Verba â âOn no oneâs wordâ (take no oneâs word for it). The Climate Industry marketing has tried to turn âskepticâ into a dirty word. So in perfect symmetry, if we are Skeptical Scientists, they are obviously: 'unskeptics'."
You have the right to accept the AGW hypothesis without tapping its wheels. I respect those with faith. But I would define it as "holding a position regardless of contrary evidence". That's fine for you, but I'm afraid I can't join in.
Brent @ 1138:
>I would define it as "holding a position regardless of contrary evidence".
You've been told many times to provide contrary evidence if you have any. You have provided none.
DNFTT
Trolls come with their own virtually infinite supply of sustenance.
questions such as this are better dealt with by helpful answers than abuse
Better how?
And when in response to a helpful answer is a further question, well, just patiently continue
To what end?
the denialisti will ask further questions âtil the cows come home
a) It's demonstrably true. b) They aren't "further", they are just repetitions. c) All questions from trolls are rhetorical.
Brent @ 1136:
Those kid of polls miss asking two critical questions, almost always.
1: "Is that your personal opinion or your scientific opinion?"
2: "If it is your scientific opinion, what is the evidential basis for that opinion? Would you stake your reputation on it?"
The fact that there are a lot of rock-knockers who don;t work in climate science, who know perhaps one or two relevant things about climate science, and who dismiss the consensus of literally all but a small handful of the people who DO work in climate science and who stake their reputation on their work, does not tell us anything about the consensus among those who are informed. And it certainly does not overturn all of the physical and bservatinal basis for AGW theory.
Scientists for the most part are notoriously poor when they make excursions into fields not their own.
Well Brent, those Hadley records certainly blow that whole AGW scam out of the water, don't they!
Except they don't, what with one local dataset not being global, an'all. And it's global warming that is the concern here.
But your devout willingness to regurgitate the predigested and spoonfed partial information carefully directed the way of those just like you by your preferred brand of corporate handler, reminds me of nothing so much as the common folk in the video linked below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pilG7PCV448
Idiots and morons?
Perhaps, and not more than a degree or less of separation from those like you who can fall back on a vast ignorance to fill in any gaps where the delivered talking points don't quite gel.
It's all gone wrong for Brent!
>And if we look at the previous 126-year period, it cooled. By the same amount. Yeek! 252 years ago it was as warm in Central England as it is today.
>
>There's no such thing as global warming. Keep the Hummer.
>Tiny variations in that useful trace-gas, CO2, are no big deal. It's business as usual.
First - the CET isn't a global measure. Obviously.
Second - you linked* to junkscience. There's a reason it's called junkscience, and it's not the one Milloy would have you believe. Never has a name had such unintended irony. Perhaps you should read before deciding whether you want to trust junkscience?
*PS your link doesn't work, but I think I've seen the graph it refers to. Is it similar to this one?
And thirdly and most importantly, in a display of blatant junkscience, Milloy is convinced (and apparently has convinced Brent) that it matters that Central England was as warm as it is now 252 years ago (and were those measurements reliable?). It may well be true, but in a global context, is it important?
I hope Brent is aware that the smaller the spatial scale you use, the more natural variability will be able to produce such titbits, and I also hope he's aware that comparing now to one short time period 252 years ago is disingenious. And cherrypicking. Why not zoom out and look at the big picture?
Further points to illustrate how Brent is disingenious: AGW is not the only reason to ditch your hummer. It's not just the evil OPEC cartel that keeps oil prices high - it's high demand. Transport uses vast quantities of oil, so if everyone drove efficient cars it would, of course, be cheaper for everyone. There are many other economic and foreign political reasons to reduce oil consumption.
Also, you conclude that CO2 is not big deal based on the fact that in England it was almost as warm in the 18th century as it is now. Well slap my arse and call me Charlie. Let's just ignore the fact that many, many other things affect climate, particularly on a regional scale... what Brent has is the beginnings of a strawman argument.
I'm not sure where you're from Brent, but I'm English. This past winter was very cold, though summers 07-09 were wet but not cold. Just cool compared to the preceding decade. Meanwhile global temperatures have been about the same as in the earlier part of the decade, when we had several 'sizzling summers', including the warmest ever temperature recorded in the UK (in 2003) and the warmest month on record (July 2006). What does this tell me? It tells me that I'm experiencing weather, and that over such short time periods this little island makes a pretty poor global climate indicator. On longer timescales you could easily conclude (and, my word, be correct in concluding) that CO2 has an influence on global temperatures. Just don't count on it always bringing 'glorious summers' to wherever you are.
And finally...
>I wondered how folks are doing in the US. A quick check on CNN: "Months Third Blizzard Pounds Northeast", "Shovelling Snow? How to Protect Your Back (and Heart)", "Rare Snow Bears Down on Deep South". Holy mackerel! THAT's where the polar bears got to!"
>And look at all these cold-related deaths across the NH:
>
Please note that I reserve the right to point out cold weather events when the satellite record is showing cool global temperatures.
D'oh. Warm weather events in that last sentence. Obv.
Second - you linked* to junkscience.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend
of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back around the goldfish bowl.
Brent laps the goldfish bowl and is now apparently reduced to cutting and pasting even weaker talking points (ooh, the "it's only tiny variations in a useful trace gas" two-for-one feint! The "it was once warm someplace" ploy!) - and approvingly quoting "authorities" such as Jo Nova and Steve Milloy. Sheesh, Brent, your denialist roots are showing.
Brent even tries gamely to spin a survey where 97% of the climatologists actively publishing in that field agreed with the propositions. He doesn't report on that fact though - wonder why? Did his cut-and-paste source feel it unhelpful to inform him of that fact, or did he cherry-pick it himself and hope no-one here would know any better?
Brent, I have to assume you haven't got any better arguments than your recent tripe. (Hint: before posting an argument, apply some actual skepticism to it - not that fake stuff you get from Nova and Milloy - and see if it survives. You don't even have to be personally scientifically skilled - Google can help, as can any number of references and arguments provided to you personally on this thread alone.)
Speaking of ironic terms such as "junk science" (successfully deployed against people like Brent), I do love the report that Jo Nova uses the term "unsceptic" without realising the depths of that particular irony. Her website provides a definition of good science, and then totally abrogates it. It blatantly cherry-picks claims that support her point of view but refuses to report or examine the broader evidence that those claims might not be what they're cracked up to be. And on top of that she personally makes and maintains astonishing claims about atmospheric physics that don't survive mild skeptical scrutiny. This is indeed most "unskeptical"!
Brent, I submit that responding to this question seeking details of your claim to reject parts of the IPCC reports:
...by dodging the question - and instead posting talking points that don't survive a couple of second's scrutiny, thereby demonstrating that your scientific skills are not in evidence - is a classic example of "hubris".
On the subject of the climate change exhibit that changed its name (and was gleefully used by Brent as proof that it's all a scam):
http://www.shell.co.uk/home/content/gbr/aboutshell/media_centre/news_an…
A new name and sponsorship by Shell? What a happy coincidence that are in no way linked to each other!
Chek (1143): You raise a fair point about the local nature of the CET dataset being local. A similar record from other parts of the globe would be useful, but that record â beginning 1659 â is not available from other parts of the globe. You supplied a YouTube link showing some banner-waving Americans. Afraid I donât catch your meaning.
Stu (1144): I know that you unsceptics dislike the JunkScience site. As I said once before, I find it a useful summary of datasets, and as far as I know JunkScience is faithfully representing (and linking to) data from authorities such as GISS and UK Met Office. (Marcel Truthmachine unkindly said that using JunkScience in this way is âso dumb it takes hard workâ. Ouch.) (Marcel, glad to see youâve recovered your âOMâ. I still donât know if itâs a religious mantra, as in âommmmmmmâ.)
You asked if the CET graph with faulty link was the same as the âCET1659-2003.gifâ link you offer. Yes, thatâs the one.
Finally, you claim the right to point out hotspots when the satellite record shows global cooling. Agreed.
Lotharssom (1148): You linked to a Deltoid thread about âMorangateâ. Iâm afraid that I donât quite get the point you are making. It shows an interesting 2008 barchart, revealing that 97% of Climatologists believe that human activity is causing Global Warming, and the public were then split 50/50. No surprises there. Brrr. I just switched the heating off to save cost. Nearly April, and Iâve got a wooly jumper on. Roll on summer, I say!
Iâm afraid I donât know much about this Moran person. Maybe Iâd better find out. In your link, he is asked if heâs an anti-evolution nutter, and he says no. What is your point?
You also say that Iâm dodging the request to declare which portions (A, B, C) of the IPCCâs oeuvre I accept and which portions (D, E, F) I reject. Maybe I am dodging. But I have only dipped in so far, and itâs a mammoth task to absorb the whole lot. Frankly, I focus on the discredited Hockey Stick and on the futurological aspects. Would you recommend that I get my head down and read it all before continuing? OK, Iâll give it a go.
John (1150): You suggest that Shellâs sponsorship of the Science Museumâs renamed Climate Science exhibit is dubious. Iâm afraid that I donât share your view that energy companies are wicked. Nor their product. When I enquire about the energy-dilemma of people here, Iâm aware that itâs a bit âbelow the beltâ, but I strongly believe that energy is an essential ingredient of our culture. Like most people, I try to economise on energy use. But for financial reasons rather than because I equate energy usage with sin. Count up the number of electric motors in your house: your life would be profoundly impoverished without them. Energyâs good, man! Provided we are not buggering up the planet by using energy, itâs a resource to be celebrated, not vilified.
Lotharssom (1130): You write ââ¦for myself I have no desire to discuss what to do about AGW with someone who thinks the science is built on lies and deceptionâ
I certainly do not believe that. I believe that science is a vast interweaving of mutually supporting discoveries of nature, and I celebrate it. Sometimes call myself a âson of Galileoâ.
But â and hereâs the but â science sometimes goes down a blind alley. Sometimes thereâs a collective misunderstanding or misinterpretation which takes time to undo. Take Newtonâs excursions into alchemy, or the aether hypothesis destroyed by the Michelson-Morley experiment, or the geometrical spheres of (I think) Archimedes. None of these ideas were held in bad faith; through the eyes of people at the time they each seemed to be âideas with promiseâ, but were false.
I do understand that you hold your ideas about CO2 being a pernicious poison â an environment-threatening pollutant - in good faith. Iâm just asking you to revisit your hypothesis and ask whether the tiny uptick in temperatures since 1975 might be due to something else (such as solar activity) or due to the same processes of natural chaotic variation that has been in evidence down the ages.
Bloody hell Brent, but how many times have people pointed out to you that solar activity is measurable and actually has shown a slight cooling trend for the last 50 years. And that the "evidence down the ages" actually highlights our climates sensitivity to CO2. And we can see our human fingerprint all over the rising CO2 levels we can measure.
I mean you ain't Galileo here mate, you're the Catholic church saying heliocentrism is contrary to scripture.
#1151. Sorry: typo. Strike "being local" from first sentence.
Andrew, if by 'solar activity' you mean W/m2, yes, you're right: the variation is very small indeed. But there's the Svensmark Hypothesis which proposes that cloud cover is affected by solar wind and its effect on the Earth's magnetic field which deflects cosmic rays. Earlier we discussed the long dataset from the Parana River which finds a corellation between sunspots and river flow.
As for "climate's sensitivity to CO2", the contrary view is "CO2's sensitivity to climate" - a lead/lag question.
The solar activity thing is not (yet) a full answer, but shows great promise. CO2's good, man. Makes plants grow.
Andrew, by 'son of Galileo' I certainly don't claim any reflected glory. No, I bask in the great man's light and am grateful for his work.
When I first read his comment upon exiting the shagging session with the Catholic hierarchy ("and yet it moves") I imagined a bewildered expression on his face, imagined that he was saying "dammit, I have this evidence that the Earth orbits the Sun, but these clever authority figures have put me in my place." But the ornery, cussed guy was probably saying "I don't give a monkeys what these stuffed shirts proclaim; I know better than them and it bloody well moves. Future generations will be my judge." What a man!
Brent @ 1155:
>But there's the Svensmark Hypothesis
Svensmark proposes a mechanism by which the effect of an increase in solar activity could be amplified. There has been no such increase in solar activity and his proposed mechanism has been shown to be wrong anyway. This was already explained to you numerous times, e.g. [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) and [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
>Earlier we discussed the long dataset from the Parana River which finds a corellation between sunspots and river flow.
No. It finds a correlation with __the small fluctuations__ in river flow __after the data has been detrended__. [This was already explained to you](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
>a lead/lag question.
Already explained to you numerous times, e.g. [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) and [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
Brent @ 1152:
>hereâs the but â science sometimes goes down a blind alley. [...] Take Newtonâs excursions into alchemy, or the aether hypothesis
That's a very common fallacy used by anti-science loons of all kinds:
http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2005/11/science_wrong.html
If you want to show that the science of global warming is wrong then you need to address the science of global warming -- not alchemy or aether.
Brent @ 1151:
>You also say that Iâm dodging the request to declare which portions (A, B, C) of the IPCCâs oeuvre I accept and which portions (D, E, F) I reject. Maybe I am dodging. But I have only dipped in so far
Generally it's a good idea to find out what a scientific theory says before deciding whether you agree with it or not. Unless you're a moron, which you've demonstrated time and time again that you are.
Dave R: Thanks for the link.
Among the text is "Yes, science has been wrong, but the scientific method is self-correcting. And it is always scientists who have unearthed new evidence who do the correcting, never people who ignore the scientific method."
I'm glad that we agree on something at last.
It always amazes me how the denialati liken their stance to Galileo's against the Catholic Church, as Brent is doing here. The truth is, if Galileo were alive today he would vociferously distance himself from those on the contrarian side twisting science as a camouflage for a brazenly political agenda. The denialists are hardly some heroic minority defending science from a mob of heathen heretics; for the most part they are a wretched bunch of misfits who are generally on the far right of the political spectrum who loathe government regulations.
Brent, like the others silently supporting an alternate agenda, claims to be concerned about nature and the environment (e.g. by stressing his opposition to hare coursing and deforestation) but then appears quite willing to hope - for that is what he is doing - that the vast majority of the scientific community, and particularly the scientists with the most acumen in their respective fields - are wrong. He is willing for humanity to throw the dice and to hope the cubes come up the right way. Given he does not understand the interaction between abiotic and biotic processes, or of scale, Brent then casually dismisses this link, as many of the lay denialiti do. But effectively Brent is placing his misguided faith in the chance that the experts have it wrong. If they are not wrong, of course, there could be catastrophic results. But Brent dimisses this, and is quite happy to say that we ought to wait until all of the data are in. Of course, this is what the commercial and political elites want as well, because they are programmed to think in terms of short time scales (meaning the maximization of short-term profits). Longer term outcomes just do not interest them.
By then, as we all know, we will be well beyond critical tipping points, and it will be too late. How well our ecological life support systems will function at this point is anyone's guess, but the ball will be out of our court for the most part. Technology cannot substitute for vital ecological services that are vanquished as a result of the interplay between a range of human assaults across the biosphere, including climate change. Those who have been responsible for the current procrastination will have a lot to answer for, but since many of them will be already dead by the time that nature 'bites back' in full, future generations will only be able to look back with utter contempt at the current generation and wonder why the hell we did not change course.
Brent, I hope that you and your kind are proud to be a part of this generation of denial. To retiterate, were Galileo alive today he would view be standing shoulder to shoulder with most of the scientific community. Not with the shills.
Jeff, you say "the vast majority of the scientific community". Vast? May I offer some more scientists who challenge the AGW hypothesis?
Meteorologist Joseph D'Aleo, former chairman of the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting,
Prominent Hungarian Physicist Dr. Miklós Zágoni, a former global warming activist who recently reversed his views about man-made climate fears and is now a skeptic, presented scientific findings at [a 2008] conference refuting rising CO2 fears.
Dr. William M. Briggs, a climate statistician who serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review,
Professor Rami Zurayk: âWhen I said, in my opening speech for the launch of UNEP's (United Nations Environment Program) Global Environment Outlook-4 in Beirut: âThere is now irrevocable evidence that climate change is taking place...â I was reading from a statement prepared by UNEP. Faith-based science it may be, but who has time to review all the evidence? I'll continue to act on the basis of anthropogenic climate change, but I really need to put some more time into this,â. Weâll put him down as undecided, then.
Science is settled, eh?
Jeff, you say "by the time that nature 'bites back' in full". I admire your futurological powers.
My fingers were getting too cold to type, so I've reluctantly put the heating back on.
>Science is settled, eh?
[Back around the goldfish bowl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
NASAâs James Hansen, quoted on Icecap: âThe US has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the US the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.â
Science is settled, eh?
Jeff you said,
'Those who have been responsible for the current procrastination will have a lot to answer for'
you can include all of the warmers in here, none of them are interested in solving the problem they are just screeching about it, judging by the news around the world more peoples and governments thoughts are similar to brents, the science is losing and none in here has any intention of looking for solutions.
So much for being believers, because of their fanatical belief in aGW they are the ones that fear it most, and yet they procrastinate !!!! Who would believe them ?
>Prominent Hungarian Physicist Dr. Miklós Zágoni
And now the Brent who told us that he doesn't dispute the existence of the greenhouse effect and agreed with the claim by James that no so-called "sceptics" dispute it, is now citing a crackpot who [does just that](http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/06/gigo-eli-has-learned-over-years-that…).
>a former global warming activist who recently reversed his views
If you have any evidence that Zágoni was once a "global warming activist", provide it. Otherwise withdraw the claim.
Michael Mann (yesterday): "if the past 50 years is the warmest 50-year period in the past millennium or longer, as the IPCC has concluded is likely the case, then the warmest year during that 50-year period also is likely the warmest year; and the warmest decade during that period, the warmest decade"
(a) Somebody give him Hansen's phone number please (#1163)
(b) The adjective 'likely' is being subverted by warmists, and used as an adverb. The adverbial usage is a euphemism for 'probably'. Would anybody care to question my interpretation of 'likely' as used by Mann: I think it means: 'with a probability above 50%', with a subtext 'but don't quote me on that - it isn't a hard assertion'.
In my view, the IPCC likely barking up the wrong tree and the end is likely not nigh.
Some interesting clue's here about using C02 as a theatrical prop to make money.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4dn
Dear Brent 1163 "The five warmest years over the last century occurred in the last eight years." James Hansen
Ooh good on me. This proves a lot.
Brent, here is your [quote of Hansen](http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/) with the part that you removed restored.
>Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934. __Global temperature, in contrast, had passed 1930s values by 1980 and the world has warmed at a remarkable rate over the last 25 years.__
Dave R (1165): Zagoni is described in 2008:
"Miklas Zagoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.
That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Ames Research Center.
After studying it, Zagoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. "I fell in love," he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week."
The description comes from:
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/001668.html
Is it true that your Hummer only gets 9mpg? My diesel Golf's record is 74mpg, driven carefully.
Dave R (1169):
Yes, you're right and I'm wrong.
Hanson's statement was taken out of context (not by me, but I should have checked out the source).
My apologies. We'll leave Hansen as one of the majority then.
Brent,
What truth machine says about you x 100.
As for your measly bunch of 'experts', if I had the time I could draw a list with 100 times the numbers of names you can muster; its a typical denialist trick to play the 'numbers' game. Unlike you, I am a scientist and I can tell you that very, very few of my peers are contrarians. Perhaps 1%. Or less. The fact that you have to dig up indiviodual names, many of them hardly having stellar publication records (like Soon) tells me all that I need to know.
Since you do not read much of the primary empirical literature, and do not understand the term 'ecosystem services', only you and people like you could suggest that there will be - in fact are - consequneces to the global experiment. Listen dumb-ass and listen well: there are already clear signs that the planet's life support systems are fraying. If you want to see it as a microcosm go to Easter Island: I have been there are the evidence of human overshoot is plain for all to see. But let us looks at ecological services: the rapid expansion of drylands and deserts; the plummetting levels of groundwater (check out the Oglalla Aquifer which underlies the Great Plains which is in serious trouble, as well as the aquifers underlying the China Plain); the extent of rainforest loss and its effects on regional climate through disruption of transpiration processes (J. Shikla has modelled these effects); changes in the nitrogen and carbon cycles; hypereutrophication; mass loss of pollinators in the northern hemipshere; failing pest control services; serious declines in songbird populations; inability of productive ecosystems to be restored after such processes as overgrazing and fire. All of this and more is documented in the empirical literature if an idiot like you would bother to read it. NATURE IS BITING BACK you clown; it is just that the effects have been regional and not systemic yet. This is because complex adaptive systems function non-linearly and systemic failure will occur once some threshold is reached. Ecology ios the most non-linear of the sciences because a change in one small property can lead to disproportionate changes in teh whole system. Some of the pseudo-scientific morons you think are luminaries may not understand this but I, as a population ecologist, does. I work in this field. Clim,ate change is certainly going to help in the unraveling of ecological communities, along with a suite of other human-induced stresses. It alread is: the pied flycatcher example I provided the other day is but one small examp[le in what is almost certainly a litany of examples.
Why I bother withg vacuous idiots like you is anybody's guess. i gave you the benfefit of the doubt when I responded to your earlier posts but it is clear to me that you are a know-nothing who does nbot wish to understand the 'scientific method'; all of this crap from you is just meant to try and suggest that you are up on the field when it is clear that you are not.
Truth Machine has described you perfectly. If you want to wallow in your denialist ignorance, take it elsewhere.
I said if you have any __evidence__, not someone else making the same unsubstantiated claim.
His crackpot theory is addressed in the link I posted above.
(that was @[Brent](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…)).
After Brent's latest hollow musings I have had enough. I am getting fed up with the kind of stupid, sarcastic remark like 'I admire your futurological powers'. There is abundant evidence that we are headed for an abyss - but Brent prefers to ignore it. Or, to be a little fair, he does not have access to it. Either way, I might as well be speaking to a wall.
I will henceforth avoid this thread and stick with other ones. I have had it up to here with Brent.
Brent's right, there's nothing evil about paying four million pounds to change the name of an exhibit that makes you look bad, and gives ammo to people like him. There's nothing wrong with spending vast sums of money to spread disinformation.
Shell, as always, are just thinking about the little guy.
[Brent](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…):
>Hanson's statement was taken out of context (not by me, but I should have checked out the source).
Time and time again you've simply cut&pasted the same old tripe from anti-science propaganda sites without making any attempt to determine whether it has any merit. When are you going to learn to exercise [some scepticism](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/feb/22/climate-change-s…)?
If it's any consolation Jeff, I very often get something worth finding out about from yours (and many others')posts, even if it may seem to you at the time to be casting pearls before swine.
Specific questions concerning your specific problems and the specific peer-reviewed science upon which your beliefs are based. If you're read the segments you're disagreeing with this should be easy enough to provide.
If you cared at all about evidentiary support, you would have looked into this and found that there is no contemporary evidence that he said any such thing in the context in which he's claimed to, and that it would have been out of character and rather stupid for him to have done so (you could start with Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter). It is in any case ridiculous for you to raise him in support of your intransigent ignorance, as Jeff Harvey points out.
Seconded. Brent, you appear to be shameless. I wonder how you live with yourself.
Yes, just ask the Wiwa family.
Also seconded. PRL* before swine, perhaps?
*Peer-Reviewed Literature :)
Strange that Jeff H should mention the septics' misuse of Galileo just as I was reading
from Diethelm and McKee.
