Actually, not so much. The major point of curiosity and research was what science would be cited. My classes later analyzed comments from several sites; science, newspaper, and those of this genre for resource quality and logical fallacies.

I think you misread the character analysis on GW, or misremembered your Lit teacher. By a long shot.

That sounds like an argument for natural variation without specifying any particular cause. That position would probably be the best bet for sceptics, but the devil is always in the details.

For example, some supporters of natural variation, such as Richard Lindzen, also accept that recent increases in atmospheric CO2 are man-made and have caused some warming. However, others like Roy Spencer seem more doubtful about the composition of the increase, while Tim Ball argues that pre-industrial levels of CO2 may have been higher than today.

So it might be difficult to gain agreement on some fundamental aspects of climate science.

The sceptic wiki proposal also includes the possibility of an evaluation of “current theories both inside and outside the official position”, and a “space for original research…”. These are very ambitious aims.

I like your tight-rope walker analogy, though, except that if the balance pole were to become, well, unbalanced, the tight-rope walker could find himself at an unwelcome tipping point.

I suspect Giles was an English Teacher out of his depth, rather than a science teacher. Recalling my English lessons I remembered he was a character from Thomas Hardy ‘The Woodlanders’ where Giles was the ‘personification of a wood god’ and I seem to recall my English teacher telling me he was also some sort of puritan. So rather a good name (or perhaps his mother just liked Hardy!)

I think the episode shows that there are three areas where blind faith can take over objective reasoning (whereby you arrive at a position after having thought about it). Those include religion, politics and philospohical life style choices.

However, those who have such blind faith in the AGW story are every bit as irrational as those on ‘our’ side who just don’t believe the AGW saga because they don’t like rules, the govt, Al Gore, or haven’t thought about it much, but are just sure ‘THEY’ are wrong.

It is useful to distance ourselves from this grouping as they tar everyone with the same brush with their off the cuff comments. I am sure Giles came over here thinking we were all knuckle dragging neanderthals who just hadnt ‘thought’ what we were doing and could be ‘saved’ if things were explained slowly to us.

We should be aware that those such as Mary Hinge and Joel Shore are of much sterner mettle and believe in the science, and personally I always welcome their posts here, but find them often unwilling to engage on history.

Their mantra is that ‘this time its different’ in order to minimise the increasingly obvious reality that todays climate is not ‘unprecedented’.

However, historical precedent is obviously important or Dr Mann and others wouldn’t be trying so hard to to subvert it. :)

Tonyb

In George Monbiot’s error filled rebuttal of David Bellamy today, he makes the claim that Michael Mann’s hockey stick has been vindicated time and time again…..and then shockingly claims….that manmade global warming ended the Little Ice Age

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/mar/16/monbiot-bellamy-climate-change-denier

Here are some excerpts of Monbiot’s great scientific learning.

The most likely explanation is that the Little Ice Age came to an end as a result of manmade climate change. (no citation given, seems unaware of dates, and seems unaware of solar activity)

The first hockey-stick paper, produced by Michael Mann et al has been vindicated by several subsequent studies

But you cannot deduce from this that CO2 is not the driver of global warming today. The evidence shows comprehensively that it is. (no citation given)

Time for everyone to leave a few comments on that page to teach Monbiot a few lessons.

So it is OK to quote Al Gore as an oracle when you agree with his warm words, but to ignore them when you don’t agree with his factual message of previous warm periods as quoted verbatim in my long post?

I am from the UK. Have you actually ever looked at the unsmoothed Hadley CET data back to 1660? Even in the LIA there were periods around as warm as now. If co2 is a driver it is an extremely weak one.

I note you haven’t answered my two questions. Can we assume you don’t know the answer? Can we also assume you haven’t been able to find it on any of the irrationalist blogs?

Personally I welcome your involvement here and hope you stay around, but if you pose questions you must also be willing to answer them or we will draw our own conclusions from your silence.

