Guest post by Alan Caruba
Full disclosure: Years ago I received a small stipend from The Heartland Institute to help cover the costs of writing articles regarding the global warming hoax, well before it was exposed in 2009 when emails between its perpetrators—the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—revealed the total lack of real science involved. I have continued to expose the hoax without any support from Heartland or any other entity.
A total of six conferences on climate change have been sponsored by The Heartland Institute. I attended the first conference in New York City in 2008 and my initial observation was that virtually no one from the press was there and the meager coverage it received disparaged it.
This week, a major smear campaign against the Institute erupted as the result of an act of deception and thievery that may well result in criminal charges against its as yet unknown perpetrator.
The President of the Institute, Joe Bast, immediately informed its supporters, directors, donors and friends that someone pretending to be a board member had sent Heartland an email claiming to be a director and asking that documents regarding a January board meeting be re-sent.
A clever ruse, but the result was that elements of the confidential documents were then posted on a number of so-called climate blogs and from there to various members of the media who, with the exception of The Guardian, took no steps whatever to verify the authenticity of the documents, some of which Heartland says were either a concoction of lies or altered to convey inaccurate information.
The leading disseminator of the global warming hoax, The New York Times, published its version on Wednesday, February 15th, titled “Leak Offers Glimpse of Campaign Against Climate Science.”
Suffice to say, the “climate science” served up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been a pack of lies from the day it first convened. Its “science” was based on computer models rigged by co-conspirators that include Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia.
The original leak of their emails in November 2009 instantly revealed the extent of their efforts to spread the hoax and to suppress any expression of doubt regarding it. A second release in 2011 confirmed what anyone paying any attention already knew.
The “warmists”, a name applied to global warming hoaxers, launched into a paroxysm of denial that has not stopped to this day. Their respective universities have since engaged in every possible way to hide the documentation they claimed supported their claims. Suffice to say, the global warming hoax was the golden goose for everyone who received literally billions in public and private funding.
We have reached the point where the warmists have been claiming that global warming causes global cooling! Along the way the bogus warming has been blamed for thousands of utterly absurd events and trends. What really worried the perpetrators was the fact that the planet had entered a cooling cycle in 1998.
At the heart of the hoax was the claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) was causing the Earth to heat and that CO2 emissions must be reduced to save the Earth. Next to oxygen, CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as it sustains all vegetation which in turn sustains every creature that depends on it as a source of food. It represents a mere 0.033% of the Earth’s atmosphere and is referred to by warmists as a “greenhouse gas.” It is, as any meteorologist or climatologist will tell you, the atmosphere that protects the Earth from becoming a dissociated planet like Mars.
The New York Times article is a case study in bad journalism and bias on a scale for which this failing newspaper is renowned. The Times reported that “Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming part of the nation’s culture wars.”
Wrong, so wrong. Polls have demonstrated that global warming is last on a list of concerns by the public. It barely registers because the public has concluded that it is either a hoax or just not happening. Teaching global warming in the nation’s schools constitutes a crime against the truth and the students.
The Times article makes much of the amounts some donors to Heartland have contributed, but in each cited case, with one exception, the donations had nothing to do with its rebuttal of global warming science.
“It is in fact not a scientific controversy”, said the Times article. “The majority of climate scientists say that emissions generated by human beings are changing the climate and putting the planet at long-term risk, although they are uncertain about the exact magnitude of that risk.”
The exact magnitude is zero. Thousands of scientists have signed petitions denouncing global warming as a hoax. The Times lies.
A post at The Daily Bayonet on February 14th said it well, “What the Heartland documents show is how badly warmists have been beaten by those with a fraction of the resources they’ve enjoyed. Al Gore spent $300 million advertising the global warming hoax. Greenpeace, the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, NASA, NOAA, the UN and nation states have collectively poured billions into climate research, alternative energies, and propaganda, supported along the way by most of the broadcast and print media.
The Times will continue to publish lies about global warming, as will others like Time and Newsweek magazines. The attacks on Heartland and the many scientists and others like myself who debunk this fraud will continue, but their efforts are just the dying gasp of the greatest hoax of the modern era.
There’s a reason the theme of Heartland’s sixth conference in 2011 was “Restoring the Scientific Method.” Real science does not depend on declaring “a consensus” before the hypothesis has been thoroughly tested, a process that often involves years of effort. Meanwhile, the planet continues to cool.
Could Romm and McKibben please reveal all and any monies they might have received, including free trips or expenses?
We have the details on Gore, Suzuki and their foundations. We know Hansen made a fortune – though he blithely says it goes to his grandchildren and the American economy and tax department, as if none of this impacts him in any positive, please-do-it-to-me-again, way. What about Revkin? What about Monbiot?
Who paid for all those wankers going to South Africa for the last boondoggle? Bet it wasn’t them.
Let’s have it out on the table, old-school style, and do some measuring. And then publish the results in the NYT.
Exactly what I wrote. Very nice.
I found some other inconsistencies in the “DeSmogBlogGate” memo.
The fake one is completely different in style than the other memos.
http://www.minnesotansforglobalwarming.com/m4gw/2012/02/desmogbloggate.html
Right on point, Alan!
If only the educational institutions would teach real earth science (geology, glaciology, earth history) and meterology – – – – rather than ecology, climate studies, and politicized geography – – – the baseless claims of “unprecedented” by the GW-alarmists would be self-evident and laughable.
Life on Earth would not have survived billion of years if climatological “tipping points” (persistent positive feedback processes) really existed.
Cross-posted Comment – Google “Yellow Dots of Mystery” – I am speculating that the fraudulent PDF document contains non-obvious forensic tracking features that law enforcement agencies mandated be automatically ‘printed’ on each scanned page of a document. You might be able to ‘see’ those features in the PDF if you know where to look and what to look for. This is NOT the File – Properties – Metadata stuff (too obvious). The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a bunch of webpages describing this for printers. There are also YouTube videos out there describing how you can find these forensic tracking features printed on printer hard-copy output
Richard Black of the BBC has knee-jerked into publication in condemnation of the Heartlands based upon these spurious documents, in complete contrast to the restraint and diligence he used over the CRU “climate-gate” leaks.
However, the comments on his blog give him a well deserved kicking for his blatantly biased double standard. Something which would not matter at a newpaper, such as the Guardian, whose views and biases are well known. But to use the once respected BBC as a platform for his personal agenda is beyond the pale.
Tiny quibble – carbon dioxide is more important than oxygen, without it oxygen wouldn’t exist. And, sometimes you’ll hear that plants produce oxygen as a “waste product” of photosynthesis, that’s not at all what they’re doing because they themselves breathe in oxgen and breathe out carbon dioxide when they’re not photosynthesising. They’re perfect self-sufficient food and atmosphere producing entities for their own needs, for spreading they’ve created the animal kingdom..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/14/microbes-and-their-impact-within-climate-models/#comment-894308
Public confidence in science also needs to be restored, especially with certain ‘scientists’ appearing not to practice the Scientific Method.
WUWT would do well to distance itself from this kind of empty bluster. It adds nothing to the body of science.
Its not about science. Its not about climate. Its not about the environment. It is all about the destruction of capitalism and the enslavement of mankind. They are not wrong, they are evil.
It never ever was about saving the planet, it was always about control, thought control, control of our actions, control of resources, to be doled out by a Global Government, unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable, & unsackable! It’s all very simple, the neo-socilaists & the neo fuedalists want control for thei own misguided aims, some not so misguided though! Thankfully I know one teacher of science here in the UK who always insists that her pupils/students check & verify all their sources of information & not just cut & paste from Wikipedia & the like! That’s why she is a fine teacher.
It seems there is too much money in play as to try anything to “save the business”. BTW What is it the real value of a “carbon share”?….It seems it decreases exponentially relative to real temperatures. Bad luck guys, sustainability in unsustainable.
Great post Alan, thank you. It could be passed on as an instant primer to those folk who understand that there is a ‘war’ going on between those who believe in anthropogenic global warming and the skeptics who point to the data (and the political agenda of the warmists) yet have not yet grasped the size and implications.
It has just one flaw in it. The New York Times, risible though this once great newspaper has become, is NOT the leading disseminator of the hoax (although it may be in the United States). The undoubted global media leader in spreading grotesquely unbalanced coverage is the BBC.
To be a BBC reporter, editor or commentator involved in covering AGW involves a shamefaced under-the-counter juggling of storylines, inviting trusted ‘safe pairs of hands’ into the studio, ignoring even highly-gifted communicators if they happen to ‘bat for the other side’ (Christopher Monckton is avoided like the plague) and a determination to eschew journalistic enquiry.
