Open thread 46

Further to my comment on the [previous open thread](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_45.php#comment-2399…) about the ["Climate change scepticism - its sources and strategies" forum](http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2010/2859986.htm), the guest speakers were Riley Dunlap, William Freudenburg, Naomi Oreskes and Stephen Schneider.

Entertaining listening.

New term to add to the english language from the last few days:

"Deniomania" (n.) - Severe anxiety disorder characterised by loud, excitable, and irrational disbelief of any and all proceedings of climate science suggesting a warming climate, even when supported by multiple lines of evidence. Hence, "Deniomanic" (n.) - One who suffers from deniomania.

Anybody have a link to a discussion of the anomalous late season ice growth in the arctic?

http://anarchist606.blogspot.com/2010/04/fox-news-falls-for-global-warm…

Hmmm; it's almost as if these news outlets and bloggers are ready to believe any old rubbish provided it appears to validate their political ideology??

The late season growth of Arctic sea ice is interesting when you compare the sites that use 15% and those that use 30%. In the last few days the 30% site has gone down while the 15% site has gone up. It shows that wind is moving the ice around at the edge of the 30% coverage causing the 15% coverage to increase and the 30% to decrease.....it is about the wind. Same amount of ice blown by the wind will cause the area/extent to change. Just looking at the numbers tells us less than we think. What we should be looking at is thermal gain/loss on an annual basis. That means looking at the thermal content of the water under the ice as well as the thermal content of the ice and the air above it. To only look at the ice is to miss the 800 pound gorilla.

nsidc.org will have an update on sea ice April 6.

Bottom line - this is just like the "COOLING IN 2008!!11ONE!!ELEVENTY!!1!"

Jeff Id tries the 'make ridiculous adjustments to the graph y-axis scales' trick with sea ice extents.

I have spent much of the day scrutinizing a recent WUWT article by Steve Goddard. I hope some people here might enjoy it.
http://climatewtf.blogspot.com/2010/04/march-madness.html

I experimented with an idea to start the post off positively looking at some science (I am no expert though so I just relayed stuff) and only looked at the WUWT post at the end.

lol I hadn't seen this before

http://iji2.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/wall-street-crisis-cancelled/

Are Strong!

Is anyone familiar with the "Heat Stored by Greenhouse Gases" article by Nasif Nahle? I have no doubt there's a fundamental flaw in his assertions or assumptions, but I have no experience in physics and find myself remarkably unable to argue against it! If anyone could point me to a rebuttal or related commentary that addresses it it wouyld be much appreciated.

FJM asked:

Is anyone familiar with the "Heat Stored by Greenhouse Gases" article by Nasif Nahle?

I am not familiar with Nasif Nahle but I had a quick look at his "paper." It is a fine example of crankiness at its worst. It is full of elementary errors in chemistry, physics and logic.

It would make a wonderful exam question for first year students: "find all the errors in the following "paper" One point for each one identified, extra points for showing why they are wrong".

It is absolute pseudo-science and rubbish.

I just hope that NN is not a scientist.

7 frankbi,

It looks like the alarmists are right that sea ice is disappearing so the anomaly makes a nice plot. What I like to do is offset the anomaly by the average amount of sea ice so that the reader can take the magnitude of the decline into proper context.

We have 2 options here: Jeff ID is an idiot who doesn't know what he is doing, or he is a despicable liar who does.

10 FJM,

I know that this is not a direct response, but Nahle is an [utter wacko](http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=116157&page=21).

11 Ian,

He claims to be. See [here](http://biocab.org/About_Us.html) and [here](http://biocab.org/Academic_Curriculum.html)

Deniomanic

Nitpick before this spreads like wildfire - shouldn't the noun be "deniomaniac" and the adjective "deniomanic"?

TS, yes he is a complete whack job. I did a little bit of searching and found that he has one English paper listed by Google Scholar. It is published in a "journal" called Journal of Human Thermodynamics. It contains such gems as:

"On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat and Occupation"

"Facial Vibration Imaging Technology and Quantification of Thermodynamic States of Individuals"

"Coriolis Force and Asymmetry in Chemical-Biological Evolution"

and

"Human Thermodynamics and Business Efficiency"

The journal is run by someone called Libb Timms who is even more of a crank than NN.

How on earth do people make a living out of pushing this nonsense?

Re frankbi:

Y-axis shenanigans is the least of the problems with Jeff Id's method.

If ice extent were to drop to zero this summer it would be roughly a -5 million sq km anomaly. But Jeff Id seems to think plotting anomalies is "alarmist". Putting it into context Jeff Id style would mean plotting it as about 7 million sq km..

No kidding. His method would take the -5 million sq km and add roughly 12 million sq km (the mean over the entire record).

His method hides how close the summer minimum, at current rate of decline, is moving towards zero. His method in fact ensures the graph can never reach zero (even if arctic sea ice disapears forever more). It's complete bullshit.

"Now it's up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It's not working. We need an army of climate outlaws."

Greenpeace 2010

Full story at Watts.

Yes, el gordo, Watts has once again clearly shown that he's on the side of corrupt business and that he is anti-democracy. No surprise at all.
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/climate/2010/04/will_the_real_climategate_…

Of course, no-one would expect Watts to support grass roots action except when it suits him (like sending out an army of people to photograph weather stations!).

That was in the interest of science, what Greenpeace are suggesting is purely political.

el gordo:

> That was in the interest of science,

Hahahahahaha! I'm sure that, if we look at Watts's surfacestations.org project in the proper context, we'll see that his support for grassroots actions are purely "in the interest of science".

Context: in each and every second that Watts was helping to host the blog Butte Country Republican Party, we can see that Watts was merely a person of science disinterested in politics. Merely.

Unlike, you know, Greenpeace.

* * *

Blob:

> Are Strong!

:)

Just for a moment, I thought that link referred to "Butter Republicans", which I assumed to be a reference to a heretofore unknown political category, like "Yellow Dog Democrat".

By the way, I was once advised not to listen to anyone who uses the phrase "It behooves us". I think the same can be said for anyone who uses "heretofore".

el gordo, I understand from seeing your other posts that you condone Watt's efforts to hasten ecological disaster, but don't support those who uncover corruption, bribery and extortion. (Who does Koch pay?)

Watt's is anti-science, he can't understand it and makes no effort to do so. He's one of those people who is afraid of anything academic and reacts by trying to belittle it. He is motivated by crowd adulation, greed and politics - not sure in what order.

BTW - the post he referred to is a blog, not Greenpeace policy. But it has some interesting information about what's going on in the world.

Sou

Let's divert our attention from politics to CC, we appear to have reached a tipping point.

http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png

The increase is mainly restricted to the Bering Sea because the wind has been pushing the ice out there. Given that the Bering ice melts every summer, plus the fact that sea ice volume is still shrinking and most other areas are below recent averages, let's get back and see what it's like in July and August.

I'd be surprised if the long term trend suddenly changes while the world is warming, especially with the arctic warming more than most other places. Although if the Karla volcano erupts it could make a difference for the next year or two.

I wouldn't be surprised if the long term trend suddenly changes and the ice extent settles on average for the foreseeable future.

You're off to a good start, el gordo. On your mate Roy Spencer's satellite records it says that the surface temp on 2 April was 530.07 degrees Fahrenheit COOLER than 2 April last year - that would make the surface temp below absolute zero, lol. (The chart shows differently.)
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+001

I wouldn't be surprised to see skeptics unsurprised as the declining arctic sea ice trend continues in coming years. I think they'll say:

You warmists with your false accusations! We never *predicted* arctic sea ice decline would reverse as you claim. In fact we fully *expected* the decline to continue! It's just an increase in wind caused by recovery from the little ice age after-all! Climate science is completely uncertain - that's why we know with certainty that rising co2 has had no effect on arctic sea ice

2 Other Mike,

A related one is Cyclomania/Cyclomaniac, describing the belief that everything is explained by natural cycles of various types.

I thought that link referred to "Butter Republicans"

Or, it might be a nuanced version of political denigration.

If a tiger can turn into butter, like in the fable, I don't see why a RINO couldn't.

So in that case, instead of being a wingnut, they'd be a butternut.

16 Ian,

I collated NN's posts in that JREF thread [here](http://forums.randi.org/showpost.php?p=3854567&postcount=779). It was quite bizarre trying to get any sense out of him at all.

#29 TrueSceptic,

I actually had someone on a different forum show me a graph of temperatures over the last couple hundred thousand years, with the glacial/inter-glacial peaks and valleys, and claim that that shows that the warming we are seeing in the last hundred years is also part of a natural cycle. I replied something to the effect that my heartbeat follows a regular pattern, and asked him if that too is evidence that the temp record is following a natural pattern. He said yes! All regularity in nature is evidence that the temp change from the last hundred years is also natural. If you find regular natural patterns anywhere in nature, apparently that means the only patterns that exist are regular natural ones!

That's the kind of pig-ignorance we're dealing with.

I actually had someone on a different forum show me a graph of temperatures over the last couple hundred thousand years, with the glacial/inter-glacial peaks and valleys, and claim that that shows that the warming we are seeing in the last hundred years is also part of a natural cycle.

In response to this kind of thing I have noted that my car's speed has heretofore been controlled by my use of the accelerator, and therefore that it cannot possibly be affected by just having driven slowly over the edge of this very tall cliff...

...but it seems many people still don't get it :-(

I've been watching Melbourne's weather since BoM announced it had a record 100 consecutive days of 20C or more. It's still going, with 118 days in a row today, if the forecast weather holds (expected 26C).

As noted on my new blog, that's beaten the 2000-01 record by more than 50% and likely to continue for another few days at least (despite the fading El Nino - in case McLean is reading - lol).

(Excuse the shameless plug :D)

There is some very cold air over the Bering Sea and Sea of Okhotsk which may slow down the summer melt.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/ANIM/sfctmpmer_01a.fnl.30.gif

Anyone notice the denialist diatribe maquerading as opinion by Chris Berg of the IPA in today's SMH?

His spiel about mitigation almost sounds Monckton-esque. Honestly I can understand this getting run in the Murdoch press but surely the Fairfax press should know better? The IPA is basically a front for the views of the fossil-fuel industry (and others) from what I've seen and they espouse the views of Carter and Plimer.

The Australian is at it again. Saturday's paper had an editorial by Frank Furedi essentially condemning the investigation into Phil Jones and the UEA CRU as a kangaroo court:

The committee's main aim seemed to be to ensure that the moral status of the current consensus on climate change remained intact.

Here's something of interest to those who fancy that betting on the weather (as opposed to climate) might be good for the delusionist cause:

Bet on world temperature embarrasses climate delusionals

Does anyone have any thoughts on this article? It says in the abstract:

...it is found that the patterns of SAT and sea ice before 1989 are mostly determined by the Arctic Oscillation (AO) in winter. In contrast, arctic warming patterns after 1989 are characterized by the intensification of the Beaufort High and the reduced sea-ice concentrations in summer induced by the positive ice-albedo feedback.

It is concluded that the arctic warming before 1989 especially in winter was explained by the positive trend of the AOI. Moreover the intensified Beaufort High and the drastic decrease of the sea ice concentrations in September after 1989 were associated with the recent negative trend of the AOI. Since the decadal variation of the AO is recognized as the natural variability of the global atmosphere, it is shown that both of decadal variabilities before and after 1989 in the Arctic can be mostly explained by the natural variability of the AO not by the external response due to the human activity.