Hope to come across you elsewhere on this blog.

tonyb

You’ll see from Giles’ last comment that he looks to be abandoning this site. Like most from the pro-AGW point of view, he has learnt his arguments (by rote) reasonably well. He parrots IPCC and RealClimate mantra, and sounds quite convincing. He demands responses from the peer-reviewed literature (a good way of limiting the argument given the pro-AGW bias in the lit).

But as soon as you ask him to respond to some actual difficult questions – questions which aren’t on the standard list and don’t have a standard reply – questions that need some understanding to respond to – he dodges the questions, makes his excuses and leaves. Suddenly his demands for a constructive argument ring rather hollow.

Back on the original topic and Steve G’s follow up (which were very interesting), I note the wiki page (citing 32 of 34 lead authors) is not complete, but a sub sample. (There are actually a lot of lead authors of the IPCC report!) To verify these stats weren’t biased through the grey wiki process, I selected the co-ordinating lead authors (which should represent the most senior) of IPCC AR4, link here. Of 22 CLAs, I managed to confirm the gender of 21 of them through googling their CVs and photos. 1/21 are female (Hegerl). (The last unknown is Prof. Jiawen Ren from China, who I could not locate on the web – if anyone can positively confirm M/F I’d be grateful). This yields 4.8% female, as compared to 5.9% estimated from the wiki page, suggesting the wiki page seems reasonably unbiased.

I’ll use Steve’s 5.9% assumption (and round it up to 6% to give the pro-AGW folks the best chance), and see what the probability of finding 2 or less presenters in a group of 70, assuming they are from the same group. I use the binomial distribution and assume each sample is independent. I’ll set a p-value of 5% suggesting the population from which they are drawn is different.

The results are:
P(no females in 70) = 1.32%
P(one female in 70) = 5.88%
P(two females in 70) = 12.9%

So the probability of seeing 2 or fewer female speakers of 70, assuming the ICCC conference speakers are sampled from the same distribution as the IPCC co-ordinating lead authors for IPCC AR4 WG1, is 20.1%. This fails the statistical test, meaning the null hypothesis (they are from the same distribution) is accepted for this small sample.

(Of course, I have not taken into account the uncertainty in the estimates of the underlying distribution, which would widen the confidence intervals even further, and make rejection of the null even less likely).

There are other compelling explanations for the demographic of the ICCC conference; unlike the IPCC conference, the taxpayer will not be footing the bill for travel etc. to the ICCC conference, so the worldwide travel (and curiously carbon footprint) of the ICCC conference will be much less, with many more “locals”. Retired people are more likely because they don’t have to worry about their career being destroyed by calculated smears from environmental activists (and mainstream media outlets).

In summary, Suzanne Goldenberg’s analysis shows her very weak grasp at statistics, and a strong tendency to smear anything that disagrees with her narrow worldview.

“H.L.Mencken wrote:The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

I think we have lost touch with our history and believe that everything is unprecedeted if WE weren’t there to experience it, have an over reliance on theoretical science as a substitute for real knowledge, have forgotten we are a part of a natural and chaotic world because of our ability to control our immediate climate in home, car and office through precisely regulated heating and cooling, and have become more credulous as H L Mencken realised

Tonyb

Good Luck in your wiki endeavor. I’m off to teach Science classes.

“deconstructing the common “straw man” arguments that scientists use to discredit and discount skeptics’ issues. Possibly, this section could be the way to start to organize the whole project – a kind of FAQ to “answer the answers”"

I wish I had the energy and time and expertise to contribute more to your project than making suggestions from the sidelines. I sure hope you get the help you deserve. (Here’s the link to her site again: http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Wiki.htm )

“A major initial hurdle for an AGW sceptic wiki would be gaining agreement on some fundamental aspects of climate, such as the greenhouse effect, the present state of the climate and the reasons for warming/cooling.
…………………
“Gaining a coherent foundation statement, much less a consistent scientific line from the varieties of AGW scepticism would be a major achievement.”