As a former UK journalist myself – I used to work alongside good, honest, BBC reporters – I have never known the corporation’s journalistic star to fall so low. It distributes these cancerous journalistic cells, of course, to all corners of the globe, using a wide variety of media.
Unhappily – much in the way that dishonest climate scientists have tainted the image of all pro-AGW scientists (yes, even those who still genuinely believe that CO2 may be the decisive element in climate change) – so have these journalists damaged the reputation of all of the BBC’s news programmes.
Although most of the BBC’s news output is probably factual and accurate, millions of people around the world now take its news coverage with a huge pinch of salt.
Global warming has irretrievably (I believe) damaged the reputation of the BBC. More damage to more reputations is on the way.
Maybe it’s time to set up a string of Honey Pots to train the media shills to be more skeptical. I suspect that in a few weeks their guard will be down and they can be stimulated to give their typical Pavlovian response again and again.
GeologyJim says:
“If only the educational institutions would teach real earth science (geology, glaciology, earth history) and meterology – – – – rather than ecology … ”
What is wrong with teaching ecology (if it is done right)??? Ecological principles are extremely important in forestry, fisheries, wildlife management etc. etc.
The planet continues to cool, but Hearts and Minds, are clearly being controlled. Here in Britain a new Climate Changer takes up the challenge….
http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/the-green-treens/
Why is it that many of the Warmist crowd come across as all weaselly and unpleasant? Their blogs tend to be unpleasant, hateful places were dissent is crushed and open debate controlled by censorship or pseudo-intellectual rantings by a small arrogant clique.
At least you, Anthony, have provided a site which is open to the science. Where newcomers are made to feel welome and where education and enlightenment are core concerns.
You have a lot of support out here.
Heartland should consider approaching Google about cleaning their search results from links to the faked document a couple weeks down the line. It constitutes well poisoning as far as the search for Heartland is concerned – which may be one of the purposes of the whole affair.
Anthony
You are hero to many, you took fight to their doorstep.
Now the end of big struggle is near, with the failure and a total demise of the AGW hypothesis.
The Great European Freeze of 2012 has done the job in Europe, reminiscent of the 1812’s Napoleons fatal march on Moscow,
http://www.napoleon-series.org/images/military/organization/Dutch/1812/
even if some deny the similarity.
Ignorance of history is of course fatal both to rational skepticism and to scientific progress.
That is why it is important to know — and to verify for oneself — that the origins of the “global warming hoax” go back to an expose in the June 1955 issue of Fortune, in the form of a much-read article by the eminent scientist John von Neumann, titled Can We Survive Technology?
The widespread impression that that climate-change warnings, from the world’s most eminent mathematicians and scientists, are any kind of modern innovation, is of course entirely mistaken.
[snip. More sock puppetry from Gneiss, RW, Alan Statham, J. Fischer, BA, Stevo, Harry Lebowski, KevinJ, Jennifer, Luke, Jackson, etc. All the same troll. ~dbs, mod.]
Sorry link got truncated
http://www.napoleon-series.org/images/military/organization/Dutch/1812/Textiles/Dutchtextiles6b.jpg
Contains profanity.
The hypocrisy of the warmistas, and the left in general, is profoundly staggering and utterly absolute. Climategate Emails are a crime and should be prosecuted fully! Hacking Heartland, swallowing the the fake Bush Air National Guard documents whole, having all kinds of fun with Sarah Palin’s emails… that’s all cool you know, becuase it’s for the greater good.
I also noticed the old meme “possibly fake BUT consistant with fact” that they used with the Bush ANG documents. Honestly I can’t even discuss anything of any intellectual or politcal heft with people of the far left because they are either liars, callow stooges, or just plain stupid. When you in your teens and twenties you can be fogiven for the “idealis” of youth, but by your 30s you need to smarten up. I think it was Churchill who said a young conservative has no heart and an old liberal has no brain (or something to that effect).
Does anyone have any other scaned pdf’s from ‘suspects’ websites that could be used as a comparison ?
Thanks Alan. Congrat. Concise, pithy, covers all the main points. Positively Moncktonesque.
That the warmist argument is so weak is indicated by the lengths some feel they need to go to create a buzz of publicity against skeptical views. Nothing else is working. Only the desperate would contrive such a plan. To me it was obvious, too convenient. They were hoping that the proven success of the Climategate releases could be copied. It is all but an admission that the Climategate ‘reveals’ are true, devastating to ‘the cause’ and further, unanswerable.
You can smell the inherent hope that once the Heartland documents are shown to be faked, that the ‘fakery’ idea will be picked up by warminst to pretend the Climategate emails were also faked or modified. This on the notion that sliming one will slime all and somehow hide the manipulations, perfidy and serial fabrications of the CRU staff.
The ‘context’ thing, which was that last workable gasp, was destroyed completely by Climategate II. Thanks to Unknown.
This is a new level of desperation.
Fortunately it is also giving WUWT a new opportunity for everyone to declare their interests, at least on the skeptical side. That provides even more ammunition for the general public to demand that the Hansens of this world come clean about how much money they are personally making from their involvement in extending and protecting the hoax. Suzuki, Gore and others immediately come to mind.
Let the scrutiny come! Let all reveal all! Start looking into the AR5 now so we are prepared to answer whatever outrages against science it will contain.
Pity Michael Crichton isn’t around to enjoy this. How prescient he was!
@an Bearpig says:
Does anyone have any other scaned pdf’s from ‘suspects’ websites that could be used as a comparison ?
++++++++++
Good point. Look for the tell-tale markers. It was exactly for this reason that those were introduced, much as analysis of the worn letters on typewriters were used to find the machine that produced the ransom demand.
The CO2 concentration is roughly 0.04% (or 0.039% to be more precise) by volume not 0.033%. Might as well get that right. It is rising a roughly 2 ppmv per year but varies seasonally.
@johnny McVail – “WUWT would do well to distance itself from this kind of empty bluster. It adds nothing to the body of science.”
Respectfully, I disagree. This issue speaks to the heart of the body of science. The attempt to discredit those who are presenting data, observations, and are trying to adhere to the scientific method is detrimental to that body directly. If the ability to present data that contradicts the “consensus” is condemned and vilified as “denier-ism” where does the body of science end up?
The beauty of the scientific method is that the data and facts established are subject to confirmation, verification, and many eyes. A scientist who has been emotionally invested in a particular path of research can, and should, be willing to hear a different view, if supported by data, and observation. In this way he can redirect, be shown flaws or short-sightedness, even at the expense of his emotional investment, if he would. Or on the other hand, his path can be buoyed up by the confirming experimental or methodical observation of others, thus the body of his part of science expanded and grown.
None of this is happening in the pro-AGW world, as evidenced by the content of the climate-gate e-mails, and the many personal attacks that have been launched against the “deniers”. Where’s the concern for the “body of science” in that? How do personal attacks further the body of science? They don’t, but they do help the illusion of “consensus”; shutting opposing views up does that.
So what does the Heartland flap have to do with this? This foundation has been supportive of the skeptical view of AGW, among other things. They have been willing to allow and provide grants or loans to projects and present gatherings to do the scientific thing: present data, discuss methods, examine outcomes. Unfortunately, there is also the PR onslaught that has to be contended with, as well. While not a direct contribution to the body of science, it keeps the possibility of contrarian views alive, in spite of the best efforts to shut them down.
**Disclaimer – I have absolutely no connection to anybody involved in any of this dust-up. I had never heard of The Heartland Institute before seeing comments here about some conference a year or so ago. I am not a scientist, nor do I have a horse in the AGW race in any way. However, I do care about both our society and environment. I feel that the environment is doing just fine without our fretting about it; our society, not so much. The ability to respectfully and civilly debate, argue even, has been lost, and must be regained. Without this ability the body of science will die, as will the body politic, and civil society, too.
Cheers
Jon (10:11 am) says: “What is wrong with teaching ecology (if it is done right)??? Ecological principles are extremely important in forestry, fisheries, wildlife management etc. etc.”
In my experience, “Ecology” is commonly presented from the static-equilibrium point-of-view in which “change” is viewed as “bad” or “pollution” or “to be avoided”. You’re right that there’s nothing wrong about studying the interactions of biology, geology, hydrology, etc.
But the real-world “ecosystem” is founded on (evolved for) fight/flight, hunter/hunted, competition for food/mates/resources/territory, evolution/extinction, adaptation, catastrophy, and above all CHANGE — — — not on harmony and balance.
Megan McArdle has what appears to be a smoking gun. See “Update” near the bottom:
The document at the heart of the latest contretemps is a fake.