Betting on the weather is mainstream and it's possible to get 10/1 for the hottest year on record. Unfortunately, the UK has a growing number of Denialati and they are only offering 4/1 that this year will be the coldest on record.

http://www.paddypower.com/bet/novelty-betting/weather

Take that bet Gordo and tell us how it pans out for you.

I'm thinking BBQ summer.

I'm thinking weasel.

Anyone else seen this over at Pielke?

[Data Analysis of Recent Warming Pattern in the Arctic](http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/guest-post-by-hiroshi-…)

"The important point is that the IPCC models have been tuned perfectly to fit the rapid warming during 1970-1990 by means of the ice-albedo feedback (anthropogenic forcing) which is not actually observed."

[Abstract here](http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/sola/6A/SpecialEdition/6A_1/_article).

This is of course being trumpeted as a nail in the coffin of the IPCC (give me strength...).

'The global warming has been stopped by natural variability superimposed on the gentle anthropogenic global warming.'

That is true.

"'The global warming has been stopped by natural variability superimposed on the gentle anthropogenic global warming.'

That is true."

Explain.

From the abstract:

'Since the decadal variation of the AO is recognized as the natural variability of the global atmosphere, it is shown that both of decadal variabilities before and after 1989 in the Arctic can be mostly explained by the natural variability of the AO not by the external response due to the human activity.'

Sounds perfectly reasonable and if you go to the AO Index Forecast it is possible to make a value judgement on this UK summer.

Sounds perfectly reasonable and if you go to the AO Index Forecast it is possible to make a value judgement on this UK summer.

I asked you to explain to me why this is "true". "It sounds perfectly reasonable" isn't a good enough response. Everything sounds good to you. Either it's right or it isn't. Why is this "true"?

John

Explain.

That constant year-on-year temperature rise that all teh models was predicting has been shown to be false.

Bud said (49):

"That constant year-on-year temperature rise that all teh models was predicting has been shown to be false."

Not one model predicts a constant year-on-year steady rise in temps. It's always been claimed that year to year variability is to be expected. It's the long-term trends that are relevant, and are what the models are dealing with.

49 Bud,

That constant year-on-year temperature rise that all teh models was predicting has been shown to be false.

What? Did you make that up yourself or get it from some other denidiot?

@ 50 and 51: [Poe's Law](http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Poe%27s_Law).

52 Dave R,

Could well be. ;)

I'm still pretty amazed at Carter's attempt to paint Hansen as a contemporary Lysenko linked to [in the previous open thread](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/03/open_thread_45.php#comment-2366…)

From that piece:

Lysenko and his supporters rejected the 'dangerous Western concepts' of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution. They preferred the Lamarckian view of the inheritance of acquired characteristics; for instance, that cows could be trained to give more milk and their offspring would then inherit this trait.

Whilst this was not an unreasonable hypothesis to erect in the early 19th century, by the 1930s the idea had been tested in many ways and was known to be wrong.

This is a fascinating assertion coming from Carter. It was "tested in many ways" and "known to be wrong"? How? By whom? Was there, perhaps, oh, I don't know, a consensus amongst scientists in relevant fields from around the world based on converging lines of evidence? How else could it have been "known to be wrong," including by the Russian scientists who opposed it?

Lysenko should be the denialists' patron saint - a rogue who challenged established scientific knowledge and the community of scientists not by conducting replicable research and publishing in respected journals but by gaining the patronage of powerful interests who found their political goals well served by his ideological critique and policy ideas (especially their propaganda value).

TrueSceptic

Could well be. ;)

Hey, I was just concocting the best explanation for el gordo's assertion that I could think of. Anyway, apart from the facts - which I made up - it was all true. ;-)

re #1
Yes, that was great session, which Robyn attended. Max Boykoff also spoke, Myanna Lahsen unfortunately couldn't make it.
They slightly reorganized: all 5 gave talks, then they had about 45 minutes of Q&A, to standing-room-only room, and could have gone longer. It was nice to be able to meet the ones I didn't already know.

Here's one for Tim's growing McKitrick file.

Mckitrick gets it wrong on IPCC

http://deepclimate.org/2010/04/05/mcclimategate-continued-mckitrick-com…

The latest climate contrarian meme appears to be (baseless) accusations of scientific âgatekeepingâ and âcensorshipâ. Ross McKitrick provides an example of this unmistakable trend, with a blow-by-blow account of difficulties encountered in publication of his upcoming paper on the supposed contamination of the surface temperature record. The new paper purports to debunk a single statement in the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, one denigrating the conclusions of a previous paper by McKitrick and Patrick Michaels.

McKitrick criticizes the IPCC assertion that "locations of greatest socioeconomic development are also those that have been most warmed by atmospheric circulation". He claims that other sections cited to support that statement do no such thing. But it turns out that McKitrick himself has it completely wrong, as he cites a passage concerning regional warming over the 21st century, instead of the actual relevant passage concerning the period 1975-2004.

April 3, 2010 Lawrence Solomon writes that France's National Academy of Science will have a debate over climate science. He enthuses: "...Franceâs two most prominent sceptics, Claude Allegre and Vincent Courtillot, have sown great doubt in the minds of a once unskeptical French public..." and credits Allegre's new book. The debate is supposed to take place by October... kinda slow, it seems to me.

http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/04/03/l…

Also at GWPF:
http://www.thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/761-france-to-hold-official-debate-on-…

Science Insider article, one day before Solomon's article:http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2010/04/french-researchers-as…

The English language articles that google has about this putative debate all seem to be Solomon's article. He doesn't mention his sources of information. So I found no independent confirmation of what Solomon says.

This French blogger thinks poorly of Allegre, and says the Minister Pecresse "... asked Jean Salençon, the president of the French Science Academy to organise consultations. With one goal in mind: to calm the conflict down..."

http://development.thinkaboutit.eu/think3/blogger/canovas
(has one post about Allegre)

There is no actual evidence that a catastrophic climate change is now taking place because of a benign trace gas.

http://i40.tinypic.com/e002s4.png

The Irish potato famine was not caused by a fungus, as originally thought.

http://i42.tinypic.com/14t0wp5.jpg

Is that both a false enough statement and an unrelated enough picture to compete with El Gordo?

That'll do nicely Stu.

PS. I laughed, thanks :)

Gordo, please answer me at 48. We wouldn't want people thinking you're a blowhard who doesn't know what he's talking about, would we?

I have to admit, reading el gordo's crapola here, there and everywhere is getting tiresome. He somehow believes that NGOs like Greenpeace take a purely political stance on climate warming while WUWT, C02 Science etc. are only addressing the science. This is startling considering that the bodies involved with or who are funding many of the contrarian sites are commerical elites with an axe to grind. And even if they aren't, there is ample evidence that some of the people involved in these web sites have connections with think tanks and the like. El gordo places a lot of stock in WUWT. One of WUWTs contributors is Indur Goklany, who has written articles for the CATO Institute and is a Julian Simon Fellow at the right wing Political Economy Research Center. He has argued that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be opened up for drilling (see Sourcewatch article). Yet WUWT is happy to enlist his services as a contributor. Whatever one might think of Greenpeace, for the most part it exists on the basis of voluntary public membership.

To make matters worse, el gordo is incapable of discussing science, so instead endlessly quotes astroturf lobbying groups for his information and then responds by saying, 'it sounds perfectly reasonable to me'. I am sure that if el gordo believed the world was flat and a Flat Earth Society article said so, he would respond similarly. I have challenged el gordo on numerous occasions to tell us how many scientific conferences he has attended, how many climate scientists he has spoken with personally, and how much he has read and understands the peer-reviewed literature on the subject of climate science, as a means of prying oput what inbues him with wisdom that somehow alludes the rest of us and the majority of the scientific community.

Of course el gordo ignores this, becausr the answers to those questions should be obvious. Nil, nil and virtually nil. This then leads us to the next point: whay is el gordo a contrarian? The answer is simple: because it fits in with his pre-determined world view, which is based on his political orientation. I am certain that el gordo, like most of the denialists, is to the right politically and perhaps even a libertarian. Someone who loathes the role of government in the economy. If el gordo is indeed as he says an unemployed journalist, then it is quite astounding for someone in his position to support those who wish to destroy the planet for short-term profit.

Stu - just for the record, the Irish famines were caused by a free market experiment - during the 1840s Ireland was a net exporter of foodstuffs, as the growers could get better prices for their produce in England than they could get at home.
As some English MPs commented at the time, the result of this trading activity being that the poor in Ireland were starving to death was an unexpected bonus for the english.

Ireland's population has still not recovered to the levels it was at 160 years ago, either.

All this history is remarkably being echoed by the evil men of today's times who are driving the world's poor towards some seriously hard times by their lies and stupidity.

If el gordo is indeed as he says an unemployed journalist, then...

...his posting record doesn't say much for his journalistic skills of ferreting out the truth from the bulldust. Or maybe he's hoping to land a Fox News/Murdoch "journalism" role?

Further to Vince's comment on the population crash from the potato famine: my family tracked down the census data from my ancestor 6 or 7 generations my senior, the generation who migrated to escape the famine. In the census prior to the famine, my ancestor was a boy in a family of 18. In the census after the famine my G^(6 or 7) father was the only survivor with known records.

His options were few under imperial Britain, he escaped by joining the **British** Army, [fought some Russians](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War) for the Empire, then migrated to the Empire's new world and the colony of NSW.

I understand that the British land lords in Ireland kept exporting potatoes while the local population perished. Little wonder that some call for this horror to be categorized as a form of genocide.

One dreads to think about [the potential result](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Famine_memorial_dubl…) of the back-winding of the 20th centurie's agricultural green revolution when the effect of peak oil starts to bite.

For more horror, I recommend Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World.

Thanks Vince, in the interests of good history I should have said the potato blight that contributed to the famine was not a fungus as originally thought.

Wait, that's not good history, it was a fungus. I've confused myself. Damn you, El Gordo!

The blight had attacked potatoes across North America for years, but European weather conditions kept the fungus away until the unique pattern of the mid-1840's.

To proliferate, a high humidity and a high minimum temperature are needed for the disease carrying spores to form. The European summer of 1845 was ideal for this process.

Scotland, Norway and Poland were too cold and much of the east was too dry, but across large parts of Europe, spores spread out like rippling waves from their epicentre in western Flanders. With humidity over 90 percent for weeks on end, the fungus went bananas.

We can blame Adam Smith for the mass starvation and migration from Ireland, he believed governments should not interfere with the free market.

For anyone in Canberra or planning to visit this weekend, it's a good chance to see "The Age of Stupid" with a panel discussion afterwards - including Will Steffen, Tom Griffiths and Julian Cribb.

Details below:

http://www.nma.gov.au/whats_on/calendar/calendar/?start=29-03-2010&end=…

Free event.

This is the epitome of fingers-in-your-ears denial.

Greenpeace is an environmental organisation that thinks global warming is the challenge of our age. It is natural for them to combat opposing opinions, and vigorously. We would think less of them if they didn't.

But they have just published a report that flings mud in all directions, obscuring the issue they need to highlight. What they have done in this report is wrong, and will serve them badly in the future. The main target of their report is Koch Industries, a private oil firm that has contributed close to $25 million over the past 4 years to what Greenpeace calls 'a climate denial machine.'

I don't believe such a 'climate denial machine' exists.