[HT to mike in comments over at Stephan Lewandowsky's piece at ABC The Drum Unleashed for the link.]
@ Brent:
"science sometimes goes down a blind alley. ... Take Newtonâs excursions into alchemy, or the aether hypothesis destroyed by the Michelson-Morley experiment, or the geometrical spheres of (I think) Archimedes. None of these ideas were held in bad faith; through the eyes of people at the time they each seemed to be âideas with promiseâ, but were false."
This betrays a deep, deep ignorance of how science works.
Aether theory (not hypothesis, Brent) lasted so long because it 1: allowed accurate explanations and predictions of natural phenomena, and 2: inspired experiments that furthered understanding. In fact, Lorenz Ether Theory included contraction of the aether, which led directly to Einstein's work and space-time contraction. Aether theory lasted so long because IT WAS USEFUL. It explained things, and it largely explained them correctly. It started faltering when we found things it couldn't explain, and found that it required physically-unrealistic requirements to keep the theory intact. But all those correct explanations didn't suddenly turn out to be false simply because we supplanted it with relativity theory.
Similar for the 'spheres' theory of the motions of the universe. It persisted for a millennium as theory because it was useful, and it made accurate predictions. Those accurate predictions don't suddenly turn out to have been wrong simply because we found corner cases where the 'spheres' theory didn't work, and we then used new observations to supplant it with an elegant and radically simplified new heliocentric theory.
'AGW theory' is certain to be incorrect in some details - all theories are. But it is a mature, well-supported theory, which makes robust, testable predictions, many of which have been confirmed. It's central useful deduction - that climate sensitivity is ~ 2C - 4.5C with more uncertainty on the high side, is arrived at from multiple lines of research, all of which give similar values - it is this concilience that drives confidence in the theory, except among the wingbat fringe. Oh, hi Brent.
Yes, you're right and I'm wrong.
Every. Single. Time.
Hanson's statement was taken out of context (not by me, but I should have checked out the source).
But you didn't, because you're a gullible git and it fit your misconceptions and your ideology. The person who took Hansen out of context did so to snare idiots like you.
My apologies. We'll leave Hansen as one of the majority then.
It also leaves you without an oar to paddle with. Hansen is of the 97%. That leaves 3% -- pointing to a few scientists who don't accept AGW (most of whom who aren't climate scientists) does nothing to challenge that. No one who is not a gullible ideological git is in the slightest swayed by you; all of your points has been refuted multiple times, and repeating them will do you no good.
This betrays a deep, deep ignorance of how science works.
It's also completely irrelevant and displays stunning stupidity. Brent points out that scientists have sometimes been wrong. Yes, and so? What possible bearing does that virtual tautology have on whether AGW is valid?
Logic, ur doin it rong.
My point was that you were quoting part of a survey that was already well known to Deltoid readers, and that it said things that were not in concordance with the spin you put on the survey. Either you were ignorant of what the survey said, or you thought the bits you left out weren't important, or you hoped no-one would notice. None of these options make your powers of analysis look good. (But at least you're remarkably consistent in that respect.) Speaking of which:
Have a look at Miskolczi's papers and see if they (even superficially) look like a robustly argued case. I submit that you don't need to have a graduate degree (in any field), and you don't need to understand climate science. Just consider each statement to determine whether it is handwaving or robust logic (and each claim of some value that is a constant to see whether it's fully supported by evidence or logic). For added points determine whether he redefines well-known laws that pertain to atmospheric physics - you may need pointers from someone in the know for that (I did). Feel free to report on your findings.
Failing that, compare Miskolczi's behaviour (e.g. here, including comments) with the Crackpot Index and see if any warning bells go off.
Alternatively, take a look around the denialosphere and see what the range of opinions are. If you find some of your fellow travelers suggesting that proclaiming his work harms their position, that might also be a hint that you've been sold a dud by whatever source claimed his papers were the ultimate refutation to AGW.
And speaking of that, it continues to astonish me that AGW "skeptics" are so easily manipulated. Every few months there's a new press release loudly touting how *this* time the new paper/evidence/logic/e-mails completely and utterly destroy the AGW science and this release is breathlessly and heavily duplicated on thousands of blogs and even appears in newspapers...and just like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown at the last moment it *always* (to date) turns out NOT to have that effect.
"Fool me a few times, shame on you. Fool me a lot of times...?"
Feel free to cite evidence for this claim.
I'll be interested to see if it involves "models", and whether you'll try to explain the apparent contradiction between you pooh-poohing predictions made by climate scientists in general as "futurology", but laud these apparent predictions.
I'm betting no on the latter.
I think it's high time we turned Brent onto [DenialDepot](http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/) where he can go and ply his sublime BlogScience and pseudo-skeptical mythoPOEsis to his heart's content with nary a flutter of ConScience.
it continues to astonish me that AGW "skeptics" are so easily manipulated
It shouldn't since it's [basic human psychology](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias). Brent, however, goes well beyond common levels of intellectual dishonesty.
>it continues to astonish me that AGW "skeptics" are so easily manipulated
TM's right, it's not astonishing. Well, at least it's stopped being astonishing for me. The funny part is not that they're easily manipulated, as everyone who isn't the most brilliant scientist ever needs to defer to some sort of authority (confirmation bias dictates the type of authority, even if it's not real authority, eg Watts).
No, the funny part is that a large proportion of the so-called "sceptics" apply precisely zero scepticism or critical thinking to anything that fits their confirmation bias. They aren't worthy of the term 'sceptic', indeed 'unsceptic' fits very well! We have all encountered this, and Brent exemplifies it with his numerous retractions above (and he really needs to make several more).
'No, the funny part is that a large proportion of the so-called "sceptics" apply precisely zero scepticism or critical thinking to anything that fits their confirmation bias'
Hmmm...same here -
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4fg
by the way Stu, have you put any thought into an alternate to C02 based energy ? Or are you still waiting for the temperature to confirm the science ? If you have done nothing then maybe it is you that is "easily manipulated" by the aGW hype, are you the same as the rest in here, more concerned about the science being right than combating the effects ? Most in here are parasitic to the science and the world,
they give nothing back.
Sunspot, you're referring to the comments to that satirical article right? Indeed, it is a case in point, but it's not all one-sided. Some supporters of global warming would swallow an equally unbelievable story that supported their view. However, in my experience it's the "unsceptics" who fall for it more often, and time and time again.
As another example, a while ago WUTW ran a story suggesting that a volcanic eruption in the Pacific was the cause of a very large (as in widespread) SST anomaly. There was a distinct lack of scepticism of this idea in from the usual WUWT crowd, and it takes many, many comments before someone attempts a back of the envelope refutation of the idea based on how much energy is needed to heat up that volume of water by that much (hint: much, much more than a moderate-sized eruption produces).
Anyway, I have already mentioned my personal actions in this thread. Smaller than I'd like due to circumstances, but not zero. In terms of energy generation, I think the biggest drive should be for efficiency at the moment, followed by energy diversification with the biggest load taken up by nuclear. Standard renewables like wind can have a role in overall energy generation, but it is limited by intermittency and transmission problems. Biofuels, done properly, could provide a large chunk of transportation energy, and with oil prices on an inexorable upward climb they will become more and more economically viable too.
In fact, that's what I think will save us the worst of AGW in the end - economic pressure. The price of cleaner technology will drop while using fossil fuel technology continues to get more expensive.
Sunspot, you fell for a satiral article.
Please don't ever tell us again that you're a skeptic.
To quote Stu:
You have just proved that.
*Satirical
John, I'm gonna give sunspot the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was presenting that article, and attached comments, as an example of
>so-called "sceptics" appling precisely zero scepticism or critical thinking to anything that fits their confirmation bias
Or maybe even as an example of how gullible Fox are?
hahahahahahahahahahaha
same here
Indeed it is the same -- the same GW "skeptic" morons Stu was referring to, falling for that article. Like so many tu quoque arguments, yours backfires. As I said before,
Is this another example of confirmation bias, or is it merely garden variety jumping to conclusions?
The commenters here who have provided information on this topic reported concrete actions to "combat the effects". For the ones that did not report sunspot has no data on what they have or have not done, but sunspot presumes that they have done nothing.
Hello guys!
I'm still ploughing my way through the IPCC reports to try and summarise the erroneous logic. By the time I get a result this thread may well be an empy place!
Global Warming News: Scottish schoolchild killed when coach skids off the road in blizzard. Thousands of houses without electricity due to blizzards. Best skiing year in a decade; Scottish ski resorts very happy. I had to scrape ice off my car on April Fools Day. Rescue of motorists trapped in their cars by snow.
It was a wise move to 'rebrand' it Climate Change. They can now say, "of course it's cold: this is due to Climate Change". Brrr! Still, at least the roads haven't melted yet.
Category error - that's weather news.
In other news goldfish orbits bowl ... again.
...and also Brent, while you're once again playing dumb, the phrase "Climate Change" was invented by Republican pollster Frank Luntz.
Why don't you do a complete Stalinist rewrite of history and brand him a warmist too, that being what all your fishtank pals are happy to assume, omplete with their own alternate universe self-invented 'logic' which you just spouted.
Why are you self-proclaimed 'sceptics' always so gullible?
chek,
"the phrase "Climate Change" was invented by Republican pollster Frank Luntz."
While it is true and relevant that Luntz pushed the term (because he thought it sounded less frightening than global warming), he didn't invent it.
It certainly wasn't invented recently as the denialists claim (the CC in the acronym IPCC and the date of its foundation provides a large clue!)
Thanks for the correction Frank.
I should have been clearer that the mainstream use of the phrase as an alternative to 'Global Warming' was Luntz's suggestion (rather than invention) to the ever-Orwellian Bush43 administration's PR effort.
It certainly has never been the weaseling about-turn by the climate scientists as is now frequently claimed by the anti-science brigade as demonstrated by Brent in his post above.
chek,
"It certainly has never been the weaseling about-turn by the climate scientists as is now frequently claimed by the anti-science brigade as demonstrated by Brent in his post above."
Absolutely not. Whenever it comes up I just ask them what they think the CC in IPCC stands for and when they think it was founded.
Also the way I understand it is that global warming causes climate change, they are not the same thing. One is about temperature and the other is not just about temperature but also changes in weather patterns such as rainfall, etc.
I really have a hard time understating why the difference between global and local and climate and weather is so hard for some people to grasp.
Brent:
I thought I had dispensed with your complete crap and then you show up again.
As Rev BDC said. If you want to play the weather game, try pretty well all of Canada this winter: it was the warmest ever, almost 5 C above the 1951-80 average, with no snow over much of the central part of the country for months on end. Temperatures in the Hudson Bay area were 10-20 C above normal for much of March. Right now temepratures are at mid summer levels in eastern Canada. The last time I heard Canada was quite a bit larger than Britain and much larger than Scotland.
The crux lies in comparing data sets over 30 years and, if you want to be a reductionist, at least to compare warm weather records with cold weather records set during that time. The former are occurring significantly more often than the latter since 1980.
Case closed. It is warming.
They say if a person's livelihood depends on not acknowledging a truth they will strenuously avoid perceiving it. I reckon it applies to ego (for some people) as much as to livelihood.
[No it hasn't](http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/riddle-me-this/).
Oops. Replied on the wrong thread there I think.
Jesus, you guys have the patience of saints.
It isn't. As transpires above, the evidence and facts don't fit Brent's personal narrative so he completely disregards the differences between weather and climate. Brent certainly understands it, he just ignores it because it doesn't fit with his ideological view.
Jeff Harvey @ 1205
You consistently refuse to account for Canada's weather anomaly being by and large the effects of El Nino & The Arctic Oscillation !
'From Ireland to Siberia the winter of 2010 was colder than usual. The winter temperatures in the eastern half of the United States were also below normal. However, on Greenland and in north-eastern Canada it was much less cold than normal in winter and the Middle East was also milder. This pattern was caused by a well-know climate mode of variability: the Arctic Oscillation (AO), also referred to as the Northern Annular Mode. The Arctic Oscillation had its largest negative excursion sinc the beginning of observations in 1900. The net effect on the global mean temperature was close to zero: the cold air brought south to Siberia, Europe and the eastern US was compensated by warm air going north into other regions. The global mean temperature was in fact near record high, pushed up by the combination of the slow trend and the effects of the 2009/2010 El Niño.' http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4qu
maybe you also should read this PDF - http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4qv
Maybe if you incorporate this in your next rantings about the wanderings of the biota you might be more credible.
So much for the alarmist predictions
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4qw
sunspot, your own quote undermines your claims (that it's somehow invalid to reference (say) the Canada anomaly in response to people referencing cold winters in some locations as evidence that global warming is not real):
Lotharsson,
1/ Read the first two sentence's. You might note that I make no reference to 'global warming is not real'
2/ You also should note that my post was directed to Jeff, if wanted to converse with you I would need my 3yr old grandson to translate your gibberish.
3/ You are a dim wit !
sunspot, I had read the first two sentences, and I had ALSO previously read the comment by Jeff that you were replying to, AND the comments that Jeff was replying to. Had you?
Jeff was responding to people who cherrypick weather events as if they are evidence that it is not warming. He pointed out weather events in Canada that go against this argument, on his way to his main point - that it's climate trends that matter.
In response you entirely miss Jeff's main point and instead take exception with his weather-does-not-equal-climate example. You argue that Jeff got it wrong, i.e. that Canada's anomalous warmth is largely due to the AO, thus appearing to lend support to the idea that Jeff was responding to, namely that "global warming is not real" because some places have had cold weather.
So maybe your points 2 and 3 indicate the problem lies with you, not me.
[sunspot](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…)
>You might note that I make no reference to 'global warming is not real'
In your next comment, state unambiguously whether you accept [the scientific consensus on global warming](http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html) and if not, precisely which parts you disagree with and on what basis.
sentence's
Stupid, dishonest, and illiterate.
You also should note that my post was directed to Jeff
Jeff's post was directed to Brent, you hypocritical cretin.
if wanted to converse with you
No one wants to converse with you, jackass.
I would need my 3yr old grandson to translate your gibberish.
Yes, anything more advanced is incomprehensible to you.
You are a dim wit !
Dunning-Kruger. No one smart thinks you are.
You consistently refuse to account for Canada's weather anomaly being by and large the effects of El Nino & The Arctic Oscillation !
Do you have any understanding of what Jeff's "If you want to play the weather game" and "The crux lies in comparing data sets over 30 years" mean? Here's a simple translation that may still be too complex for your simple mind: "GW is about climate, not weather" -- so it doesn't matter whether it's El Nino or the AO or invisible fairies that caused Canada's weather or the blizzards Brent mentioned; those weather events are red herrings.
Do you have any idea what this statement from your source means? If you do, you should explain it to Brent. If you're having trouble, here are a couple of other bits from your source:
So much for the alarmist predictions http://www.tinyurl.com.au/4qw
Aside from your reference to a piece by Jonathan Leake, who may have even less credibility at Deltoid than you, this has been addressed before when you raised it before, but as usual you prove yourself too stupid to comprehend: ice volume is way down. The fraud being perpetrated by denialists like you is akin to conmen who display a case full of money that actually is worthless paper below the top layer.
hahahaha, The Three Stooge's !!!! and two of them are trying to lie, twist and manipulate my words, TROLLS.
Morons, I know what was in my post, maybe you all need to explain to Jeff that the record high temp's in Canada were caused by El Nino & The Arctic Oscillation, Jeff never mention's these two facts and doesn't acknowledge aGW would only add a small percentage to Canada's high temp's.
So in other word's the cold temps around the world were weather events, and the warm weather in Canada was also a weather event, aGW added only a small percentage.
SO STOP TWISTING FACTS & LYING BY OMISSION OF FACTS.
sunspot, you are clearly too stupid to understand any of the points made either here or in the articles you post.
aGW added only a small percentage
Yes, it adds only a small percentage, but continually adding in a small factor results in a large factor over time, you cretin. From your own source:
LYING BY OMISSION OF FACTS
You really are a shameless piece of shit.
twoofer, use your chancrous brain to deduct the supposed aGW temperature rise from Canada's winter high's, it is a low percentage of those temp's that were caused by the weather effects of El Nino and The Arctic Oscillation, these are strong and naturally occurring weather events.
STOP LYING BY OMISSION OF FACTS
Sunspot, like his alter ego Brent, mangled the thrust of what I was saying. I was revealing how hypocritical the denialists are when they allude to cold weather patterns as disproof of AGW, whereas the same bunch of lying cretins go mute when warm weather records are broken (and far more of these have been broken over the past 20 years). I never said that either were climate related events, but just aimed to reveal how the denialists are, for the most part, IMHO a bunch of liars and deceivers. I never said that Canada's winter was not correlated with EN/SO; I just was sick and tired of people like you and Brent and other know-nothings wading in here and cherry-picking in an attempt to downplay AGW, which by now is occurring beyond any reasonable doubt. Moreover, given that there have been other EN/SO events that have occurred throughout recorded history (e.g. the 1998 one was huge, but I notice that people like you conveniently ignore this fact when you stupidly claim that it has been 'cooling since 1998') why is this one such an exception at the global scale?
Moreover, if you want to play that game Sunpsot, please tell me why Eurasia's winter was below normal (but certainly not record cold) whereas Canada's warmth was unprecedented. Further, please try and explain away why GISTEMP and the satellite records showed the recent winter to be amongst the warmest in recorded history at the global level. This coincides with longer term data sets showing that the first 10 years of this century were the warmest (by far) since records were kept. This year is likely to come out at # 1.
I am certain that if this year turns out to be the warmest since records are kept, the denialati will claim that it was due to an abnormally strong EN/SO event, and use this to downplay the anthropogenic component. Then when the next few years are slightly cooler, but still above the 2000-2009 mean, they will say that it 'has been cooling since 2010'. Mark my words. They will twist and mangle and distort the scientific facts to promote their agenda.
Truth is, sunspot, you are actually a waste of time and energy.
Jeff,
'I never said that Canada's winter was not correlated with EN/SO'
no, you conveniently committed it.
'(e.g. the 1998 one was huge, but I notice that people like you conveniently ignore this fact when you stupidly claim that it has been 'cooling since 1998')'
I am well aware of this, it impacted my bank account significantly, other than low water supply I noticed that between 98 - 06 that leaf on plants were burning from the intensity of the sun that would normally be ok, how does C02 act as a magnifying glass ?
'please tell me why Eurasia's winter was below normal (but certainly not record cold) whereas Canada's warmth was unprecedented' Read the links I supplied.
'Further, please try and explain away why GISTEMP and the satellite records showed the recent winter to be amongst the warmest in recorded history at the global level.' I believe that neither you nor I can answer that, the knowledge of the cycles of the sun and its effects on ocean warming is far from adequate. If global warming is caused by a greenhouse effect then why is the temperature rise not rising in the atmosphere at all altitudes above 7.5 klm ? tick all the boxes. http://www.tinyurl.com.au/43t
'Truth is, sunspot, you are actually a waste of time and energy.'
Maybe to you, but reflect on this. I have asked in here what people are doing about aGW, only one person replied ! Nobody else !
I've been plugging away doing things for years, I don't doubt an aGW effect on temperature, more the degree of the effect. Time will tell, but you say we haven't got time ! Well the ex-sperts say Kyoto aint enough, and we all know a carbon tax will probably do jack-shit.
So what does that leave ? I think I might be the only person in here to suggest gathering some thoughts on how to tackle aGW, but no one here seems to care enough to explore anything, including you !
Sunspot,
You have been 'plugging away' for years to find the truth? C'mon, pull another one will you? How many scientific conferences have you attended where climate scientists have assembled to discuss the issue of climate warming? How many workshops? How many climate scientists have you spoken with personally?
I agree that solutions will be hard to find, but not impossible. Many have been laid out for us, but you seem to think its better to wait to plunge over the cliff and then for those remaining alive to 'pick up the pieces' and continue from where we left off. Science has shown that there is a problem with climate change that, if left untended, threatens humanity with serious and perhaps catastrophic consequences. By raising early alerts, scientists have also informed the public and policymakers of the conseqeunces of business-as-usual in the past on issues as diverse as the overuse of pesticides, various other forms of pollution, ozone-depletion, destruction of natural habitats and loss of biodiversity, overextraction of aquifers and overharvesting of natural capital. In some of these areas our species reacted by pushing through meausures designed to offset the potentially serious consequences of inaction. The same is true of taking stored carbon and burning it to such an extent that atmsopheric concentrations of greenhouse gases increase with concomitant effects on climate that threaten natural systems in a variety of ways. We have been warned in language that should be strong enough to take seriously.
I am not a technologist but I certainly realize that the technology exists - even if the will of political and commercial elites does not as of yet - to mitigate the effects of climate change that is almost certainly due to human actions. Your only argument left here is to lecture the contributors as to what should be done. This is akin to saying that, because I am not a fireman and do not know how to tackle a burning house, I should just let it continue to burn to the ground. But of course there are people out there with the expertise to push our economies in the correct direction. This also applies to the issue of sustainability. Humans are maintaining a growing ecological deficit that also has repecussions down the road if left unchecked. Should we just continue along the same path as we are at present unless someone on Deltoid can provide clear alternatives?
As I said, sunpsot, your posts are vacuous and exhausting. You have little left to discuss. Why do you persist?
>I noticed that between 98 - 06 that leaf on plants were burning
[Not surprising with you around](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Dz5lE6FaN_g/Sg1qS2hZRQI/AAAAAAAAAQk/4sjwLIPke…).
I agree with [Jeff Harvey](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
For months it's been buggin me that 2010 will probably break all temperature records, and the Denialati will simply then have the capacity to say for the next few (noisy) years that "it has cooled since 2010".
It's all the more infuriating for the fact that not a one of them are able to answer the [simple question](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_44.php#comment-2348…) that should be answered before any such pronouncement of cooling is made.
Why is that?
Jeff your comprehension skills are disgusting !
I said, 'I have asked in here what people are doing about aGW, only one person replied ! Nobody else ! I've been plugging away doing things for years,'
You Twisted it to this, 'You have been 'plugging away' for years to find the truth? C'mon, pull another one will you? How many scientific conferences have you attended where climate scientists have assembled to discuss the issue of climate warming? How many workshops? How many climate scientists have you spoken with personally?'
I've put a lot of hard work and time into the environment, you seem to have only waffled on about it !
I said, 'I think I might be the only person in here to suggest gathering some thoughts on how to tackle aGW'
once again you tell a lie,
'but you seem to think its better to wait to plunge over the cliff'
and the twist goes on
'Your only argument left here is to lecture the contributors as to what should be done'
I said, 'I think I might be the only person in here to suggest gathering some thoughts on how to tackle aGW'
Your avoidance of answering my questions and your lying exposes the fact that your are not as credible as you portray.
Gee Sunspot, who are we going to to with here? A scientist who specialises in ecology or a rube who posts satirical articles thinking they're real?
Jeff your comprehension skills are disgusting !
Yeah, Jeff mistakenly thought you care about the truth.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
That's really not a good representation. I'm pretty sure Brent asked essentially the same question, and between your and his questions, at least three different people replied.
Furthermore, given your (and Brent's) ... somewhat *eccentric* commenting history (devoid of an evident commitment to reality; with this question likely to be perceived to be accusatory in tone, let alone the fact that it's a little bit OT on *this* thread), I can imagine why many people may not have felt the need to justify their actions in these areas *to you* on this thread.
And the fact that you earlier jumped to the conclusion that because most people didn't reply to you that they must therefore have done nothing only reinforces the wisdom of not replying to someone who doesn't appear to be honest and straightforward in their comments here.