I’ve not seen Richard Blacks article at the BEEB but if it’s even remotely actionable in the States, it will almost certainly be here and as the libel originated in the UK, here is where it should be contested.
I’m not going to give it the traffic to give an opinion.
Can’t remember which has the legal background, either Pompous Git or Dodgy Geezer I think.
DaveE.
Great post! There is a greater problem here. How can dissenting scientists get funded to offer up a skeptical view? We just assume that the scientific method is a free-for-all heading toward the truth. But as climate science has shown, the gate-keeping alone keeps the dissenters under-funded while the consensus seekers are over-rewarded. Heartland funding is a crumb on the bakery floor.
Ken Hall says:
“Richard Black of the BBC has knee-jerked into publication in condemnation of the Heartlands based upon these spurious documents, in complete contrast to the restraint and diligence he used over the CRU “climate-gate” leaks. …. But to use the once respected BBC as a platform for his personal agenda is beyond the pail”. “once respected” – How well put.
Yesterday it was announced that the BBC need not disclose a report which the Corporation itself commissioned into the BBC’s anti-israel bias. The Information Tribunal ordered its release under the Freedom of Information Act but the BBC fought this decision all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the judges concurring with those of the Appeal and High Courts, decreed that it need not be revealed as it was matter held for the purposes of journalism.
Of course, had the report not found strong evidence of bias there would have been no need for the BBC to continue to hide it.
You may expect the same results if the BBC ever commissions a report into its coverage of Climate Change or for that matter any other interests for which it acts as a propagandist such as wind turbines and the Euro.
The thing I find most fascinating about this affair is how quickly and how ferociously people leaped on the documents. Clearly Anthony and WUWT has gotten under the skin of many people who have no counter to the messages here, until this “gift” of a leak from Heartland. Not also, the focus of these people is not so much Heartland, but a smallish grant to Anthony.
We’ve had detractors posting on the subject who I haven’t seen in months so quick to stand up and relish the moment without applying the slightest skepticism that should follow any anonymous release. Some quoted nonsensical passages like the one about discouraging teachers from teaching.
On thing I’ve learned from my engineering point of view is that you can learn more from a system that is failing than one working well. In this case it appears that:
1) There are a lot more people interested in destroying WUWT and its reputation than I thought.
2) WUWT and Anthony have as strong a foundation as I thought. Apparently it’s going to take more than social engineering and faked documents to stop open debate.
WUWT rocks.
Logic and science is on the side of the skeptics.
The feedback response of the planet to a change in forcing is to resist the forcing change by increase or decreasing cloud cover in the tropics (negative feedback) which increases or decreases the amount of sunlight reflected into space. (Four published papers support this assertion as does the actual temperature rise vs IPCC model predictions.) The IPCC extreme AGW paradigm requires that there is positive feedback to amplify the warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 without feedbacks which is 1C to an amplified warming of 3C to 5C.
As there is a negative feedback response (cloud cover in the tropics increases to resist warming), the temperature increase due to a doubling CO2 will be less than 1C.
Trillions of dollars of tax pay dollars are proposed to be spent on boondoogles which will result in minimum practical reduction in CO2 rise. Atmospheric CO2 rise is not a problem from the standpoint of dangerous rise in temperature if the increase in temperature due to a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. The biosphere expands when the planet is 1C warmer (with most of the warming occurring at higher latitudes) and contracts when it is 1C colder.
Commericial greenhouses inject CO2 into the greenhouse to reduce growing times and increase yield. Plant’s eat CO2.
The skeptics are on the side of logic, tax payers, and the biosphere.
What side are the extreme AGW promotors on?
This issue and the funding received by advocacy groups reminded me of an idea that has always intrigued me. I keep hearing of groups like Greenpeace, WWF etc receiving large donations from the likes of large corporations like Exxon and Goldman Sachs to name a few. What intrigued me was why. Why would large Oil companies and Finance institutions donate to an advocacy group whose core principles are anti-corporate. Is it to use these organizations as hitmen to advance the cause of some particular industry or concern over their competitors. This could be the case and there seems to be evidence suggesting this, or is it something else, more nefarious and disturbing. Is it hush or protection money, paid by these corporations to keep the spotlight off them, lest these advocacy groups sick the dogs of war on them. Shakedown rackets like the Mafia of old. A comparison of big corporate donations in relation to the actions of these advocacy groups receiving them, would make for an interesting read.
Isn’t about time for the remaining Climategate emails to be released? I would love to see the analysis of what remains. They don’t have to be made up.
For Elmer: Waiting for your next global warming song. Love your humor.
Here’s an honest question: I am not that familiar with thea actual history of the Heartland Institute and their actual stances in the past on controversial issues such as smoking & ozone layer destruction, etc. I can of course do an internet search and find lots of fairly negative information that would paint the Institute in a very bad light on these issues, which would explain why journalists, scientists, and others pretty much view the Heartland Institute in such a negative light. So, what is the truth of the matter in these issues? What actually was the Institute’s stance versus what is stated now around the web? The perception is of course, that the Institute will take any position that supports and protects big business versus public health and the public interest. Is this perception of the Institute unjustified? Can you give an example of when the Institute took a stance against the interests of big business when the evidence indicated that stance was justified?
Google ‘Obama birth certificate’
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
~More Soylent Green!
While all this is going on, I’d keep in the mind the veiled threats made by D. Brown about legal action against skeptics. It’s also wise to bear in mind the fact that these guys really are relentless. These people (of course, not necessarily the same individuals) have already driven a governor out of office and a presidential contender from the race. Some of them are half-mad (if you don’t believe that, ask Eric Bell; he received some interesting instruction on this point just recently, though in a different context), and they won’t give up easily, especially on a cause that has become so central to their entire Weltanschauung.
(If only it were just about money!)
Pull My Finger says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:32 am
I think it was Churchill who said a young conservative has no heart and an old liberal has no brain (or something to that effect).
According to an article on wikiquote on Churchill at:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
this quote was misattributed to Churchill.
If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.
According to research by Mark T. Shirey, citing Nice Guys Finish Seventh: False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations by Ralph Keyes, 1992, this quote was first uttered by mid-nineteenth century French historian and statesman François Guizot when he observed, “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head. (N’être pas républicain à vingt ans est preuve d’un manque de cœur ; l’être après trente ans est preuve d’un manque de tête.)” This quote has been attributed variously to George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli, Otto von Bismarck, and others.
However, the idea that your experiences as you grow older make you more conservative is one that many of us relate to.
Sorry. Forgot the quotes around the quote from wikiquotes begining with “If you are not…” and ending with “and others”
nothernont,
You’re certainly twisting in the winds of political correctness!
(It is a pretty complicated world, isn’t it? Wait till you find out that Wall Street contributes most of its political donations in the US to the Democratic Party.)
Megan McArdle who writes for The Altantic and is a self-described believer thinks the strategy memo is fake. She does a long dissection of the memo here.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/
@Fenbeagle: Dan Dare!!!! And Dogby!!! (LOL) Absolutely the BEST strip yet. I just wish our colonial cousins could appreciate it, but I doubt they know who Dan Dare was. I’m still chuckling (The Mekon is my favourite).
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am): “Can you give an example of when the Institute took a stance against the interests of big business when the evidence indicated that stance was justified?”
You mean, like the multibillion-dollar big business of global warming alarmism?
Just a small nitpick. CO2 is way more vital than oxygen. There is a significant number of microorganism who can survive without oxygen and for some of them oxygen is even toxic. Remember that O2 is a byproduct of photosynthesis. The composition of the young Earth did not include oxygen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism
Until today, I was not aware of the existence of the Heartland Institute. Thanks to the release of the fake pdfs, I am now.
To R. Gates: February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am
I encourage you to take a look at the Heartland web site. As a libertarian organization, they favor smaller and less intrusive government, and policy based on science rather than a political agenda.
I was curious about the Heartland stand on smoking too. They take a libertarian stand. They agree that it is bad for you, but that extreme taxes and other means to stop people from smoking is not the right way to go. On second hand smoke they cite studies that it is not as bad for you as the government would have you believe, which is probably what prompts detractors to proclaim that Heartland doesn’t believe smoking is a bad thing to do.
http://heartland.org/.
Can someone please advise: NCSE claims that Hansen has published his Algorithm and all in peer reviewed literature? is this correct This is their claim ” The methods are described in peer reviewed literature and on NASA’s website: http://1.usa.gov/xvs3t1“
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:50 am
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am): “Can you give an example of when the Institute took a stance against the interests of big business when the evidence indicated that stance was justified?”
You mean, like the multibillion-dollar big business of global warming alarmism?
_____
So apparently you can’t. Thanks, that says a lot.
