Global Warming Email-Gate and the Smoking Gun Evidence for Lies and Distortions

All this fuss over commented code???

Welp, that doesn't surprise me. Much ado about nothing.

One thing that didn't occur to me at first about this situation is the enormous problem it exposes for the 'framers' approach to science. Chris Mooney has been desperately bailing out water on this one, not because the email hacking exposed any real meat but because it allowed a framing agenda to be used by the denialists that was opposed to Chris' scientific consensus one.

Sig: I know. I've been having similar thoughts.

I've looked at Tim Lambert's post. He does do an excellent job at explaining the code.

My question for Greg and Sigmund is, how are you going to go about transmitting the necessary information to the public?

Whether you call it framing or not,enough information needs to be conveyed somehow to enable the public to comprehend that the scientific position is highly credible.

And of course, diabolically clever people are going to do their darnedest to undermine whatever explanation you choose.

Fishermen.

There used to be two major ice fishing tournaments in Minnesota. Now there is one, because the more southerly of the two is on a lake that seems to refuse to ice-over enough to allow the tournament to happen. The tournament has been canceled forever. Ironically, that lake is in Michele Bachmann's district.

AGW denialists will of course have an answer to that. It is a local phenomenon. It is only the current decade. Whatever.

But there is another lake just like this one, and another and another and another, and they are strung across the temperate zone around the planet.

And then there are the people in New England who's great grand parents walked to work in the winter. And they worked on islands in the Atlantic that were habitually trapped in sea ice that no longer happens. And countless other stories like that, which bring the story to new regions and back in time by well over a century, clearly obviating the importance of some small short term changes in temperature.

Race car drivers who use a different carberation than grand dad because it is warmer for the winter races, fishermen who can't get on the ice and who have novel expereicnes at the begin and end of seasons, , hunters who have different experiences than dad or mom with the seasons, public works directors who deal with heat buckling roads and freezing pipes differently than the manual that was written fifty years ago tells them to, plumbers who have stopped having to deal with frozen pipes not because people stopped getting stupid but because winters stopped getting cold enough where they work.

We just need to find people in these walks of life to cross the line and notice what is going on around them. The mayor of a city in Montana that is about to be burned down becuase it is surrounded by dead pines .... dead because of global warming ... said the other day "Well, we can't explain this (the dead trees) and there is nothing we can do about it, but it sure is a problem" have to be pushed aside by an angry populous, who's city just burned down, because there was something to do about it, and that was not to deny the reality.

That sort of thing.

Sigh, That seems pretty much after the fact.

Greg,

Here is a good USGS open file paper on the change in ice-out dates on Maine lakes since the 1850s. Note the trend lines. Unf. the data only goes to 2000, but is still very illustrative.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2005/3002/

I think there is an added problem regarding climate change, in that we are not simply asking people to accept expert opinion about the facts of the matter (similar to evolutionary theory) but are also implicitly asking them to accept some financial burden in tackling the question.
In my experience there are plenty of individuals who accept that the temperature is rising and even that man is the cause for this rise. What they don't accept, however, is the idea that it is such a big problem that we need to do much to address it.

Wow, pathetic, the scientists and researchers have already admitted that all of that data was theirs. Case closed. What's to argue?

The information is now "made-up?" You armchair scientists like big words, how about you look up cognitive dissonance - in other words, pounding a square peg into a round hole.

CO2 levels and temperatures go up and down, sometimes gradually, sometimes drastically all throughout earth's history, how do you we know it is now being done by man by just looking at 60 years worth of semi-global industrialization? Where's the evidence of that? How could you even prove that? These CO2 levels and temperatures are not unprecedented.

We need to figure out what we are going to do if sea levels and temperatures rise in spite of man's behavior. I somehow doubt paying extra taxes is going to somehow keep the water out.

Tony, we can tell that the CO2 increases over the last century plus are from humans because it is utterly obvious that when you burn solid or liquid material in which carbon is trapped, that carbon links up with O and gets into the air as CO2. Furthermore, the CO2 in the atmosphere is isotopically the same as the CO2 in the fossil fuels. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere have fluctuated in the past in was that we understand, and they fluctuate today in ways that we understand, and when I say "we" I mean scientists.

You really are trapped in this idea that if something varies naturally that this variation is a) OK, b) never human caused and c) not bad for us.

Fine. O levels have also varied, "naturally", on the earth. Why don't you try living without free oxygen in the atmosphere for a while? It could improve your reasoning. Seriously. Give it a try. Report back.

OK another cop out by the emotionally compromised Greg Laden. If you can't tell, I'm trying to objectively propose problems I see with the argument and am looking for facts to prove or disprove my skepticism. You are free to fill your retorts with insults and assumptions but that just makes your argument look fanatical and far adrift from science.

My question is, if the temperature can naturally spike by 22 degrees F in under 60 years, and CO2 levels can be twice what they are today during pronounced periods of cooling, how do we know that 1) an increase in CO2 automatically infers global warming and 2) this isn't another natural spike in temperature, albeit a very minimal one compared to the one that occurred 11,000 years ago?