If global warming is caused by a greenhouse effect then why is the temperature rise not rising in the atmosphere at 7.5 klm and all altitudes above ? tick all the boxes when veiwing each altitude.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/51x
If Al Gore told you mugs that dog turd's were Easter egg's you warmers would pig out on them !!
Sheesh, go back to troll school. You forgot the basic trinity of Al Gore talking points - "Al Gore is fat and uses lots of electricity and will make a lot of money from carbon trading".
(And you wonder why people don't care to engage with you when you interrogate them on their "actions"?!!!)
Hahahahahahaha
I would like to bring this to attention from sunspot's (note the correct use of the apostrophe) link:
sunspot:
"If global warming is caused by a greenhouse effect then why is the temperature rise not rising in the atmosphere at 7.5 klm and all altitudes above ?"
aummm. becasue the mechanism by which greenhouse gasses cause warming, si to cause cooling at upper altitudes, is why. Congratulations, sunspot, you have stumbled upon confirmation of one of the key predictions of greenhouse climate theory, and one of the key signatures that distinguishes greenhouse gas warming from warming by other forcings.
Erm, because that it not what 'greenhouse' physics predicts?
Erm, because that is not what 'greenhouse' physics predicts?
Dang. I said it twice, but Lee said it better.
Anyway, welcome to the AGW club sunspot. You must be so proud that you are helping to point out the deficiencies in AGW denialism.
After all, it surely could not have been an own goal...
*Your avoidance of answering my questions and your lying exposes the fact that your are not as credible as you portray*
Whatever you say sunspot. But at least my arguments and those of just about everyone else on this thread (with the exception of Brent) are a lot more credible than yours are. And I certainly do not wish to engage in discussion with you on the frankly peurile tone of many of your posts (e.g. # 1231).
My point was to say that you make a lot of noise with little substance. If your views that AGW is exaggerated are to be taken seriously, then I would expect you to have spoken with the people doing the research about it rather than to have made up your own mind on your clearly limited knowledge base. It is clear from your response that your answer to my questions were , 'no, no and no'. Thank you for the clarification.
As I said, your tactic appears to be to demand that those defending the science of AGW prove to you that they are doing something concrete about the problem in tewrms of their lifestyles and actions. This shows that you have lost the scientific argument and have now retreated to the sandbox. What do any of us here have to prove to you, sunspot? In no way do I have to justify the way I live to you, nor do any of the others posting here. As I said, it all comes to down to policy makers and those with power taking the views of scientists seriously. Moreover, joining organizations that pressure for change is also a useful step. There are solutions, just as there have been are are for other burgeoning environmental problems. It all comes down to whether our elected representatives wish to speak and act on behalf of the majority or only for those with short-term vested interests.
Lee said: 'aummm. becasue the mechanism by which greenhouse gasses cause warming, si to cause cooling at upper altitudes, is why. Congratulations, sunspot, you have stumbled upon confirmation of one of the key predictions of greenhouse climate theory, and one of the key signatures that distinguishes greenhouse gas warming from warming by other forcings'
sunspot says:
If global warming is caused by a greenhouse effect then why is the temperature not "rising" or "falling" from 4.5 klm and all altitudes above ? tick all the boxes and push the redraw button when viewing each altitude, you will see that the atmospheric temperature is between the highs and lows at all altitudes and 'confirmation of one of the key predictions of greenhouse climate theory' is KAPUT !!
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/51x
I think you all would like the new movie 2012
And I think you would like the movie Dumb and Dumber.
As this thread is about the empirical evidence for climate change, perhaps sunspot would like to [consider the changing trend in noctiluscent cloud observations](http://www.aad.gov.au/default.asp?casid=34672), and what this implies for his [claim of no cooling in the higher reaches of the atmosphere](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
As ever, he is welcome to refute or to otherwise counter the work in this field: in doing so he will surely review the best of the science that measures the temperature profile of the atmosphere, and the trends of such over time.
It would be very interesting to read sunspot's comprehensive analysis of this work, rather than to go no further that his reliance on Roy Spencer's widget at UAH...
Does that widget only go back to 1998, or am I missing something. Doesn't seem to be a great deal of help as it stands, all noise, no idea what point the troll is making.
AFAIK, the slower rate of warming in the upper troposphere was found to be as a result of stratosphere data interfering with the readings. This was in the last IPCC report, it isn't news.
Hi fellers!
Have you seen yesterday's article by Professor Lindzen at:
http://gazettextra.com/news/2010/apr/08/con-earth-never-equilibrium/
He writes: "To be sure, manâs emissions of carbon dioxide must have some impact. The question of importance, however, is how much." Almost word-for-word James's point at the beginning of this epic thread.
I'm watching Gardener's World on TV. The presenter says, "We're all worried about this interminable winter and its effect on our plants. It's FREEZING!" But we're OK in our house: my wife begged a carful of logs from a passing tree surgeon. Roaring fire in the grate... a week after Easter! Roll on global warming, I say!
Over on Bishop Hill they are discussing why you warmists are so... look, there's no diplomatic way of saying this so I'll just come out with it.... humourless. So straitlaced-straight-faced woefully tunnel-vision serious. And all over a few lousy tenths of a degree on a dodgy thermometer. Well, a contributor to BH has written alternative lyrics to Gilbert & Sullivan's Model Major General song. I hope it brings you at least a little chuckle:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/4/9/the-modern-climatologis…
He rhymes 'coniferous' with 'Briffa has'! Bodacious!
Miss you all. Group hug. Still trying to find loopholes in IPCC WG1, but having trouble scrolling down in woolly gloves. Brrr!
Humourless, Brent?
If only you realised how much of a laugh you and the band of Bishop's Boys (and the rest of the McinTyre support ecology system) occasionally provide!
The only trouble is, it's rather like a Romero film where the hillbillies have the zombies penned up and can safely laugh at them bumping into each other and knocking decaying body parts off each other all day.
However, add just a double figure IQ and as an entertainment, it all gets a bit tedious after a minute or two.
Just like any one of the burning hot non-news talking points you somehow feel compelled to bring here, repeatedly.
Double figure IQ? Thanks for the compliment, Chek!
I've just discovered a rich seam of - wait for it - Bloggerel! For instance, by George H (no, not that one, he died):
"There once was a man from the NASA
Who warned of impending disasta
He worked hard for years
To fill us with fears
But his science was only half-assta"
And, by Evan Jones when the sunspots went away:
"It is the very model of a modern Maunder minimum
(I wanted to be plainer but I couldnât find a Synonym)
And thanks to modern media itâs not believed by anyone
The sun has done a bunk and we will freeze for a millennium"
Marcel, are you still there? Your turn, mate. Give us a song!
Congratulations, you just summed up the IPCC report. As for the humourless jibe...wow, you've come to this?
Weeks and weeks of having your weak, yet presumptuous, arguments destroyed and you finally return to call us all...humourless?
If you'd bothered to read the above thread you'd see we've all been having a great laugh at your expense.
New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining phase of the current solar cycle. For the first time, researchers can show a timely link between the Sun and the climate of Earthâs thermosphere, the region above 100 km, an essential step in making accurate predictions of climate change in the high atmosphere.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/54h
The sunspot cycle unmasks the failing's of the CO2 model.
In a way, the calm is exciting, says Pesnell. "For the first time in history, we're getting to see what a deep solar minimum is really like." A fleet of spacecraft including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), the twin STEREO probes, the five THEMIS probes, Hinode, ACE, Wind, TRACE, AIM, TIMED, Geotail and others are studying the sun and its effects on Earth 24/7 using technology that didn't exist 100 years ago. Their measurements of solar wind, cosmic rays, irradiance and magnetic fields show that solar minimum is much more interesting and profound than anyone expected.
Modern technology cannot, however, predict what comes next. Competing models by dozens of top solar physicists disagree, sometimes sharply, on when this solar minimum will end and how big the next solar maximum will be. Pesnell has surveyed the scientific literature and prepared a "piano plot" showing the range of predictions. The great uncertainty stems from one simple fact: No one fully understands the underlying physics of the sunspot cycle.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/54g
The sunspot cycle unmasks the failing's of the CO2 model.
So, we re several years into the deepest solar minimum we've directly measured - and we're still on pace to have the warmest year we've ever measured. And somehow this 'unmasks the failing's of the CO2 model."
sunspot, you're delusional.
In response to a Klotzbach draft paper, Gavin Schmidt recently clarified what the models predicted regarding expected tropospheric warming rates compared to the surface. Note that unlike Ms Nova's understanding, the key metric is not the absolute warming or even the rate of warming in the troposphere - it's the relative rate of warming between troposphere and surface.
And the interesting thing was that expected tropospheric rates over land are slightly slower than at the surface, whereas expected rates over sea are faster.
Love the dry unemotive scientific language at the end ;-)
Then consider the implications of (IIRC) the fact that most of the radiosonde measurements have been taken over land...
Given that this is about 100km+ altitudes, what precise claims do you reckon your link falsifies for the (say) earth's surface, troposphere (up to about 18km) or stratosphere (up to about 50km)?
Here are some bits from that link you may want to factor in to your response:
To understand the long and short sunspot cycles influence on tropospheric temperature refer to this paper.
THE SOLAR WOLF-GLEISSBERG CYCLE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE EARTH
PDF: http://www.tinyurl.com.au/3pu
If you can comprehend what the word "Empirical" means then one would have to agree that the word does not apply to aGW as the sole cause of GW.
Brent it's nice to see that not all scientists are butt kissers and can speak out in opposition to the politically tarnished science of the IPCC.
http://gazettextra.com/news/2010/apr/08/con-earth-never-equilibrium/
Wow, you really killed that strawman! Well done! You must feel really good :-)
Now, how about reading up on the actual case for AGW rather than the fantasy case you have in your head? That one's a little tougher than straw.
Empirical Evidence ?
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/54p
That last link from sunspot is Lindzen in non-scientific media. He certainly knows his audience's weaknesses.
He does his best in the first paragraph or two to tarnish any scientific reputation he may have with readers who are moderately scientifically literate or capable of critical thought - e.g. through use of religious metaphors, and implying that daily variation being so much larger than the long term climate change variation means there is nothing to worry about.
He also claims overall feedback is negative (in part due to clouds) - which is rather interesting because I don't recall him being able to sustain such a claim in the face of scrutiny in the scientific literature. But he claims this with a straight face anyway - hoping most readers won't know any better.
He further claims "these models show much more warming than has been observed". To do this it seems he pulls a sleight of hand on unsuspecting readers - arguing from the warming expected from ONLY CO2 forcing AT EQUILIBRIUM, and comparing it with the current non-equilibrium state at a time when other negative forcings are at work.
He even implies that warming has stopped, and pulls the "failure of the models to predict no statistically significant warming over the last 14 years" fallacy. No, the fallacy is not that the observed warming over the last 14 years is not (quite) statistically significant to the 95% level, even though that line is intentionally misleading - it is that the model predictions include periods where warming is much slower or temporarily reverses - and are in line with observations.
He also discusses Al Gore's involvement in "activities such as these", which amongst other things he characterises as the "sale of indulgences".
Any wonder why Lindzen's reputation is in the toilet with other scientists? He's happy to actively and passively mislead the rubes who don't know any better with rubbish such as this. (And sunspot appears to be one of those in the absence of any evidence to the contrary.)
Sunspot's latest link (here in undisguised form) is to an article on volcanoes as a source - no, pretty much as the source - of CO2 acidification. Amongst other things the author repeats the claim "there has been no statistically significant warming over the last 15 years" as evidence that "greenhouse gas theory is under a cloud". That alone should disqualify him as a solid source of scientific information (but not to sunspot!)
The underlying article is by Timothy Casey, apparently a B.Sc geologist, and at first glance doesn't appear to be published in the literature. One wonders why not ;-)
It argues that no acidification has been observed in fresh water sources, therefore the ocean can't be acidifying either - essentially implying that the same processes and results SHOULD be observed in both, without justifying that assumption.
It even provides additional "empirical evidence":
Hmmmm, given that surface ocean pH is estimated to have reduced by 0.075 over 250 years...this so-called "empirical evidence" is highly amusing. (Let alone the questions that arise about how they chose the sample for this claim, what period they measured demand over, how they would even know if customers were responding to acidification - or whether they just pulled the claims from somewhere the sun don't shine.)
But if it's an example of the standard of "empirical evidence" required to convince sunspot, then it DOES have some (minor) useful purpose. It proves that sunspot's use of the phrase doesn't mean what scientists mean by it so it can be safely ignored in the future.
I suspect Brent's definition of "humourless" is "laughing at me rather than with me when I lampoon things based on my goldfish troll misconceptions".
So hey, in that case I'm more than happy to be humourless ;-)
Marcel, are you still there? Your turn, mate.
Marcel, being a lot quicker than most, said back in #144
I can smell people like you and James from a mile away.
Brent is funny the way racist jokes are funny.
eastangliaemails
Based on the correlation between changes in atmospheric concentrations of cosmogenic isotopes (10Be or 14C) and climate proxy records, some authors argue that solar activity may be the driver for an organised centennial to
millennial scale variability (e.g., (Bond et al., 2001; Fleitmann et al., 2003) (Karlen,
> 1996) (Wang et al., 2005b), whereas others point to modes of variability driven by processes within the climate system, for instance related to the deep ocean circulation (Bianchi and McCave, 1999) (Duplessy et al., 2001) (Oppo et al.,
2003) (Marchal et al., 2002).'
With best regards, Fortunat Joos
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5h3
Solar Variability and Climate Cycles,
Fleitman
According to the IPCC, âchanges in solar
irradiance since 1750 are estimated to cause a
radiative forcing of +0.12 [+0.06 to +0.30] W mâ2,â
which is an order of magnitude smaller than their
estimated net anthropogenic forcing of +1.66 W mâ2
from CO2 over the same time period (pp. 3,4).
However, the studies summarized in this chapter
suggest the IPCC has got it backwards, that it is the
sunâs influence that is responsible for most climate
change during the past century and beyond.
PDF http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5gy
I know it is received wisdom that volcanos only force climate for 1 to 2 years -
but in our SOAP transient models this is not the case where several large eruptions occur
(co- incidentally often in sunspot minima periods - see the actual magnitude of radiative
forcing in Figure 2 (and these effects are directly transmitted as continually propagating
coolings in ocean in HADCM3 and ECHO-G for up to decades i believe
Professor Keith Briffa
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5h4
Sunspot I might bothered to click on your worthless links if I didn't know that you can't tell satire from fact.
Everyone here can safely dismiss sunspots latest links. They come from a contrarian source (John Sullivan) and from what it looks like this tudy by Casey os an online one and has not appeared in a peer-reviewed journal (Casy does not have a PhD either - he says that he has a BSc on his web site). Instead the reference is cited as:
Casey, Timothy. "Volcanic Carbon Dioxide." Consulting Geologist Carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net Accessed March 2010. In other words, it is not in a journal. Quite embarrassing really, for sunspot, but given that he routinely humiliates himself on Deltoid, this is no surprise.
There is no indication at all that recent submarine volcanic activity is correlated with ocenai acidification. Its a pile of crap for those anxious to promote denial in any way they can clutching at the thinnest of straws.
Jeff Pinocchio your nose has grown another foot, two of the links from East Anglia emails are verbatim from Briffa and Joos , you lie again !
This PDF http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5gy is not from whom you say, it is about "Solar Variability and Climate Cycles", volcano's only have a mention and are not implicated to GW. Your a Scientist ?? haha, I suppose study and acumen is not your virtues, stop lying !
It is interesting to note that in this region of the
world, where climate models predict large increases
in temperature as a result of the historical rise in the
airâs CO2 concentration, real-world data show a
cooling trend since around 1940, when the
greenhouse effect of CO2 should have been most
prevalent. And, where warming does exist in the
record (between about 1820 and 1940), much of it
correlates with changes in solar irradiance and
volcanic activityâtwo factors free of anthropogenic
influence.
Hardly spotless sunspot,
You are a time wasting troll. You do not have a clue what you are talking about, as I and others have pointed out here. Your lack expertise in any of the fields you discuss, and you are forced to cite non peer-reviewed articles that are often obtained from contrarian web sites to support your gibberish. Note that your vacuous posts are falling on mostly deaf ears on this thread now. I will also refrain from responding to your baseless taunts from here on in.
I have science to do, and I just cannot bother to expend any more time and effort on your nonsense. You are one of those best summed up by the Dunning-Kruger effect. Or, to quote Charles Darwin: "Ignorance begets confidence more often than knowledge".
Hmmmm, I have a sneaking suspicion that climate scientists have noted that and have studied the reasons.
But I have a blinding certainty that the concept has not occurred to sunspot.
From: Tom Wigley
Here, ice cores are more valuable (CO2, CH4 and volcanic
aerosol changes). But the main external candidate is solar, and more
work is required to improve the "paleo" solar forcing record and to
understand how the climate system responds both globally and regionally
to solar forcing.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5ka
Lotharsson,
Exactly. The effect of aerosols in countering the effects of greenhouse gases between 1940 and 1980 has been extensively discussed in both the literature and amongst climate scientists. Yet this has bypassed sunspot.
As for his link @ #1267, it is more contrarian crap with a link to the Idso's appalling website. Thus it can be dismissed as more denialist garbage.
Every time sunspot contributes on this thread I hear the refrain of "Dunning-Kruger! Dunning-Kruger! Dunning-Kruger!!!!" ringing in my ears.
The IPCC is pulling Pinocchio's strings, so much for peer review !
only when it suits it seems.
The chairman of the IPCC has repeatedly said the report relies solely on peer-reviewed literature to support its findings. He has said research that hasn't appeared in peer-reviewed journals should be thrown "into the dustbin" (see the last line of this newspaper article). But our audit has discovered almost 5,600 non-peer-reviewed references in this report.
In elementary schools in the United States, students are assigned grades ranging from an A to an F, based on the mark they've achieved out of 100 (see Wikipedia's table here). Most parents would be alarmed if their child brought home a report card similar to the one received by the IPCC.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5mu
The web site sunspot links to @ #1270 is credited thusly:
*Begun in early 2009, the NOconsensus.org web site is wholly researched, written, designed, and published by Donna Laframboise, a self-employed photographer. Prior to 2002, Ms. Laframboise wrote news features, weekly columns, and daily editorials for Canadian newspapers and magazines. Between 1993 and 1998, she was a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association - serving as a Vice-President from 1998-2001*.
'Nuff said. What are Ms. Laframboise's qualifications in climate science? Clearly nil. Its the D-K effect all over again. Sunspot, crawl back into your hole. The more you write, the more you look like a complete idiot.
From the IPCC AR4 Principles Governing IPCC Work: Appendix A
PROCEDURES FOR THE PREPARATION, REVIEW, ACCEPTANCE, ADOPTION,
APPROVAL AND PUBLICATION OF IPCC REPORTS
Annex 2
PROCEDURE FOR USING NON-PUBLISHED/NON-PEER-REVIEWED SOURCES IN IPCC
REPORTS
"Because it is increasingly apparent that materials relevant to IPCC Reports, in particular, information about the experience and practice of the private sector in mitigation and adaptation activities, are found in sources that have not been published or peer-reviewed (e.g., industry journals, internal organisational publications, non-peer reviewed reports or working papers of research institutions, proceedings of workshops etc) the following additional procedures are provided. These have been designed to make all references used in IPCC Reports easily accessible and to ensure that the IPCC process remains open and transparent."
It's really not that difficult to find this stuff.
Contrary to statements by the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the celebrated 2007 report does not rely solely on research published in reputable scientific journals. It also cites press releases, newspaper and magazine clippings, working papers, student theses, discussion papers, and literature published by green advocacy groups. Such material is often called "grey literature."
We've been told this report is the gold standard. We've been told it's 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have not come within a mile of a scientific journal.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5mv
and a huge trail of these
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5mw
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5mx
admit it, the evidence is not empirical
Sunspot
I am just about to reference a European Environment Agency report in a paper I am writing. I am referencing it because it contains an extremely concise review of several contrasting opinions about a matter that is germane to my paper's subject matter.
In your opinion, am I about to commit some sort of deception by citing the report rather than the original papers, which are clearly and unambiguously referenced within it?
Hasis, no that's not my opinion.
My thrust is that Mr Pinocchio nose has double standards regarding his peer review obsession.
No, you haven't. That's basically the case for WG1, but not WG2 & WG3.
Go figure out the difference between the WG1 report and the WG2 and WG3 reports. Then come back and tell us which of them are allowed to use non-peer-reviewed sources - and why that "report card" is based on egregious misunderstanding of the IPCC rules.
I'm betting you won't.
That's a very bizarre conclusion to draw from a misunderstanding of the IPCC peer-review rules. It's like you haven't even determined whether there's any empirical evidence in the whole 3000+ pages, but you're quite prepared to say there isn't...
Oh, and sunspot - did you check that these guys classified all the references correctly? Were they the ones who are so competent they couldn't figure out whether PNAS was peer-reviewed or not but fudged it by "giving it the benefit of the doubt"?
Lotharsson,
Good points. the other I wish to make is that the completed IPCC document went through 3 rounds of external and 12 rounds of internal peer-review. As a result, the conclusions are much milder than they would have been had they not gone through this process. The document is far from extreme. Many scientists believe that they do not go remotely far enough. But this is what peer-review does.
Furthermore, I do not need to be taught about peer-review from some contrarian hack like sunspot, nor from a feminist writer and photographer from Canada. The fact is that Ms. Laframboise has no apparent qualifications in any field relevant to Earth or climate science. This reveals that she either thinks she knows the science very well (with a tip to Dunning-Kruger) or else that she isa basing her views on her own personal political ideology (like sunspot). I think the answer is obvious to this question.
You guys would do well to stop wasting your time on that prevaricating moron.
I bet they would!
They'd be alarmed that people who don't teach their child and clearly have no teaching skills in the first place are attempting to rate their children's progress on externally defined metrics which they don't understand and can't even apply correctly and for which they don't even have the assessment skills, all the while totally failing to assess, appreciate or communicate the big picture of their child's level of achievement. And they'd be even more alarmed that other people who don't have these insights might be mislead about their child's performance by this type of false "report card".
Wait...that's not what you meant?!
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5p2
Hmmm...the global implications.....
sunspot's near-perfect record for getting the implications ass-backwards is maintained - from the link provided:
Finding this took a total of about 5 seconds.
sunspot appears to be vying with Monckton for "most reliably inaccurate commenter on climate science". You'd make money overall if you blindly bet against any comment sunspot made.
Slothy Lothy so you think this will only have a regional effect do you ?
Abstract. Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum (about 1650â1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe.
Yep, sunspot, that's regional.
Denialism is a fascinating phenomenon. Let's compare the quote from the scientists that sunspot linked to:
...with sunspot's response when presented with that very quote:
Truly astonishing. I just wish they'd open up a betting market on sunspot's prognostications - there'd be plenty who'd back them - so that I could set up a bot to bet against them...
Slothy Lothy so you think this will only have a regional effect do you ?
That's what the paper you cited claims, moron.
Abstract. Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum (about 1650â1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe.
Yes, and so? Here's the relevant part of the abstract:
Regional all the way. And for people like you who are too stupid to understand the bleeding obvious, they threw in
That's from the abstract you're quoting from the paper you're citing, you pathetic cretin.