On the contrary, skeptics don’t need to present a unified face in order to attack CAGW theory–they only need to poke holes in it and weaken it enough so that the case for immediate mitigation is unpersuasive. I.e., so that it would prudent to wait for another five or ten years while more data is gathered and the issue is more fully debated. If the global temperature continues to plateau or to decline slightly, as it has since at least 2002, that would falsify the AGW hypothesis. (Or at least would require such severe contortions to “save the case” that its proponents would reveal themselves to have been “crying wolf” with their prior predictions. And, given their alarmist bias, would likely be continuing to do so.)

Smokey has often said that the skeptic’s side has nothing to prove–it’s the believers who must prove that the 30-year warming that’s been observed falls outside the range of natural variation, and that the upward trend culminating in about 1998-2001 will continue, rather than pause or reverse. (The burden on “catastrophic” believers, who predict an accelerating warming based on a tipping-point effect, and claim that huge taxes are needed for mitigation, is much greater.)

Decadal periods of natural variation have been observed earlier in the 20th century (warming from 1900 to 1940, cooling from 1940 to 1970). And of course there were century-long periods of natural variation earlier in the past millennium: the Medieval Warm Period, followed by the Little Ice Age. It’s not necessary for skeptics to have a well-founded theory about the cause(s) of such variations. Rather, the burden is on warmers to explain why the current upward “zig” differs from those in the past, which were followed by downward “zags,” and which were not caused by AGW.

The IPCC attributed the current warming trend to CO2 by a process of elimination. I.e., it could think of no natural cause for the trend other than CO2. But that method of reasoning also fails to account for the earlier upward “zigs” by anything other than man-made CO2, which is absurd. So the Insisters are in the same pickle as the Resisters: they can’t explain natural variation either. Therefore, it’s not incumbent upon us skeptics to do so. Getting to the bottom of climate change is apparently something that will take centuries to get a handle on. It would be presumptuous to do more than throw out a few hypotheses at this point.

Indeed, it seems to me that there needn’t be any external cause for the variation–variation might be generated internally as the means by which a system’s stability is attained. A tight-rope walker maintains his balance because he constantly counterbalances himself back-and-forth against his balance-pole. If he were forced to eliminate his wobbling and walk steadily, he would fall. (I owe this insight to an essay by a Hungarian author in a book of his odd-ball essays published within the last ten years whose title I’ve forgotten.) Similarly, in a dynamical system with long-term feedback loops and natural counter-balances and counter-counter-balances, multi-decadal zigs and zags are probably (IMO) part of an overall equilibrium. When they were not–when the zigs were extensive and multi-century extremes ensued–they were anyway not due to man-made CO2, so there’s no need for cap-and-trade.

FWIW, I think the skeptics can plausibly account for the recent warming trend as a combination of the following, in order of importance:

1. A rebound from the Little Ice Age. (See the paper by the University of Alaska professor on this topic.)
2. Oceanic oscillation cycles that were mostly set to Warm for the latter third of the 20th century. (See Roy Spencer’s paper.)
3. Urban Heat Island effects, which increased the slope of the apparent warming in the 20th century in the industrialized world beyond the reality of what actually occurred.
4. Bias, largely unconscious, in collecting, adjusting, and correcting temperature data by the data’s guardians. (For instance, mistakes on the warm side might not get “corrected” as readily as mistakes on the cold side, because the former sort of mistakes wouldn’t seem suspicious.)

But:

“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly”
–Oscar Wilde

If you’re not quoting those genius peer-reviewed IPCC scientists George Monbiot, Fed Pearce and Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian then all that science you posted is a waste of time ;)

You see, these days the youth have it so easy that any small thing like CO2 which rocks their popcorn buckets is a threat to their way of life. They’re willing to surrender their liberty and all reason for any socialist paradise that promises them that the popcorn bucket will be green and sustainable forever. Then they can sit and eat popcorn all day long without worry because the government is looking after them…and at them!

And to think that within living memory there was a generation that worried about threats like Stalin’s tanks and Hitler’s bombs. These people died on the beaches of Normandy for what? What idiots they were. A trace gas is so much more threatening!!!