Unlike anything Sunspot posts, this is not satirical.

AGW supporters will think this is irrelevant, but we can all agree it's climate change.

http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2212

I'm sorry El Gordo, that *is* what neo-conservative laissez-faire economists claim Adam Smith advocated, and the dim amongst us choose to believe them. (It's a fact: neo-conservative views equate with lower IQs).

However, it's clearly untrue: Adam Smith also believed in justice, just as does any rational person of reasonable intelligence.
According to Adam Smith, the "free" market fails when there is a power imbalance.

#72 - Wow! El Gordo, fascinating new research - she could call these cyclical climate-affecting changes in the Earth's orbit.....I don't know......say, "Milankovitch Cycles"?

I don't believe such a 'climate denial machine' exists.

Denying denialism - it's all getting a bit recursive ;-)

Damn those 'neo-conservative laissez-faire economists' pulled the wool over my eyes, yet again. Did you know that a very strong El Nino was operating between 1844-46?

Vince, we all know about the Milankovitch Cycles, I was just excited by the graph over at Watts.

The Large Hadron Collider will open up a black hole and destroy the universe.

It sounds reasonable to me.

While over there I picked up this link, which should keep me occupied for quite some time.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/indexoce.html

Yes El Gordon - I have no doubt whatsoever that those datasets will keep an unemployed journalist busy for years.

As for "Vince, we all know about the Milankovitch Cycles, I was just excited by the graph over at Watts. " - surely this takes the non-sequitur to new heights? Quite apart from that - why on earth is anything "over at Watts" of any value or interest to anybody - isn't Watts a weather man who made a raft of false assertions about weather station sitings recently exposed as being utterly without foundation?

I guess what I'm asking is why would you expose yourself to misinformation provided by an unqualified purveyor of proven lies?

"Adam Smith... ...believed governments should not interfere with the free market."

Utter hogwash, El Gordo.

Speaking of weather men who dabble in what they think is climate science despite having no expertise whatsoever, I posted this on the Science Show on Climate Change Skepticism thread, but it seems appropriate here too:

...weather forecasters, especially those on TV (in the US at least) are much more skeptical about global warming than climate scientists - and a majority of the public tends to trust them, even though they often don't know what they're talking about when it comes to climate science.

From the NYT article referenced in that blog post:

A study released on Monday...found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was "caused mostly by human activities."

More than a quarter of the weathercasters...agreed with the statement "Global warming is a scam,"....

...polls show that...weather forecasters -- especially those on television -- dominate communications channels to the public. A study...found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore or Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate.

Well, at least they have the good sense not to trust Palin ;-)

The reported skepticism is at odds with the professional society:

The American Meteorological Society, which confers its coveted seal of approval on qualified weather forecasters, has affirmed the conclusion of the United Nations' climate panel that warming is occurring and that human activities are very likely the cause.

Gaz

Herbert Stein writes that Smith "viewed government intervention in the market with great skepticism ... yet he was prepared to accept or propose qualifications to that policy in the specific cases where he judged that their net effect would be beneficial and would not undermine the basically free character of the system."

It's only one opinion amongst many.

Great article about influential climate change denialists" at New Matilda.

Agh.

http://newmatilda.com/2010/04/08/climate-deniers-clout

Looks like 'global cooling' has stalled already.

I wonder if Fox News will cover this like it did the snowstorms a mere couple of months ago.

Fox will say the same as the Weather Channel, because it's news. The weather is out of whack and it has nothing to do with global warming.

Shorter Gordo: Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

For those who love to joust, can a few sane voices go over to:
Intersection, Attack on Mann, Again
and help balance the discussion a little?

John

That link left out Andrew Bolt of 'the Hun' - surely one of the most active members of the Denialati in Australia.

Gordo,

Who's Andrew Bolt?

We should get a clearer picture of ice thickness in due course, which will help clarify a lot of 'wishy-washy' ideas.

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cryosat/SEMH5ZZNK7G_0.html

Yet another piece of denialist nonsense today from Alan Moran of the IPA on the ABC's The drum - Unleashed.

Go over and give him some stick.

The Google/China hacking case: How many news outlets do the original reporting on a big story? Answer: not a lot, most news outlets are just regurgitating other outlets' 'facts'.

Nothing to do with AGW and this probably falls into the "ask a stupid question" file ... but please bear with this non-physicist.

Yesterday I was out in the yard clearing some invasive vegetation and dying trees. In order to save some effort, I began tossing some of the chunkier sawn off tree stumps onto a pile about 15 metres away rather than walking them down there.

I found that when I threw them caber-style (by applying force at the base, or javelin-style they didn't travel as far as when I threw them hammer-style (grabbing a branch and swinging them so the stump travelled through an arc with the heaviest part travelling the greatest distance.

Were I a physicist, what would be the most accurate way to describe the differing effectiveness of each approach referencing laws of motion?

...'there are the well-meaning individuals who believe that in accepting the alarmist view of climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue. For them, psychic welfare is at stake.'

Richard S. Lindzen

He's got me there, I really will have to give up global cooling alarmism.

[Fran](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/open_thread_46.php#comment-2414…).

I can think of at least four explanations that might contribute to your observation.

You might best achieve an initial angle of 45º for the trajectory of your branches using the hammer throw method, which will in turn best maximise the horizontal distance traveled.

Your hammer throw technique may be imparting to the branches the minimum surface area exposed to air resistance, compared with the other methods you used.

Your hammer throw technique may be imparting the maximum initial velocity, compared with the other methods you used.

The pieces that you threw hammer-style might have been randomly slightly lighter or more aerodynamic than the other pieces.

I'm sure that others will add to this. It's actually an interesting question to pose to school students to make them think about the underlying physics...

Thanks Bernard.

It's true of course that I didn't examine the relative mass of each tree portion, but they were fairly similar and the differences in distance were very substantial.

I'm thinking the initial velocity explanation sounds the best. At the point of release, the portions were certainly travelling faster. Perhaps it's easier for me to apply energy to the mass using this style than by the other methods?

One variable was the length of the protruding branch. When the "handle" was only short, it didn't work as well as when it was about 30cm. Also it helped if the heaviest portion was down one end. So a stump that was 200mm thick all along didn't travel as well as one that was 150mm at one end and 250mm at the other. If the "handle" was at the thinner and lighter end, this also helped.

As you say though, it might have been easier to achieve the optimal inclination using this hammer-throw method.

Fran at 94: Where's a physicist when you need one? That really is an interesting question. I'd guess that the answer has something to do with greater initial velocity when you're throwing hammer-style. If you throw javelin-style, you're imparting the maximum velocity as measured at the end of your arm; but if you're throwing hammer-style, the end of the stick is stretching out past the end of your arm, traveling at a higher speed.

Meanwhile, here's another question for those sports-physicist-mathematician types: How much energy is imparted by a good, solid punch? A couple months ago, [MSNBC had an article in which they interviewed Cindy Bir](http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/35221044/?ns=health-behavior), a biomedical engineer. The article stated that "A blow that gives the head enough spin to go from 0 to 43,000 rpm in just one second has a 25 percent chance of knocking a person unconscious."

I laughed really hard when I read that. It sounded completely crazy: 43,000 RPM??? Surely the reporter had really, really garbled something. I decided to spend a little time figuring out just how wildly wrong that number was. I found some estimates of how fast a well-thrown punch would be traveling, and then I tried to estimate the radius between the neck and the cheek, and did a little math to figure out how many RPM that would be... and damned if it didn't work out. But seriously... Forty-three thousand RPM? I still think I must have screwed up the numbers somewhere, because... well, 'cause it just sounds crazy impossible.

So all you physicists: once you answer Fran's question, want to take a crack at estimating the RPM of a spinning head?

A recent paper by W. M. Napier offers convincing proof that the Younger Dryas came about because we were hit with a very big rock.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/pdf/1003.0744

If it convinces an expert in paeleolithic extinctions like yourself, Gordo, I'm sold.

Temperatures in Europe plummeted after the event, but in the SH temperatures actually increased by 2 degrees and it has been cooling ever since.

el gordo (99): Napier offers no such proof.

Summary and Conclusions: "... the accumulation of observations has allowed us to build an astronomical model, closely based on the contemporary environment, which can plausibly yield the postulated [Younger Dryas Boundary] catastrophe... The object of this paper is not to claim that such an encounter
took place at 12,900 BP â that is a matter for Earth
scientists â but to show that a convincing astronomical scenario
can be constructed which seems to give a satisfactory
match to the major geophysical features of the Younger
Dryas Boundary data" (emphases added).

What is "Gore-gate", Sarah Palin?

SteveC

On further reading it looks like the impact theory has lost traction and so we are left with a very sharp reversal which requires explanation. It could be your classic 'binge and purge', the conveyor belt came to stop because of a freshwater flood into the Atlantic.
That's the most popular theory at the moment.

Last year W.S.Broecker said 'evidence from Chinese stalagmites suggests that, rather than being a freak occurrence, the Younger Dryas is an integral part of the deglacial sequence of events that produced the last termination on a global scale.'

And so Melbourne's record run of 123 days in a row over 20 degrees has come to an end today. It only reached 17.

It must be global cooling after all.

[John](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/open_thread_46.php#comment-2416…).

To anybody who lives in this part of the world, the idea that Melbourne could go so far into autumn without a daily maximum below 20C is staggering. I remember decades ago when I used to work in NSW, regularly standing on a train station in early March with an overcoat wrapped around me against the howling, bone-chilling southerlies, and watching the daily maxima struggle to top 15C.

These days I live more than a thousand kilometres further south, and I have yet to experience weather like that for at least a month and a half later in the year.

Of course, it's just weather...

Of course it's just weather, a cool PDO will produce CAO's and that is why California is experiencing wintery conditions in April.

http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/069.html

gordo,

Yes, it's weather.

And, this is a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill late season storm in California, not the slightest bit unusual. In my 50 years in California, I remember at leat one of these as late as Memorial Day at the end of June.

The winter weather warning is for elevations above 4000 feet. Most of California is *not* going to experience winter weather.

"Snow accumulations: two feet of snow is possible above 7000 feet by Monday afternoon... with 12 to 18 inches above 5000 feet and several inches down to 4000 feet."

Mountains getting snow- unheard of! lol

@108 - end of May, of course. Brain cramp....

I'd just like to clear Gordo up on a point - it's actually the VPL that causes the HMS to begin contracting, that in turn speads a variety of DIY, DUI and SAO's over the Pacific Ocean in turn causing unimaginable bullshit in Gordo's posts.

Fran - what you noticed is precisely the physics concept which lead the aborigines to invent the *woomera*.
The additional angular velocity you get out of a flick of the wrist will drastically increase the forward momentum of what you are throwing.
Alternatively - try throwing your stick sideways *without* flicking your wrist!

There's no need for alarm as the ice is not thick, just a little more widespread.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_2010.png

J, Leake interviews Vicky Pope, a Met office scientist.

âThe reality is that greenhouse gases are making the world warmer, but it is a mistake to see short-term changes in weather, currents or Arctic ice cover as evidence of this,â Pope said.

âInstead you have to look at long-term trends. These show that Arctic summer sea ice is decreasing by 232,000 square miles a decade, nearly 2.5 times the area of Great Britain.

âOn current trends it will still become ice-free in summer by around 2060.â

Trends that can't continue, won't. Herbert Stein's Law.