And even if it were otherwise, even if low solar activity results in severe winters globally, that wouldn't tell us about average global temperature -- you do know that it isn't winter everywhere at the same time, don't you? And even if it were, that would have no bearing on AGW -- on the fact that human activity increases greenhouse gases, resulting in gradual warming of the globe.
you nerds are a bit slow to catch on.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/5wh
One hopes sunspot is a POE, but I really doubt it. In which case, this unintentional irony is most amusing.
Hi guys!
I hope we can all agree that the latest news on the AGW scare is all good. There's Solar Cycle 24 which just doesn't want to get started. This'll help cool things down. There's Eyjafjallajokull dusting the atmosphere with lovely reflective ash. And over on 'Watts Up With That' there's some great work being done on dodgy thermometers in the arctic.... it seems that after a few beers, the temperature at a place called Nunavut can soar by 15C, but just for an hour. Between 9pm and 11pm it went from chilly to tropical and then back down to chilly! Seems that my expression "a few lousy tenths of a degree on dodgy thermometers" was an understatement.
Here in England, the election campaign is hardly mentioning the absurd Global Warming scare story. In one way, I wish it were more prominent. We need a statesman to declare the multibillion-pound windmill programme an environmental and financial disaster, and cancel them before they bankrupt us.
By the way, we STILL have frost in the mornings. It's nearly May, fer Chrissakes! Outrageous! If a new Little Ice Age has started, triggered by a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, maybe we should be planning a major CO2 Production Programme. Brrr!
And another thing: Remember how you warmists claimed that the terrible blizzards of last winter were due to Global Warming? Well, there's an upward trend in arctic sea ice: largest coverage in 8 years at this date. Is this also caused by Global Warming? And, with more ice, will the increased albedo put us at risk of a 'tipping point'?
And another thing: I'm sure that you warmists are up to date on your purchase of Carbon Offsets. Well, a recent investigation suggests that the offsetting industry is.... er... not actually helping. Here's a link that may save you all money:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0420/Buying-carbon-offsets-ma…
g/day brent I thought that with all the freezing climate change over there that you had met your demise in the same way as a woolly mammoth !
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/669
brent, slothy will be in soon for a babble,
twoofy is still looking for his dummy
and harvey has gone to buy a chainsaw to prune his nose
Sunspot,
Speaking of endangered species, sunspots are pretty rare these days...
Maybe Slothy Twoofy and Harvey are away on holiday trying to get some sunshine onto their vitamin D deficient, lilly white, blubbery carcasses.
#570: There were only 89 months to save the world (according to Prince Charles). We're down to 88 now...
Aw look guys, you hurt Brent's feelings earlier. He can't get over it. He can't go away. He must win. He must beat you at whatever cost.
It must have been embarrassing for him to have his every argument completely destroyed earlier.
Oh by the way Brent, let me counter your weak "it's cold here!" idiocy by saying it's hot where I am. Unusually hot. Being a much smarter person than you I know weather means nothing though. Thanks for playing.
I'm guessing we'll see a few more months of sporadic weak tea postings cheered on by a clueless sunspot who resorts to childish name calling and insults - leading Brent to respond in kind, which rather clashes with the faux-civil trying-hard-to-be-witty-over-a-mocking-tone veneer that Brent usually aims for - at first.
Anyone want to bet on a year?
Quote from Oleg Pokrovsky of Russia's Voeikov Main Geophysical Observatory: "Politicians who placed their bets on global warming may lose the pot."
I am reminded of the film "Monty Python's Life of Brian", where a discussion on 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' ended hilariously with a list of exceptions as long as your arm.
In this chatroom we hear, "The scientists are unanimious."
-Apart from Spencer
-Yeah, obviously apart from Spencer
-And Soon
-Well, all right, apart from Spencer and Soon, the scientists are unanimous.
-And Baliunas.
-And Svensmark
-And Abdussamatov and Solanki and Gray and dâAleo and Plimer and Zagoni and Briggs and Zurayk and Dyson.
-Well, apart from Spencer and Soon and Baliunas and Abdussamatov and Solanki and Gray and dâAleo and Plimer and Zagoni and Briggs and Zurayk and Dyson and Svensmarkâ¦.. the SCIENCE IS SETTLED!
Not that science works by opinion poll. What bugs me is that the whole house of cards is based on a few lousy tenths of a degree on a dodgy thermometer. Look out of the window, guys. Itâs business as usual. The polecaps are not melting, New York is not being inundated, the end is not nigh. Itâs business as usual.
Brent, did you just call D'Aleo a scientist?
You lose. Again.
Colour me surprised - Brent making a false claim in order to attack it? Whatever is the world coming to!
Note that "the science is settled" is shorthand for "enough of the core science is strong enough to be very concerning", NOT for "the scientists are unanimious [sic]".
Who is a "skeptic" but has been trying for ... what, a decade or more now? ... to come up with a reason for his skepticism that stands up to scrutiny with no success? And who allowed his dodgy satellite temperature processing to stand for several years because it suited his argument, even though others were saying it seemed wrong? And when corrected...it didn't exactly support his argument any more? He reports it really is warming, and quite a lot. Which is rather at odds with your "business at usual" assertion.
And yet you seem to think that "Spencer" will really bolster your argument.
Yep, they'll really bolster your argument too, because their papers stand up to scrutiny about as well as Spencer's do.
You're not doing well if these are the first three you can think of. Even though you give lip service to the idea that it's not numbers that matter - but strength of argument - it's almost like you haven't bothered assessing their claims. Do you think that bolsters your argument?
You never know, he may come up with something new. But to date he doesn't appear to be able to substantiate his suspicions about other climate influences either. And it would have to be a spectacular piece of work to take current climate understanding outside of the current understanding of uncertainty bounds for existing influences. We all hope he does have a non-anthropogenic explanation for a useful chunk of observed climate change...but don't rate his chances very highly.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Are you actually playing the POE or are you really this clueless?
Try looking into how well "Heaven and Earth" stands up to scrutiny - firstly on the level of basic integrity (e.g. fairly representing sources and graphs and the like), let alone on the scientific claims. You should be smart enough to be able to do this.
Oh, and for REAL bonus points - reconcile Spencer's contention that climate sensitivity has just got to be low with Plimer's observations that lead to climate sensitivity being in the middle of the range identified by the IPCC.
And once you've done that, reconcile all the other incompatible skeptical positions - or decide which ones you discard and tell us why. (And then count the remaining ones and compare with the count of your original list...I think it will merit a comprehensive rewrite at that point.)
ROFL! Science by "looking out the window"!
Which is doubly amusing because on a recent thread commenting on Jo Nova's conspiracy theories, one of the assembled "skeptics" accused "warmists" of making a fallacious argument (complete with Classical reference that escapes me right now) that amounted to "look out the window, it's warming".
I wish you "skeptics" would get together and figure out a consistent story. Half of you think one thing and the other half think the exact opposite.
Seeing you really need help I'll remind you of Lindzen - although he has been trying about as long as Spencer with the same spectacular lack of success, and has instead resorted to unsupported innuendo and conspiracy theories in the media rather than arguing his case in the scientific literature. Maybe that's why you left him out - you DO have some potential for embarrassment regarding really bad arguments?
Oh god, is Brent back?!
"What bugs me is that the whole house of cards is based on a few lousy tenths of a degree on a dodgy thermometer."
Brent, you either know that isn't true - in which case it is apparent what you're doing - or you think it is true, in which case you have just demonstrated that yo are utterly and completely clueless about the science yoo are attempting to dismiss.
Once anybody mentions Plimer these days they're scraping at the bottom of the barrel. Even SamG is wary of him.
Wrong*.
*Two seconds Google, two seconds cut and paste
Lee - Brent is a lying liar who lies. He cares not for science and all about pushing his political agenda.
Wow, a new record low - "4" on the Google Debunk Index!
Better trolls please.
At the moment there are no Arctic-wide satellite measurements of ice thickness, because of the end of the NASA Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) mission last October. NASA has mounted an airborne sensor campaign called IceBridge to fill this observational gap.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Trolls, Lotharsson? The word was given a definition above in this thread.
We are not trolls. We look you doomsday-mongers in the eye and challenge your harebrained faith in the Global Warming religion.
You doubtless believe in every scare story that emerges, and will believe in the next one. When finally this scare story is debunked, I wonder if you, like your Jehovahs Witness cousins, will keep the faith. Faith: the holding of a position regardless of evidence.
From the font of all knowledge:
And it's being debunked this very day (click on draw graph).
ROFLMAO! That's the best laugh of the week! Well done!
Shame you had to go for comedy and religious accusations rather than, well, you know, actual robust challenges to the scientific position.
Projection: thy name is Brent.
Shorter Brent 1: my evidence-free assertion that your position on the science is faith-based is not itself faith-based.
Shorter Brent 2: I can't answer your questions on the basis for my skepticism and which other skeptics my particular brand of skepticism invalidates - but trust me, my skepticism is not faith-based.
Really really short Brent: Waaaahhhh!!!
Well, apart from Spencer and Soon and Baliunas and Abdussamatov and Solanki and Gray and dâAleo and Plimer and Zagoni and Briggs and Zurayk and Dyson and Svensmarkâ¦.. the SCIENCE IS SETTLED!
As has repeatedly been pointed out, 97% of climate scientists accept AGW. That would leave ... let's see ... 100 - 97 is ... let me get out my calculator ... 3%. Your list would be considerably too small even if those folks were all climate scientists.
Making transparently stupid arguments is not the way to convince anyone of your position, Brent.
Not that science works by opinion poll.
Uh, right, the science is what you say it is and not what the vast majority of researchers in the field -- the people who actually do the science -- say it is.
You so-called "skeptics" (people too stupid, ignorant, and ideological to follow the evidence to its inferentional ends) who dis "consensus" are clueless about what it is and why it matters. Consider Fermat's Last Theorem or the Four Color Theorem. A skeptic/moron like you, Brent, might read about the proofs of these theorems and judge, in your ignorant arrogant little minds, that they don't count as proofs or aren't convincing; you might even declare them wrong. That would leave you lacking knowledge or even having a false belief. People who aren't morons like you, OTOH, understand that the consensus among mathematicians, particularly among those in the relevant fields, is that the proofs are valid, and understand that consensus among those best able to judge that some technical claim is true is damn strong evidence that it is true.
You doubtless believe in every scare story that emerges
The last time you visited that on your trip around the goldfish bowl, it developed that sunspot believes the anti-vaccine scare.
Faith: the holding of a position regardless of evidence
Yes, as when you say stupid stuff like the above. "doubtless" indeed.
At the moment there are no Arctic-wide satellite measurements of ice thickness, because of the end of the NASA Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) mission last October. NASA has mounted an airborne sensor campaign called IceBridge to fill this observational gap.
It is striking how often sunspot omits material right next to the material he quotes that undermines or negates his views and claims:
Maybe Slothy Twoofy and Harvey are away on holiday trying to get some sunshine onto their vitamin D deficient, lilly white, blubbery carcasses.
I get plenty of vitamin D because I bicycle 3000 miles/year in sunny California (where the view out my window may be a bit different than yours); how about you?
Here is the noble crusader Brent looking us in the eye and challenging our "faith":
So yeah, challenging by lying. Funny how quickly our brave challenger turned on, well, all of that.
Brent's definition of sceptic is someone who believes everything Watts and McIntyre tell him.
Hi John.
Changed my mind. On the Unsceptic side there are:
(a) Watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) who desperately wish for catastrophe in one form or another, preferably caused by man, ridden with guilt, hypocritically living the same energy-intensive lifestyle as others but berating others for using the stuff.
(b) Neoapocalypticists, the modern-day version of the "End is Nigh" sandwich-board people of yesteryear, who follow every crazed Armageddon Myth before moving onto the next'un.
(c) Career scientists, filling their boots at the taxpayers' expense, media-savvy enough to attribute every variation to Global Warming and calling for extra "funding" (a euphemism for the wealth created by productive members of society) to pad their seat on the gravy train.
The educated informed and sincere people I have met on this site bear an uncanny resemblance to Jehovahs Witnesses. In both cases, when the End of Days fails to materialise, they rewrite the forecasts and carry on a few more decades. The JHs can be dismissed as an annoying fringe of nutters; the damage caused by you warmists is on a much larger scale, with government agencies and offsetting scams and commodities trading and green taxes the consequences of belief in your myth.
But - as they say - if you can't beat 'em, then join 'em. So I'll set up my fan-powered windmill and sell the current back to the grid at a juicy markup. Like Jeff Harvey, criss-crossing the atlantic on business class, I'll tell people it's all for a good cause. Green and prosperous: makes perfect sense!
Brent returns with no scientific argument but more revelations from his faith-based view of the world.
Brent's done a superb job of outing himself completely.
If any reasonable person (which don't include ideological extremists) read is latest rant they'd see him for what he is.
Aww, how cute. Brent is just trolling for a reaction now.
I think Brent believes what he writes -- which reveals him to be a rather dimwitted entrenched ideologue, incapable of a shred of intellectual honesty. But then, that's the standard profile of deniers.
I don't believe he believes what he writes at all. If he were so secure in his views, why would be need to come here and try to prove us all wrong?
Deep down he knows what's happening, but he has to deny it because accepting global warming is letting the left win. In his view it's a political argument, after all.
Interesting article in yesterday's UK Daily Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7639614/Whale-excrement-coul…
And the Arctic sea ice is still above average. Don't buy property in northern Greenland just yet...
Brent said: "And the Arctic sea ice is still above average."
Above average what, Brent?
Or are you merely content to draw whatever self-comforting meaning your meagre understanding affords such a vague assertion?
Oh, hi Brent!
How's this coming along?
Hi, Salty, and thanks for jogging my memory.
It's quite a big job to go through the IPCC WG1 document, but here are a few thoughts:
1.Technical Summary p.32: CO2 is referred to as a "long-lived greenhouse gas". I make the half-life 123 +/- 2 months, about 10 years. That ain't long-lived. Britain's Royal Society claims it's 'millennia'. Newton would be turning in his grave if he knew that his august institution had been hijacked by a generation of intellectual pygmies.
2.Same page claims a tiny effect for solar forcing, 0.12W/m2 out of a Total Solar Irradiance of some 1600W/m2. This takes no account of the Svensmark hypothesis that solar activity affects albedo, with variations in cosmic rays causing variations in cloud cover and hence albedo. Herschel noticed a correlation between sunspot activity and agricultral productivity; the Parana River supports a sunspot/rainfall link. TSI is an oversimplification.
3.In Summary for Policymakers, p12, it is claimed that âwater vapour changes represent the largest feedbackâ. There is an asymmetric assumption here, namely that warmer -> more water vapour -> more greenhouse affect, but the equal and opposite must also be true, that in the event of cooling, cooler -> less water vapour -> more cooling. Scaremongers have a great sensitivity to positive feedback and a blindness to negative feedback.
4.Same page: âCloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertaintyâ. Unlike every doommongering IPCC statement which is rated according to a likelihood statement (from âvirtually certainâ to âexceptionally unlikelyâ), the vast army of gravy-train pundits (700 of these hangers on) fails to grade the effect of clouds on climate (is it 'more likely than not', or what?). The astrophysicists will, I hope, soon give us chapter and verse. When this happens, the hijacked adjective 'likely' will again be used adverbially: "We climatologists likely had not the slightest understanding of the effects of the sun on weather - or is that climate? - and were likely drawing our salaries under false pretences."
5.Chapter 1, p101, shows a terrifying graph with a 1840-2000 timescale. This is cherrypicking. A 1750-1840 timescale would show that a new Ice Age will engulf us during Victoriaâs reign.
6.Chapter 3, p. 242 shows a decline in temperature between 1940 and 1975, during which time CO2 increased. This disproves the claimed linear relationship between CO2 PPM and temperature. The CO2 hypothesis - of a fictitious linear relationship - is false. Those who support it are as expert in the interpretation of chaotic data sets as gypsies reading tea-leaves: articulate, convincing, clever and relient on gullible punters.
7.Chapter 3: page after page of cherrypicked graphs 1900-2000 and 1840-2000. A glance at the Aletsch Glacier graph (1500BC-2000AD) shows an unexceptional retreat since 1860. It comes and goes. Big deal. Without the underlying physics, extraoploting such graphs are vacuous numerology. The only attempt at âunderlying physicsâ in the whole document is aimed at a useful trace gas, carbon dioxide, which constitutes one part of the greenhouse effect.
8.Chapter 4, p339: ââ¦decline in annual mean arctic sea ice extent since 1978â¦â has now been halted and reversed, not that the assembled brains can be blamed at time of writing for the pesky planetâs refusal to conform to their dumb-arsed extrapolation of a brief trend.
9.Chapter 4, p.339: âsnow cover has decreased in most regionsâ. Whoops. Tell it to the Texans. Nearly May and Iâve got a blanket round my shoulders here in England. Global Warming my foot.
10.Chapter 4, p 376: FAQ: âIs the Amount of Snow and Ice on Earth Decreasing?â Answer given in the IPCC paper: 'yes'. Correct answer: 'Is it hell, but please give us a research budget in any case.'
11.Chapter 6: page 467. A 1300-year graph, shaped like a âhockey stickâ claims to show temperatures in the NH, but shows no Medieval Warm Period (dismissed on p.469) or Little Ice Age, when British ports had to contend with sea ice, fer chrissakes. Google this: âUntil the onset of the Little Ice Age, the Icelanders also grew a hardy strain of barley in the north, south, and southeast of their homeland. However, the farmers had abandoned barley cultivation in the north by the end of the twelfth century. By the fifteenth century, no one grew cereal crops. Despite occasional experiments, barley did not return for eight centuries.â
12.Chapter 9, p.729: âAnthropogenic change has been detected in surface temperature with very high significance levels (less than 1% error probability).â Oh yeah? The tossers who wrote this may well be the sons and daughters of the halfwits who were claiming the exact opposite in 1975, when temperatures had been falling for a generation.
13.A recent study (in my house) suggests with significance levels above 97.831% that there is a bunch of scaremongering pseudoscientists earning a living from a patently not-happening catastrophe.
Chek (1324): You're quite right to point out my inexcusable vagueness. By 'above average', I meant that the arctic ice area has been above the 1979-2006 mean since the beginning of April.
Have a look at Watts Up With That: they have many good articles on the unravelling of the Global Warming myth. Pesky planet, eh?!
Here are some more errors of these intellectual pygmies. Clearly, only I am on the level of Newton. If he were alive today he would verily be a skeptic. The rest of you should be kissing my feet for adressing these problems.
1. It is a well known fact that grapes were grown in England during the Medieval Warming Period!!!! Why is this left out?!!
2. The graph on page 135 is clearly cherry picked. It shows the years 1534 to 2005. But had it started 1534 the warming trend would be less statistically significant than it is now! Ah ha!!!!
3. Medieval Warming Period!!!!!! Every one knows it was warm in Europe then! Grapes!!!
4. Pages 1-1600 show evidence of warming. Big deal. It's all made up. I know this. My evidence is far too complex for you intellectual pygmies to understand so I won't bother reproducing it.
5. Token attack on funding for no reason.
6. Um.....
7. SCIENTISTS WHO DISAGREE WITH ME ARE TOSSERS!!11!
8. Token ad homenim attack that proves nothing.
9.GRAPES!!!!!!!!!
You learn [something wrong](http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeser…) every day with Brent.
Brent posts a list. Let us just look at the very first item as a sample indicative of the quality you can expect from the rest:
"Technical Summary p.32: CO2 is referred to as a "long-lived greenhouse gas". I make the half-life 123 +/- 2 months, about 10 years."
That is the lifetime of an individual molecule, not concentration of CO2, which is what causes the greenhouse effect. It is like arguing that since the lifetime of an individual player on the field is 5 minutes in a football game, and implying that the numbers on the field must be decreasing rapidly.
Marcel, is this you under yet another psedoe er... psudon.... er... false name?
Yeah, GRAPES indeed, thank you for mentioning them! And Icelandic barley. Let's hope that the planet does warm up a bit: those poor old Icelanders would welcome a return of agriculture.
SaltyCurrent invited me to challenge anything dodgy in the IPCC's report. It's only a small list, but it's a start. As for your crack about Newton, with a few small equations he opened up a whole universe. Will we hold Mann and his mates in the same esteem in future centuries, I wonder?
[Brent](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
You are wrong in so many ways that I seriously doubt your claims to having completed any type of higher education.
Before we start to pick your points to mercilessly mascerated pieces, will you stand by a claim of scientific veracity of your pronouncements?
In other words, if it is shown that your points are scientifically ill-informed/ignorant/misrepresenting of the facts/spurious, will you accept that you are speaking from your arse?
Think carefully now...
Hi Bernard,
I accept your challenge. If you demolish what I wrote in #1326, then I'll declare defeat and shut right up.
Give it your best shot.
Problem is Bernard, Brent believes what he wants. Is the solid scientific fact that temperature and climate are different troublesome for your political beliefs?
Ignore it!
Say it's been cold in England and Texas! Yes, that's a well thought out scientific point that can not in any way be proven wrong.
Oh what's this?.
Global warming is global?
Who knew?
Brent's been trolling us for ages now and he's still yet to land a single blow.
Pesky planet indeed.
I don't believe he believes what he writes at all. If he were so secure in his views, why would be need to come here and try to prove us all wrong?
The same could be asked of us. This is not a valid form of argument.
Deep down he knows what's happening, but he has to deny it because accepting global warming is letting the left win. In his view it's a political argument, after all.
He may or may not know what is happening "deep down", but on the surface, where his beliefs lay, I think he believes that all "warmists" are leftists who fit his stereotypical view of them as expressed in #1317.
Problem is Bernard, Brent believes what he wants.
See? We agree.
And the Arctic sea ice is still above average.
Extent isn't volume, moron.
I accept your challenge. If you demolish what I wrote in #1326, then I'll declare defeat and shut right up.
No one gives a fuck whether you declare that you're an ignorant cretin -- it is already obvious.
Brent, your grasp of the concept of 'global' is akin to the Blackadder character Baldrick's grasp of differential calculus. Same with your grasp of the state of the cryosphere and how it's indicating increased global temperature.
As for your 'challenge' given what you've actively failed to comprehend so far in this megathread, well let me put it like this: if McinTyre is the Baldrick figure of climate science, and Montford is his Baldrick, and in turn you're the bookbinder's Baldrick, Bernard would probably find it more rewarding (and get more comprehension) cutting out the middlemen and explaining climate directly to a turnip.
So it melted, then it froze again, then it nearly melted, now its undetermined if it's freezing again.
Whatever !!! it's been hotter before !!!
This is Empirical evidence of higher temperatures than now.
YELLOWKNIFE, NT â APRIL 2010 â High in the Mackenzie Mountains, scientists are finding a treasure trove of ancient hunting tools being revealed as warming temperatures melt patches of ice that have been in place for thousands of years.
Tom Andrews, an archaeologist with the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife and lead researcher on the International Polar Year Ice Patch Study, is amazed at the implements being discovered by researchers.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6ht
>Whatever !!! it's been hotter before !!! This is Empirical evidence of higher temperatures than now.
Are you aware that's what happening now is not the pinnacle of global warming, and the worst of the impacts are still decades or more in the future? Saying that global warming is not a problem because what's happening now isn't alarming (although in some ways it is) completely misses the point.
yeah yeah...ok
"We could have an ice age any time," Dr. Goldberg says, "Over the past one million years, we have experienced eight ice ages. Eighty percent of the last million years was ice age. We are lucky to live in this short inter-glacial period."