Bob Koss says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:45 am
Beat you to it, Bob. It appears she has it all wrapped up. The document is a fake.
I find it so hypocritical that warmists can take billions from whoever they want without question, but a single dollar from a doubtful source put to disprove them is automatically a scandal… I always thought science was supposed to stand on it’s own merit… I guess I’m an idealist…
If we should contribute to both The Heartland Institute AND WattsUpWithThat, are we automatically co-conspirators?
Hot Damn!!!
Regardless of the releases of any information, it is the science that will win the argument. From the beginning proponents of AGW forgot the first law of data analysis, ‘things correlated to the same thing, aren’t necessarily correlated to each other.’ As temperatiures went up, they made millions, but now that temperatures have leveled and threaten to go down, they resort to the base tactics they have displayed all along.
Facts will always (eventually) trump bad science, and it looks like we are there.
Well it starting to look like FAKEGATE is an own goal for the AGW crowd. Yet another thing that wakes the public up to the reality that the eco-loons have been lying to us all along, and are still at it. They’re getting desperate and the last thing they want is for the general populace to be able to look a graphs of real data so they can make their own minds up. It used to be forbidden for anyone who wasn’t a priest to read the bible in case the churches lost control of the flock – only the blessedly chosen are allowed to consult the scriptures, all others who try are evil heretics & should be burned at the stake.
Beesaman says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:18 am
“Why is it that many of the Warmist crowd come across as all weaselly and unpleasant?”
It’s because they are…(well at least Romm and McKibben…).
Wake me up when the climate elites break their addiction to copious amounts of government/taxpayer money…otherwise this whole event is nothing but a big yawn…
Downdraft says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:55 am
To R. Gates: February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am
I encourage you to take a look at the Heartland web site. As a libertarian organization, they favor smaller and less intrusive government, and policy based on science rather than a political agenda.
_______
Thanks, I have poked around their site. I actually am favorable to certain Libertarian positions myself, especially in regards to the intrusion of the government into the private affairs and lives of citizens and fiscal responsibility. What I’m trying to find are neutral sources of information that would clearly indicate the Institute’s actual positions– for example, longer sound bites or recordings that clearly indicate their position on issues, with no chance for misinterpretations, etc. Any organizaitons can (and individuals too), and many do, go back and “sanitize” their past, so as to make themselves appear to be something more acceptable to various groups or the public at large.
Re: Heartland and “Big Business”. Heartland has forthrightly and consistently opposed Sarbanes-Oxley. Sarbox is undoubtedly a boon to “big business”, as the reporting requirements are easily handled by large corporations with existing legal, compliance and accounting departments. This gives them a huge incumbency advantage over their smaller competitors, and, in particular competitors that are contemplating IPOs, which is often a good way to raise funds in order to crank up the competition. Sarbox certainly was a factor in a very successful small company in which I was involved deciding to get acquired by our large competitor as opposed to going public.
Warmists as peculating Luddite sociopaths –cf: Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Keith Farnish et al.– are wholly in the pocket of Big Government collectivist Statists, capable of any deception and malfeasance whatsoever in pursuit of their public-sector rent-seeking gravy train.
Since the Global Cooling Scare ended c. 1988, no disinterested observer has granted Briffa, Hansen. Jones, Mann, Trenberth or any of their ilk the slightest credibility. Fuss and bluster as they will, over decades their malicious propaganda has blighted everything it touched, destroying an entire generation of potentially invaluable research. Anabaptists of Munster come to mind.
This latest warmist attack is a direct attempt to distract skeptic bloggers and the general public from the cold European winter.
The day after MSM starts to mention ‘extreme cold snap’… BAM, the next day Heartland documents are released, and the skeptics are distracted. There are many people employed to persuade the publics opinion on AGW, it’s a trillion dollar industry. Remember the last distraction? Days after announcements of the coming little ice age… caused by the SUN, there was a paper released that claimed volcanoes cased it (primarily). The volcano paper was waved in the publics face for days on every website possible. And no mention of the sun after that.
Do not let this ordeal distract from the actual tasks at hand: expose the greatest hoax of the modern era.
I see Richard Black has updated and edited. Magic. (Is he related to Sirius?)
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:50 am
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am): “Can you give an example of when the Institute took a stance against the interests of big business when the evidence indicated that stance was justified?”
You mean, like the multibillion-dollar big business of global warming alarmism?
—————————————————————————————-
Great answer Gary!
Its become a complete smear I wonder if Heartland has the B### to sue all of them
http://news.google.com.au/news/more?hl=en&gl=us&q=global+warming&gs_upl=1587l3973l0l5620l14l9l0l0l0l0l366l1163l2-2.2l4l0&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dVY3POaGI3N_n4MffVSh0EzZ2AJIM&ei=t2Y9T8WTOpGtgQfZ78WdCA&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=2&ved=0CDoQqgIwAQ
Fake or not, it doesn’t matter. The unwashed masses of worshipers have and never do their homework on the issue anyway. This just becomes a talking point which “proves”, skeptics are “anti-science” and funded by nefarious means. It is no different than the “inquiries” which supposedly exonerated the participants in the leaked East Anglia emails.
IMO, this isn’t going to change a single thing. The worshipers in their pews would have stayed devoted to the cause anyway, it just hardens them. The critical thinkers like never believed in the first place, and those with some common sense started bailing a few years ago, when the rhetoric got more dire and vitriolic while the prognostications never came close to materializing.
carry on. keep reporting observations and the diversity of theories and time and truth will continue to advance.
I don’t believe Sar-Box has been a boon to anybody except the auditing and consulting firms. It’s a drain on the economy and just one more reason to not start a business here.
You are correct that bigger businesses can often more easily afford to comply and it stifles competition.
R Gates,
“The perception is of course, that the Institute will take any position that supports and protects big business versus public health and the public interest.”
i would have expected that even you would have realised that this is an extremely simplistic black-white argument of the sort most commonly associated with the lowest form of politics. it should be clear to any enquiring mind that there are plenty of big businesses that are profiting from the AGW cult, as there are those that are disadvantaged by it.
In Europe, utility corporations have reaped billions by gaming the system – collecting carbon credits as part of a deal that allows them to continue to emit co2, while other businesses have seen the price they pay for electricity increase. Not suprisingly, these utilities are vociferous in their support of actions to cut emissions.
We have seen investment bankers profit from the very same carbon trading schemes, as they skim off profits from brokerage fees.
We have seen land owners and wind turbine companies profit by the direct subsidies paid by compulsory renewable energy obligations – again, a direct transfer of wealth from working people to capitalists.
It would appear then, that the Heartland institute is taking a position that is squarely at odds with the interests of a lot of “big business”.
A physicist says:
“The widespread impression that that climate-change warnings, from the world’s most eminent mathematicians and scientists, are any kind of modern innovation, is of course entirely mistaken.”
====================================
The history of the pronouncements of doom go back a long way, starting perhaps with the eminent Thomas Robert Malthus, yet we are still here. 😉
Although that is not to say I was impressed by this article, which comes across as angry, paranoid and ridiculous.
The last line is just a bold faced lie.
You know it is Anthony.
This site has no credibility.
[REPLY: Neither do anonymous trolls with fake e-mail addresses. No further comments until you comply with site policy. -REP]
GeologyJim said @ February 16, 2012 at 11:05 am
In my experience the term “ecology” has been misused by envirowhackos and there are some commenters here that are foolish enough to believe that makes any user of the word is an envirowhacko. Completely illogical.
Check out Dave Stockwell’s Niche Modeling to read what a Ph.D. in Ecosystem Dynamics from the Australian National University has to say about CAGW. You might learn something. You certainly don’t seem to understand what ecology and the study of ecosystems is about.
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am
IF the strategy memo is a fake, what does that say about the nature of the multi-billion-supported forces arrayed against tiny Heartland and even tinier Anthony?
Vince Causey said @ February 16, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Vince, anyone with half a brain can see that CAGW is something devised by and for Big Business and Big Government. Sadly, R Gates is only using the other half of his brain.
Exp says:
“The last line is just a bold faced lie.”
Thanx for your uncited, baseless opinion. However, it is wrong.
David A. Evans said @ February 16, 2012 at 11:09 am
The Git’s legal experience extends only to that of fathering a fine son on a legal secretary. Happily, he married SWMBO almost exactly nine months before she bore The Gitling 🙂
Oh, and one of his favourite people to drink with was a criminal barrister.
[Moderator’s Query: the barrister was a criminal? -REP]
Will Nitschke said @ February 16, 2012 at 1:02 pm
The history of pronouncements of doom go back to the classical Greeks. It seems likely that pronouncements of doom were being made before it occurred to the Greeks to invent history. I that I share your opinion regarding the head post.