World Temperature Hits New 12 Month Record

Anyone wishing to see where The Drum has got to should look here where Chris Berg from the IPA offers an apologia for the Tea Party Movement in the US.

Apparently, Obama is "not literally a member of the Communist Party", you will be glad to know, but The Drum does publish a picture of him in green as if he is toxic, with the endorsement "Health Care Poison: Obamacare".

Amazing.

>*World Temperature Hits New 12 Month Record*

So that means the cooling has begun. 2010 is the new 1998! All trends should now start in 2010 to show the new cooling trend.

Of course it's just weather, a cool PDO will produce CAO's and that is why California is experiencing wintery conditions in April.

Hey, I live in California, moron; it ain't "wintery" here.

http://www.wunderground.com/US/CA/069.html

What part of "ski area" are you too stupid to understand?

Actually, [jakerman](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/open_thread_46.php#comment-2424…), it's been cooling since January 2007...

Bernard, your link is bad.

Oops, sorry ... nevermind.

The reserachers in Sweden still stands by IPCC:
http://uppsalainitiativet.blogspot.com/2010/04/overwhelming-majority-of…

Magnus

Those climate scientists are dependent on the gravy train for their livelihood, so they would naturally endorse the IPCC. By comparison America and UK voters are becoming more sceptical by the day.

In the US the public opinion tide turned in 2009, when several Gallup measures showed a slight retreat in public concern about global warming. This year, the downturn is even more pronounced.

Those climate scientists are dependent on the gravy train for their livelihood, so they would naturally endorse the IPCC.

Fail.

I've just put this on Jo Nova's site.

Wonder how long it will last?

"Nice references for this article, Jo â an old newspaper article, two out-of-date papers 29 and 23 years old respectively, and some sort of graph."

"Fantastic. Theyâll give Uni degrees to just about anybody these days, wonât theyâ¦"

"I noticed you are still quoting the unsupported and now debunked assertions from that ex-weatherman Anthony Watts. Arenât you bothering to keep up-to-date with the science on this issue before writing these articles?"

Tip to All Norwegians;

OSLO Saturday 17 April 12:00 Auditorium 4, University of OSLO

NIELS AXEL MÃRNER and MARTIN HOVLAND :

Sealevel: Observations versus Models !!!!

I've got an observation for Morner:

Dowsing doesn't work.

Using Google Trends to examine global warming memes, I couldn't help but notice Canberra is the number one city Googling "Lord Monckton".

Changed to his correct name, Christopher Monckton, it becomes Sydney.

Those climate scientists are dependent on the gravy train for their livelihood, so they would naturally endorse the IPCC.

This is true. In fact, I've heard that unless every department in each university makes up a global catastrophe they will all lose their jobs.

Say, does anyone know how much money Jones, Mann et whomever made from their gig with the IPCC? It must be a lot. Follow the money!

Here Stu could be ther title for Morner: Morner stick it to the science. ;-)

Pough added:

This is true. In fact, I've heard that unless every department in each university makes up a global catastrophe they will all lose their jobs.

Quite true. It's not as if some well-conceived study that challenged one or other plank of the basic science or the modelling would attract any cash from anywhere. I mean, there would be yawns all round wouldn't there? Snoozers! would be the comment from the Exxon Board.

"Those climate scientists are dependent on the gravy train for their livelihood, so they would naturally endorse the IPCC."

This line of argument always makes me wonder - what do scholars of, say, Ancient Greek literature or Cuneiform script rely on for their funding?

The billions of dollars spent on climate change research is money well spent, but unfortunately the warming bias has distorted the political landscape.

Hopefully the money will continue to flow to these scientists, because in their narrow fields of expertise they need the support. Eventually we will discover, without the political hype, whether the world is really getting warmer.

There is no urgency, nothing catastrophic will occur if we fail to cover Britain in windmills before 2012.

This is great news, just love the science.

âWe switched SIRAL on and it worked beautifully from the very start. Our first data were taken over the Antarcticâs Ross Ice Shelf, and clearly show the ice cover and reflections from underlying layers. These are excellent results at such an early stage and are a tribute to the hard work of the entire CryoSat community,â said Prof. Duncan Wingham, CryoSatâs Lead Investigator.

Full story at Watts

Eventually we will discover, without the political hype, whether the world is really getting warmer.

Wow.

If el gordo did not exist, he would have to be invented. Probably by recycling some ostrich DNA.

I've got to ask you - AGAIN - El Gordo, why on earth would you need to visit a debunked ex-weatherman's blogsite to read about the European Space Agency's latest satellite when you can get the information first hand from the European Space Agency?

Does *everything* have to pass through the patented Watts Stupidifier beofer you will read it?

So much for the "Renaissance Man"...

Vince

You're a sensitive petal.

The new satellite will give us the evidence, to convince me it isn't just noise.

[Vince](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/open_thread_46.php#comment-2427…).

Every day I become more convinced that Oh Gawdo is a poe fabricated to parody, over the long-term, the sheer stupidity of the Denialati. Seriously, no-one could be that moronic, without being off their medication as folk such as Bird are.

"Renaissance Man"? Re-nonsense Man, more like.

Peruvian glacier breaks apart causing tsunami, 3 people feared dead.

Of course since global warming is a "hoax" (El Fraudo's word) this never happened, and anyway, even if it did it isn't because of us.

Also, Al Gore.

Re-nonsense Man

That term deserves much more ubiquitous usage :-)

Conventional wisdom is often wrong and science is never settled, so the satellites will be invaluable in monitoring climate change.

Temperatures in the 20th century warmed almost three times faster in the Arctic than anywhere else in the NH and Arctic amplification looked like a real possibility. Here is a story that you may find interesting, if you have an open mind.

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=39136&tid=282&cid=54366&ct=162

Natural variability rules!

Natural variability rules!

Energy (im-)balance at the top of atmosphere rules the long term climate, and everything that doesn't significantly affect that is pretty much short term noise.

Meme meme meme meme,

link

Stupid statement.

[No response to any criticism]

Another link (note: must contradict first link because I can't tell the difference)

"Seems reasonable."

El Gordo stops making sense:
"The new satellite will give us the evidence, to convince me it isn't just noise."

What evidence? What noise?

Please elaborate.

From El Gordo's 'Natural Variability rules!' link:

>The scientists noted âthat the increased liquid and frozen freshwater flux into the Labrador Sea was probably tied to the large export of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean that contributed to the record minimum in sea-ice extent observed in the summer of 2007. Ironically, this disappearance of Arctic sea ice, which has been linked to global warming, may have helped trigger the return of deep wintertime [water sinking] to the North Atlantic.â

All sniping at Gords aside, that actually is interesting.

Lord Oxburgh [reports](http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/14/oxburgh-uea-cleared-m…)

We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it. Rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention.

Well knock me down with a feather...

The deniosphere is trying a new topic: the IPCC report has MANY non-peer reviewed references!
(see noconsensus or nofrakkingconsensus, no, I'm not linking, find it yourself)

Hilariously, they even labeled the IPCC reports themselves as not-peer-reviewed (well, at least in the first three I checked). Seriously.

Even more hilariously, there apparently was uncertainty that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA were a legitimate journal that was peer reviewed. They gave it "the benefit of the doubt", though!

The stupid, it hurts!

Here is nofrakkingconsensus http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/

Jo Nova puts in the boot.

'Every time the IPCC have spat on a scientist with âthatâs not peer reviewedâ, they have set themselves up to look like duplicitous fools when caught relying on student theses, magazine articles, and boot cleaning guides.'

Gordo lacking the spine to take on criticism of his posts, check.

John

Love visiting Huffpo, gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

'According to ITN, Peru is home to more than 70 percent of the world's tropical ice fields, and scientists predict that within 20 years warmer temperatures will melt them away altogether. This is the first sign of that ominous prediction, showing the devastating effect global warming will have on Peru.'

Within two decades! That's a risky prediction and will be proven wrong.

Gordo making a prediction he has neither the knowledge or authority to make, check.

In 2007 they were saying all the glaciers in Peru would be gone in five years. Easy to find, just google up 'Peru glacier melt' and see for yourself.

They lose credibility making such alarmist claims.

Who are "they" Gordo? Regardless of when they will be gone, they're going. One went yesterday and at least three people died.

But that's just "alarmist", right?

el gordo (149), quoting Jo Nova undermines any cred you may still have.

[Aside: the surname is ironic isn't it? I mean, when was the last time she said anything novel?]

El Gordo said

>In 2007 they were saying all the glaciers in Peru would be gone in five years. Easy to find, just google up 'Peru glacier melt' and see for yourself.

I did google, and all I could find was stuff like this:

Peruvian Glacier (singular) May Vanish In 5 Years

I could not find anything suggesting that all the glaciers in Peru would be gone in 5 years. That came straight out of Gordo's imagination.

>They lose credibility making such alarmist claims.

No, you lost credibility when you make stuff up (well, you would if you had any to start with).

Seriously El Gordo, don't you get tired of being wrong?

Going to admit you're wrong, Gordo?

I mean, when was the last time she said anything novel?

It's all novel when you're in active denial - or are in goldfish troll mode ;-)

...the surname is ironic isn't it?

I tend to think it's ironic in the sense that it implies something rather bright.

And less ironic in that it implies a spectacular explosion...

And so the momentum shifts.

I wonder if a "prize" should be awarded to first person to cite an accurate claim made by El Gordo that was not affirming AGW.

Fran,

Their prize should be a brief glimpse of daylight, having spent many hours if not days cooped up inside searching for that accurate nugget...

Indeed Stu ...

Honourable mention shoulf flow if anyone can identify El Gordo posting a response to some challenge that makes passing sense and is germane to the challenge.

Anyone see the news about the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcanic eruption spreading across parts of Europe?

I wonder if it will be large enough to affect temperatures significantly? (and subsequently allow the denialist industry to further propagate the meme of cooling for another few years)

Oh btw I spotted el gordo posting over on Andrew Bolt's blog. I think any theories of him being a poe can safely be put to rest.

'Scientists are now warning that Britain can expect to endure a series of extreme winters - the like of which have not been seen for more than 300 years.

Researchers have found that low solar activity - marked by a decrease in the sun's magnetic field - influences the weather conditions across northern Europe.'

UK Telegraph offers more unnecessary alarmism, everyone here knows that humans are the main CC culprits and sol has nothing to do with cold LIA winters.

Nevertheless, the economic refugees from Europe will come in dribs and drabs.

This recent UK winter saw an increase in deaths among the elderly because of 'fuel poverty', up by more than 12,000 on last year. As global warming fails to eventuate we can expect a marked increase from the 'mother country', particularly if there is a nasty turn in the weather.

The UK is the largest provider of migrants to Australia by far. According to the Census there were 1.04 million UK born people living here. This represented 24 per cent of our overseas born population and 5 per cent of our population overall. The median age of 53 is well above the general Australian population figure of 37 years.

In the good old days of global cooling (1947-1976) Australia picked up a large swag of migrants from the UK. This new wave will primarily consist of baby-boomers.

...expect a marked increase 'in migration' from the mother country.

Think Big,
It most certainly will affect temperatures.
That's why this is exactly the sort of event which climate modellers add in to their models when running future projections.
And the variety of available inputs like this is why different projections can vary so much.

@162 it was said that:

Oh btw I spotted el gordo posting over on Andrew Bolt's blog. I think any theories of him being a poe can safely be put to rest.