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6hn
empirical what ??????????
Buried deep within the report is a compelling piece of evidence. In volume two, there is a memorandum submitted as evidence from Lord Lawson of Blaby, chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was in response to four very significant questions from the investigating committee. This memo confirms the claims by many global warming skeptics that the scientists at CRU were trying to hide data and silence the skeptics. The questions asked by the investigative committee are as follows:
(i) Have the CRU scientists been manipulating the raw surface temperature data in a way that is less than wholly objective and dispassionate?
(ii) Have they refused dissenting scientists and/or other outsiders with a bona fide interest in global warming access to the raw data, contrary to the proper canons of scientific research and to the demands of scientific integrity?
(iii) Have they been improperly seeking to avoid answering Freedom of information Act requests?
(iv) Have they actively sought to prevent papers by dissenting scientists, statisticians, or other informed commentators from being peer-reviewed and/or published, again contrary to the proper canons of scientific research and to the demands of scientific integrity?
Lord Lawson's response to these questions is damning:
We believe that there is compelling evidence both independent of the leaked email exchanges and arising from those emails to suggest that the answers to (ii), (iii) and (iv) above are clearly 'yes'.
However, Lord Lawson chooses his words more carefully in answering the smoking-gun question at the top of the list:
Moreover, we are disturbed by the CRU scientists' treatment of the so-called divergence problem. That is the fact that, for that period of time where both a proxy global temperature series and a recorded global temperature series are available, the two series markedly diverge. This clearly suggests either that the proxy series is unreliable or that the recorded series is unreliable (or possibly both: the point is that they cannot both be true). The CRU scientists' attempt to hide the problem by concealing the divergence demonstrates, we believe, a lack of integrity. http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6p1
>Lord Lawson's response to these questions is damning:
"We believe that there is compelling evidence, however, we're not going to tell you what that evidence is."
Yes, that's compelling evidence that Lawson and his fellow conspiracy nuts have nothing.
hahahaha, another ex spert
The political problems between Cuba and the United States will be resolved in 50 years when the island disappears under water because of climate change, said Carlos Pascual, the U.S. ambassador in Mexico City.
Mr. Pascual, born in Havana in 1959, was introduced as an âexpert in climate change and renewable energyâ at a Forum called Green Business Expo held at a private university in Mexico City.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6p4
Shorter sunspot:
_One person was once wrong about something, therefore anyone else who says anything I don't like is also wrong._
It seems the diplomat was making a joke.
Hmmm.....
the arctic sea ice is not following the script, isn't supposed to be VANISHING ??
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6p9
So sunspot, if I ask you to give me the heaviest gold object you have, and I'll replace it with a bigger, though gold plated version, by your "logic" you'll be happy with that?
After all it's only the surface area that's important, right?
Interestingly, if you go back to the press releases on the record minimum extent in 2007 at NSIDC here:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2007.html
And search the entire set of release for the word âvolumeâ, you wonât find it used anywhere that year. The volume worry is a more recent talking point that first appeared in October 2008 when it became apparent that extent wasnât continuing to decline. They couldnât tout another record low extent, so volume became the next big thing:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2008/
Yep, good diagnosis for warmers
The possible mental health conditions that could be caused by global warming range from irritability to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, sexual dysfunction, and drug abuse. http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6oy
>when it became apparent that extent wasnât continuing to decline.
Liar. [It is continuing to decline](http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure3.png).
daRv, that was a crappy graph, your being an ice denier, these are higher quality graphs and they clearly show that its bloody cold up there ! http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6p9
>its (sic) bloody cold up there
Straw man. Nobody claimed that it isn't cold in the arctic.
and antarctic ice, it's cool.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6pm
incase your vision impaired, http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6pn red line above black line, what does that tell you dave ?
shorter daRv: der, its a weather event
It's the long term trend that matters, moron.
funny thing is daRv, regardless of volume, the extent demonstrates that the trend has faltered, if the world has warmed because of CO2 then there would be a continual decline of sea ice extent, it's not happening !
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6p2
Sunspot said: And search the entire set of release for the word âvolumeâ, you wonât find it used anywhere that year. The volume worry is a more recent talking point that first appeared in October 2008 when it became apparent that extent wasnât continuing to decline. They couldnât tout another record low extent, so volume became the next big thing"
And because you really don't have a clue what you're talking about, you never thought to search for the term 'mass'.
In the Sea Ice chapter of the IPCC's 4th report they have a 'Frequently Asked Question' on p.376: "Is the Amount of Snow and Ice on Earth Decreasing?"
First word of their 'answer' is "Yes."
They are working on the 5th report now. What are the chances of them changing the 'answer' to "No."?
If they'll be kind enough to add me to the drafting committee (on the same money as this vast army of idle penpushing fibbers) I will write: "No, but just to be on the safe side we need to work on it for another decade or two. Ask us again when we're writing the 6th or 7th report."
>funny thing is daRv, regardless of volume, the extent demonstrates that the trend has faltered, if the world has warmed because of CO2 then there would be a continual decline of sea ice extent, it's not happening !
Utterly incredulous argument. CO2 is an influence on climate, and hence sea ice. However, it is not the only influence on climate, and I've never seen anyone claim otherwise. What an obvious strawman argument.
Brent said "I will write: "No, but just to be on the safe side we need to work on it for another decade or two. Ask us again when we're writing the 6th or 7th report."
In other words, you'd lie.
Not exactly news round here.
Sunspot, reading about volcanoes in the IPCC report, I find that a big factor in Global Warming is "aerosols".
Just as we thought! Global Warming, a figment of tree-huggers' imagination, was always a human problem. It's aerosols like Dave R and the loathsome Marcel Kincaid who keep this great scam rolling.
(What's the betting that Truth Machine OMMM will emerge from the slime and croak, 'Don't be nasty to Marcel. I know him intimately.')
Brent I think your doing enough of a job on yourself without the need for intervention.
Mmmm.
Nature Magazine, the academic journal that introduced the world to X-rays, DNA double helix, wave nature of particles, pulsars, and more recently the human genome, is set to publish a paper in June that shows atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is responsible for only 5-10% of observed warming on Earth.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6qc
sunspot @ 1363:
ROFL!
CFP is you idea of a reliable source???
Is it also just me or are the adverts that everyone else is getting served with that page for a 'Hot Stocks' scam and '2012: The End of the Wrold'?
The headline alone made me crack up: 30,000 Anti-Global Warming Scientists Canât Be Wrong.
here's the source if you can read it.
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6qh
The adv. on that page that cracked me up is the "win a green card" sheez yud have to be desperate
University of Turku, Department of Physics, the study shows that carbon dioxide is a significantly smaller impact on global warming than previously thought. Tulokset perustuvat muun muassa spektrianalyysiin. Results are based on, inter alia, spectrum analysis
translated page,
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6qi
Oh, I get it...
[Sunspot](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) is a poe!
What's wrong with these pesky Finns? Looks like the writings of a chimp at the keyboard. "perustuvat muun muassa", indeed.
And what is "myös Climategateksi kutsuttu tietomurto, jonka seurauksena IPCC" referring to?
If you read the translated page, you find that Kauppinen's paper has not been accepted by Nature, but merely submitted there. And the absorption spectrum for CO2 has been confirmed by satelites observations, so I don't see how can possibly prove what he says.
Oh, would the Warmisti like to comment on items curruntly in the news?
What are your thoughts on the attempt to pursue Mann for fraud?
And your thoughts on green energy? I'm half way through a revealing book called The Wind Farm Scam.
As I said when I first arrived on this site, I am fascinated by our Great Debate. Quite aside from the environmental and financial implications, my fascination stems from this: how can two groups of people (for the most part intelligent, educated and sincere) access the same data and yet draw conclusions which are diametrically opposed?
My current thinking is that the mindset of you tree-huggers is different to normal people. Most normal people go about their daily business paying not the slightest attention to the Global Warming myth (and I'm glad to say that it has hardly featured in the UK's election campaign), but some laymen and some scientists feel a need to challenge the basis of the IPCC's armageddon scenarios.
OK, I have given up trying to be polite to unsceptics. My early aspirations for a cool and mutually respectful debate foundered upon the appalling rudeness and insults.
So far, I see the following attributes in unsceptics:
(i)Complete absence of humour. In this, you resemble political extremists and religious fundamentalists.
(ii)A belief in positive feedback, where us sceptics believe in negative. In both cases, the b-word is open to attack, and our intuitive feel for negative feedback ('mister blue sky will return soon enough', if you catch my drift).
(iii)Concession. Reasonable people, when seeking common ground with an opponent, often use phrases such as "that's a fair point", or "admittedly there are exceptions to my argument", or "yes, you're right there". Such give and take is part of a collective search for truth.
Putting those three points together, I reckon that deep down you Jeremiahs know that the end of the world ain't nigh, don't really believe that your grandchildren will endure starvation resulting from the collapse of agriculture, perversely enjoy doom-and-gloom-mongering.
Earlier in this thread, I tried to find pass/fail criteria we could all buy into. This was in the hope that we could resolve this great issue. Because it does need a resolution!
If the AGW hypothesis is false, the western economies are in the process of frittering away badly-needed billions on counterproductive wind farms etc, and saddling our productive industries with a destructive tax burden. Crippling our economies is good news for our competitors. e.g., China, who are wise enough to sit on their hands.
I hope to live long enough to see the issue resolved, but I fear that the financial benefit to the likes of Mann and Jones will keep them peddling their wares for decades to come. The vast armies of hangers-on who travelled to Copenhagen at great expense have a vested interest in keeping the gravy train rolling.
Man we need an anti-Gore, and fast!
Abstract: In this paper, I have resorted to basic formulas obtained from experimentation and observation by several scientists for calculating the heat stored by any substance and the subsequent change of temperature caused on a determined system. I demonstrate that the climate of Earth is driven by the oceans, the ground surface and the subsurface materials of the ground. I explain also how the photon streams from oceans, ground and subsurface materials of ground overwhelm the emission of photons from the atmosphere to the ground during both daytime and nighttime. http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6sk
Hmmm.....empirical evi...??
A second argument from the AGW side is that carbon dioxide behaves like a blackbody, which is absolutely incorrect because carbon dioxide absorbs but a small amount of the energy in transit and emits only a small amount from the energy stored by the molecules. To be a blackbody, carbon dioxide would have to be able to absorb electromagnetic energy from all frequency bands and all existing wavelengths, which is incongruent with reality.
Fail - as already pointed out earlier in the thread. Dunning-Kruger strikes again in the very first point Brent makes.
...perhaps because Svensmark has no convincing evidence of a non-trivial effect? Funnily enough, if Svensmark has no such evidence then the scientific thing to do is to NOT give any weight to his hypothesis. Science fail.
Indeed. And how does your repetition of standard scientific understanding embodied in all the climate models demonstrate that global warming is a myth? Logic fail.
Logic fail - quote and subsequent argument does not prove Brent's claims.
Bonus double Dunning-Kruger goldfish fail! Left as an exercise for Brent, which he has almost zero chance of successfully completing even one half of the double. One would suspect Brent of POE-ship at this point, but there's ample evidence to suggest otherwise.
Another Dunning-Kruger goldfish fail. Prediction: highly likely Brent will not be able to explain why.
As for the previous quote.
...for different - and correct - reasons. Dunning-Kruger again.
Your inability to see or understand it does not mean it's not there.
Come to think of it, that applies to more than humour...
Haven't bothered looking at the link as sunspot has been reliably wrong, and this sounds like a quote from a link mined from another thread where someone with a complete misunderstanding of atmospheric science and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics think they've discovered a basic glaring flaw in AGW.
They haven't.
Are you really this poor at comprehension, gullible or desperate that you need to resort to quoting people attacking completely made up "science"? Or are you running out of POE inspiration?
Other "skeptics" argue that the CO2 absorption bands - which are clearly shown in heaps of relevant literature - are so narrow and easily saturated as to be incapable of significantly affecting climate - a hypothesis that is completely incongruent with the "blackbody" argument. (Feel free to denounce the majority of "skeptics" for being suckered by the "non-blackbody absorption bands" red herring. Please make a list and post it here...)
Dear Brent,
A response:
Was that before or after you lied to us?
Because we don't sit around composing limericks like the retirees at Bishop Hill's? It's rubbish. There's nary a thread here that doesn't contain multiple references to Monty Python.
As I've pointed out earlier I've delighted in taking the piss out of you.
Please see the above comment.
Brent, you only want us to "agree" with your points because they are traps designed to trick us into admitting that global warming is a hoax. Except we won't and it isn't. We don't have to concede that you have good points, because you don't.
I know how frustrating it must be for you that your personal beliefs don't meld with the science, and no amount of wordplay, lying, misrepresenting or "mutual concessions" will make it otherwise.
I'm so happy that you've finally admitted to being the conspirtorial tin-foil nutcase I revealed you as way back at #188.
Until you return with another pissy, sobbing farewell comment,
John.
xx
...with that belief grounded in...well, actually, let's leave that as an exercise for an apparently mystified uncomprehending Brent. Seriously, Brent - if you can lay out the case why almost all of the climate scientists believe there's a net positive feedback at work you might start regaining at least a smidgin of the reputation you worked so hard to denigrate. Bonus points for outlining why "skeptics" think net negative feedback is at work - and double bonus points for pointing out the evidence that supports this argument and avoiding - or calling out - the previously proffered evidence for this position that has NOT stood up to scrutiny.
Me - I bet you slide on to the next talking point instead, or at least unskeptically trot out the usual talking points in this particular topic.
You...er, left out a really key bit.
They only do this when the opponent actually has a fair point. When the opponent only has lies, distortions, blatant misunderstandings, incorrect logic, unsupported assertions, conspiracy theories, untestable propositions, redirection from the argument at hand to some other argument...and the like, then reasonable people DO NOT say "yep, that's right". Not unless they're backing away slowly looking carefully from side to side and feeling behind them for the door handle. In which case their may be a certain amount of irony in their statements.
Slothy = Dunning-Kruger again !
poor slothy, you really want the world to burn just so you can be right don't you, that's endemic in here. Willing it to happen won't work !
The problem with the AGW idea is that its proponents think that the Earth is isolated and that the heat engine only works on the surface of the ground. They fail to take into account that incoming heat from the Sun is transferred by conduction from surface to subsurface materials, which store heat until the incidence of direct solar radiation declines, explicitly during nighttime.
At nighttime, the heat stored by the subsurface materials is transferred by conduction towards the surface, which is colder than the unexposed materials below the surface. The heat transferred from the subsurface layers to the surface is then transported by the air by means of convection and warms up. The upwelling photon stream affects the directionality of the radiation emitted by the atmosphere driving it upwards, i.e. towards the upper atmospheric layers and, from there, towards deep space. This process is well described by the next formula:
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6sk
And people gave you some, and then suggested that you could look at the exact same criteria from the perspective of starting (say) 20 years ago instead of waiting another 20 years - if you were serious.
You weren't. And trying badly to spin it now doesn't change that.
Brent, all the lie's will be revealed,
it's not only Mann's funding, once the ball starts rolling the climate geeks will shit their duds and will spill the beans on each other.
Washington Post
In fact, reasonable contenders for possible major climate-forcing candidates, such as clouds and cosmic rays, are minimized or ridiculed by the author. Regarding the offering of a cosmic-ray effect on climate (by Henrik Svensmark of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish Space Research Institute), Mr. Hansen simply dismisses the carefully documented, straightforward proposal as "an almost Rube Goldberg concoction."
Furthermore, it's apparent that only those who agree with Mr. Hansen are "relevant scientists" or even "scientists." He is kind enough to refer to those in disagreement as simply "contrarians."
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6sr
References? You really think scientists haven't thought about this? Not the ones looking below the surface of the sea, not the ones measuring the heat flux from the earth's core, not any of the others thinking about how the earth retains and re-emits heat? (Given you bandy about "Dunning-Kruger" when you demonstrably don't know what you're talking about, you might...)
You realise that convection is already an integral part of climate science? As is outgoing longwave radiation emitted from the surface, which you've completely left out? So what you're saying is so far completely described by the science you deride, even though your description is woefully incomplete?
ROFL! How exactly does it "modify the directionality of atmospheric radiation" - in ways that are inconsistent with current atmospheric science - which you might be surprised to learn takes into account an "upwelling photon stream" - although it's normally called something like "outgoing longwave radiation"? Or did you just cut and paste this from somewhere despite not understanding the argument?
Cue subject change in 3...2...1...
Brent @ [1358](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…),
You say: "on the same money as this vast army of idle penpushing fibbers"
Do you have any kind of substance to back up calling the authors of the 4th IPCC report a bunch of liars? If not then what cause do you have to complain we aren't being polite, or have no humour? Would you expect such from a crowd that knows some of them personally, and may indeed include some of them? If so you're dumber than I thought.
Towards the end of [your rant](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), you state: "I fear that the financial benefit to the likes of Mann and Jones will keep them peddling their wares for decades to come"
Do you know how much a scientist on the salary of a University or Government Institution earns? How much do you think said scientist could earn producing solid science disproving AGW (if that were possible), on the employ of the fossil fuel industry? Logic fail.
'Concluding, atmospheric gases do not cause any warming of the surface given that induced emission prevails over spontaneous emission. During daytime, solar irradiance induces air molecules to emit photons towards the surface; however, the load of Short Wave Radiation (SWR) absorbed by molecules in the atmosphere is exceptionally low, while the load of Long Wave Radiation (LWR) emitted from the surface and absorbed by the atmosphere is high and so leads to an upwelling induced emission of photons which follows the outgoing trajectory of the photon stream, from lower atmospheric layers to higher atmospheric layers, and finally towards outer space. The warming effect (misnamed âthe greenhouse effect") of Earth is due to the oceans, the ground surface and subsurface materials. Atmospheric gases act only as conveyors of heat.' http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6sk
Slothy why don't you try to invent a CO2
thermos flask.
Lotharsson,
[He](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) can't not be a poe.
Ok Sunspot @1384, so you've been taken in by Nasif Nahle.
For starters, this is an obvious case of selectively applied scepticism (also known as confirmation bias). Do you want to apply some scepticism to Nahle's article? Ok, then let's explore the concept of induced, or stimulated, emission.
Induced emission is a real physical process. It's how lasers work (it's an acronym - light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). A photon is absorbed by an atom which has an electron in the right quantum state. The photon causes the electron to drop to a lower energy state, emitting another photon with the same phase and direction as the first... while the original photon seems to carry on unchanged. So you get two photons moving in the same direction and with the same phase as the first (hence the amplification part).
However, nowhere in his paper does Nahle demonstrate that induced emission of photons from GHGs occurs in the atmosphere. Does the atmosphere behave as a laser? Is it supposed to be self evident? If so, then I invite answers to the two following questions:
1) If this occurs in the atmosphere, why is the observed outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) much less than the amount of longwave radiation emitted by the surface? Shouldn't the intensity of the OLR be greater than the OLR emitted by the surface, due to the amplification effect? Or if not more, it should at least be the same!
2) Nahle says
>At nighttime, the heat stored by the subsurface materials is transferred by conduction towards the surface, which is colder than the unexposed materials below the surface. The heat transferred from the subsurface layers to the surface is then transported by the air by means of convection and warms up. The upwelling photon stream affects the directionality of the radiation emitted by the atmosphere driving it upwards, i.e. towards the upper atmospheric layers and, from there, towards deep space.
My question is this: why, then, do we observe a downward flux of longwave radiation at the surface? This flux is nearly constant throughout the day, particularly when skies are clear. Consider this plot of radiation measured by the meteorology department at Reading University, where I studied until last year. April 10th 2010 was a sunny day, as you can see from the fairly smooth global solar radiation curve (you can select it from the dropdown menu). The little wiggles are occasional cloud.
There is a downward flux of longwave of around 300W/m2 all day and night. According to Nahle, that shouldn't be there. WUWT?
To the unwary...
The last three posts by Sunspot link to "Biocab"/Nasif Nahle.
For those who are familiar with NN, no more need be said.
For those who are not so acquainted, Nahle comes from the peculiar stable of people who apparently have scientific qualifications, but who demonstrate 'understandings' of science (especially beyond their own fields of education) that spectacularly and bizarrely contradict the fundamental underpinnings of disciplines in which they imagine that they have more competence than the experienced professionals who work in the disciplines.
The bottom line: an ignorant non-scientist quoting a Dunningly-Krugered pseudo-expert, in a manner that builds no credible argument from any first principles.
The simple response: walk around it; you don't want to step in this one...
Dang.
Pipped by Stu whilst taking a break to feed toddlers.
Still, one gets a very clear idea...
;-)
Heh sorry Bernard, though I am quite pleased with my post so if you come across some denidiot presenting Nahle's article as evidence, feel free to link to it.
I guess that, like Khilyuk and Chilingar's paper comparing all CO2 emissions over geological time to anthropogenic emissions, the errors in NN's article are so glaring (this isn't the first line of argument I've made against this article) that anyone who cites it can simply not be considered a sceptic in the true sense of the word. As Tim said, "their mistake is so large and so obvious that anyone who cites them either has no clue about climate science or doesn't care whether what they write is true or not." Change the first part to 'His mistakes are' and apply at will to NN.
>_The upwelling photon stream affects the directionality of the radiation emitted by the atmosphere driving it upwards_
I don't think Nahle quite understands what he has discovered here. What this suggests is a mechanism for harnessing Maxwell's Demon. He shouldn't be wasting his time arguing against warmists, he should be working to refine this principle in order to make billions and billions of bucks in the energy biz.
Oh, wait...
Lotharsson (1380), you say that the 20-years-ago timescale is the correct starting point.
Dr. James Hansen predicted in 1988 that New York's West Side Highway would be underwater in 20 years. Is it?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year…
John (1377): You take issue with my claim that none of you Armageddon Fundamentalists are capable of conceding a fair point to your opponents. Here's an example of what I would find reasonable: "Yes, Hansen's forecast was wide of the mark. At the time it seemed reasonable, but we must concede that we lose some credibility."
Even the Jehovahs Witnesses have the decency to say, "Yes, all right, the second coming did not in fact happen as we said it would. 1999 came and went without a new Messiah, but just you wait! He'll be back in 2015 for certain!"
Maybe a form of Group Therapy is called for. If we put Global Warmists in a room with Hypochondriacs and Millennium Cultists maybe you would discover the deep sadness which rules your lives, and maybe snap out of it.
I just discovered this website which investigates your common ethos with your bible-bashing colleagues: great photos!
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/01/end-nigh-religious-language-glo…
We don't have to concede to you. You are a conspiracy theorist with no real desire to understand the science as long as it clashes with your personal beliefs, as expemplified by your downright refusal to accept that climate and weather are different. If you conceeded that point you might have to admit that, gosh, we are right!
You knew all along that you were putting forward rubbish theories. We'd shoot the obvious crap down, you'd concede a point you knew was wrong all along, and then you'd expect us to concede in return.
And we didn't.
This is why you are acting like the petulant child you are.
You have no intention of finding common ground with us. As you yourself said "You have to understand your enemy in order to destroy them."
This is what we are to you. The "enemy" who must be "destroyed". And you wonder why we won't play your little games?
Furthermore, the science does not hinge on what James Hansen says. He is one out of hundreds (or is it thousands?) of climatologists who agree on one central thing - that we are warming the planet. Even if we had stooped to your level (in the gutter) and conceeded your little point, guess what? The science would still stand.