All this “he said – she said” stuff is silly anyway and eventually turns the general population off.
Ask any “climate scientist” to explain why the Moon, heated solely by solar radiation, reaches temperatures twice that recorded on Earth.
They have been so completely brainwashed that they cannot see that the fact the solar radiation alone heats the Moon to ~120 degrees C during the day completely destroys their use of one quarter of the solar constant as evidenced by Kiehl & Trenberth –
“Here we assume a “solar constant” of 1367 W m-2 (Hartmann 1994), and because the incoming solar radiation is one-quarter of this, that is, 342 W m-2, a planetary albedo of 31% is implied.”
If solar insolation is really one quarter of the solar constant why doesn’t this premise apply to the Moon ?
There may be lots of argument about radiative effects on Earth but these do not apply to the Moon.
The simple “Inconvenient Truth” about the MAXIMUM surface temperatures observed on the Moon is that it requires the full “solar constant” reduced by the accepted Moon albedo to explain these temperatures -one quarter simply doesn’t cut it.
If their “one quarter of the solar insolation” thingie is so wrong for the case of the Moon – as is easily demonstrated – why is it right for Earth ?? Are they trying to claim the solar radiation somehow knows to quarter itself and spread all round the globe sneaking in under the cover of darkness ??
In every explanation of the “greenhouse effect” I see the insolation is always quoted as around 170 W/sq m due to the method of trickery using the geometry of an illuminated disk in equilibrium with a sphere- WHAT RUBBISH .
It clearly doesn’t apply to the Moon – no-one cares about averages – the argument is about radiative heating and averages have no place in the discussion – the solar insolation is either on or off – not some average.
The obvious truth is the Sun could cause the surface temperature of the Earth to rise much higher than is observed during the day and therefore the atmosphere acts to actually cool the Earth’s surface – there is no “greenhouse effect”.
There is no justification for reducing solar insolation to one quarter other than to obfuscate and achieve a result they want.
I really do not understand how intelligent people let them get away with this obvious lie – during the day the atmosphere shields us from intense solar radiation and cools the surface by convection and evaporation.
[Moderator’s Query: the barrister was a criminal? -REP]
Possibly, but I doubt it. He defended some pretty dire characters. “Criminal barrister” is how barristers who defend criminals describe themselves in the English speaking world. See:
for an example.
[REPLY: Ahhh! Thank you for the clarification…. and we’ll let the advertisement for your friend slip through this time… -REP]
[SNIP: I did say something about valid e-mail addresses…. -REP]
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am
Here’s an honest question
That’s a cracker lol
It is not about climate.
It is about taxes.
It is about power.
Therefor lies are required.
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Any organizaitons can (and individuals too), and many do, go back and “sanitize” their past, so as to make themselves appear to be something more acceptable to various groups or the public at large.
###
No only lefties do this. Conservatives don’t have to. Fraud is a defining characteristic of all socialists. It has to be because most people would not willingly submit to slavery.
I often see the argument “if the downwelling longwave radiation” doesn’t heat the oceans or surface where does it go ?”
Perhaps it joins with the other 3 quarters of the solar radiation which climate scientists somehow disappear.
I still defy anyone to explain the Moon’s temperature during the day whilst preserving the nonsense that the Sun requires extra power from “greenhouse gases” on Earth to maintain temperatures that never reach even half of the lunar daytime temperature.
Once that nonsense is assigned to the dustbin we can move onto proper climate discussions ’cause the quarter thingie is obviously Clearly Recycled All Purpose.
Johnny McVail says:
February 16, 2012 at 9:56 am
WUWT would do well to distance itself from this kind of empty bluster. It adds nothing to the body of science.
———————————-
I don’t think WUWT needs advice on how to do well. Cheers Anthony and co., all the best.
Suffice to say, the global warming hoax was the golden goose for everyone who received literally billions in public and private funding.”
Never was a truer word spoken. Any atmospheric “greenhouse effect” amounts to a complete violation of the laws of physics and is a travesty of such.
First they realised they had to give up on the concept of warm air acting as a blanket, so then they came up with the conjecture that second-hand “backradiation” would slow the rate of cooling of the surface.
Well, to slow the mean rate of cooling you also have to slow the rate of warming every sunny morning. After all, the same process (whatever it could possibly be) has to add thermal energy both morning and evening.
Now think about it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics has to apply between any two specific points wherever there is matter in the universe. And it applies for radiation just as much as it does for conduction. Can you imagine a long metal rod extending out of a patch of ground into the colder air with a heat flow going from the cooler air back into the warmer surface which is getting warmer and warmer due to the Sun at, say, 11am somewhere? This crazy reverse heat flow dreamed up by you-know-who is the conjecture upon which $ ??? billions are being betted.
It just isn’t physics..
Radiation from a cooler source always includes all the frequencies which a warmer surface is able to emit. So all its waves merely resonate and in effect get scattered back out again without any of its energy being converted to thermal energy – no energy is left behind. But radiation from a warmer source has additional frequencies above those of a cooler target, so these higher frequencies cannot resonate and their energy ends up being converted to thermal energy, as seen when the Sun warms something.
Hence, when analysing what would happen when the atmosphere and surface interact by radiation all the radiation from the cooler atmosphere should be disregarded. Only radiation from hot to cold is converted to thermal energy and this is how and why the Second Law of Thermodynamics works for radiation.
[REPLY: Ahhh! Thank you for the clarification…. and we’ll let the advertisement for your friend slip through this time… -REP]
Not my friend, just the first criminal barrister who came up on a Google search. His face is very familiar though; he is on TV news from time to time when he is defending particularly notorius criminals. He practices in NSW and The Git lives in Tasmania, a far more salubrious place than Sydney.
“A total of six conferences on climate change have been sponsored by The Heartland Institute.”
Fifty years ago, these conferences would have been sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. In the 21st Century, The Heartland Institute decides to do the Academy’s work.
Alan Caruba’s writing is trenchant, with one minor stumble. At the end of paragraph 11, he wrote that the Earth’s atmosphere prevents it from becoming “a dissociated planet like Mars.” “Dissociated” is almost certainly not the word he intended.
A quick check of the meaning of “dissociated ” gives “to sever the association of (oneself); separate”. In some sense, planets are all dissociated, but that’s probably not the meaning the author was reaching for.
From the context, the author’s intent appears to be realized by replacing “dissociated” with “desiccated” (dried out). Mars is certainly desiccated!
“It is, as any meteorologist or climatologist will tell you, the atmosphere that protects the Earth from becoming a dissociated planet like Mars.”
I have no idea what a dissociated planet is but I do know that Mars is a desiccated planet because it no longer has much water, at least not on its surface.
DesertYote said @ February 16, 2012 at 1:33 pm
Give it a rest DesertYote. As an example, Malcolm Fraser, when he was the conservative Prime Minister of Australia, used to claim hotel expenses from the public purse when he was staying at his mother’s home. And never to forget, The Memphis Trousers Affair:
Colonial said @ February 16, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Here’s an example of Caruba’s “trenchant” writing:
Clearly, he has never read any of the IPCC Assessment reports. Off the top of my head, they include what Caruba calls “a pack of lies” from co-conspirators like Chris Landsea, Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke Sr. Methinks he’s a paranoid fantasist. Not a good look.
> Its “science” was based on computer models rigged by co-conspirators that include Michael Mann
This is all a joke, yes? Try to get your story straight. I know you hate Mann, and I know you hate models, but Mann does Palaeo, not GCMs.
Well, at least they’re consistent. The warmists believe in falsehoods all the time.
@Vukcevic: Now the end of big struggle is near…. No dear Vuk, it is far from over: Now they call it “Sustainability”, and their next “Jamboree” will be held in june at Rio de Janeiro. I hope it will fall snow on Copacabana beach, as lately happens during those “jet set” gatherings.
http://www.earthsummit2012.org/
> We have reached the point where the warmists have been claiming that global warming causes global cooling!
No we haven’t. You made that up.
> Al Gore spent $300 million advertising
Doesn’t sound very plausible. Has no source. Do you fact-check any of this stuff?
> Real science … Meanwhile, the planet continues to cool
No, the planet continues to warm; e.g. http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/2011-temperature-roundup/
Doug Cotton says:
February 16, 2012 at 1:38 pm
It just isn’t physics..”
Yes, it is. But, explaining it to you has been like explaining the Monty Hall Problem to those not conversant in probability and statistics. They are just sure the odds are 50/50, and they think by repeating it over and over, they will sway me to their side.
Pompous Git, Malcolm Fraser is no conservative. He just pretended to be one while he got to be Prime Minister.