I've long suspected that El Gordo is a poe, precisely for the reasons others have advanced, but the trouble here is that it is one of those unfalsifiable things. What he posts at The Blot could have the same meaning there as here. He could be seeking to encourage more people to outbid him on stupid. He might have no opinion at all and just be a lonely attention-seeker who figures rightly that when you annoy people they give you more attention, whereas at Blots he gets an echo chamber.

Blot used to be an ALP consultant, and given the mess he is making of the Liberal Party these days, one can't rule out the possibility that he still is working for them in a more Machiavellian way by making the Liberals less electable and causing them to bleed their best talent. Some conservatives in the US have started to express this view about Fox News. One ironic result of Blot's efforts might well be a Green balance of power senate after July ...

So if El Gordo is posting there objectively he could be part of an effort to game the opposition -- or he could simply be a dupe or a moron, or unhinged, as we often suspect The Blot is.

Intent can be very hard to fathom, especially in a medium like this, and sometimes, it is simply a waste of time.

Unhinged, perhaps, but nothing worse.

Going to admit you're wrong, Gordo?

*crickets*

This recent UK winter saw an increase in deaths among the elderly because of 'fuel poverty'...

IIRC (and I may not be), in some models the UK may get markedly colder as AGW progresses due to changes in key weather patterns.

'Director the Institute for Solar System Research there Sami K. Solanki said he used magnetic field measurements to measure sun activity, but because these records date back to just 1900, researchers reconstructed older levels with the help of computer simulations.

âThe connection between sun activity and the cold winter in Europe was only recognisable after we calculated out the overlaying trend of global warming,â Solanki said in a statement.'

They took out the trend of global warming and now they can forecast the European weather more accurately. Amazing!

For a laugh read Malcolm Robert's comments in [âthat threadâ]( http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2861936.htm) [re Malcolms claims that the IPCC theory violates the laws of physics].

Malcolm finishes one post with:

>Priorities and family do not currently permit me to reply in detail to your other comments now. Hopefully later today.

Then starts another post with this exquisite hand waving:

> Consider these:

>1. What bed clothes (sheets, blankets) are commonly used:
>- at start of a warm summer night and in early morning hours of the same night
>- at start of a cool summer night and in the early morning hours of the same night
>- at start of a winter night and in the early morning hours of the same night.

And on it goes. I donât quite know what he is trying to say. But I can guess that he doesnât want to go into âdetailâ in response to the direct questions I put to him.

Gordo fails again, deliberately providing no links and leaving out this:

But the scientists insisted that their findings did not disprove the theory of climate change.

"We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect,â the study said, adding that âresults presented here indicate that, despite hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold winters than during recent decades.â

That was two seconds of Googling and five seconds of cut and paste.

Gordo, for my own edification, can you tell me when your expected global cooling is due to begin? I know it's difficult for you but try to leave out the waffle.

John, I have a strange feeling of deja vu.

Oh yeah, we asked Gordo this question in open thread 45! Didn't get answered then. Oh well, 'if at first...' and all that.

el gordo

Are you conceding that "climategate" was a crock?

The report in the Telegraph is based in a paper by Mike Lockwood et al. [Are cold winters in Europe associated with low solar activity?](http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/2/024001/fulltext). They compare the detrended Central England temperature record with solar activity.

So where does the temperature data come from?

We use annual means (centred on 1 January) of the HadCRUT3v compilation of northern hemisphere (NH) observations [17], which is available for 1850 onwards (shown in black in figure 1(a)), and extend these data back to 1659 using an ensemble of 11 reconstructions based on a wide variety of proxies. The reconstructions used are: d'Arrigo et al `STD' and `RCS' [18]; Mann et al `EIV' and `CPS' [19]; Smith et al [20]; Ammann and Wahl [21]; Jones and Mann [22]; and the reconstructions calibrated by Briffa et al [23]. The results presented here use the median of this ensemble for each year ...

The tin foil hat brigade over at WUWT also got a bit excited by this paper but i suspect that like el gordo the article into moving from eye to brain got morphed into "cold winters, cold winters, cold winters, cold winters, cold winters, cold winters, cold winters".

Speaking of "cold winters", I'm not sure about the rate of current SO2 emission from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, but a cursory review of the literature related to the [8 month long] 1783 Skafta-Fires event would seem to suggest that next winter could be a real freezer in the UK [even if it does follow something akin to what was described in 1783 as a "portentous summer" of acrid haze, intense heat, electrical storms: Grattan and Brayshay, 1995].

Flight anyone?

Hasis, it's not anything close to the 1783 eruption, which was massively effusive and lasted 8 months, and included several explosions capable of injecting SO2 into the lower stratosphere. Here's an abstract for the interested.

Currently the eruption plume has made it to mid-upper tropospheric level, maybe 6km high. It's essentially a point source rather than a long fissure. It doesn't really have much going for it in terms of a multiannual effect on NH climate at the moment!

Thank you Stu, I think that your use of "...at the moment" is an important caveat. One has to wonder what the Icelanders' perceptions were of how things were going to pan out as they observed their event in the early weeks of July 1783 [their's did indeed last 8 months, kicking off on 8th June of that year and lasting until 8th Feb 1784]

I'm not saying this will have severe NH effects [my crystal ball's as cloudy as your's], just that there is relevant historical precedent.

PS. My understanding is that it is the tropospheric gunk that causes some of the nastiest effects (haze, heatwave)...the stuff injected into the stratosphere just does the cooling thing

Yes it's the stratospheric stuff that has both radiative and dynamic effects. Apparently the haze was so thick in 1783 that it was strongly heated by the sun - that doesn't look like happening this time, because the eruption is rather more explosive than effusive.

If a 1783-type event were to occur, it may require mass evacuation of Iceland, as the gases released were really very poisinous!

Forgive me but didn't this eruption commence in an effusive state on ~20th March, before migrating under the icecap?

The fact that we are currently witnessing a phreato-type explosive eruption [glacier ice is being flashed to steam, resulting in lava being ejected explosively], does not mean that we are out of the woods yet. Did you not say yourself that the 1783 event was predominantly effusive, with some explosive interludes?

IMHO the potential for significant regional effects as a result of tropospheric emissions from any on-going eruption along this fissure should not be discounted [+ is it going to trigger Katla? The probability/possibility is certainly there.]

Enough speculation though, some of the images are fantastic.

It seems now Andrew Bolt has nailed the evil scientists behind Swine-flu-gate.

Independent "researcher" (i.e. unqualified, obsessive conspiracy theorist) Douglas Keenan has forced [Queen's University Belfast to hand over 40 years of tree data](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8623417.stm). Expect future manifestations of the DunningâKruger effect.

tree *ring* data.

El Fatso.

Let's for a moment accept that you are not a poe.

In that circumstance, given the number of times that you have claimed a denialist triumph, only to have it shot down in flames, and given the number of times that AGW proponents have been shown to actually be wide of the mark, and given the relative significance of the failures of the denialists' case against when compared with the actual errors detected in the AGW case...

...what magnitude of disparity between your completely-trashed denialist case and the rock-solid case for AGW must be reached before you actually engage your second neurone and concede that you have mightily screwed up the science?

I'm just wondering.

On Douglas Keenan, I've just remembered this bit of information from [Real Climate](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/the-guardian-disa…):

"As an aside, Keenan has made a cottage industry of accusing people of fraud whenever someone writes a paper of which he disapproves. He has attempted to get the FBI to investigate Mike Mann, pursued a vendetta against a Queenâs University Belfast researcher, and has harassed a French graduate student with fraud accusations based on completely legitimate choices in data handling. More recently Keenan, who contacted Wigley after having seen the email mentioned in the Pearce story, came to realise that Wigley was not in agreement with his unjustified allegations of âfraudâ. In response, Keenan replied (in an email dated Jan 10, 2010) that:

.. this has encouraged me to check a few of your publications: some are so incompetent that they seem to be criminally negligent.

Sincerely, Doug"

I assume the FOI request is part of his on-going vendetta against the QUB researcher mentioned.

John

"We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect.â

I think they are wrong on that score, both China and Russia experience harsh winters in tandem with Europe, so it depends more on the position of the jet stream and AO.

The LIA had a universal impact and the MIA (which has not officially started) should be the same.

That was two seconds of Googling and five seconds of cut and paste.

I think we need a new metric for the standard of argumentation, perhaps the SGD rating - number of seconds to Debunk via simple Google search. (Suggestions for a better name, anyone?)

So that one was a 7SGD comment. Anything under 60SGD would presumably be blatant trolling - e.g. you can find the provided selective quote and extract nearby context from the same source that debunks the quote provided in under a minute - or at least indicate extreme gullibility.

I think they are wrong on that score, both China and Russia experience harsh winters in tandem with Europe, so it depends more on the position of the jet stream and AO.

Have any evidence? Or is that John 3, Gordo 0?

Might be extreme gullibility, but even scientists are guilty of that. Here's a yarn, worth a laugh.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ice-cap-thaw-iceland-v…

...but even scientists are guilty of that.

No, just you.

Ha, the volcano may not be erupting enough to cause cooling; but think of all the CO2 that is not being emitted by those planes whose flights have been cancelled! This clever blog has a graphic to demonstrate.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/planes-or-volcano/

Thanx Holly Stick, I will pass it on.

The fat one said

>Might be extreme gullibility, but even scientists are guilty of that. Here's a yarn, worth a laugh.

>

What's laughable about that? Perhaps you think it's it's worth a chuckle because if your laughable and unfounded notion that rather precipitous global cooling will be upon us soon.

To quote the article:

>"Global warming melts ice and this can influence magmatic systems," he told Reuters. The end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago coincided with a surge in volcanic activity in Iceland, apparently because huge ice caps thinned and the land rose.

So isostatic rebound would be the culprit. Interesting.

BTW Holly Stick, did make me laugh. I immediately thought someone should show it to Ian Plimer!

As an aside, here in southern England there is the clearest blue sky we've had in a long time. I've decided I quite like having no planes - so long as I don't have to fly anywhere :-p

We are not at the end of the last ice age so isostatic rebound is irrelevant on this occasion, yet negative feedback and cooler temps are a real possibility.

If the eruption continues for a year or more then it should produce lower temperatures and coupled with low solar activity - a Dalton Minimum.

My concern, as the concern troll on this blog, is that thousands of poms are going to die needlessly because all the adaptation mechanisms are geared towards global warming and not cooling.

It has been recognized for more than a decade that global warming improves health and vitality, while global cooling is to be feared. Not long after the 1995 heatwave in the UK
a paper by C.G. Bentham didn't find its way into the lame stream media, so I will paraphrase.

If UK temperatures increased by 3 degrees the death toll would be cut by 17,500 a year. After the 2009-10 winter we can say that was fairly accurate, so adaptation to climate change is important, it's just too bad we are looking the wrong way.

We're sitting in what will be the hottest year on record and only little contrarian Gordo could be worried about the "imminent cooling" that he refuses to tell us when it's actually coming.

What an alarmist.

Oh, and Gordo, go to the starving of Africa and tell them warming is going to improve their "health and vitality". I'm sure they'll be thrilled.

Funny, somehow I've survived in Canada, which is often a lot colder than the UK. What on earth does he think they would die of?

Holly Stick,

even humans adapt to their usual environment.