Are you trying to tell me that just the FIRST steam engine began emitting enough CO2 to change the atmosphere's composition noticeable enough to be found in tree-ring records and ice core samples? I propose that humanity has been polluting for only a good 25-50 years at best, enough to actually make any noticeable difference. I really find it hard to believe that something as vast as the atmosphere, oceans, and the forests that cover and interact with the earth's natural carbon cycle could be overwhelmed by localized CO2 emissions back in 1900.

My point about natural causes is to illustrate that today's "climate change" is very tame compared to extreme shifts that have occurred naturally in the past. These changes are poorly understood and it stands to reason they could happen again at any time. What are we going to do to face these - because obviously a world government run by carbon tax collecting lawyers and bankers isn't going to save us.

Finally, am I to understand that CO2 levels are balanced naturally by "sinks" and that our 3% addition in CO2 levels are what's throwing things out of balance? Because as my studies of natural history have shown me, nature is quite capable of throwing out the balance all on its own. I propose that there is NO balance, and Earth's natural history is a chaotic, over-correcting system, much like our Keynesian economy, with depressions and booms along the way. A system this complex could be no other way. Nature is not perfect, it is violent and chaotic and science has proven that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Tony, if you would address the "cop outs" that could be a good starting point.

If humans were doing something today that caused most of the free O2 to become trapped in rock and in other compounds, that would be totally natural because that is where the O2 was at one point in our past. Your argument that excessive CO2 today is OK becuase it is less than at some periods in the past is similar to saying that a hypothetical human-caused trapping of most of the free O2 in rock woudl be OK.

Deal with that "cop out" then perhaps if you have not worn my patience too much we can move on to the 22 degree increase in temperature that you seem to think happened, and we can deal with your lack of understanding of the greenhouse effect, which is really pretty simple.

You can get a basic overview on some of the science here:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/01/global_warming_the_blog_epic_…

Report back. Leave the smoke screens home, please.

Other people "seem to think" the temperatures naturally rose by 22 degrees in 50 years also...

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/greenland_ice_core_show…

I tried to read your link, that you wrote... not exactly an objective source is it? And it was riddled with politicking. You strike me as a religious atheist, well I am a political atheist. As much as bible quoting will turn your stomach, so do people's primitive politicking.

I have said many times, I am all about conservation of the environment. Don't equate my skepticism with apathy or agenda. Though I am skeptical about AGW, I am still convinced of the need to drastically change the way we do things as a society. But instead of deindustrialization, carbon taxes, and global government in the hands of bankers and lawyers, I am in favor of innovation, education, technology, and decentralization as the solution.

I find it hard to believe anyone honestly thinks taxes and regulations are better than technological and innovative solutions. Imagine if humans decided to ration the hunting of mastodons instead of developing agriculture ...

Other people "seem to think" the temperatures naturally rose by 22 degrees in 50 years also...

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/greenland_ice_core_show…

I tried to read your link, that you wrote... not exactly an objective source is it? And it was riddled with politicking. You strike me as a religious atheist, well I am a political atheist. As much as bible quoting will turn your stomach, so do people's primitive politicking.

I have said many times, I am all about conservation of the environment. Don't equate my skepticism with apathy or agenda. Though I am skeptical about AGW, I am still convinced of the need to drastically change the way we do things as a society. But instead of deindustrialization, carbon taxes, and global government in the hands of bankers and lawyers, I am in favor of innovation, education, technology, and decentralization as the solution.

I find it hard to believe anyone honestly thinks taxes and regulations are better than technological and innovative solutions. Imagine if humans decided to ration the hunting of mastodons instead of developing agriculture ...

Other people "seem to think" the temperatures naturally rose by 22 degrees in 50 years also...

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/greenland_ice_core_show…

I tried to read your link, that you wrote... not exactly an objective source is it? And it was riddled with politicking. You strike me as a religious atheist, well I am a political atheist. As much as bible quoting will turn your stomach, so do people's primitive politicking.

I have said many times, I am all about conservation of the environment. Don't equate my skepticism with apathy or agenda. Though I am skeptical about AGW, I am still convinced of the need to drastically change the way we do things as a society. But instead of deindustrialization, carbon taxes, and global government in the hands of bankers and lawyers, I am in favor of innovation, education, technology, and decentralization as the solution.

I find it hard to believe anyone honestly thinks taxes and regulations are better than technological and innovative solutions. Imagine if humans decided to ration the hunting of mastodons instead of developing agriculture ...

Other people "seem to think" the temperatures naturally rose by 22 degrees in 50 years also...

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/greenland_ice_core_show…

I tried to read your link, that you wrote... not exactly an objective source is it? And it was riddled with politicking. You strike me as a religious atheist, well I am a political atheist. As much as bible quoting will turn your stomach, so do people's primitive politicking.

I have said many times, I am all about conservation of the environment. Don't equate my skepticism with apathy or agenda. Though I am skeptical about AGW, I am still convinced of the need to drastically change the way we do things as a society. But instead of deindustrialization, carbon taxes, and global government in the hands of bankers and lawyers, I am in favor of innovation, education, technology, and decentralization as the solution.

I find it hard to believe anyone honestly thinks taxes and regulations are better than technological and innovative solutions. Imagine if humans decided to ration the hunting of mastodons instead of developing agriculture ...

Just for your information, I'm arguing with a denier right now and he used this page as proof for his argument, i.e., that global warming is a hoax.

Apparently some people are totally incapable of reading sarcasm.