William M. Connolley says:
February 16, 2012 at 2:30 pm
“No we haven’t. You made that up.”
Yes, we have.
“Has no source.”
Source.
“No, the planet continues to warm…”
No, it continues to cool.
You know, you could look this stuff up yourself using a “search engine”.
Someone mentioned science should distance itself from empty bluster the only problem is bluster is also part of the global warming campaign to discredit opposition. Ignoring what is being called empty bluster is accepting the benefits of a punching bag.
Among the most disturbing is the global warming crowd in the schools teaching children to believe in a fraud, the billions spent internationally in lock step, scientist supporting global warming fraud and profiting and the MSM ignoring their self-proclaimed mission and the evidence of the fraud while attempting to discredit opposition. All of this by the global warming crowd to bring life changing loss of freedom and wealth to the general population while consolidating limitless power for themselves.
WUWT is about science and climate presenting the truth through facts but what good is science if it is wrapped in a punching bag with no response to abuse.
Excellent post,but I do have one small nit to pick. “Suffice to say, the global warming hoax was the golden goose for everyone who received literally billions in public and private funding.”
Suffice to say, the global warming hoax IS the golden goose for everyone who continues to receive literally billions in public/private funding.
There.All fixed. Unfortunately,unlike in the parable,this scam will continue until we strangle and roast this damn goose.
> Yes, we have
The claim was *global* cooling. Your link to to European cooling in response to the sea ice loss. That is a plausible result which is become better substantiated as more winters show it.
> Source
Well, it is a source, good. But that quote is from 2008, and isn’t what they actually spent. It doesn’t appear to be consistent with http://nonprofitfacts.com/DC/The-Alliance-For-Climate-Protection.html#b which suggests much smaller numbers.
> it continues to cool.
a link to the Daily Mail? Come now, the Daily Mail is a joke. No-one is silly enough to get their science from newspapers, particularly tabloids, are they?
but their efforts are just the dying gasp of the greatest hoax of the modern era.
Totally agree. However, whilst I’ve already called the “unofficial end to the global warming scam”, I think it is worth looking to other similar events to see that they seldom go out with a big bank … more a fizzle.
Swine flu is a classic. When it came it was never out of the papers, when it went … it wasn’t because there was an “end” … it just didn’t get a mention. What about the Ozone hole? Again fizzled out.
So, based on historic precedence this scam ought to just fizzle out.
But can it? Politicians haven’t just signed up to replace one refrigerant with another. They have in reality signed up to destroy the fossil fuel economy. That is not something you can hope no one notices. You can’t just stop people using cars and hope no one notices. You can’t close down fossil-fuel using industries and pretend it’s blip in the economy. You can’t convert half the agriculture of the world to bio-fuels and leave half the world’s population without food and expect it to go unnoticed.
From now on the natural inclination of the political elite who signed up to this con will be to ignore it and hope it goes away. What they will find, is that very quickly it will begin to dominate politics and rather than going away, the problems caused (although no necessarily linked to the policy of global warming) will create such a problem for them that they will not be able to ignore.
It is the proverbial unstoppable train hitting the immovable mountain … and the driving (our political elite) trying to ignore the problem in the totally vane hope that by ignoring the mountain that is fast approaching it will somehow disappear.
The Pompous Git
February 16, 2012 at 1:52 pm
###
Sorry but your point is irrelevant. The “but they all do it argument” is nothing but a distraction. My son used to try that when he was 10. The crimes of socialist are magnitudes more numerous and far far far more damaging the the crimes of conservatives. The crimes of socialist will result in the death of millions more then have already died at there hands. Socialist really are trying to destroy the economy. If you don’t understand this then you are a fool.
[Moderator’s Request: Name calling is BAD. Neither Gits nor Yotes seem to be constitutionally inclined to back down, so could we, perhaps, declare a STAND down and dial back the rhetoric? -REP]
William M. Connolley says:
February 16, 2012 at 3:01 pm
“The claim was *global* cooling.”
Looks down to me. Actually, looks like an inflection before accelerating descent.
“…which suggests much smaller numbers.”
Smaller than $44,000?
“Come now, the Daily Mail is a joke.”
So is Tamino. Maybe you missed the part about “Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years”.
Exp says: February 16, 2012 at 1:02 pm The last line is just a bold faced lie. You know it is Anthony. blah blah
Anthony.
First they deny there is a problem [with their ‘science’]
Then when they have to admit there are problems, they deny they are important
Then when it is impossible to downplay their huge problems, they … shoot the messenger to distract attention away from their problems. (I.e. you!!!)
Then when no one is fooled by shooting the messenger, they delay and obfuscate in the hope that the problem will go away.
Then finally, … when there is no choice but to act, they eventually and reluctantly address the obvious problem issuing a press release proclaiming the historic progress they have made, making it clear that it was always their intention to act in this way …. and they would have acted much sooner if only the messenger hadn’t interfered with their progress.
DesertYote says:
February 16, 2012 at 1:33 pm
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 12:10 pm
Any organizaitons can (and individuals too), and many do, go back and “sanitize” their past, so as to make themselves appear to be something more acceptable to various groups or the public at large.
###
No only lefties do this. Conservatives don’t have to.
_____
Oh…I see, then that would explain why Romney is not actually a conservative. Thanks for clarifying that. Well done!
“Never was a truer word spoken. Any atmospheric “greenhouse effect” amounts to a complete violation of the laws of physics and is a travesty of such.”
[SNIP: You can post this kind of trash talk when you comment with your real name. -REP]
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/07/yes-virginia-cooler-objects-can-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still/
The rather odd idea that clouds at night will not lead to a warmer surface.
380 molecules get so heated up by reflected infra-red that they heat up the other 999,620 molecules. Then water vapor goes crazy and makes all these molecules even hotter. The models teach us this, children.
RobRoy says: The models teach us this, children.
They also teach us that botox makes them look beautiful, that anorexia makes you look healthy and that dressing girls as young as six to make them look like prostitutes is not child abuse.
You believe the models if you like …. I prefer the solid science which goes through these models like a dose of Epsom salts.
I have always held that to claim that a trace gas of 380ppm DRIVES the climate, is stupid.
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Predictable that you would avoid the question:
IF the strategy memo is a fake, what does that say about the nature of the multi-billion-supported forces arrayed against tiny Heartland and even tinier Anthony?
RobRoy says:
February 16, 2012 at 3:58 pm
“380 molecules get so heated up by reflected infra-red that they heat up the other 999,620 molecules.”
This is an argument from incredulity, like when the warmists sneer that there would have to be a vast conspiracy in order for the science to be so wrong. But, there doesn’t have to be a vast conspiracy, and besides, conspiracies do exist – that’s why there is a word for it.
The element you are missing in your argument is that of time. How long does it take for one of those 380 molecules to absorb and emit radiation? Microseconds? Then in one second, you have effectively millions of absorbing and radiating molecules.
RobRoy says: “I have always held that to claim that a trace gas of 380ppm DRIVES the climate, is stupid.” … apologies thought you were pro-models & to the exclusion of real science.
@myrrh, you are incorrect with regard to photosynthesis.
Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and they breathe out oxygen which is then breathed in by humans, who then breathe out carbon dioxide.
This is what I was taught in science class almost 50 years ago. The science has not changed since then!!
When did you write this, 1976? That’s about the last time the concentration was 0.033%. Not that it matters much, but you should have your facts straight…
Mike Borgelt said @ February 16, 2012 at 2:40 pm
That would appear to indicate that those who elected him their leader were gullible. Personally I find both extremes of politicz distasteful. And I have very great difficulty distinguishing between welfare statists who seem to only disagree on who gets to stick their snout in the trough. Tweedle Dumb or Tweedle Dumber — some choice.
I have over the last forty years managed to be on conversational terms with a number of politicians — from both major parties. Remarkably few have been decent, honest people, but those I do admire are from both sides of the House.
BTW Mods, I don’t mind at all that DesertYote called me a fool. More than happy to be called a fool for believing in such things as honesty, truth, justice… that kind of thing.
neill said @ February 16, 2012 at 4:20 pm
That no matter how much money you can muster, you can still be inept?
Rosco, you answered your question, why max temp on the moon is higher than max temp on earth in your last paragraph. It is due to the atmosphere, convection, advection, evaporation, and one more you didn’t mention: heat capacity. The reason why 1/4 applies is not to make earth’s max temp cooler, but to determine average energy hitting the earth. No different for the moon which averages -23C, a lot cooler than earth.
Doug Cotton, are cloudy nights warmer than clear nights (all other things being equal)? Does the surface stay warmer due to radiation from the clouds? If not, how does it stay warmer? Note that the clouds are nearly always colder than the surface.