Also, old, infirm people may die in unusually cold weather (the same is true of unusually hot weather) although I seem to remember the 'excess mortality' figures from the UK this past winter (coldest in 30 years) were lower than winter 04/05.

Of course, this morbidity modelling assumes ceteris paribus where one may not. If the total impact of milder winters and more extremely hot summers goes way beyond the relative numbers of deaths in heat waves and cold snaps. The deniers want to say we can't model climate but they want to say that one can model morbidity in a variety of climate settings. Hmmm

It may also be the case that protecting the people of Europe from extreme cold is a lot easier than protecting them from heatwaves. It's even more likely that protecting them from cols is a lot easier than protecting Africans and Asians from heatwaves and drought. Protecting Europeans from mosquito-borne disease is likely to be a lot harder than protecting them from cold.

Moreover if instead of premature deaths, if one focuses on quality life years lost, the calculations may be different. Someone who is in very poor health and socially disadvantaged may well die prematurely of cold, but then, they may die prematurely of lots of other causes. Being disadvantaged is not good for your health -- and we really ought to focus on correcting that disadvantage. If more extreme heat prejudices the life chances of people who aren't so disadvantaged or likely to die or suffer life-altering setback from other causes, then this will be worse.

I concede that I don't know with certainty what the total net effect on patterns of morbidity changing climate will bring, and I rather doubt anyone else does either, though there are persuasive reasons for thinking it will be especially harsh on the socially disadvantaged and marginalised wherever they are. The reality is that it's much easier to design rational evidence-based human systems when the system is in a state of stasis rather than open-ended and dynamic change -- precisely because we are then reliant on less accurate modelling. So fiddling with the climate settings, as we humans are now, is not a good idea.

Bureau of Meteorology Aerosal Research Manager Jim Haywood said it was likely that Britons would see increased temperatures as a result of planes being grounded.

...all the adaptation mechanisms are geared towards global warming and not cooling.

Really? You've catalogued them?

It has been recognized for more than a decade that global warming improves health and vitality, while global cooling is to be feared.

A rather stupid blanket statement.

But it has also been recognised for quite a few years that AGW may bring COLDER temperatures to Northern Europe - especially the UK - so if the politicians have been paying any attention to the scientists they would be thinking about adaptation mechanisms for both warmer and cooler conditions.

But if they've been listening to denialists, they'd have only heard that nothing unusual was going to happen, so they may not have bothered preparing for any climate change...

A quick look at UK CIP shows how much time and effort we have devoted to AGW adaptation.

'But it has also been recognised for quite a few years that AGW may bring COLDER temperatures to Northern Europe - especially the UK -...'

Do you have a link to support that statement?

Gordo, considering the number of requests for evidence you have flat out ignored you aren't one to be demanding links off people.

The danger of science denial.

'Climate change may directly affect human health through increases in average temperature. Such increases may lead to more extreme heat waves during the summer while producing less extreme cold spells during the winter. Rising average temperatures are predicted to increase the incidence of heat waves and hot extremes.'

That's the general AGW view and it's clearly wrong in fact.

In standard fashion, Gordo @ 203 gives half the story:

>Bureau of Meteorology Aerosal Research Manager Jim Haywood said it was likely that Britons would see increased temperatures as a result of planes being grounded.

>But he said that could be cancelled out by the volcanic ash, which in effect can act as contrails by reducing the temperature.

>'We will be looking at this in our temperature records to see what effect the volcanic ash plume will have on reducing the temperature,' he said.

It is also important to remember that this is the Daily Mail, which has a long and indistinguished history of distorting climate change research, and the article scarecely mentions and doesn't quantify another known effect of contrails - warmer nights. So essentially Europe should see warmer days, colder nights but we also don't know how much of a cooling effect the ash will have.

Global dimming was first discovered by the Israelis and the Americans confirmed it after 9/11, so I was just making the point that with the planes out of the air, Europe could become even hotter without all that extra CO2.

William Hill have trimmed the price of temperatures hitting 100f this summer from 8/1 to 6/1 as forecasters suggest that the UK could be in for a red hot summer.

A BBQ summer is now quite likely, but I wouldn't bet my house on it.

That's the general AGW view and it's clearly wrong in fact.

That's a fairly simplified AGW view, so you would expect at least some differences with reality based on the simplifications, if nothing else.

Thank God, Nick Griffin of the BNP is threatening to "expose the global warming scam".

And not a moment too soon.

As the BNP are going head-to-head with Christopher Monckton's own UKIP this promises to be a close election.

el gordo:

Bureau of Meteorology Aerosal Research Manager Jim Haywood said it was likely that Britons would see increased temperatures as a result of planes being grounded.

The effect on global temperature from reduced CO2 emission will, of course, be played out over centuries rather than the few weeks that reduced aerosol level will last. This is similar to the opposite of what happened from 1945 to 1970 when the post-war boom brought a huge level of aerosols and slightly falling temperature. The aerosols emitted then are now gone from the atmosphere but a lot of the CO2 is still up there. Of course, village idiot el gordo doesn't have the analytic skill to understand this.

el gordo @ 197:

It has been recognized for more than a decade that global warming improves health and vitality, while global cooling is to be feared.

If a heatwave results in major crop failure (from poor pollination) is any starvation that follows considered to be a heat-related death?

Heatwaves happen, it's natural variability. The 1995 heatwave in Britain killed slightly more people than normal for that time of year and there is a reasonable chance that it may happen again this summer.

Severe winters year after year, crop failures in Spring because of late frosts or excessive wetness reducing the harvest, this is also natural variability. In the old days it meant widespread famine throughout the UK and Ireland.

These days its just the old and poor Britains who will continue to die prematurely in large numbers because of the cold. A properly thought-out adaptation strategy could prevent this with a government subsidy for heating.

Meanwhile the more active 'boomers' might prefer a fruit picking holiday in Oz during the NH winter. The cool PDO will be around for years to come, so it's time to think seriously on a matter of life and death.

These are all serious suggestions as we await global warming to gain traction.

El Gordo ... "natural variability" is not a scientific explanation and still less a cause of measurable phenomena. It's a way of acknowledging the limitations of one's capacity to model these phenomena on a time scale that is useful.

In the mouths of the filth merchant spruikers and the delusional fringe more generally it is a quasi-metaphysical concept, designed to cover their lack of an explanation of the data and sometimes used as a variant on "we're coming out of the Little Ice Age". Used this way it is not far different from religionists who, when confronted by evil in the world, declare that "god moves in mysterious ways".

@197

It has been recognized for more than a decade that global warming improves health and vitality, while global cooling is to be feared.

See
Eli's latest post

Where the EPA says

the available literature strongly supports the conclusion that extreme heat is, on an average annual base, the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States.

Australia Looking Petty on Climate Financing
SMH April 16, 2010

'Australia committed to a fast start-up fund agreed to at Copenhagen last year â $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions â but is yet to say how much it will contribute. Aid and green groups have calculated Australiaâs commitment to be $600 million over the three year based on the size of its economy.'

A complete waste of money.

Gordo, be a man and defend your arguments. You really don't believe anything you say, do you?

Tim,

Just to let you know.

For no particular reason Tom Fuller has a guest post over at The Air Vent. For no particular reason he felt compelled to compare the behaviour between a 'consensus' and 'non-consensus' blog... And for no particular reason he chose yours as the 'consensus' blog... Surprisingly he found your blog rather 'unfriendly' and filled with spite... And for no particular reason he feels that you blog is 'exhausted' and has run out of things to say...

All for no particular reason.

Hey guys, I'm looking for some information on the following:

The Institute of Public Affairs has made reference to a list on 400 people/organisations in Australia that in their latest climate change denial book, [Climate Change: The Facts](http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/new-denialist-campai…)...I have a copy, which I am reviewing.

It's your typical denialist move: science by popular opinion, not facts.

However I only have a partial list - has anyone else come across this list of 400 Australian signatories? I've already contacted IPA directly.

I want to know if this is a new tactic or something they are recycling.

I've started checking some of the names including wine maker [Voyager Estate](http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/prominent-australian…) who are listed in the book as supporting an "open debate" on climate science".

Sincerely, WTD

'And for no particular reason he feels that your blog is 'exhausted' and has run out of things to say...'

It's fairly obvious the Deltoid larrikins lost their momentum after Tim went head to head with Monckton. What we have here is a bunch of old boffins, splitting hairs (infinitum), which will not attract new recruits to the consensus view.

This open thread is still robust, but anomie is just around the corner.

>It's fairly obvious the Deltoid larrikins lost their momentum after Tim went head to head with Monckton.

Only fools and ignorami cannot tell that Monckton is a liar, on personal matters, science in general and climate science in particular. So by default, it's the same people who think Monckton won the debate.

By the way, looking back through the Deltoid archives, it's always been about responding to unscientific press releases, popular 'science', public comments/statements and journalism, often but not always related to climate science.

Fuller concludes: "Deltoid is (or has become over time) a site more concerned with the opposition than the fast moving field of climate science".

Apparently he hadn't noticed that Deltoid has always been committed to exposing and correcting the errors, mistakes, distortions, slander and flat out lies that come out of a certain section of the anti-science brigade. For which Tim deserves high praise, especially for doing it in a concise, coherent and entertaining way!

And for no particular reason he feels that your blog is 'exhausted' and has run out of things to say...

Endless conspiracy theories get pretty boring after a while.

ignorami

I've learnt something today. The elegant plural of ignoramus.

Tom Fuller is full of it. In addition to Deltoid, he has weighed in against Real Climate whilst defending appalling web sites like WUWT and the like simply because IMHO thse anti-science sites generate garbage that fits in with his own personal bias. Writing articles about climate change for the corporate MSM in no way confers one with wisdom on the subject. It seems to me that he is just bitter because Gavin Schmidt flayed him last year in a post on Real Climate.

Moreover, to suggest that the contrarian sites are honest brokers and do not resort to smears takes remarkable hubris. I suggest that Fuller looks a bit deeper into the history of anti-environmental denial before opening his mouth again. Scientists and environmentalists have been under sustained attack for two decades now on a variety of areas. The fact that many in the denial camp have also downplayed the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer, acid rain, loss of biodiversity etc. shows that they are ideological clones. The debate has never been about science, as Fuller intimates; it is about policy as this relates to profit. The so-called 'scientific debate' on climate change and other environmental issues is and has always been a mirage; a smokescreen aimed at promoting a more sinister political agenda. If Fuller cannot or does not want to look beyond the end of his nose, then that is his problem.

As the BNP are going head-to-head with Christopher Monckton's own UKIP this promises to be a close election.

They should both know better than to commit electoral suicide via AGW - everyone knows you shouldn't split the gullible fairy-tale-believer vote.

*It has been recognized for more than a decade that global warming improves health and vitality, while global cooling is to be feared*

Recognized by who, Gordo? The dorks at WUWT or C02 Science? Moreover, the 'health and vitality' of what? Certainly the majority of the scientific community (me included) has not 'recognized' the current rate of warming as being beneficial. Many population ecologists are well aware that rapid warming threatens to unravel food webs and ecological interaction networks, and in turn this will undermine critical ecosystem functions and services such as nutrient cycling, maintenance of soil fertility and pest control, just to name a few.

As usual, Gordo is speaking out of his you-know-where. If it were not that it was Gordo was making such ignorant and baseless assertions, I would we amazed. Yet nothing Gordo writes these days surprises me, no matter how anti-scientific and appalling it is.

