Debunking
illconsidered | March 21, 2014I am a longtime fan of ThingsBreak though his/her posts are a bit of a rarity these days. The latest post is a very good one on the recent debut of Nate Silver's 538 blog. I have read a few now and "Nate Silver falls off" is the one to choose if you only only choose one.
I don't have anything to add, ThingsBreak says it all and says it well.
illconsidered | November 12, 2013While reading an AP attributed article on Huffington post about Super Typhoon Haiyan (also known as Yolanda), I did a double take at this paragraph:
Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 235 kilometers per hour (147 miles per hour), with gusts of 275 kph (170 mph), when it made landfall. By those measurements, Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., and nearly in the top category, a 5. Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same thing. They are just called different names in different parts of the world.
It struck me because "nearly in the…
illconsidered | March 8, 2013(image info and credits)
Fake skeptics of anthropogenic global warming love to set up the straw man that mainstream climate science believes that CO2 is the one and only driver of climate change. They can then use it in many different attacks, such as gee whiz isn't it stupid that they haven't even thought of the sun's influence. This is of course patently false as even the most cursory survey of actual scientific content will quickly reveal. This straw man is also an implicit part of the argument that the "16 year pause" in global warming proves that CO2 is not a climate driver. If CO2…
illconsidered | October 26, 2012As you travel the inter-tubes in search of learned discourse, understanding and information to prepare you for the coming climate cataclysms, you will see many curious creatures, some common, some rare, who are here for the sole purpose of deterring, deceiving and confusing you. Some will pray on your admitted ignorance or uncertainty. Some will pray on your subconscious wish that climate change not be real or if it is, it will be benign. Some will seem to engage sincerely but seek only to lure you so deep into the rabbit hole you will be unable to return. Some will dazzle you with words so…
illconsidered | September 21, 2012I am not afraid of admitting my own areas of ignorance. The human body of knowledge is enormous and no one can possess all of it, or even be moderately familiar with all of it. The only shame is in pretending otherwise.
This admission fundamentally shapes my personal approach to the whole Hockeystick/Dendrochronology/Michael Mann brouhaha, which continues to this day despite MBH98 having receded into the rather distant past, in scientific research terms. I have to rely more on networks of trust and take a more removed view of it all and generally park that paper and that famous graph in the…
illconsidered | September 12, 2012I honestly think that while belief in creationism is the antithesis of scientific thought, it is still possible to be a good scientist and a creationist at the same time. This is for two main reasons. Firstly, creationism is a term that covers a wide spectrum of beliefs, from literal 6000 year old earth bible thumping denial of evolution to a more nuanced kind of mysticism that believes somewhere beneath the deep layers of complex and wonderful natural processes exists an unexplainable and supernatural foundation.
There is no practical difference between investigating how deeply "God's"…
illconsidered | November 28, 2011(not an original moniker in the title, someone remind me where it came from so I can give credit where credit is due!)
While I think the approriate response to ClimateGate 2.0 is to ignore it, I also think the mainstream media is doing mostly just that so it is safer to bring your attention to this good rebuttal to the whole affair from potholer54 on YouTube:
I think the most telling quote echoing around the denialosphere right now is this one from Jonathan Overpeck:
The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid what's included and what is left out.
It's supposed to…
illconsidered | September 23, 2011Hat tip to Chris S on the last AWOGWN thread for posting the link, here is the video of David Mitchell shredding the "prove it first, then we'll stop the pollution" argument embedded below:
I have argued many times that the "let's do nothing til we're sure" people have it backwards because we are in fact doing something: altering the atmospheric chemistry. Do nothing til we're sure would entail an immediate cesation of all long-lived GHG emissions.
illconsidered | July 22, 2011Did you ever wonder just how it can be possible that the same, thousand times debunked, climate "skepticisms" keep re-emerging, month after month, year after year? Obviously, there are those individuals (like Singer and Soon), organizations (like HeartlessLand), and media outlets (like Faux News) who deliberately lie and misinform with no concern for scientific or journalistic ethics whatsoever, but how is it they are so successful?
Well, it seems simple human nature, of the sort the most earnest and conscientious of us all possess, lends itself to being deceived by whomever yells loudest,…
illconsidered | June 24, 2011The natural world is complicated. Therefore, so is the science that tries to understand it.
Complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity are all a part of the story that describes processes that are as extraordinary as they are mundane. While these are the very characteristics of scientific study that motivate professional and amateur alike, they are also the characteristics that give delayers, doubters and liars in the climate debates ample material for confusing and misrepresenting reality.
One such complexity is the interaction of infra-red or long wave radiation (IR or LW), the ocean surface…
illconsidered | June 2, 2011"I agree. This is real science. But I have no idea what it means."