PB-in-AL says:
I agree with your disagreement, but not with your “respectfully”. 😉
Trolls and dishonest posters tend to display certain quirks in their writing. I’ll point one of them out here because no matter if they’re told, they can’t seem to refrain anyway, so the trolls remain easy to spot. Posts that make comment on some failing of the host site while appearing to respect it generally are almost always trolls. Here, for example, “WUWT would do well to distance itself from…” implies that WUWT is of a higher standard than the thing it should distance itself from, but at the same time gives WUWT a “fail” nor not having distanced itself so far. This is not the same thing as a poster who simply disagrees, for example “I think this is all empty bluster”, nor is it the same as honestly encountering the issues, e.g. “This is mistaken because…”. Lots of people disagree with us without being trolls, but what you have in McVail’s remark is bull’s eye troll material.
William M. Connolley says:
The claim was *global* cooling.
And it is. This European cooling is accompanied by Australian cooling, and Antarctic cooling, and south pacific cooling, and a bunch of other cooling. The net effect being that the *global* temp anomaly has been trending down gradually for a decade, steeply for the past few years, and currently is lower than it has been in a decade or more. And it is this cooling which is called warming that is being held responsible for this cooling which is taken by some to be evidence of warming, which is apparently slated to bring more of this cooling.
a link to the Daily Mail? Come now, the Daily Mail is a joke. No-one is silly enough to get their science from newspapers, particularly tabloids, are they?
I’d like to say that you’d be surprised at how many people get their science from higly questionable and grotesquely biased sources, but given that you used to be one you are likely familiar with the concept.
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 12:02 pm): ”
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:50 am
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am): “Can you give an example of when the Institute took a stance against the interests of big business when the evidence indicated that stance was justified?”
You mean, like the multibillion-dollar big business of global warming alarmism?
_____
So apparently you can’t. Thanks, that says a lot.”
Actually, I did. And thank you, too. Your answer says a lot about you.
So much for your “honest” question.
Compare to the Tides Foundation, Tides Center, etc. Incredible offices in what was the Presidio at taxpayer’s expense. A thousand organizations and growing.Billions in grants.Hundreds of investigative journalists and lawyers funded through Byzantine foundation interconnections.
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 3:55 pm): “Oh…I see, then that would explain why Romney is not actually a conservative. Thanks for clarifying that. Well done!”
No doubt most here have heard this joke, but for the few who haven’t:
A liberal, a moderate, and a conservative walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hi, Mitt.”
Lest anyone think I’m picking on poor MR, I believe the joke could be told about many, if not most politicians.
@Vince Causey says (responding to R. Gate)s:
February 16, 2012 at 12:45 pm
R Gates,
“The perception is of course, that the Institute will take any position that supports and protects big business versus public health and the public interest.”
“i would have expected that even you would have realised that this is an extremely simplistic black-white argument of the sort most commonly associated with the lowest form of politics. it should be clear to any enquiring mind that there are plenty of big businesses that are profiting from the AGW cult, as there are those that are disadvantaged by it. […]”
==================================================================
Vince, I’ve been disappointed by R. Gates on the BogusGate topic. R. Gates seems to be a maladroit shill on the political side of the CAGW argument. I do appreciate R. Gates’ scientific arguments as, most of the time, they focus on the debatable points of CAGW.
R. Gates makes some interesting points in the CAGW debate, but in this instance, I see R; Gates succombing to base political instincts. I expressed my disappointment in the long original thread of the Heartland documents. The raw political side of CAGW is beneath the R. Gates I like to read.
The Pompous Git
February 16, 2012 at 5:15 pm
BTW Mods, I don’t mind at all that DesertYote called me a fool. More than happy to be called a fool for believing in such things as honesty, truth, justice… that kind of thing.
###
I did not call you a fool for those things, and I really did not call you a fool. What I said was that you would be a fool IF you did not understand that socialist want to decimate the economy. You talk about both sides of the political spectrum. What you mean is both sides, as in the terms left and right, which are just either end of the SOCIALIST spectrum as defined by lefties. Conservatives are learning to abandon the term “right” as it really is a trap designed by socialist and overloaded with meaning that is contrary to conservatism.
The greatest good for the greatest number of people has been made possible only because of a limited government with limited ability to intrude into the market. Socialist have to destroy that in order to bring about their great socialist utopia, which has little room for individual freedom. That is why ever single thing socialist do is target at destroying society and its infrastructure.
[Moderator’s Observation: The Git and the Yote seem to have, sort of, acknowledged their similarities and congruence of interests. My job here is done. -REP]
And right you are. As a scanned, non-searchable PDF – Adobe is acting as no more than a wrapper around the G42D Tiffs that make up the document. Extract the tiffs and, voila, you have the scanner metadata in the images. TIFF, if you didn’t already know, is Tagged Image File Format and most scanning hardware/software embeds information in the tags at scan time. Since the source scanner (Epson) had not been scrubbed from the PDF, I’d bet the image tags are intact. Not really any big trick to getting at it either. Very simple and routine matter for someone that does electronic document forensic analysis.
William M. Connolley says:
February 16, 2012 at 2:30 pm
No, the planet continues to warm
It’s called “global warming.” It’s caused by human activity. It’s dangerous.
That is only in the adjusted data, not the real data.
For the real data for the last 10 years see the downward trends for both the combined 4 major data sets and the sea surface temperatures.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1980/plot/wti/from:2002/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/trend
#Time series (wti) from 1979 to 2012
#Selected data from 2002
#Least squares trend line; slope = -0.00383708 per year
#File: hadsst2gl.txt
#
#Time series (hadcrut3) from 1850 to 2012
#Selected data from 2002
#Least squares trend line; slope = -0.00903442 per year
Now whether or not this is significant or over a long enough time period is a totally different but valid question.
If your bath tub is filling as fast as it can with the hot tap turned on fully it will indeed fill faster if you also turn the cold tap on.
If the Earth’s surface is filling with thermal energy (ie it is warming) as fast as it can on a sunny morning with the Sun shining fully it will indeed fill (warm) faster if you also radiate extra thermal energy from a colder atmosphere if and only if you violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Rosco, you answered your question, why max temp on the moon is higher than max temp on earth in your last paragraph. It is due to the atmosphere, convection, advection, evaporation, and one more you didn’t mention: heat capacity.
_______________________________________________________________
And you Eric forgot to mention the far greater amount of thermal energy in the crust, mantle and core (at about 5,700 deg.C) of the Earth- all of which has a significant stabilising effect on surface temperatures so they don’t warm too much in the day, or cool too much at night. Of course the atmosphere helps keep us cooler in the day and warmer at night also.
Frankly I’m glad the Earth’s atmosphere cools the Earth so the Sun doesn’t boil the lakes as it would if any existed on the Moon, seeing that maximum temperatures exceed 100 deg.C.
And thank Heaven for the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which also helps to absorb incoming energy in the infra-red which makes up about half the Sun’s radiative flux.
Who knows, without carbon dioxide sending back to space some of the incoming solar radiation, we might have been 33 degrees hotter /sarc.
And, by the way, if all other things are equal (including relative humidity and pressure) I see no reason why cloudy nights should be cooler or warmer than clear nights. You tell me your reasons based on genuine physics which does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics by transferring any thermal energy from any colder point in the atmosphere to any warmer point on the surface at any time, morning, evening or whenever.
R. Gates’ move, n’est-ce pas?
It appears those who push the extreme AGW paradigm can no longer defend the science and must therefore attack the messenger. If attacking the messenger does not work, basic propaganda and buying support is another tactic.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/theater/04arts-SCIENCEFOUND_BRF.html
“The National Science Foundation has awarded a $700,000 grant to the Civilians, a New York theater company, to finance the production of a show about climate change. “The Great Immensity,” with a book by Steven Cosson (“This Beautiful City”) and music and lyrics by Michael Friedman (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”), tells the story of Polly, a photojournalist who disappears while working in the rain forests of Panama. The grant is a rare gift to an arts organization from the foundation, a federal agency that pays for science, engineering and mathematics research and education. The company says it plans to spend the money on the development and evaluation of the show, as well as on a tour and educational programs, including post-show panel discussions with experts in related scientific fields. No performance dates have been announced.”
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:41 pm
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 12:02 pm): ”
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:50 am
R. Gates says (February 16, 2012 at 11:24 am): “Can you give an example of when the Institute took a stance against the interests of big business when the evidence indicated that stance was justified?”
You mean, like the multibillion-dollar big business of global warming alarmism?
_____
So apparently you can’t. Thanks, that says a lot.”
Actually, I did. And thank you, too. Your answer says a lot about you.