Your sad method reminds me of the creationists who attack Darwin as opposed to actually challenging the theory of evolution. Mann! Jones! Gore! Hansen!
Nobody cares what you "find reasonable" because you are not a reasonable person. You are fringe nutter standing on the street corner shouting incomprehensibly at passers by.
It's so pathetic to watch somebody waste thousands of words and not land a single scientific blow.
Oh, and Brent? The Messiah never came but the planet continues to warm...
>_Here's an example of what I would find reasonable: "Yes, Hansen's forecast was wide of the mark. At the time it seemed reasonable, but we must concede that we lose some credibility."_
If it can be shown that Hansen actually did make such a forecast, not relying on some writer's hazy ten or eleven year old memory of an informal conversation, but rather a first hand contemporaneous record, then, yes, you might have a point. However, Hansen is consistently on record as saying such an increase of sea level is only likely in a centennial time frame, not 20 (or 30) years, and there is zero corroborating evidence for Reiss' second hand account.
That some activists might rhetorically appeal to a religious ethos does not necessarily mean that they share that ethos. That some activists might make such an appeal does not mean that all who accept the scientific basis for AGW agree with making such an appeal. You are compounding false analogy and dicto simpliciter fallacies.
Unfortunately for your false prophesy assertions, on the scale prescribed by 95% statistical confidence levels, global temperature and sea level continue to rise with no credible scientific theoretical cause other than anthropogenic forcings and no credible scientific theory for why anthropogenic forcings shouldn't be causing these and other well observed changes in the global climate system and concomitant and consilient eco-system changes.
@Brent:
"Dr. James Hansen predicted in 1988 that New York's West Side Highway would be underwater in 20 years. Is it?
Oh good god...
Brent, in 1988 THERE WAS NO WEST SIDE HIGHWAY!!!!!
The original elevated West Side highway demolition was completed in 1986, after a portion of the aging decaying steucture failed in 1973 and a cement truck fell through it.
A temporary 'highway' was routed along West Stree and 12 Avenue.
Approval of a new West Side Highway was not given until 1993, construction begun in 196, and construction of the new West Side Highway was not complete until 2001.
The article of that piece, is quoting someone who interviewed Hansen 20 yeas agao, and who cliams that in that interview 2 decade ago Hansen made claims about the impact of flooding a highway THAT DID NOT EXIST IN THAT FORM AT THE TIME OF INTERVIEW!!! And the flooding claims are at odds with hansen's published work at the time.
Yeah, that's credible.
1395 Lee on the West Side Highway.
Oh my stars! Thankyou ever so much! :-D
A link for those interested. The amount of times I've had that 1988 "quote" thrown at me...
http://www.nycroads.com/roads/west-side/
Was it Jim Hanson or Jim Henson?
Hey, I just heard about a lottery they do in Alaska. People bet on the thaw-date of a certain river, the Nenana.
They have records going back to 1917. The ice usually melts around 5 May. This year it was 26 April. The two earliest breakups were in 1998 and 1940, and the latest 1963.
http://calderup.wordpress.com/
If youse guys are right, the 1998 record should soon be broken (well, should already have been broken.... it takes a lot of patience to be a Global Warming True Believer). I imagine you'll be buying tickets for early April.
Jeff Harvey says it's been ten degrees warmer than normal in the region. (Or is that dodgy data... there has been some controversy recently about minus-20C being mis-reported as 20C. Oops!)
The Nenana is one more proxy refusing to conform to the Gore Hypothesis. Pesky planet. Warm, damn you!!!
It's still looking like a few lousy tenths of a degree on a dodgy thermometer, a scare story, a myth. And we're blowing how many billions on zero-yield windmills? Hey, Jeff, you're well clued up on birds aren't you? Do you have any statistics for us on bird casualties from windmills?
Actually it's Jim Hansen but thanks, you continue to illustrate your moronic level and standards of research and background knowledge admirably.
Hey! Have you heard about a competition were Tony Watts and Andy Montford see who can get the most number of cretinous zombie repeater conspiracy bots signed up by 21/12/12?
No? Oh, well.
Never mind Brent - you're always pretty clueless about everything else anyway.
Hot news: April's CET (Central England Temperature) result has just emerged from the UK Met Office.
At 8.8C, it's been cooler than April 1865, when it was 10.6C.
We had the heating on this morning. Brrr!
>Hot news: April's CET (Central England Temperature) result has just emerged from the UK Met Office.
>At 8.8C, it's been cooler than April 1865, when it was 10.6C.
Mmm that cherry you picked sure tastes good Brent. Unfortunately you neglected to mention that April 2010, at 8.8C, was 0.7C warmer than the 1971-2000 average. Oh.
Even when it's warmer than average, it can feel chilly. You and I live in a pretty cold country Brent - get over it already!
Observe the deflector shield in action:
Brent will bring up [a topic](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), get shown he's wrong, and without so much as a pause or a 'by-your-leave', move on to another [equally moronic](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), unrelated denier talking point.
His talking points seem to be getting progressively more and more obsessed with the politics and Al Gore, [pointless trivia](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) and seem to be getting more abusive.
Brent: Did you miss [my question](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) to you on #1383?
Better known as a Gish Gallop.
Brent doesn't want to see the [global data](http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/plot/gistemp/mean:240/plot/gis…).
MFS,
In the Climategate emails, have you read no. 826209667.txt?
It's from Dedkova to Briffa.
It's maybe an isolated incident, but the Russkies are saying that if only they can get their hands on 20 million roubles they'll be able to publish. They explain that the nasty Russian government taxes the money-gusher from Britain, so would the EUA folks kindly send the loot in tranches no bigger than 10 grand, and send it to their personal accounts.
Sounds to me like there's a lot of loot sloshing about.
Are you on this gravy train? If you made it to the Copenhagen gig, did you fly first class, and how many stars was your hotel?
>_Brent will bring up a topic, get shown he's wrong, and without so much as a pause or a 'by-your-leave', move on to another equally moronic, unrelated denier talking point.
[Bingo!](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…)
Roubles to dollars. 20 million roubles approx 700,000 bucks.
So...having had his only example for his key argument pwned...will we see some "concession" from Brent, as he indicates reasonable people do?
I think not.
(And never mind actually reconsidering his position in the light of falsified assumptions - that's clearly too difficult for him.)
Actually, when this e-mail was sent in March 1996 the exchange rate for the ruble was about 5000 RUB = US$1, or 20M RUB = US$4000.
Nope, it looks like Brent is far, far more wrong than even that indicates.
Try a historical conversion from roubles to dollars at the date of the referenced e-mail (7 Mar 1996). The current Russian currency unit (RUB) did not exist back then - it looks like the previous unit was coded RUR.
And 20,000,000 RUR on that date = $5433 (Australian).
Sounds to me like Brent isn't very skeptical.
>_Also, it is important for us if you can transfer
the ADVANCE money on the personal accounts which we gave you earlier and the sum for __one occasion transfer__ (for example, during one day) will not be more than 10,000 USD._
Amazing how 'one occasion transfer' is translated into multiple 'tranches' in the septic mind. Or whatever it is that passes for Brent's mind.
Which is entirely unsurprising for Brent, because it was developed by people anxious to project the appearance of vaguely plausible scientific backing for their unsubstantiated-by-the-actual-evidence (religious) beliefs.
Brent @ 1404,
"[Are you on this gravy train? If you made it to the Copenhagen gig, did you fly first class, and how many stars was your hotel?](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…)
I am a biologist, so no, no, N/A, N/A.
Is this how you lamely try to [dodge the question](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…)?
Here are the options.
1. Study. I mean really study. Spend 30 years working hard to reach the top of your field. Publish dozens of papers that are held in esteem by scientists everywhere, and add greatly to the sum of knowledge on the topic. Finally, after all the hard work has paid off you can apply for a piddling grant and get yourself some research assistants.
2. Become a spokesperson for a oil funded thinktank.
Yeah, I know which one I'd rather be doing if I wanted the easy money.
Terrible news, guys.
I have just seen a map of Britain in 2109, and with sea-level rises only an archipelago will remain. Source: the Carbon Trust.
It's just as bad for the yanks. Scientists say (i.e., David Yoskowitz, professor of socio-economics at the Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi) that 100,000 households will be displaced in the Houston-Galveston area, with $12bn infrastructure costs. Who paid for this? Oh no! Funded (yes, that word again) by the British Consulate-General Houston. D'oh!
Businesses have to raise something called "finance". Scaremongering unproductive pen-pushing climatologists get something called "fun-ding", which I guess is defined as "taxpayers' hard-earned money shovelled out by the authorities with no regard for anything as distasteful as value-for-money.â
>_Brent will bring up a topic, get shown he's wrong, and without so much as a pause or a 'by-your-leave', move on to another equally moronic, unrelated denier talking point.
[Bingo](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…)
Great news, guys!
A wave of raids on the offices of Emissions Traders: 25 arrests in Britain and 3 in Germany; 81 premises raided in Britain and 230 in Germany. Europol says: "as much as 90 percent of the entire market volume on emissions exchanges was caused by fraudulent activity."
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate
More Climategate: Briffa to Eugene, November 1998 (911405082.txt): "I am also sending Stepan's 5000 dollars to Switzerland now to be carried back by his colleague." Would that be banknotes?
Briffa to Bradley 1998: "I am currently involved with writing a bid on behalf of the earth science community to try to extract 8 million pounds for a 5 year project from NERC to support Palaeo/Modelling validatin work."
Hence the expression Megabucks.
From Simon Shackley at UMIST, 2000: "dear TC colleagues
looks like BP have their cheque books out! How can TC benefit from this largesse? I wonder who has received this money within Cambridge University?" He then refers to BP's intention to give $85m over 10 years to universities in US and UK.
Is this the wicked 'big oil' that's trying to undermine the Gore Hypothsis?
MFS, if you are getting by on a modest salary, maybe you're missing a trick? Whatever your interest, be it snails or quails or fingernails, the trick is to word your funding applications so: "To assess the effect on snails/quails/fingernails of Global Warming." If your establishment does not have a press officer, get one fast. Press releases should say, "Scientists are worried that Global Warming is having a destructive effect on [...]. At the IPCC's estimated rate of change, there is a risk of permanent damage to [...], however more research is required over a period of [enter your years-to-retirement here]. This gravy train cannot continue for many more years: the unwashed public have smelled a rat. So fill yer boots lad, while you can.
Is [BP] the wicked 'big oil' ...
The galloping troll seems to be too busy running his game here to read recent headlines.
I know it's a gross violation of privacy and so it can't truly be recommended, but... It would be very interesting to compare the car and house values of climate scientists versus their critics. I've heard a lot of people say "follow the money", but I've never seen anyone actually do it.
Well, except for [Scott Mandia](http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/taking-the-money-for-granted…), in a general sort of way.
@1348
It was immediately obvious to me that sunspot plagiarized that from somewhere. Why was it immediately obvious? Because sunspot is an illiterate git who is incapable of writing anything that coherent.
MFS, if you are getting by on a modest salary, maybe you're missing a trick? Whatever your interest, be it snails or quails or fingernails, the trick is to word your funding applications so
Right, because if the application is approved the funds will be deposited in your personal account.
how can two groups of people (for the most part intelligent, educated and sincere) access the same data and yet draw conclusions which are diametrically opposed?
Because one of those groups is composed of ignorant, ideologically driven morons like yourself and sunspot.
It's hilarious!
The troll Brent [deploys](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) a new deflector shield (this is starting to look like Star Wars), [steers](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) hard, comes up with out of context email quotes (that don't make a whole lot of sense) [here](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), and ends up with a bizarre paragraph where he advises me that I should be stealing from my employer. WTF?
Meanwhile, he seems to be pretending he's coated in teflon and slippery enough to keep [dodging the question](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…). At the risk of sounding repetitive, I'll ask it again:
"Do you know how much a scientist on the salary of a University or Government Institution earns? How much do you think said scientist could earn producing solid science disproving AGW (if that were possible), on the employ of the fossil fuel industry?"
> ...if you are getting by on a modest salary, maybe you're missing a trick?
Brent seems to be under the illusion that any funding grant - especially the potentially "large" ones he obsesses about - goes to increase the salaries of the scientists (because they couldn't possibly be on a rigidly defined pay scale!) - and to pay for things like first class air travel and five star hotels. Brent proffers no evidence for this, and appears unfamiliar with the typical level of penny-pinching and financial control that goes on at publicly funded research institutions around the world. Brent repeatedly [declines to answer the relevant questions](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) MFS has been posing. Brent does not appear very skeptical of his unsupported assertions.
I estimate Brent [owes this thread quite a few concessions based on his own standards](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), but I doubt they will be forthcoming.
Our very own Gordo offered to be a oil PR flack. He knows where the real money is.
Lotharsson's point about conceding is a good one. ".. owes this thread..." puts it succinctly. Yes, I will try to address the several points raised against me in the next day or so.
Most of my spare time is being spent on a new(ish) scare story I am hoping to launch: Global Cooling. When the Global Warming lobby cunningly changed its name to "Climate Change" it was a very clever move. If we enter a new ice age they'll be able to say that their point is proven! Had they branded themselves IPGW they'd be a sitting duck in this chilly decade of ours with its expanding icecaps.
Can anybody recommend how the new IPGC should conduct its mission to scare the pants off the general public with forecasts of Snowmageddon? Jeff Harvey, if you're still there, would you be prepared to do a learned piece on the plight of birds as they head for the equator to escape the loss of habitat in the chilled regions? We'll er.... make it worth your while.... know what I mean....
The ultimate triumph for this new venture would be a permanent conflict between Warmists and Coolists. For every carbon capture project there would be a carbon creation one! For every Offsetting Scam there would be an equal and opposite (what's the word I'm looking for? Upsetting? Carbonlicious? HeartWarmingTM?) attempt to raise atmospheric CO2 and save the world from the Great Freeze.
Maybe, under the UN's auspices, there would be two opposing bodies. Mister Pachauri would be seen on the floor of the UN assembly room muttering darkly to his entourage whilst his opposite number, surrounded by his own bunch of fur-clad hangers-on, mutters darkly about the hated IPCC with much finger-jabbing.
After years of conflict, we'll do a deal. For every megatonne of CO2 that Warmists agree not to sequester, the Coolists will agree a CNCC: a Carbon Non-Creation Credit. Funded by whom? Well. Of course, it must be funded by the common man in his factory, or farm , or shop. They are many; the intelligentsia are few and therefore affordable.
Press photographers capture the historic handshake between Pachauri and his opponent. And from that moment on, the climate carries on what it has always been doing: going about its business blithely unaware of the existence of homo sapiens sapientis, a species "so good they named it twice", so imaginative that it believed itself master of the universe, but not quite smart enough to rename itself homo stupidus hubristis.
Meanwhile, normal people carry on with their daily business, barely aware that the chattering classes hold the fate of planets in the palms of their hands.
Brent were you looking for this ?
700 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming http://www.tinyurl.com.au/6yy
>700 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting [so-called "Skepticism"](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/feb/22/climate-change-s…).
All of which either are not peer reviewed, do not support so-called "skepticism" or have been refuted in the peer reviewed literature.
So Sunspot, do you have any reply to what I wrote @1386 or what Bernard wrote @1387?
Brent, I wouldn't expect anything less than fantasy from you.
Sunspot, thanks for that list.
Dave R, you were quick of the mark! Was that speed-reading that enabled you to dismiss 700 papers in Sunspot's list?
I can understand you objecting to a paper with a title such as: "Global Warming: Is Sanity Returning?" Remember that comedy song about a medical panacaea, and its punchline: "and now he's emperor of Rome"? In your case, the sanity question will be answered when you either (a) abandon your nice comfy home to the advancing sands/lapping waves or (b)give in to your poor wife's demands for a foreign holiday like normal people and - gulp - forget your Global Warming fixation and buy the plane tickets.
Dave, please tell us a little about your lifestyle.
By all means, Dave, give in to Brent's no doubt well-intentioned demands.
Tony Watts has utterly confounded the scientific community with previously unknown [facts](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), proving that Arctic warming is just a normal and natural variation. Someone should tell NASA.
[Oh, Wait...](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/time_series.html)
FYI, spot, much of the Arctic warming in the 30s-50s is strongly attributed, not to natural variation, but industrial soot and soot from human caused and enhanced forest fires.
>you were quick of the mark!
We've seen it all before. You and sunspot aren't the first idiots to come here posting up tripe like that, and you won't be the last.
>please tell us a little about your lifestyle.
[Back around the goldfish bowl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
Brent says: "Dave R, you were quick of the mark! Was that speed-reading that enabled you to dismiss 700 papers in Sunspot's list?"
Around 105 papers from Energy & Environment. Now make it 595 papers.
McLean et al (2009), and Correction to McLean et al (2009).
Now we're down to 593.
Okay, hold your breath, your gasbag's about to deflate. Go to the following link and find a list of papers on that list that in no way support scepticism of global warming, from when the list was a mere 450.
http://devoidofnulls.wordpress.com/2009/11/17/how-not-to-use-an-argumen…
That's roughly another 120 off your list. We're down to around 480+
Ummm...... now, how about comments, corrections, errata, replies, responses and submitted papers..... Nah, dinner time.
MFS, you asked me in #1383 why I call the IPCC authors a bunch of liars.
Well, I had a bash at it in #1326. I was expecting the True Believers here to challenge the 12 points I made. To my surprise, only a couple of people responded.
T P Hamilton, queried my estimate of CO2 half-life. We have discussed half-life earlier in this thread. In #1330, TPH makes a fair point about the lifetime of an individual CO2 molecule, but my definition of half life would be: âthe time after which PPM would reduce by half if the annual August reduction were to obtain year-round.â This, of course, isnât going to happen, but the discussion of residence time is an important one. If CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is essentially a one-way journey (as the Royal Society would have it, quoting âover a thousand yearsâ) itâs a very different matter to what the Mauna Loa monthly data tell us: that northern vegetation gobbles up half-a-percent-per-month at its summer peak.
Bernard Jâs response to my hastily-prepared list of 12 points was to just be rude about my education.
My objections to the IPCCâs ouvre is, in short:
-That there is a groundless extrapolatiuon of post-1860 temperature measurements into future decades
-That an assumption of unstable equilibrium underlies it, complete with the vile expression âtipping pointâ which, used by marine engineers has a clear sense but, used by political advocates is mere hyperbole.
-CO2 forcing is portrayed as being vastly more significant than solar activity which is reduced in the report to Total Solar Irradiance. No other solar forcing mechanism is advanced, despite empirical evidence that solar activity correlates with climate and rainfall.
-Cloud feedback is only briefly addressed. It is admitted that it is little understood, with potentially large forcing, but receives little attention.
-From what I have read about computer modelling, which features heavily in the report, the models are a simplification employing âknown knownsâ. Quality control is a matter of comparing one model with another; agreement with each other (rather than agreement with future observation) is dangerous group-think.
And finallyâ¦
The warming, the melting, the flooding just ainât happening.
True scientists have an iron devotion to Popperian Falsifiability. This bunch of latter-day soothsayers are firmly in the tradition of Nostradamus, gypsy tea-leaf readers and horoscope-writers. Their common vice is to claim pattern-recognition skills superior to those of the punters they claim to enlighten, and the dubious skill of avoiding accountability.
>That there is a groundless extrapolatiuon
No there isn't. There is an application of the well known physics of [the greenhouse effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect).
>an assumption of unstable equilibrium
Straw man. No such assumption is made.
>CO2 forcing is portrayed as being vastly more significant than solar activity
[Back around the goldfish bowl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
>No other solar forcing mechanism is advanced
[Back around the goldfish bowl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
>despite empirical evidence that solar activity correlates with climate and rainfall
[Back around the goldfish bowl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
>Quality control is a matter of comparing one model with another; agreement with each other (rather than agreement with future observation)
[Agreement with future observation was good even with early models](http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm).
>The [warming](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif), the [melting](http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20091005_Figure3.png), [...] just ainât happening.
Liar.
Brent,
Why, oh why do I waste my time?
I believe the first point has been addressed already.
Your second point is a good one at showing you clearly did not understand the science. Can you show me a reference that plots to a correlation between cosmic ray flux and global temperature? [Svensmark](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/10/svensmark-global-warming-stopped-…) hypothesises a link between cosmic rays and albedo, but the effect of albedo on climate is still poorly understood. More to the point, Krivova and Solanki ([2003](http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/r47.pdf)), on page 281, Fig. 8, show a clear lack of correlation between cosmic ray flux and global temperature.
The funniest part is when Svensmark and Friis-Christensen ([2007](http://www.spacecenter.dk/publications/scientific-report-series/Scient_…)) show a graph on p. 1 (Fig. 2, bottom half), where they find a correlation between cosmic rays and global temperature after removing, among others, a warming trend of 0.14 degrees per decade!
I'm not sure what a correlation between sunspot activity and agricultural productivity, or between sunspot activity and rainfall in the Parana River have to do with this debate. If you give us some references maybe we can find out more.
Since you've hammered the 'gravy train' conspiracy pretty intensly, I will repeat the part of the question I posed to you, since, being a scientist myself, and having worked for both public and private employers, I know the answer:
Do you know how much a scientist on the salary of a University or Government Institution earns? How much do you think said scientist could earn producing solid science disproving AGW (if that were possible), on the employ of the fossil fuel industry?
Your [third point](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) is that:
Now, I don't think anybody is disputing this piece of brilliant logic. However, in a warming world, which do you think is the more important feedback (as that's what the summary for policymakers says), that which happens as it warms or that which happens as it cools? Pretty simple, huh?
Anybody care to continue down the list? I have to go to work.
> To my surprise, only a couple of people responded.
To our complete lack of surprise, you failed to respond to the substantive responses that **were** made - let alone concede the point(s).
> Yes, I will try to address the several points raised against me in the next day or so.
I doubt you will provide any concessions or even substantively address the points raised. Feel free to prove me wrong.
> That there is a groundless extrapolatiuon of post-1860 temperature measurements into future decades
Comprehension fail - it's not "extrapolation" that underlies the forecasts.
> That an assumption of unstable equilibrium underlies it, complete with the vile expression âtipping pointâ which, used by marine engineers has a clear sense but, used by political advocates is mere hyperbole.
Along with your quantum physics, I'm seriously doubting that you finished your engineering degree - or you strenuously avoided the more difficult subjects like automatic control. "Tipping point" is a well-known engineering and science term.
(Oh, and you can't seem to stop conflating the political with the scientific and pretending that somehow that invalidates the science - or as appears to be the case here implying that the term is being used ONLY by the political advocates and not by the scientists. Bonus multi-fail.)
> Cloud feedback is only briefly addressed. It is admitted that it is little understood, with potentially large forcing, but receives little attention.
Can't see the forest for the trees. Is there a reasonably well bounded uncertainty range for cloud feedback? Does it contribute to the stated uncertainty for future predictions in the report? Is it large enough to invalidate any of the conclusions or forecasts given that they all include an uncertainty range?
> Quality control is a matter of comparing one model with another...
...which is why they publish papers about how well (or not) the models agree with actual observations?
Riiiiiiight.
Brent finally responds:"T P Hamilton, queried my estimate of CO2 half-life. We have discussed half-life earlier in this thread. In #1330, TPH makes a fair point about the lifetime of an individual CO2 molecule,"
as being irrelevant to lifetime of global warming,
"but my definition of half life would be: âthe time after which PPM would reduce by half if the annual August reduction were to obtain year-round.â
This is also irrelevant. What is relevant is the half-life of the CO2 we add, which has nothing to do with the seasonal variations of total CO2.