Posted this on Ms Nova's latest thread at The Drum (which is insanely large and mostly full of crud). Copied it here in case it doesn't pass the moderation filter, and out of possible reader interest:

Steve Mosher, author of a "quickie" book with Tom Fuller promoting the ClimateGate e-mail conspiracy theories as WORSE than even imagined from the initial breathless press releases, apparently makes an appearance at Rabett Run.

He first appears to say that perhaps people like McIntyre and Watts are "nutjobs", and that the GISS code appears just fine...

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/02/steve-had-little-list.html?showComme…

"In the end, I hope that CRU will release their data and their code. People will find minor errors. the quality of the code will improve, the temperature series will not change substantially, and doubts that arise from the "hiding" behavior will vanish.

Nutjobs will still complain. But reasonable people will start to regain trust. I know I did when GISS released their code."

...and then when pressed on the "nutjobs" comment admits that McIntyre, Mosher and Watts - in fact anyone he casts as "having any credibility" (which context indicates refers to "skeptic" circles) "...expects to find some huge smoking gun in the code. No error that accounts for the warming."

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/02/steve-had-little-list.html?showComme…

Ms Nova and her supporters don't appear to have got that message. I'm guessing readers of Mosher's book won't have either, despite having paid for a tale that he apparently doesn't really believe in.

Funny that. And most disturbing if you happen to think these guys are honest brokers, or have any sort of integrity, or have reasonable motives to improve the science, or that they provide sensible and measured analysis and media messages.

Read the whole thread if you want more insight.

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/02/steve-had-little-list.html

The Climate 'Science' Coalition of America web site is still being overrun by crackers. Or perhaps we should call them whistle-blowers.

Jeff Harvey

Before the CC peer review system began to break-down there were papers that gave an entirely different view to the one Eli showed.

Thomas Gale Moore at Stanford University wrote on 'The health and amenity benefits of global warming' 1998, which focussed on he United States. There was also the research of Alexander Lerchl 'Changes in the seasonality of mortality in Germany from 1946-95' was published in the International Journal of Biometeorology in 1998.

Both give unbiased, accurate assessments, which illustrate global warming is not to be feared - because life expectancy is increased.

Clive Hamiltion is being unnecessarily alarmist in this morning's SMH.

'As less of the continent is suitable for human habitation, the pressure on southern cities and regional areas will become intense. And it won't let up any time soon.'

He is simply wrong.

He is simply wrong

As opposed to village idiot el gordo who is both simple and wrong.

If Gordo says he's wrong, no evidence provided, he must be right.

Here's the plume being sucked into an extratropical cyclone.

http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/realtime/single.php?A101091305

Here's El Weasel ignoring all criticism.

Anyone else been threatened with legal action???

"20.Robert E. Phelan said
April 20, 2010 at 1:55 am
Nathan:

You really need to learn English. Tamino can defend himself. You called me a liar. You can apologize or meet me in todayâs equivalent of Weehauken Heights. Laugh if you like, but Jeff will not ignore a subpoena. You can meet me for a beer or meet in court. You have 24 hours to respond."

What can I expect?? WEIRD!

Link, Nathan?

John

It's in the comments in here:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/8863/

Thankfully the thread is short.

So bizarre!

That's hilarious Nathan. How desperate are these people?

VERY weird John...

What is "Weehauken Heights"?

It's like he lives in another world...

Gordo,

... and therefore one article by Thomas Gale More 'is the law' in your opinion. Is this the same Thomans Gale More who is a Senior Fellow perchance at the libertarian Hoover Institution? Who has links with the Cato Institute? The same More who has absolutely no pedigree in environmental science? It appears that More's 'expertise' is in evolutionary psychology, economics and religion. Where is populatiuons and systems ecology included?

Juxtapose More's kindergarten level approach with hundreds if not thousands of articles published in the pages of just about every major peer-reviewed journal in environmental science. *Nature*. *Science*. *Ecology Letters*. *Ecology*. *Journal of Ecology*. *Biological Conservation*. *Conservation Biology*. *Oecologia*. *Oikos*. *Global Change Biology*. *Journal of Animal Ecology*. *Functional Ecology*. *Ecological Monographs*. *Trends in Ecology and Evolution*. *Proceedings of the Royal Society B*. *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*. How many relevant articles along linking climate change to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning that are published in these journals have you read lately, Gordo? And this is just a sample. They all point to the effects I described yesterday of rapid warming on both natural and managed ecosystems, and how these will generate asymmetrical effects on food chains and webs, leading to their unraveling. Longer term effects will lead to the disruption of critical ecosystem services that sustain human civilization.

Gordo, how many times must you expose your ignorance? You latch onto one piece of garbage on the internet then you run with it as if it is authoritative. Please just go away until you can make a comment that has even a vestage of interest.

Just spotted the International Journal of Inactivism link on the sidebar is kaput - anyone got a fresh address for it?

Chris S: http://inactivism.tk/

stepanovich: thanks!

I'm guessing many of you will have heard that Spencer has a new book, promoted with the line that "I predict that the proposed cure for global warming â reducing greenhouse gas emissions â will someday seem as outdated as using leeches to cure human illnesses." Apparently Marc Morano has echoed this line.

Some commentary at Climate Progress - where it is noted amongst more impactful observations on Spencer's claims that leeches are an orthodox treatment for some medical conditions today.

Nathan, Phelan's ploy is one that he can only use once with impact. Again and it will roll off your back.

Can you imagine the lawyer fest for trying to sue bloggers all around the world for calling out a lie.

Good [link BTW!](http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2010/04/19/climategate-accusations-shr…)

Hopefully Jeff Id and Steven Mosher will succeed in their quest to [raise the standard](http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/radiative-physics-yes-co2-d…) of skeptics arguments.

I would be nice if the debate was withr real skeptics.

Structure, intertia and media as its is tells me that their efforts won't get the traction I'd hope. I can't see Id nor Mosher getting a spot on Fox News to explain to the faithful that they can accept Radiative Physics and still question other stuff.

Michael Mann is threatening legal action against M4GW, the people who created the utube satire 'Hide the Decline'.

Bring it on!

More evidence that the MWP and LIA were universal in nature.

http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l1_makassarstrait.php

Gordo,

Anything and everything from C02 Science (the Idso site) is null and void. I am sure that, as they usually do (and as they did with a colleague's work a few years ago) the Idso's have mangled the original conclusions of the Nature paper. Its time you read the original literature and stopped relying on third party interpretations of it.

I have just read the article in Nature. As expected, nowhere in it do the authors suggest that the late 20th century warming was not exceptional. They actually make this clear at the beginning of the piece.

As i said above, C02 (non)science is cherry picking to bolster their pre-determined world view.

These people are classic denialists.

Oh guess what, Plimer still thinks that CO2 is a "wonderful gas"!

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rural/201004/r552794_3282757.mp3

Given the opportunity to spout forth about Eyjafjallajökull, once again he states that one single big volcanic eruption wipes out a year's worth of anthro CO2 emissions and that whilst there is evidence for land use affecting local climate there is none for anthro factors influencing global climate

He doesn't miss a trick does he?

Jeff

'Reconstructed SSTs were, in their words, warmest from AD 1000 to AD 1250 and during short periods of first millennium, .... we calculate that the Medieval Warm Period was about 0.4°C warmer than the Current Warm Period.'

So you're saying that is wrong?

Ply-mer still thinks that CO2 is a "wonderful gas"!
He doesn't miss a trick does he?

Indeed not.
Which is probably why he now commands all the respect due to any decrepit, aging old prostitute anywhere in the world today.

It's the sun, silly.

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/sdo_first_light.jpg

>'Reconstructed SSTs were, in their words, warmest from AD 1000 to AD 1250 and during short periods of first millennium, .... we calculate that the Medieval Warm Period was about 0.4°C warmer than the Current Warm Period.'

>So you're saying that is wrong?

That's CO2 Science's take on it. I think they might have mangled the graph and/or conclusions to get that. I'm sure Jeff has access to the full text and will confirm or refute my comment in due course.

But from past experience, if it's copy 'n pasted by Gordo it's probably wrong.

I can't say Nova's blog has nothing good for rational people, I just came across this very useful link to [another site](http://www.campaigncc.org/node/384) on her blog.

>*Are you fed up with sceptics and pseudo-scientists dominating blogs and news articles with their denialist propaganda? Well, fight back! We are trying to create an online army of online volunteers to try and tip the balance back in the favour of scientific fact, not scientific fiction.*

>*To sign up, enter your e-mail address in the box below...*

These people are classic denialists.

Cue denial of that claim in 4...3...2... ;-)

Well, in response to a question on Oppo et al. over at RC MM said this about it. And you should follow the "recent past" link therein to the Trouet et al. paper.

Quelle surprise! Aucune surprise! one might say.

'We are trying to create an online army of online volunteers to try and tip the balance back in the favour of scientific fact, not scientific fiction.'

Maybe I could join even without a science degree, because I'm a big fan of scientific fact over science fiction.

Maybe I could join even without a science degree, because I'm a big fan of scientific fact over science fiction.

Finally thrown out your copy of Heaven + Earth?

John @262: seems a shame to debase the works of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams by association with H&E...

For those of you amused by Graeme Bird, he's claiming on Nova's blog post about The Drum thread that Glenn Tamblynn and I claimed that the sun doesn't affect the whole globe - because we pointed out that a paper claiming to have discovered a solar-influenced regional weather effect (specifically and pointedly noted to be NON-GLOBAL in the abstract) was not in fact global nor necessarily a climate-scale effect, as had been implied by the original poster. (You know, "the sun could be doing it, rather than CO2" - or something.)

And he's doing this in a comment headed "News from stupidtown". And despite his errors being pointed out on The Drum, he's failed to correct them at Jo Nova.

You just can't parody this. There's nowhere left to go with it.

And how did the mighty band of highly intelligent and supremely ungullible Nova skeptics treat these astonishing claims? One unthinkingly endorsed them; zero pointed out the easily refuted lie.

Loth, I didn't think the Novarians could at the drum could have discredited themselves much more than they did. Even people uneducated on the issue should have been able to see through their empty claims.

I was surprised to see one of the (Tide I think) citing one of Malcolm Roberts shocking SPPI publications as a source disproving warming.

He may as well cite a LaRouchian news leaflet, except that SPPI documents look nice and glossy.

I was surprised to see one of the (Tide I think) citing one of Malcolm Roberts shocking SPPI publications as a source disproving warming.

I suspect it was Tide, in response to which I noted that that particular document had a whole bunch of falsehoods and unsubstantiated assertions, and encouraged the commenter to keep posting so that people can see the sources for their ridiculous claims.

I found this on WUWT Arctic Sea Ice thread for 22 April.

Anu (14:31:37) :

Steve Goddard writes via email: [snip]

Selecting parts of a personal email and arguing it
online is not appropriate. ~dbs, mod.

I've considered asking Watts why it was OK to discuss selected parts of Phil Jones' private emails online, but I doubt my post would be published, let alone receive a response.

Watts is a complete buffoon.

Everyone's favourite peer shows up at 7:10.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbyFeFhUTmI&feature=player_embedded

And he reappears at 9:30 pledging his support to Fox News.

Yes jackerman #258. And I cannot wait until 'Global Day of Action' too ;-)
We can all change climate... I know we can, if we all just wish hard enough.... :-)

[Revolution9](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/open_thread_46.php#comment-2455…).

