Does anyone know the pedigree of this “21stcenturysciencetech”? I haven’t heard of them before. It’s very hard to get mainstream anything to do anti-GW stuff and you never know what the cat dragged in.

He FINALLY got himself a decent forum, huh? I am going to enjoy this.

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/MornerInterview.pdf

2005-2008

http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/06/university-of-colorado-global-sea-level.html

1993-2008

http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_ns_global.pdf

I think the Rev should run a feature on that!

True, Pam. (But evidently this seems to be quite beyond the capacity of a considerable majority of college-educated adults.)

It is truly a study in fooling people. This website uses the basic “sky is falling” rhetoric to spread consternation and ultimately unscientific political agendas. However, I think the site is also done with good intentions and complete belief (as in fooled) in AGW. For example, it hysterically states that the South Pole will melt and soon, even though a child could simply google that issue and learn readily that the South Pole is gaining ice. The fooled mob political mentality mixed with genuine concern for planet Earth demonstrated at this website will lead us to silly and wasteful economic programs that benefit few and rob many.

Hmmm. I wonder if they are sophisticated enough to have heard of the term “educated incapacity”?

Didn’t Rand refer to that as “The Aristocracy of Pull?”

If you like what is goin on, good growing season, pleasant spring and fall temps, for example, it is weather, if you dont like it, hurricane hits a vulnerable spot (vulnerable spots inordinately correlate with places with dysfunctional politics) such as New Orleans or Burma, then it is climate.

I agree with all three of the above.

http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003238.html

“KT, Luke, Gavin, Louis and Eyrie:

My personal bias: We are in a late interglacial and the climate is warming naturally. Some level of AGW has occurred in the last century and perhaps more will follow this century. Divining the natural from the human induced is an invitation to a game of hyperlink ping-pong. For instance, the MWP was as warm or warmer than today.

Surface temperature is the noisiest and most variable component of climate, i.e. an elastic yardstick. And finally, the whole debate has serious basic epistemological problems, which undermine all propositions for direct radical human intervention at this time based upon the AGW or CC premise. There is a calm, rational approach to address our dependence on fossil fuels, which has little to do with fear driven assaults on reason.

In my risk assessment the balance of evidence is that climate sensitivity to CO2 doesn’t exceed 2c. That’s not enough to cause climate disasters larger than the one we face by allowing irrational fear to coercively deny the economic aspirations of humanity’s billions living in poverty, speciously based on a phantom of our collective consciousness.

No matter how fashionable the trope of “green” energy is to wealthy and free bourgeois, to impose it in a kind of collectivist pseudo-ritualistic frenzy has deep socio-psychological motives that have yet to be exposed in the debate.

Ultimately, a polity driven by a kind of civic madness will come to challenge of the basic principles of our civilization: reason, democratic due process, inalienable rights, freedom of speech, property and movement, scientific progress (ie, integrity of method and freedom of research.) More on this later.

That said: If a preponderance of new research eventually reveals the climate sensitive to CO2 is above 4c. (Bob Brown believes its 6c or more.) Then I would reasonably change my position on the dangers of AGW. I have an open mind to the science and look for new information to update my position all the time.

We should all approach this debate with humility and compassionate reason foremost in our minds, ready to receive and adapt to new information.

I know Luke is capable of compassionate reason should he put his heart in the right place. Personally, I bore of duelling trolls and hereby swear off engaging in ad hominem. (Hope I can resist temptation, beside I always win. ;0) So boring. Personal attacks push us into ideological corners more extreme than we would otherwise chose to defend.

I did not come to this debate with an agenda. I came to it as a young environmentalist in the 1980’s fighting on the ground in the forest to save Redwoods. I first heard of the “Greenhouse Effect” in a lecture given by James Lovelock in the early 1980’s. Today, as an old conservationist, I love nothing better than to sleep out in forest listening to the koalas talk. I live on a large remote property backed up to a national park. Most of it is primary forest. My wife and I planned to bequeath the property to the national park when we depart. So if I am a shill for anyone it would be for rational thought, perspective, Gaia and my favourite “faith”: Evolution.