The problem is all about net rates of CO2. The seasonal variation averages out because the seasons average out. The manmade contribution does not average out, but accumulates at a rate about half of what is emitted. The other half goes into the ocean pretty quickly (that short half-life you are so keen to point out) acidifying the ocean. The cycling of CO2 into carbonate precipitates is slooooooooowly increasing, but it will be thousands of years catching up, and that is assuming nothing else wacky happens (the uncertainty there is not bounded on the upper end unfortunately). Such as major circulation pattern changes.
Ok, tea break progress:
Your [fourth point](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), Brent, is hard to understand. You draw attention to cloud feedbacks being the greatest source of uncertainty. How is this 'erroneous logic' in the IPCC report?
You the descend into some sort of rant about 'gravy trains', adjectives, and drawing salaries under false pretenses. I think we can safely say point 4 shows no erroneous logic in IPCC AR4, and read between the lines if we had any vague misunderstanding that you had any care for, or understanding of the science involved.
Your fifth point says something about cherrypicking and terrifying graphs. Can you show us how you are not yourself asking us to cherypick, and what relevance a graph drawn from 1750-1840 has on the debate about current climate change? If you look at Mann et al (2009) [here](http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/MannetalScience09.pdf), you can see a graph spanning from 500 AD to after 2000 AD giving a longer context. As a final note, please explain how your fifth point is 'erroneous logic' in the IPCC report.
6th point: It is your logic that is faulty. You have to consider CO2 the only driver of climate change in order to use a deviation from the trend to disprove the theory. Nobody has claimed CO2 is the only driver of climate change. Do you have an alternative hypothesis to explain how temporary deviations from the trend, when the trend as a whole is perfectly solid, constitute a problem? I mean a prime example was the plateau in the early 2000s, but the temperature is still rising and the trend continues to be good. I have seen several possible explanations for this 45-75 plateau, from atmospheric nuclear testing, to natural climate oscillations, but the warming did eventually resume... Please show us your alternative hypothesis.
7th point: Can you spell out which part of this point is the 'erroneous logic'?
8th point: Can you supply a reference for this, please? That you disagree with a statement without producing a valid reason is not an example of 'erroneous logic'
9th point. I'll quote you: âsnow cover has decreased in most regionsâ. Whoops. Tell it to the Texans. Nearly May and Iâve got a blanket round my shoulders here in England. Global Warming my foot.. I don't see you disproving this statement. That it's cold in you house today has no bearing on the bigger picture. Claiming that texans having seen late snow disproves the above statement is also a glaring logical fallacy, as the statement says "most regions", and Texas is not a proxy for the world at large. Please enlighten us as to how you have shown the above quoted IPCC statement to be 'erroneous logic'.
10th point: You again fail to show an error in the IPCC AR4.
11th point: Again you mistake your home for the world. You are in essence contending that the lack of MWP of LIA in a northern hemisphere average temperatures graph is incorrect because it was warm in Iceland and cold in England. Last I checked the proportion of the northern hemisphere taken up by England and Iceland was pretty tiny... you could add Greenland, which also supported agriculture in the late middle ages, and you would still not be able to extrapolate from that to the whole northern hemisphere. Again it is you logic that is faulty.
12th point: You fail to disprove the statement or show that it is in any way faulty logic. You also attempt some sort of ad-hominem attack, but fail.
13th point: gibberish.
So Brent, now that we have [demolished what you wrote](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) in post #1326, please do us the favour of, in your words, declaring defeat and shutting right up.
(Why do I have that feeling that the goalposts will suddenly shift?)
T.P.Hamilton (1440):
We seem to be at cross-purposes in discussing Residence Time.
You are saying that the upward year-on-year trend in CO2 PPM, due to unrelenting human production of CO2, makes the annual 'ripple' - 3 steps forward 2 steps back - trivial in comparison. (Hope I am not misrepresenting you here).
I am saying that the annual 'downtick' indicates a high (although short-lived) rate of absorbtion.
The two statements are surely not mutually exclusive. I, for instance, must concede that if production exceeds absorbtion then atmospheric concentrations must obviously rise. Would you not agree that if, say, a Great Plague suddenly caused a cessation of anthropogenic CO2 then a rapid decline (decades, not millennia) in CO2 PPM would be the result?
Brent, you're more full of excrement than a colostomy bag.
Can you not see your own incompetence when the [mirror](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) is [held](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) up to [you](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…)?
> ...then a rapid decline (decades, not millennia) in CO2 PPM would be the result?
You need to define your terms more precisely before anyone can agree with them. Rather than defining your own, perhaps you might care to adopt the terms used by some of the scientists have researched this question?
You might even want to peruse their research seeing they've studied this more than you and may have insight that you don't yet possess. IIRC there are at least four processes at work in this area operating over significantly different timescales, so focusing on any one will give you the wrong picture - let alone (say) extrapolating or presuming without evidence that "the annual August reduction" could "obtain all year round".
wonder how this is goin ?
http://www.tinyurl.com.au/72q
MFS (1437):
Second Point (Cosmic rays/albedo/climate). You quite rightly say that the effect of albedo on climate is not fully understood. The point here is that the Svensmark hypothesis has promise. You claim a âclear lack of correlationâ in the Krivova & Solanki paper p.281. You must have advanced pattern-recognitions skills. Gypsies in your ancestry?
You asked for references to the agricultural productivity idea and Parana River study. The first is a conjecture by the brilliant Herschel, a man with the lost art of combining intuition with calculation. Oh, polymaths, where are you today? I suspect that the IPCC Armageddon Myth is a consequence of compartmentalisation in science, of narrow-and-deep expertise. Thereâs a link to the Parana River paper in #382.
You asked me if I knew scientists pay scales. Guilty as charged: I do not. I should instead be moaning about the value for money taxpayers get from climatologists. It isnât the absolute level of salaries that matters; youâre right, and I stand corrected. In my next letter to the Climate Change Minister I will propose an innovative remuneration system: suspend salary payments in pounds/dollars/euros, and pay them instead in carbon credits, reducing with every year the pesky icecaps refuse to melt.
"Oh look, another letter from Brent. File under 'G' for 'Garbage', Sarah. There's a girl."
Hilariously, on Brent's system scientists would be rich beyond their wildest dreams, no doubt initiating more conspiracy theories about scientists faking evidence for cash.
Brent says:" the Svensmark hypothesis has promise"
But then anything that isn't CO2 driven AGW 'has promise' in Brent's circles.
1400+ posts pointing to a wealth of linked data, yet Brent still doesn't get it.
It HAS to be that those narrow minded, agenda driven scientists are missing something, anything. Surely?
MFS (1438):
Third Point in #1326 (assumption of unstable equilibrium): You ask âin a warming world, which⦠is the more important feedback?â Well, it may be warming on Planet Pachauri, but itâs business as usual on Earth. Relax, dude, you are not going to fry or drown. I guarantee it.
Fourth point (IPCCâs probability grading): Are you deliberately failing to grasp my objection to AR4âs spectrum of likelihood? They simplify things for the poor old politicians, explaining where theyâre certain and where theyâre less so. And then they drive a coach and horses through the Great Scare Story by saying âof course, clouds may have some effect on climate, but the sums are so hard that we canât even put a label on their effect. We likely havenât the foggiest idea how to model their behaviour.â
Fifth point (last century and a half): We have had joyous discussions here on the good old Aletsch Glacier. (The Warmists always scream: âlocalised phenomenon â irrelevant.) It comes and goes. Sometimes it spits out some Roman ruins and sometimes it gobbles them up again. It comes and goes, and has been going since 1860. At each âlap of the waveâ we wonder whether to build an ark or an icebreaker. Hey, Iâve got an idea. Thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis. Letâs build dual-purpose arks capable of dealing with ice age AND flooding! See if you can find Holzhauserâs 3200-year graph of the Aletsch. Itâs business as usual.
1399 Brent,
CET monthly averages for April since 1970 (mean average for each decade in brackets).
6.7
7.9
8.2
7.0
8.2
8.3
8.1
7.2
6.5
7.8 (7.6)
8.8
7.8
8.6
6.8
8.1
8.3
5.8
10.3
8.2
6.6 (7.9)
8.0
7.9
8.7
9.5
8.1
9.1
8.5
9.0
7.7
9.4 (8.6)
7.8
7.7
9.3
9.6
9.4
8.9
8.6
11.2
7.9
10.0 (9.0)
8.8
Overall mean 8.3
Anything special about April 2010? Why mention it unless you thought it would impress someone who didn't know better?
1384 sunspot,
You really ought to take care who you quote as an "authority". NN/Biocab's many attributes include the inability to understand basic arithmetic, as you can see [here](http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3854567&postcount=779). (If you've got all day, you can follow the thread from [here](http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3821197&postcount=507))
1426 sunspot,
Would you effing believe it? It's a link to the infamous Pop Tart's list, which has been destroyed many times over. BTW Pop Tart is borderline psychotic.
Brent @ 1326
Positive feedback enhances an effect, negative feedback works in opposition to an effect. This is still positive feedback. You really need to learn the basics before you make smart-alec comments.
TrueSceptic (1451):
Oh, no, I feared this might happen. It's a test, isn't it?
You asked if there's anything special about 8.8C. Can we do it as multiple choice?
a. It was a bit chillier than last year.
b. Upward trend since 1970.
c. 84th hottest April since records began.
d. Something to do with Global Warming.
e. Don't know.
Lemme think about this one. Why is there never a bleedin' climatologist around when you need one...
1455 Brent,
If there's a "test", it's to see if you would give a reasonable answer. You failed.
Richard Simons (1454):
You're quite right, of course. I phrased my objection badly, and I see how it can read. Here's the point I was trying to make:
The arguments for unstable equilibrium are as compelling in both runaway-warming and runaway-cooling scenarios. To advance a 'tipping point' argument without quantifying it is unscientific; is the tactic used by advocates as a shorthand for 'any change is courting disaster'. Earth's long history of stability - or at least variation within a range supporting life - suggests that negative feedback is the norm, that the climate has a certain robustness.
It's unfashionable to bang on about the coming ice-age, but the crazy tree-huggers here will doubtless be big supporters of the IPGC when it launches. I dread to think of the geoengineering schemes to combat Global Cooling.
Brent said:"We seem to be at cross-purposes in discussing Residence Time."
No shit, Sherlock! This all arose from your opus, point 1, which you have conceded. Remember this?:
"It's quite a big job to go through the IPCC WG1 document, but here are a few thoughts:
>1 Technical Summary p.32: CO2 is referred to as a "long-lived greenhouse gas". I make the half-life 123 +/- 2 months, about 10 years. That ain't long-lived."
Lifetime of individual molecules is not the same as the lifetime of the gas concentration, and you have made no argument that CO2 gas concentration is short lived. However, should you wish to investigate the effect of various CO2 emission and climate scenarios, there is an applet for that.
http://carboncycle.aos.wisc.edu/carbon-budget-tool/
Even a cut of 50% in emissions will result in CO2 increasing to 20% higher than today by 2200.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/ go to the If Emissions of Greenhouse Gases are Reduced, How Quickly do Their Concentrations in the Atmosphere Decrease? link.
1457 Brent,
Are you really pretending that you don't know what IPCC stands for?
What coming ice-age? Care to make a prediction?
BTW is there *any* nutty denialist meme that you haven't brought up here? Do you believe all of them, or are you just trolling?
It's official, I should have been sitting in the sun and enjoying myself during my [tea break](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…).
> Well, it may be warming on Planet Pachauri, but itâs business as usual on Earth.
Dodging the question (and for bonus points asserting a measurable falsehood). Which is standard modus operandi for the goldfish troll.
> And then they drive a coach and horses through the Great Scare Story by saying âof course, clouds may have some effect on climate, but the sums are so hard that we canât even put a label on their effect. We likely havenât the foggiest idea how to model their behaviour.â
Dodging [my earlier question](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), and constructing a strawman. You're caricaturing the science by turning "it's the **largest** source of uncertainty" into "we have zero idea of **the uncertainty range**". And for good measure you're throwing in a high proof requirement - no buying car insurance for you until you're damn sure you're about to crash!
Also standard modus operandi.
> At each âlap of the waveâ we wonder whether to build an ark or an icebreaker.
Strawman. No-one but you is suggesting we forecast global climate from a single glacier.
> To advance a 'tipping point' argument without quantifying it is unscientific...
...and to ignore the quantifications made by scientists on the basis of physical principles and empirical evidence is a strawman. There are **reasons** why scientists talk about tipping points.
You've proven time and time again you're incapable of or unwilling to address the *actual case* made by the scientists. It speaks volumes about the strength of your "objections".
I think it would be instructive to compare the weight of evidence for a proposition that Brent finds to ["have promise"](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) with a proposition that he finds to be obviously wrong (e.g. large parts of climate science, especially if cited by the IPCC).
Hi guys, Iâve just been re-reading the IPCC documentâs references to the Svensmark hypothesis.
Because the âLOSUâ (i.e., level of scientific understanding) is stated as âvery lowâ, they do not spend long on cosmic-ray influences on albedo. This makes sense: if itâs merely a POSSIBLE driver of temperature they can hardly include it in their nice clear Radiative Forcing graph which consists of wicked greenhouse gases and some minor also-rans.
Lotharssonâs jibe about folks like me not buying car insurance until weâre damn certain weâre about to crash puts it well, I think. Itâs a question of risk-assessment.
Maybe hereâs the pilosophical divide: The Warmists and the Sceptics take a different view on the probability of Carbongeddon. The Warmists are not entrail-poking soothsayers as per some of my jibes, but people whose rationality obliges them to accept the known-knowns in an argument, even if the logical conclusion looks bonkers. Millennium bugs, SARS, H5N1 mutations, dinosaur killers and C02 are all fearworthy to a Warmist.
AGW sceptics, on the other hand, temper the calculations with emotional judgment, with (oh, Iâm just gonna come out with these words and be pilloriedâ¦) belief. (Go on, crank up the Insult Machine.)
The two sides do seem to have one thing in common: a distaste for blind faith. Once or twice I have been asked on this site if I were an evolution-denier, which I am not. There lurks a suspicion that any challenge to the IPCC oeuvre is anti-science, or maybe gratuitous spoiling. For my part, I will hurl accusations of tree-hugging apocalypsephilia, or âunscepticismâ at the other side. But I donât really see you as new-age crystal-mongers, just misguided.
I hear you gasp, âBelief??? He used the flippinâ B-word! Got him!â But bear with me for a moment. Thales of Miletus is credited with laying the foundations for the physical sciences in the 6th century BC, and something called âthe Ionian Enchantmentâ: the feeling we get when a complex issue is distilled down to a small number of underlying principles. Prof Brian Cox writes: âThis poetic term describes the belief that the complexity of the world can be explained by a small number of simple natural laws because at its heart it is simple and orderly. The scientistâs job is to strip away the complexity we see around us and to uncover this underlying simplicity.â Kepler felt it: âAhhhh! A goddamn ELLIPSE!â The army of IPCC hangers-on are marching towards complexity and cacophony: in the wrong direction.
Unless and until it gets warmer, we sceptics just donât buy the Great Global Warming Hoax. (Yeah, yeah, weâll take the greenhouse effect as read â itâs the apocalyptic extrapolation thatâs the problem.) The sheer scale of the groupthink, based on the flimsiest of futurology, is very reminiscent of a religious cult.
I hope that Svensmark & Co wil shortly explain why the end is not nigh, and then weâll disband the silly IPCC and all go down the pub for a pint and a singsong.
Idiot.
>*Iâm just gonna come out with these words and be pilloriedâ¦) belief. (Go on, crank up the Insult Machine.*
Then Brent shows us where the strengths of his argument are:
>*tree-hugging apocalypsephilia, or âunscepticism*... groupthink, based on the flimsiest of futurology, is very reminiscent of a religious cult.*
Then Brent accuses the IPCC of Belief (a new word for their 3000 pages of evidence) while Brent himself is not influenced by such, because he know the correct belief is his faith that Svensmark's speculative hypothesis find sound evidence to overturn the radiative forcing of GHG.
And what evidence is needed by Brent?
>*Unless and until it gets warmer, we sceptics just donât buy the Great Global Warming Hoax.*
Who new, all Brent needs is [evidence of warming](http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/plot/gistemp/mean:240/plot/rss…)?
I wonder where he would start looking for such evidence? Perhaps [Sea level rise](http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/), or [Glacial retreat](http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/mbb/sum08.html), or the [Canary](http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20100504_Figure3.png) of [Arctic ice](http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/365871main_earth3-20090707-full.jpg)?
Or perhaps [biological indicators](http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/papers-on-biological-indica…)?
So will Brent dismiss all these metrics of warming, or will Brent need to fabricate a new excuse to for his faith that there is no problem and no action required?
sceptoid Also skeptoid (chiefly US). Portmanteau word derived from sceptic + factoid.
1 A person who irrationally doubts the validity of accepted, knowledgeable sources in a particular subject; a person inclined to doubt any assertion or apparent fact but who readily inclines to believe in the veracity of factoids. E21.
2 A person not seeking the truth; an inquirer who has arrived at definite convictions from information supplied by dubious sources. E21.
Synonyms: septic, denier, denialosaur, pseudosceptic, deluded, timewaster, troll, blockhead, nitwit, dunderhead, dolt, dunce, halfwit, fool, ass, booby, nincompoop, ninny, ignoramus, cretin, moron, brent, sunspot, ...
Brent said: "The sheer scale of the groupthink, based on the flimsiest of futurology, is very reminiscent of a religious cult".
Like you hanging your hat (and future generations hats) on Svensmark in preference to the combined and distilled expertise of the world's working climate scientists, for instance?
I think you hit your own nail right on the head there, Brent me ol' troll.
I haven't read all of your comments, but it seems to me that wishful thinking, misrepresentations, off-topic remarks and teenage put-downs are all you have brought to the discussions here. Tell me, exactly where do you think that climatologists have got the science wrong?
1467 Richard,
I haven't read all this thread but it appears that Brent has gone through just about every denialist meme going. Please don't get him to do it all over again. ;)
1467 Richard,
See # 1435. Also the intelligent vibrant debates on WUWT.
>intelligent vibrant debates on WUWT.
Hah! Don't make me laugh.
Oh, too late.
1469 Brent,
That settles it. You are a Poe, aren't you?
@ 1469, Brent:
"See 1435"
Brent , you have gotten hammered, demolished, on the claims you made in 1435. You have not responded in any substantive way to the demolishing of your claims. Stop being so freaking dishonest.
Back in #124 our friend Lotharsson declared that if UAH MSU temperatures remained below their 1998 peak for 20 years he would still consider the Global Warming hypothesis valid.
Is there anybody out there with the decency to admit that if the globe doesn't warm there's no such thing as global warming? Lotharsson's unshakeable faith in the impending catastrophe must be an embarrassment to any rational Warmist bedfellows he may have. Can we agree on 50 years? If the 1998 record remains unmatched until 2060, will you give up?
Brent: Your claims in 1435 completely ignore the main points, which are that CO2 absorbs in the infrared, the amount in the atmosphere is increasing (as is that of some other greenhouse gases) and that the increase is a result of human activity. The basic physics tell us that Earth's temperature will increase, other things being constant and in the absence of any plausible negative feedback mechanism. There is no reason to expect changes in any other major factors of anything like the magnitude required to counteract the effect of the greenhouse gases. Unless you have evidence to counteract these points, all your snarky comments about tipping points, 'Charlatans on the gravy train' (#796), confusion between weather and climate, etc just form a side show.
> ...temper the calculations with emotional judgment...
...because as is well-known, the climate system reconfigures itself to fit *emotional* judgements made by humans!
> The two sides do seem to have one thing in common: a distaste for blind faith.
Nope. Your "side" *frequently* puts blind faith in any claim that suits your existing beliefs regardless of the lack of or lack in quality of evidence - often it merely has to have enough plausibility to fool a four year old without especially advanced skills in climate science for that age and the deniosphere falls over itself to repeat it far and wide and proclaim that *this time* - no, really, truly, cross my heart, I promise - *it's solid proof of the death of AGW*.
Furthermore, your "side" often espouses several mutually contradictory claims at once. IIRC I challenged you earlier to point out the contradictions in some of the "skeptical" positions that you reported and to specify which ones you did not agree with. No response to that...I guess your emotional judgement method wasn't sufficiently discriminatory to figure out which was which in the real world?
> ...but people whose rationality obliges them to accept the known-knowns in an argument, even if the logical conclusion looks bonkers **to "skeptics"**.
There, fixed it for you...
...since you haven't provided any robust logic to show how the "logical conclusion *is actually or looks likely to be* bonkers" - if anything you've shown that your perception is based on flawed logic.
> Millennium bugs, SARS, H5N1 mutations, dinosaur killers and C02 are all fearworthy to a Warmist.
Yes, because (for example) a Millennium bug fixed was **never** going to be a problem if left **unfixed**, right? This is a well-known cognitive flaw that leads to poor system and business management, due to thinking very similar to that which you demonstrate here. Go read the papers by Repenning from MIT that I linked to much earlier. "No-one ever gets credit for a problem that didn't happen."
> The army of IPCC hangers-on are marching towards complexity and cacophony: in the wrong direction.
Because CO2 reducing outgoing radiation thereby changing the top-of-atmosphere radiation balance leading to a total climate system energy increase is **too complex** for your aesthetic preference?
And/or because a system that has *inherent* complexities just *shouldn't* exist in the real world because it offends your delicate sensibilities? Oh my Lord, flutter a scented hankerchief below Brent's nostrils and help him to the fainting couch!
> Unless and until it gets warmer,...
I have sad news for you. Burying your head in the sand and pretending it's not warming doesn't *actually* stop the measured temperature going up.
But I do have some praise for you. You're doing a masterful job of discrediting your position, so please keep it up!
> Back in #124 our friend Lotharsson declared that if UAH MSU temperatures remained below their 1998 peak for 20 years he would still consider the Global Warming hypothesis valid.
Brent demonstrates how to lie by omission.
> Lotharsson's unshakeable faith in the impending catastrophe must be an embarrassment...
For anyone keeping score at home, I elaborated on why Brent's simple test was not sufficient, and that elaboration did not indicate "an unshakeable faith" - it explicitly specified criteria for **falsifying** the warming hypothesis:
> So...if you're looking for falsification criteria based on observed temperature trends, you need to factor in (or at a minimum sufficiently constrain the uncertainty ranges of) all the forcings and feedbacks. And that means you can't pick N and do a simple max temperature comparison after N years.
> Strictly speaking if you really want to falsify the current hypotheses, you should aim to create a model that explains observations better than current models do without relying on the current understanding of anthropogenic influences. (And you likely want to show reasons why your model is not only better at explaining observations, but is at least equally plausible in terms of physical considerations.)
So Brent, is it that you have cognitive issues (with at least memory and comprehension - since you explicitly referenced my comment #124 which clearly didn't say what you implied it did), or is it that you have to lie to support your argument?
Brent @ 1473,
Just in order to see whether you understand what a trend is, please consider a measurement of a physical quantity which reads as the following series {expressed as (time point) measurement}:
What would you say the trend is, increasing or decreasing? Do you think the fact that values 21 to 30 are all lower than value 20 indicate the trend has reversed to a decreasing one? Because this is EXACTLY the argument you're trying to put across on post 1473, which makes you look like either you have no idea what you're talking about, or are picking a specific measurement (20 in my example, the year 1998 in yours) with the intent to decieve.