I [asked Tom Fuller](http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/a-comparison-of-tier-2-clim…) pretty much the same question.

I was particularly interested in his response because he was the one who, along with Steve Mosher, had the temerity to publish a book titled "Climategate: The CRUtape Letters", which delved deeply into the UEA emails, and who also took great umbrage when Tim Lambert [published part of an email from Fuller](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/tom_fuller_and_senator_inhofe.p…) that was a continuation of the ongoing dialogue of the [Tom Fuller and Senator Inhofe thread](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/tom_fuller_and_senator_inhofe.p…).

Apparently [Fuller cannot discriminate](http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/a-comparison-of-tier-2-clim…) between the context of sending an email to a second party with whom he is engaged in a very public and colourful exchange, and the context of being a third or fourth (or higher order) party vacuously attributing motivation (without evidenced analysis) to first and second parties who quite reasonably have no expectation of anyone else ever seeing their correspondence.

And apparently when yet another party, composed of said first and second parties, references their own stolen emails after the event, in order to place context, he then has tacit permission to publish whatever he pleases about those emails - even if they are subsequently shown not to say what Fuller claims in his book.

And apparently, in all of this, there is no double standard on Fuller's behalf.

Tangentially, [Tim Lambert showed quite some prescience](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/11/tom_fuller_and_senator_inhofe.p…) when he said:

Dear readers, please don't let Fuller wind you up. He really wants to portray us as an angry mob, so don't help him.

And while Fuller isn't open to persuasion, others who read your comment might be.

It is exactly what Fuller is doing on [the thread at the Air Vent](http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/a-comparison-of-tier-2-clim…)...

There appears to be a significant increase in sea ice around Antarctica.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic…

El gordo: say again? The graph shows almost exactly neutral conditions as of last datum.

Newspeak in real life? Inactivist Anthony Watts tries to use "Climategate" as a generic meaningless descriptor.

[More dubious scholarship from Wegman and his proteges](http://deepclimate.org/2010/04/22/wegman-and-saids-social-network-sourc…)

In both the original Wegman report and a subsequent follow-up paper by Yasmin Said, Wegman and two others, the background sections on social network research show clear and compelling instances of apparent plagiarism. The three main sources, used almost verbatim and without attribution, have now been identified. These include a Wikipedia article and a classic sociology text book by Wasserman and Faust. But the papers rely even more on the third source, a hands-on text book that explores social network concepts via the Pajek analysis software package â the same tool used by the Wegman team to analyze âhockey stickâ author Michael Mannâs co-author network.

Not only that, but the later Said et al paper acknowledges support from the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, as well as the Army Research Laboratory, raising a host of new issues and questions. And chief among those questions is this: Will George Mason University now finally do the right thing and launch a complete investigation of the actions and scholarship of Wegman and Said?

The graph shows almost exactly neutral conditions as of last datum.

But hey, for el gordo, isn't that an increase on the expectations he attributes to "AGW theory" or something, therefore it's a "significant increase"? ;-)

...along with Steve Mosher, had the temerity to publish a book titled "Climategate: The CRUtape Letters", which delved deeply into the UEA emails...

And someone who appears to be the very same Steve Mosher, at great odds with the publicity surround and promotion of that book thinks that the CRU temperature code will turn out to be basically correct, and dobs in Watts and McIntyre as having the same belief.

Someone could ask Tom Fuller about that apparent lack of integrity while they're at it ;-)

El Gordo said:

There appears to be a significant increase in sea ice around Antarctica

You're exactly right Gordie boy, I heard that the inhabitants of Scott Base has flooded a couple of extra hockey rinks this winter.

Hey, you not El Gordo Howeo are you? He knew all about ice and hockey rinks.

FYI Steve Easterbrook has filed a report on a talk given by Ray Pierrehumbert ("Climate Ethics, Climate Justice").

This diagram paints a rather bleak picture which, despite the incoherent blatherings of the neocon press and its acolytes, will only get worse with 8+bn people on the planet, all of whom aspire to the developed world's much-vaunted (but with one or two honourable exceptions, largely unexamined) "standard of living". While climate change is obviously a sgnificant factor in the habitability of the planet for future generations, IMO the "elephant in the room" is biodiversity loss - even in the absence of climate change, the irreversible damage done to ecosystems and ecological processes critical to human life already in place would eventually screw us anyway, let alone consideration of how such processes will cope with the projected increase in the human population over the next 50 years or so.

[SteveC](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/open_thread_46.php#comment-2459…).

The Rockstrom et al paper paints more than a bleak picture for any ecologist, population biologist, or indeed anyone who has any inkling about the use of finite resources.

The cornucopian approach to economics is a naïve utopian one, dismissals of Malthus, Ehrlich, Club of Rome et al notwithstanding. The problem for the cornucopians is that the whole concept of limits to growth is not a matter of if, but when.

There will be regular trolls on Deltoid who disagree. To them I say, prove your case by explaining how the loss of biodiversity, replenishable water resources, cheap fossil energy, productive topsoil, and other necessary resources will be overcome during the next century.

Nota bene: appeals to technological magickery do not count.

Billy Boob Hall:

We can all change climate... I know we can, if we all just wish hard enough....

We already have changed the climate, so what's your point?

An attempt at a Grand Unified Global Warming Blog Aggregator, by yours truly:

http://feed.kickrss.com/climate2010
http://feed.kickrss.com/climate2010/rss

The sun has been spotless for 14 days and there has been wild talk about temperatures falling 2.2 degrees over the next decade. This I've got to see.

Meanwhile, Met Office spokesman Barry Gromett said the present warm weather in the UK is thanks to 'similar conditions prevalent in the winter where we had this blocked pattern of high pressure sitting in the Atlantic. It blocked the Atlantic weather systems which normally bring rain across Britain. Instead, the rain has been sent north over Iceland or south over Iberia.'

As a consequence it has been one of the driest Aprils on record in the UK.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1268351/April-showers-fail-mate…

>The sun has been spotless for 14 days and there has been wild talk about temperatures falling 2.2 degrees over the next decade. This I've got to see.

The only talk of such flights of fancy that I have come across is from you, Gordo. Who is talking about a 2.2 degree drop in temperatures over the next decade? Is that Celsius or Fahrenheit? Is it global or regional?

OTOH, it could just be more excellent POE-ing.

Thanks for the compliment, Stu. The first signs of global cooling will be an increase in sea ice around the coast of Iceland, just as it did in 1203 AD.

It will be regional, but obviously if the sun remains fairly quiet over cycles 24 and 25 then the impact will be global.

It's funny how the sun has been fairly inactive for thirty years yet the temperature has just risen and risen and risen...

Gordo,

you're never one to answer all the questions posed in a comment, even a short one like mine, are you?

Based on the theory originally proposed by Friis-Christensen and Lassen, this implies that cooling of up to 2.20 C may occur during Cycle 24 (compared with temperatures during Cycle 23) for the mid-latitude grain-growing areas of the northern hemisphere.

I'm having a completely unreal experience over at Bart Verheggen's blog. I'm in a 'discussion' with Tim Curtin! Even el gordo sounds intelligent compared to Tim...

He's even doing McLeanian analysis now: first differencing the temperature at Barrow, and then claiming [CO2] does not explain the observed variances (but precipitable water apparently does). Well...duh!

Howard Hayden asks a few relevant questions for warmists to answer.

When and where did you read anything from climate alarmists that said that humans are responsible for about 3% of all CO2 emissions?

When and where did you read anything from climate alarmists that said that warming oceans emit CO2?

When and where did the climate alarmists tell you about CO2 levels that were up to 20 times current levels when dinosaurs roamed the earth?

When and where did alarmists tell you that the conditions they openly worry about have repeatedly happened without turning the earth into an oven?

Nowhere and never, did you say? Perhaps you should consider that you have been deliberately misled.

Nowhere and never, did you say? Perhaps you should consider that you have been deliberately misled.

el gordo,please check the IPCC report. you will find a discussion of each of those subjects.

you are either unable to read or dumb as bread.

Gordo I know that answers to all those questions off the top of my head.

John 6, Gordo 0.

@el gordo:

Add me to the list of 6 - 0, too. I knew all of that, and even without having to read the IPCC report. Much of it is common knowledge. But apparently Dr. Howard Hayden does not really understand anything. Or he is deliberately deceiving. I'm hoping it is brain fossilisation on his part.

El Gordo.

Hang on a minute. Don't move on so fast. Care to answer what it is about [this graph](http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic…) you've posted the link to, that makes you say: "There appears to be a significant increase in sea ice around Antarctica".

âProfessor Stephen Hawking has finally admitted what we had all suspected for many years. He is, in fact, an alien from the planet Thaal. He was sent to earth in 1964 on a mission to find intelligent life. Sadly, he believes that his mission has been a total failure.â

The Spoof

Do any of you have a link where Hayden's questions are discussed in the msm? We, the ordinary folk, have trouble understanding even the basic science.

Hayden is a nobody discussing nothing.

MFS

'The peer reviewed literature, both extant at the time of the AR4 as well as published since the release of the AR4, shows that there has been a significant increase in the extent of sea ice around Antarctica since the time of the first satellite observations observed in the late 1970s. And yet the AR4 somehow âassessedâ the evidence and determined not only that the increase was only half the rate established in the peer-reviewed literature, but also that it was statistically insignificant as well. And thus, the increase in sea ice in the Antarctic was downplayed in preference to highlighting the observed decline in sea ice in the Arctic.

It is little wonder why, considering that the AR4 found that âSea ice is projected to shrink in both the Arctic and Antarctic under all SRES scenarios.â

Picked this up at World Climate Report - will supply a link on request.

And yet Mark A. J. Curran, Tas D. van Ommen, Vin I. Morgan, Katrina L. Phillips, and Anne S. Palmer (14 November 2003). Ice Core Evidence for Antarctic Sea Ice Decline Since the 1950s. Science 302 (5648), 1203. [DOI: 0.1126/science.1087888] indicate that there are "persistent, high amplitude decadal fluctuations" in the extent of Antarctic sea ice, and that "Detection of long-term change is masked by large fluctuations from decade to decade", and conclude that "this research indicates the Antarctic sea ice is decreasing, we cannot say how unusual these changes might be over longer timescales from centuries to millennia or more".

A summary of the research for those who do not have access to the original paper at the Science website can find it [here](http://www.aad.gov.au/default.asp?casid=14700) at the Australian Antarctic Division website.

Finally, once again, [the graph you linked to](http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic…) in order to make your [original assertion](http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/04/open_thread_46.php#comment-2456…), shows the extent of this short-term fluctuation very clearly, and shows pretty much exactly average conditions for southern hemisphere sea ice as of last available measurement. You still have not answered how you can make such a statement based on that graph.

I see from Wott's Up With That that a long-term "favourite" at Deltoid, the inimitable Girma "You-know-who", has made the nanowatt gallery ("sorry", not linking directly to there) with his "mathematical model that predicts global cooling by about 0.42 deg C by 2030."

I have no intention of splitting hairs with a perfect stranger down in the archives, but this is how close the Arctic got to total meltdown in 2007. Have a good look, it's a warm anomaly.

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/np2007/cam3-2007web.mov

Readers please note, you don't need to respond to el gordo, his attention seeking behavior is simply that.

Jakerman: I agree. He has refused to answer the question so far three times. Instead he changes tack down a different trolling lane.