Posted by: wes george at July 10, 2008 11:19 AM”

I wish I could have ‘penned’ these words, instead of just fantasising about reaching for a troll whacker.

“One very difficult canard to nail is the suggestion that the Earth is “warming up”. As I understand it, the mythological “global temperature” is the average temperature, not the maximum.”

As I understand it, it’s not even an average temperature of the earth, at least not in a meaningful sense. What they do is calculate a crude local average daily temperature as the midpoint between the daily max and daily mimumum temperatures and then average that spatially across the globe. Would you, for example, take the average temperature of a high rise in this fashion, if you wanted to estimate the heat loss from the high-rise? Record the daily max and min on each floor divided by 2, then sum the averages and divide by the number of floors? I don’t think so. You would probably take a number of simultaneous measurements – one on each floor, each simultaneous measurement averaged spatially over the building and then integrate or average over time.

The real question is whether the average temperature, however it is measured, is meaningfully related to the net radiative heat transfer into/out of the earth. Using the temperature anomoly method currently employed, I don’t think this is necessarily the case. Assume, for example, that the daily min and max at a location stay the same, but the profile over the day changes so that it spends longer at the peak or less at the minimum. That location will still radiate more heat, indicating that it has warmed. The reverse is also true; you could have a change in the average daily anomoly at a location, but the net heat flux out of the surface at that location hasn’t actually changed. How likely is this? I don’t know.

More importantly, radiative heat transfer out of a surface is proportional to the fourth power of the surface, meaning that to expel an extra increment of heat entering through the surface, that surface has to warm less at the maximum daily temperature than it does at the minimum daily temperature, and also that hot areas of the earth need to heat up less than do cool areas of the earth to counterbalance any additional increment of back-radiation from greenhouse gasses. Thus, and this is just my opinion, weighting the maximum daily temperature the same as the minimum, and weighting all regions of the earth equally as they do with respect to the so-called average temperature of the earth doesn’t really produce an accurate measure to judge whether, and to what extent, the earth is absorbing more radiation than it emits.

http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-is-wrong-with-wikipedia.html

I follow debate on AGW and other energy related blogs to try and learn something about critical issues to society.

Try as I might to let it slip, I find it absolutely infuriating to have to regularly plough through posts such as that he highlights where the writer pours scorn, sarcasm and venom on an opposing, and usually sceptical, contributor.

In essence, by criticising the opponents’ age, mental faculties and mooting likely other derogatory viewpoints of the opponent, such as creationism, without a shred of evidence seems consistent with a trend of such writers to seek to de-humanise critical opponents. Much like the label ‘denier’.

And the fear, for anyone with a scrap of historical knowledge of 20th century totalitarianism, is that once someone has de-humanised another person or group – it becomes very easy to rationalise inflicting much worse outcomes on that group. Which is where I fear this political debate will land when I read of Hansen’s calls for show trials for dissenting energy company executives. A well tried and proven method to crush dissent and probably a loud greek chorus of support on the blogosphere from persons such as Mr Goetz has highlighted.

I would love to know whether this crass and threatening behaviour by people with education levels to know better is a function of the growth of cyber debate on the internet – or is just what was always there but could not be seen in a world of snail-mail exchanges ? A Phd thesis there for someone.

But it is probably just as well that these clashes are fought in cyber-space. If someone spoke to me that way in person, I would be looking for the nearest heavy object to wrap around his head and deal with his squeals afterwards.

No, don’t blame them. they are being crafty, but they are also being wise. If temps are down over the next couple of decades, those measures will never be enacted.

If temps DO go up as predicted (though I bet they don’t), then maybe something SHOULD be done–but with tomorrow’s much greater wealth by means of tomorrow’s much greater technology. Probably far more cheaply (in % terms) and far more effective.