Insert meme here. Ignore inconvienient criticisms of my logical fallacies. Misunderstand science based on WUWT comments. Use highly charged, emotional, non-scientific language to try and make scientific point. Accuse everyone of fraud. Fail. Attempt to be funny. Fail. Accuse "warmists" of having no sense in humour. Fail. In the last parahraph declare victory anyway and hint you'll never return.
Return.
Do it all again.
Insert meme here. Ignore inconvienient criticisms of my logical fallacies. Misunderstand science based on WUWT comments. Use highly charged, emotional, non-scientific language to try and make scientific point. Accuse everyone of fra*d. Fail. Attempt to be funny. Fail. Accuse "warmists" of having no sense in humour. Fail. In the last parahraph declare victory anyway and hint you'll never return.
Return.
Do it all again.
> Because this is EXACTLY the argument you're trying to put across on post 1473, which makes you look like either you have no idea what you're talking about...
MFS, Brent is [swimming around the goldfish bowl](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…), conveniently appearing to forget everything he learnt on each lap - such as [this response to his flawed proposal for determining if warming has stopped](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…) as an alternative to the falsifiability criteria I specified. (And his ducking and weaving and changing the subject in response to critiques of his proposed test including a focus on *trends* are most instructive - and quite likely to be reasonably predictive of his near-future behaviour on this thread.)
He's had quite a few laps on this thread already. One might be tempted to suspect that it's deliberate. It certainly seems he's too busy swimming in circles to [make any concessions or answer specific questions that point to flaws in his argument](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/the_empirical_evidence_for_man…). Why, it's almost like he *feels* that if he doesn't make any concessions or answer any questions that disprove his case that he can continue to *think* that it remains unsullied...
Hi, guys! It occurs to me that agricultural land usage could be a useful calibrator of global warming. (After all, what greater contrast could there be between the overzealous climatologist who never goes outdoors, and a pragmatic no-nonsense farmer.)
Is anybody aware of data showing "crop range" - the lands where farmers think they get optimum yields over the years? Such data would of course be subject to other influences such as market price, new strains, etc., but intelligently treated and filtered might contain a useful climate signal.
Agricultural records?!?!?! :slapping self onforehead: Well, duh!!! Why on earth did no one think of this before.
Why, things like first and last frost dates, winter chill hour accumulation, date of first blossom, date of soil warming and planting, harvest date... Those things might actually be useful for tracking climate. I bet someone could actually analyze that and see if there are changes and trends! Who woulda thunk?!
It's a good thing we have Brent here with his massive intelligence, originality and creativity to point out things that no one else would have ever thought of. Thank you, Brent!
The title at the top is 'The empirical evidence for man-made global warming' but no evidence for AGW was presented in the video - only that temperatures appear to be going up which could and probably is Nature just doing its thing.
I'm not a denialist but I am definitely skeptical of AGW. Why should it surprise anyone that there are skeptics? If regulations based on AGW theory continue to go into effect, people's lives will be dramatically affected and quite possibly for no good reason. The burden of proof is on the AGW proponents and given the extent of change that would be required, the science behind the claims must be ironclad and fully disclosed. But there's plenty of room to have doubt about AGW (as even expressed by the Climategate scientists themselves). It has been the history of climate science that we should just take the AGW proponent's word for it in the absence of empirical proof. But what data/proof that actually has been made available has apparently had serious issues (such as trying to capitalize on urban heat affect in temp station data or burying tree-ring data that doesn't support AGW).
This video makes me even more skeptical...
For instance regarding sea level rise as shown in the vid, given the rate of increase indicated in the graph, the sea level will rise by a whopping 0.12-ft per year... hardly a crisis. And the big question is, "Is this human induced or just a natural effect?" This context always seems to be missing from the 'science'.
The Harries et al plot looks far from conclusive to me that there is any real increase in trapped heat. And I'm more concerned with what is missing from the plot. Where is H2O? It is well understood that water vapor is by far the most important greenhouse agent. And the plot only shows the differences for each agent; but not in context with overall radiated energy.
Regarding the satellite plot showing a decline in Earth's radiated energy, it was admitted by Climategate scientists that the Earth's energy budget is not understood. And given the plot scale, as far as I can tell, the increase in CO2-related effect (at the far left) is less than 0.8%. I would think well within the statistical error range. And I don't understand why there are two CO2 ranges depicted. The second one shows no real change at all. In fact, based on my reading of that plot, we should be far more concerned about CH4 (methane), not CO2. So please, everyone do your part to save the planet and stop farting!
The video also shows that temperatures appear to have gone down in the lower latitudes and there are questions about the extent of ice reduction (or maybe even net gain?) in Antarctica. The AGW scientists seem to be conveniently focused on the upper latitudes. So maybe there are other factors at work in climate change... but we'll never know until climate science undergoes reform because these scientists are too busy 'proving' their dogmatic AGW theory. And of course they are because their research grants are to study an impending crisis... not a non-crisis. I'm continually amused that the skeptics are charged with having a profit motive (big oil, etc) and yet how many $millions in government funding is at stake if AGW isn't a crisis after all?
A chronic question I have regarding CO2 concentrations is that the measured increase has been constant since the 1970's but given that industrial output plus auto emissions have gone up at presumably accelerated rates, why hasn't CO2? What's up with that? Or is the minimal amount human activity contributes (~3%) lost in the background noise and thus not a factor?
So I'm skeptical of AGW and for good reason. Lots of questions and not many answers from the 'scientific community'; just a lot of proclamations ie 'AGW is true because we (the ordained) say so'. But if the AGW crowd get their way, people's quality of life will be dramatically affected (in a bad way). The burden of proof is on AGW theorists and there appears to be many holes in the theory and a whole lot of defensiveness on their part. We need a climate science reboot before more really stupid policy decisions based on incomplete or bad science get made.
ppk, where are you getting your information? I ask, because nearly every single thing you say in your post @1484 is simply not true - much if it made untrue by omissions or partial presentation of what we do know.
Lee (#1485) -
Sadly, my post is factual. First, I can read a graph and the ones presented in the vid indicate what I posted above.
CO2 concentration rates are shown here (http://earthsci.org/processes/weather/airpolute/airplou.html) among other places. You'll note the increase is linear even though actual human output is undoubtedly not.
Amount of CO2 contributed by human activity is around 3% of the 0.04% of total atmospheric volume CO2 represents. In other words, human produced CO2 is estimated to account for a total of 0.012% by volume of atmospheric constituents. I don't even know how that can be accurately measured... and yet I'm supposed to believe this is a catastrophic condition.
See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere.
Quote from Kevin Trenberth email (Oct 2009):
'We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we cannot account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless, as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!'
What are we supposed to make of such an admission by a leading climate scientist?
sigh...
ppk, yo are beign badly misinformed.
CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is clearly accelerating. Anyone who says otherwise is not being truthful. See here, for one of many, many good analyses of this fact:
[Tamino CO2](http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/co2-acceleration/)
"I don't even know how that can be accurately measured" Then you should learn how - this is no secret. Humans are directly responsible for some 40% increase in atmospheric [CO2], which is the dominant greenhouse gas forcing. That is directly measurable, and directly attributable to human processes, and is one of the most rock-solid and clearly true things we know - as solid as nearly anything we know in all of science.
And your quote from Trenberth IS NOT WHAT HE SAID. You are quoting something that was made up from quote mined fragments and other people's words misattributed to him - it is not what he actually said. That is why I asked about yor sources - you are being misinformed.
What Trenberth actually wrote was:
""The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."
John Cook - among many others - has analyzed this in context, including looking at Trenberth's many publications, and says this:
After reviewing the discussion in Trenberth 2009, it is apparent that what he meant was [this, from Skeptical
Science.com](http://www.skepticalscience.com/Understanding-Trenberths-travesty.html):
>>"Global warming is still happening - our planet is still accumulating heat. But our observation systems aren't able to comprehensively keep track of where all the energy is going. Consequently, we can't definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That's a travesty!"
>Skeptics use Trenberth's email to characterise climate scientists as secretive and deceptive. However, when one takes the trouble to acquaint oneself with the science, the opposite becomes apparent. Trenberth outlines his views in a clear, open manner, frankly articulating his frustrations at the limitations of observation systems. Trenberth's opinions didn't need to be illegally stolen and leaked onto the internet. They were already publicly available in the peer reviewed literature - and much less open to misinterpretation than a quote-mined email.
ppk, your facts are in error. Here's just one error: you cite a Wikipedia article to support your claim that:
amount of CO2 contributed by human activity is around 3% of the 0.04% of total atmospheric volume CO2 represents.
The article you cite does not support your claim. It does say that there are about 810 gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. And this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_emissions
shows that anthropogenic carbon emissions amount to about 8 gigatonnes per year. If you eyeball-integrate the area under their curve, you'll see that total CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels is probably about 300 gigatonnes. Compare that to the current amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (810 gigatonnes) and you get anthropogenic emissions adding up to about 35% of total atmospheric carbon dioxide. Indeed, the measurement of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere shows an increase from 1750 to 2004 of about 107 ppm out of a total of 387 ppm. These numbers are all approximately consistent. Your claim that anthropogenic CO2 emissions constitute only 3% of total atmospheric CO2 is off by a factor of ten.
Even to concede that humans are contributing 10 times what the Wikipedia article states is only 3%... That would be 30% of 0.04% or 0.12% contribution by humans. If CO2 constitutes as the Wikipedia article indicates from 9%-26% of the total greenhouse effect (water vapor by contrast is 36%-72%!), and humans contribute 3% of that, then the human influence based on these percentages is somewhere between 3% to 9% of all global warming. Concerning maybe, but not alarming. And that doesn't account for any offsetting contributors such as increased albedo, ocean absorption, etc. We don't even know if GW is a net negative consequence... We do know that average global temps have been much higher prehistorically than today and that CO2 concentrations have been much higher. Climate scientists don't know if CO2 is a temp forcer or just a by-product. Ice cores are indeterminate showing CO2 concentrations leading and lagging temp changes.
Another question is how does human-produced CO2, which is more dense than air, get into the upper atmosphere. As far as I can tell, climate science has no mechanism to explain this phenomenon. Only that CO2 quantities have gone up... but that's not an answer. How have they gone up?
Again, there's no compelling argument here to turn our society upside down with draconian regulations on carbon emissions.
The Trenberth quote is relevant and in the context that the science is not 'settled' and that important questions (even among the climate researchers themselves) remain as to how these complex natural processes work and what, if any, effect human activity might have.
I believe it is very dangerous to base public policy on dubious science. And climate science today is dubious... Thank you Climategate whistleblower!
Oh good god... what do you DO with that kind fo crap?
Lee -
Your reply brilliantly captures the whole problem skeptics have with current climate science... Don't answer questions or be responsive or even civil... just burn the heretics! ;)
ppk:"CO2 concentration rates are shown here (http://earthsci.org/processes/weather/airpolute/airplou.html) among other places. You'll note the increase is linear even though actual human output is undoubtedly not.
Amount of CO2 contributed by human activity is around 3% of the 0.04% of total atmospheric volume CO2 represents."
According to your recommended reference the CO2 curve is not linear, and at least 10% of the CO2 (only that emitted from 1958 to 1994) was manmade.
ppk @ 1484,
Translated: I am about to regurgitate most denier talking points but I object to being called a denier.
Followed by:
Apart from the quaint tell-tale of putting 'scientific community' in inverted commas, your clear implication is that scientists are coming up with a false or unreliable result in order to keep themselves in a job.
You see, several people here are scientists. Maybe even a few, like me, were once fence-sitters or, while clear on the science, may disagree on policy points. There is hardly anything better guaranteed to make said scientists sit up and take notice than hinting that there is a profit motive behing their actions, because, let me put this clearly, no-one goes into research for the money, which is lousy.
Once I myself saw that a large thrust of climate change deniers attacks was to cast aspersions on the motives of scientists, I started paying much closer attention to the science. Unlike most of the trolls that drop in here once or twice a week, I can understand much of it, as it indirectly affects my work, and many colleagues work in it. What I found was that most denier arguments are based on either outright lies, misrepresentations of the science, or putting the most emphasis on small, uncertain forcings (like cosmic rays) that do not affect the overall picture. Once you start noticing that the arguments made by one side are totally lacking in scientific rigour, what other course of action are you going to take but to cease believing in them?
Finally let me address a point you make in your final post:
Since you seem to like Wiki as a source (most would warn you against putting too much trust in it - go to the primary sources), you can find about atmospheric circulation [here](Another question is how does human-produced CO2, which is more dense than air, get into the upper atmosphere. As far as I can tell, climate science has no mechanism to explain this phenomenon. Only that CO2 quantities have gone up... but that's not an answer. How have they gone up?), and about convection [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_convection). These are two of the mechanisms involved.
>That would be 30% of 0.04%
No. The amount of non-greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is irrelevant. You could add any amount of nitrogen to the atmosphere and it would not cause any warming. What matters is the increase in greenhouse gases. CO2 has increased from ~280ppm to ~390ppm since the industrial revolution. That is an increase of about 40% and [it is caused by human activity](http://cdiac.ornl.gov/faq.html#Q7).
>We don't even know if GW is a net negative consequence
[#12](http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-positives-negatives.htm)
>We do know that average global temps have been much higher prehistorically than today
[#2](http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-…).
>and that CO2 concentrations have been much higher.
[#45](http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm).
>Climate scientists don't know if CO2 is a temp forcer or just a by-product.
[#11](http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm).
>Only that CO2 quantities have gone up... but that's not an answer. How have they gone up?
[#27](http://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emission…).
>The Trenberth quote
[#101](http://www.skepticalscience.com/Kevin-Trenberth-travesty-cant-account-f…)
House!
Even to concede that humans are contributing 10 times what the Wikipedia article states is only 3%...
I was unable to find any place in the Wikipedia article you cited that supports your claim. Please provide the exact quote from the Wikipedia article so that I can verify it.
That would be 30% of 0.04% or 0.12% contribution by humans.
You argue that 0.12% is too small a quantity to have any significant effect. On what scientific principle do you base your evaluation? Scientists who have studied the matter have demonstrated quite plainly that 0.12% is sufficient to produce significant warming.
f CO2 constitutes as the Wikipedia article indicates from 9%-26% of the total greenhouse effect (water vapor by contrast is 36%-72%!), and humans contribute 3% of that, then the human influence based on these percentages is somewhere between 3% to 9% of all global warming.
This Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
states: in the absence of the greenhouse effect the planet's mean temperature would be far lower - about -18 or -19 °C [6][7] instead of the much higher current mean temperature, about 14 °C.[8]
Thus, the net greenhouse effect amounts to 32ºC. By your calculation, the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are warming the earth by between 1ºC and 3ºC -- pretty close to the actual values. And of course, if we increase the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere, the earth will warm by even more.
Thus, your own calculation demonstrates that, if we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we'll get temperature increases of between 2ºC and 6ºC -- pretty serious warming!
And that doesn't account for any offsetting contributors such as increased albedo, ocean absorption, etc. We don't even know if GW is a net negative consequence...
Yes, we do know the effect here: you can find it in the IPCC reports -- I'll get the exact quote for you if you wish, but they make clear that the net effect is strongly positive.
We do know that average global temps have been much higher prehistorically than today and that CO2 concentrations have been much higher.
Yes, and in those days, the locations of New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and a host of other cities were underwater. Sure, the earth will be just fine if temperatures climb. Humanity won't.
Climate scientists don't know if CO2 is a temp forcer or just a by-product.
That is not true. They have declared in numerous publications that CO2 has a net positive forcing. Please provide a quote to substantiate your claim.
Ice cores are indeterminate showing CO2 concentrations leading and lagging temp changes.
Actually, ice cores often show CO2 concentrations lagging temperature increases. That's because warming leads to the release of even greater amounts of CO2. Thus, releasing CO2 leads to a vicious cycle. We're just getting started triggering the effects.
Another question is how does human-produced CO2, which is more dense than air, get into the upper atmosphere.
It's called diffusion and it goes up automatically. Your physics is way wrong here. Just apply a little logic to your thinking: if it were true, then the atmosphere would consist of layers, with the densest gases at the bottom and the lightest gases at the top. We'd be breathing pure CO2, all the oxygen would be in a layer above that, all the nitrogen in a layer above that, and so on. That's ridiculous!
Again, there's no compelling argument here to turn our society upside down with draconian regulations on carbon emissions.
Not quite. There's no compelling argument that you know of. There are indeed compelling arguments, you just don't grasp them yet.
the science is not 'settled' and that important questions (even among the climate researchers themselves) remain as to how these complex natural processes work and what, if any, effect human activity might have.
The science is settled to the degree that the National Academy of Sciences has seen fit for a number of years to declare that CO2 releases pose a significant threat to our well-being. Do you consider yourself smarter than the NAS?
I believe it is very dangerous to base public policy on dubious science. And climate science today is dubious...
Only to those who don't understand it. I'll be happy to answer your questions on the matter. But the big question is: would any amount of logical argumentation and scientific data sway your opinion?
ppk @ 1484
If you come out with unsupportable accusations of unprofessional conduct against a group of people about whom you know nothing, do not be surprised if they do not treat you kindly, especially when the rest of your comment shows that you are woefully misinformed about the subject.
I suggest that you apologise to the climatologists here (I am not one) and start again, but this time assume that people who have studied the matter for 20 years have actually acquired some knowledge in that time, and that you have something to learn from them.
The temperature here in Central England is a bit less chilly. We've had the heating on this evening, but just for a couple of hours to... er... hide the decline! Global warming? I wish!
Roy Spencer over on WUWT is explaining how climate sensitivity to CO2 has been overestimated by the IPCC, and that we're at last getting a handle on negative feedback.
We've mulled over sensitivity and feedback here, haven't we, boys, using little more than an intuitive feel for thermodynamics and a little common sense. Could it be that the armies of climatologists exercise their left-brains to excess, to the detriment of right-brain qualitative thinking? (Too much Cray time makes them crazy?)
Sensitivity and feedback: are they the key? The two misconceptions which, when yanked away, bring the tottering AGW house of cards down?
Brent, Roy Spencer is not what I would call an eminent scientist. He is welcome to his opinions, but when Roy Spencer says X and the National Academy of Sciences says Y, I'll bet my money on the NAS. I went to his blog and read his posting there and things are not as clear as you seem to think they are. In the first place, his paper has not been published yet, which means that it is just now undergoing scrutiny from various scientists. If it passes muster, then we can treat it with some respect. Until then, it's pure speculation.
Nevertheless, I'll make some comments on his piece. Quotes from his blog are in italics.
Iâve been slicing and dicing the data different ways, and here I will present 7 years of results
First off, whenever somebody says that they have tried many different approaches to the data, red flags should go up. While I was a graduate student, I carried out an immensely complex statistical analysis, and kept getting null results. I just kept trying new methods until one day I got a statistically significant result. I was overjoyed. I went to my advisor to tell him the good news. "How many different analyses have you run?" he asked. "30 or 40", I answered. "And what statistical significance did you get?" "Just under 5%". He proceeded to explain to me that a statistical signficance of 5% means that purely random data will yield similar results in one case in 20. I had run 30 or 40 analyses. He congratulated me for the integrity of my calculations. But no, I hadn't found anything.
That may well be what's going on here. Mr. Spencer can find statistical significance in any data if he just keeps crunching numbers. And indeed, the method he finally proposes is truly arcane. He looks at changes from month to month. Why in the world is this scientifically relevant? He doesn't explain. He uses seven years of data, but the original dataset has 9.5 years. Why didn't he include the other data? He doesn't say. It sounds like he cherry-picked his data to support his hypothesis. And the r-value he got really isn't that impressive.
Without going into the detailed justification, we have found that the most robust method for feedback estimation is to compute the month-to-month slopes...
This reminds me of an old physics cartoon showing two professors contemplating a complex calculation on the chalkboard. Partway through the calculation, there's the notation "and then a miracle happens" and then it continues from there. One of the scientists is saying "I think you need to tighten up that step." If Mr. Spencer can't justify his methodology, then it has no scientific value, especially with such an arcane approach. Asking us to accept his decision on faith is not how we do science.
In comparison, we find that none of the 17 IPCC climate models (those that have sufficient data to do the same calculations) exhibit this level of negative feedback when similar statistics are computed from output of either their 20th Century simulations, or their increasing-CO2 simulations.
So Mr. Spencer is declaring that his model disagrees with 17 other models. Doesn't this suggest that he bears a strong onus to really nail down his methods? But he doesn't explain why his methods are even appropriate, much less solid enough to overturn all the other work.
This is not science, this is a classic example of garbage computations yielding garbage results.
I guess no one here is going to respond to my questions regarding the vid that's the topic of this thread. It claims evidence of AGW and I didn't see any. What is it? If it can't be presented in a video entirely dedicated to the evidence for AGW by AGW cultists, what should anyone make of that?
Regarding rising sea level (one of the poster children of doom), the graph presented shows 1.5" per year rise. And presumably only a percentage of that is human induced. How much? Seems like a pretty reasonable question. The context in which those graphs are always presented to the public is that the change is 100% human induced... but we know it isn't, right? wink, wink, nudge, nudge... Gotta keep the crisis alive!
What about the Harries et al plot in the vid? Why is CO2 shown in two different places and what is the context of the result? I see only a 0.8% difference in the one CO2 result and no change in the other and methane appears to be the bigger problem anyway (which apparently has been going down in concentration). Please explain.
Oops, I just Googled the Harries et al paper and apparently Nature issued an erratum in 'Nature 410, 355; 2001' that undermined that study's results. Why is it featured in the vid if the conclusions were wrong? I suppose the vid makers know that most viewers aren't going to look up something like that. So it would seem that whenever I dig into climate research, I come up smelling like... well, not like roses. It's no wonder Mann, Jones, et al have tried so desperately to keep their work so close to the vest.
Erasmussimo,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/07/spencer-strong-negative-feedback-…
Reading through the WUWT comments (including Roy Spencer's own), I think the point is not that Spencer has a better model; it's that he is advancing a more realistic feedback level in order to make the existing models more accurate.
When Spencer writes, "Iâve been slicing and dicing the data different ways," maybe this phrase does indicate a faulty approach. But if this work results in models with genuine forecasting ability, and observation accords better with theory then it's a step forward. Almost like real science.
He adds that "Only a 2% change [in cloud cover] is needed to cause global warming or cooling," which may be familiar to you but is news to me. That's some sensitivity! And if solar wind does cause cloud fluctuation, well poor maligned CO2 is one step closer to acquittal.
In his Chaos book, James Gleick describes a wierdo called Feigenbaum wandering aimlessly around Los Alamos in 1974. He was thinking about clouds and other messy untidy things such as leaves and flames. Those with a linear mind are not comfortable dealing with fuzzy stuff.
The IPCC report acknowledges, p114: "It is somewhat unsettling that the results of a complex climate model can be so drastically altered by substituting one reasonable cloud parametrization for another." They repeatedly say that cloud simulation is inadequate.
On p593 they are admirably frank about the greenhouse effect: "At present, these feedbacks are not tightly constrained by available observations." More admirably frank would be to rephrase it: "Our boffins are brilliant, and we have shiny new Cray computers, but it's bloody tricky to say how much of what goes up comes down again. Call for Spencer." Or even, "We know there's a greenhouse effect, but we do not know how strong it is."