There is a reason science is not a democracy.
If you don't (understandably) want to wade through that whole "analysis", here is the crux of the (surprise, surprise!) conclusion that climate sensitivity to CO2 is almost nothing:
If we accept the IPCC/AGW paradigm and grant the climatological purity of the early 20th century, then the natural recovery rate from the LIA averages about 0.05 C/decade. To proceed, we have to assume that the natural rate of 0.05 C/decade was fated to remain unchanged for the entire 130 years, through…
illconsidered | April 29, 2011From greenman3610, Climate Crock of the Week gives a thorough review and debunking of "hide the decline" including the latest on Muller and the BEST project.
Also, if you are interested in the unfolding nuclear calamity in Japan, ClimateCrocks blog has been providing great coverage.
illconsidered | February 1, 2011By far my favorite climate crank is the Non-Lord Cristopher Monckton. He is prolific and pseudo-scientific and the darling of the denialosphere, but he is also a certifiable crackpot and a very colourful loon. He is great material to make fun of and I highly endorse his self-promotion as the spokesman-in-chief for the climate sceptic community.
Unfortunately, after the laughing stops, his nonsense continues to resonate in the anti-science echo-chambers. The arguments, gibberish dressed up in sciencey language and mathematical equations, need to be undressed and shown for what they are.…
illconsidered | January 13, 2011Over on the history of CO2 thread, that old chestnut of an issue has been raised, namely that there's this one paper in one journal, notorious for publishing anti-science papers on climate (a field well outside its focus), that has shown wild flucuations in CO2 to levels well above today's in times as recent as 60 years ago. Therefore....Not the IPCC.
The paper is by Ernst G Beck and the journal is Energy and Environment, 2009 (sorry, all my primary links are stale...anyone?)
Here is the graph, supposedly showing global CO2 levels:
This picture is at-a-glance completely implausible.
To…
illconsidered | December 16, 2010A recent model study of some hypothetical effects of biological feedbacks of climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 came into the comments here. The paper was referenced in an article on the Register and is being misused as a revelation that the world is not going to warm so much after all.
mandas had a good go at it, identifying the assumptions and qualifications that the paper explicitly enumerated and the Register article completely ignored. I thought readers might also be interested in this video debunking from "potholer54" on youtube.
Just an aside: it is funny how worthless models are…
illconsidered | December 3, 2010Okay, the "Globally and Seasonally averaged" thread has grown to over 500 comments and thus reached its point of diminishing return in terms of the time it would take to read it and the utility of doing so. And while on the one hand I don't like to feed what is drifting towards to troll-like behaviour, the conversation continues and I don't want to stifle it. It began with a comment of mine at Judith Curry's blog about who is a denier and who is a sceptic. See the update in the original article for why Richard clearly falls out of the sceptic category.
So I am going to close that thread…
illconsidered | November 22, 2010Okay, "A Team" was a little to simple, and it was taken. Instead I would like to inform readers of the "CSRR" Team, or CSRRT. I will let the press release speak for itself:
NAME: Climate Science Rapid Response Team (CSRRT)
WEBSITE: www.climaterapidresponse.org
WHO & WHAT: The CSSRT is a match-making service between top scientists and members of the media and office holders and their staffs from various levels of government. Our group consists of dozens of leading scientists who wish to improve communication about climate change. The…
illconsidered | November 18, 2010November 17 marked the one year anniversary of the hacking of CRU mail servers and the release of thousands of emails between climate scientists.
Though irrelevant to the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change, the event was significant in the public relations sphere. I have not found the time to do a proper memorial write up though I think it is important to reassess and reframe the controversy with the benefit of hindsight. But as luck would have it, a young climate blogger named Kate at Climate Sight has written a piece as well laid out and written as I could ever have hoped to…
illconsidered | November 10, 2010A great and substantive post up at Skeptical Science on La Nina and what we should expect (and not expect) in terms of its impact on global temperatures.
Read it all!
(image borrowed from Skeptical Science)
La Ninas typically redistribute the global heat budget in such a way as average surface temperatures are depressed from where they might otherwise have been, and we are several months into a strong one now.
(image borrowed from Skeptical Science)
Be on the lookout for lots more "global warming stopped!" bull.
illconsidered | November 7, 2010[Update: I am closing this thread as it is now over 500 comments long. However, because the discussion is still ongoing it will continue on this post. There is also the possibility of Chris S coming back with his own analysis of Richard's data.
This is a quick summary of what we can conclude thus far.
Richard thinks he is a sceptic. I am sorry to say that he is not. A sceptic considers all available material and evaluates evidence objectively. We know Richard does not do this because he has several times cited material that he admits himself he has not read. A sceptic will consider all…