So much for your “honest” question.
_____
Please be specific in listing which “big businesses” would stand to benefit from global warming “alarmism”. We can certainly all list those who benefit by creating doubt about the existence or threat, and Heartland’s own documents indicate who’d they like to see increase their donations to fight this “alarmism”. So who benefits from the alarmism?
The Pompous Git says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Or, regardless of how much money or popularity you garner to your cause, that has absolutely NO bearing on it’s rightness or wrongness. As Einstein said (paraphrased), everyone can agree with my hypothesis, it takes only one experiment to prove it totally wrong.
I beg to differ says:
February 16, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Regardless of the releases of any information, it is the science that will win the argument. From the beginning proponents of AGW forgot the first law of data analysis, ‘things correlated to the same thing, aren’t necessarily correlated to each other.’ As temperatiures went up, they made millions, but now that temperatures have leveled and threaten to go down, they resort to the base tactics they have displayed all along.
Facts will always (eventually) trump bad science, and it looks like we are there.
_____
Not quite…but close. But as a skeptic, you may not like the way it goes.
Gates says:
“So who benefits from the alarmism?”
Answer: government bureaucrats, politicians, NGO’s, QUANGOs, universities, and big businesses like GE that make windmills.
But taxpayers lose.
[Moderator’s Observation: The Git and the Yote seem to have, sort of, acknowledged their similarities and congruence of interests. My job here is done. -REP]
Not much chance of open warfare between two libertarians REP 🙂
H.R. said:
“I expressed my disappointment in the long original thread of the Heartland documents. The raw political side of CAGW is beneath the R. Gates I like to read.”
_____
Hey, I asked an honest question about the truth and reasoning being Heartland’s positions on the issues which has given them a bad reputation with both the press and the majority of the scientific community. I actually know very little about Heartland. This whole “supposed” scandal, which the majority of average people could care less about (much like Climategate by the way), just got my curiousity aroused to find out a bit more about Heartland. When I found out Anthony was involved, it especially got my curiousity up. Politically I’m an Independent, with conservative leanings in financial and basic constitutional and personal freedom issues, but tend to be somewhat liberal in social issues. So in checking a bit about Heartland on the web, you come across what I consider to be pretty unscientifically founded positions that some claim that Heartland has taken over the years. So I’m curious about what the truth is. For example:
In spite of massive evidence to the contrary, did Heartland at one time actually try to claim that either smoking and/or second hand smoke was not bad for people’s health? (i.e. likely to cause a whole host of bad health effects?) And were they paid to make this claim by those with a financial interest in the issue?
Did Heartland at one time actually try to claim that CFC’s were not damaging the ozone layer? And were they paid to make this claim by those with a financial interest in the issue?
These are simple questions, that should have yes or no answers, but in asking them, I get attacked. Very interesting.
DesertYote said @ February 16, 2012 at 6:01 pm
My response was badly worded; I should have said I didn’t mind if you called me a fool 😉 However, we do disagree on the accepted definition of socialism. I can live with that. I do agree that socialism is an economic disaster. I do not agree that Australia’s conservative coalition are socialists, but they are welfare statists. Welfare statism is also an economic disaster. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.
Smokey says:
February 16, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Gates says:
“So who benefits from the alarmism?”
Answer: government bureaucrats, politicians, NGO’s, QUANGOs, universities, and big businesses like GE that make windmills.
But taxpayers lose.
_____
Interesting list there Smokey. Except for GE, this is not very specific, and of course, GE benefits from just about any issue out there, no matter which side wins because they are so big and do so many different things. The others also benefit from many different issues, and in fact, you could substitute “Excessive and Bloated Military Budgets” for the term “alarmism” in your statement above, and you’d see that pretty much the same groups benefit, and the same group is the loser– the taxpayer. In this regard, I agree with much of Ron Paul’s thinking.
I would like to disclose that I allowed methane to be produced on the family ranch I have managed for the past 7 years. I rented and leased to ranchers who put…cows…on the pasture. Gawd…I feel so much better.
Smokey said @ February 16, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Smokey, you forgot “big” oil. They seem to benefit greatly from this: increased prices, diversification into “alternative” energy where profit margins are likely higher than oil profits. Oh, and the financiers: Goldman Sachs etc. Lotsa snouts in the trough; almost too many to count.
And yes, we lose 🙁
Rosco,
There are two main reasons the moon gets much hotter during the day. First, there being no atmosphere. there are no winds and thus no way for the heat accumulating where the sun is high in the sky to be dissipated. (note this has nothing particular to do with “greenhouse” gases. An atmosphere of say, Helium, would do a pretty good job of mixing the heat around.) Second, the moon is locked into having one side facing the earth, which means it’s “day” is 28 times as long as an earth day.
Now would you like to try asking a hard question?
Git,
Right. Lots of entities benefit from alarmism. Those were just some things that occurred to me over about half a minute. No doubt there are lots more. But I’m not playing Gates’ game because he doesn’t play fair. He asked, I answered, he nitpicked. No matter what I answer, he will nitpick endlessly. He can’t help it. Cognitive dissonance. Or, at least 75% cognitive dissonance.
Gary Hladik says:
February 16, 2012 at 5:51 pm
No doubt most here have heard this joke, but for the few who haven’t:
A liberal, a moderate, and a conservative walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hi, Mitt.”
_____
Of course, he covered his bases well with the statement, “I’m extremely conservative!” What’s next? Maybe he’ll say: “When it comes to my wealth, I’m just hyper-middle class?”
R. Gates,
I would recommend that you do not bet your life savings on the extreme AGW paradigm. It appears that there are cycles in the paleoclimatic record of warming followed by cooling and occasionally by extreme, rapid cooling events, that following a 1470 year pattern. The sun does appear to be acting strangely. If you are interested in the science this book is a good introduction.
http://www.amazon.com/Chilling-Stars-Theory-Climate-Change/dp/1840468157
http://arxiv.org/abs/1009.0784v1
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
Independent of the normal solar cycle, a decrease in the sunspot magnetic field strength has been observed using the Zeeman-split 1564.8nm Fe I spectral line at the NSO Kitt Peak McMath-Pierce telescope. Corresponding changes in sunspot brightness and the strength of molecular absorption lines were also seen. This trend was seen to continue in observations of the first sunspots of the new solar Cycle 24, and extrapolating a linear fit to this trend would lead to only half the number of spots in Cycle 24 compared to Cycle 23, and imply virtually no sunspots in Cycle 25.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amet/aip/543146.pdf
Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures
The long temperature series at Svalbard (Longyearbyen) show large variations and a positive trend since its start in 1912. During this period solar activity has increased, as indicated by shorter solar cycles. The temperature at Svalbard is negatively correlated with the length of the solar cycle. The strongest negative correlation is found with lags 10–12 years. The relations between the length of a solar cycle and the mean temperature in the following cycle are used to model Svalbard annual mean temperature and seasonal temperature variations.
These models can be applied as forecasting models. We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5 to 2oC from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009–‐20) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6 oC.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000PA000571.shtml
On the 1470-year pacing of Dansgaard-Oeschger warm events
The oxygen isotope record from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 (GISP2) ice core was reanalyzed in the frequency and time domains. The prominent 1470-year spectral peak, which has been associated with the occurrence of Dansgaard-Oeschger interstadial events, is solely caused by Dansgaard-Oeschger events 5, 6, and 7. This result emphasizes the nonstationary character of the oxygen isotope time series. Nevertheless, a fundamental pacing period of ∼1470 years seems to control the timing of the onset of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. A trapezoidal time series model is introduced which provides a template for the pacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events. Statistical analysis indicates only a ≤3% probability that the number of matches between observed and template-derived onsets of Dansgaard-Oeschger events between 13 and 46 kyr B.P. resulted by chance. During this interval the spacing of the Dansgaard-Oeschger onsets varied by ±20% around the fundamental 1470-year period and multiples thereof. The pacing seems unaffected by variations in the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water formation, suggesting that the thermohaline circulation was not the primary controlling factor of the pacing period.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
Pamela Gray says:
February 16, 2012 at 8:08 pm
I would like to disclose that I allowed methane to be produced on the family ranch I have managed for the past 7 years. I rented and leased to ranchers who put…cows…on the pasture. Gawd…I feel so much better.
____
I would like to disclose that I own a family couch in which various people have used over the years and I’ve allowed the production of methane on said couch, but received no financial benefit from same.
Pamela Gray said @ February 16, 2012 at 8:08 pm
And The Git would like to disclose that not only do the cattle he agists for his neighbours emit methane, but also is known to exit the house through the French window, onto the deck where he also emits methane. SWMBO says she much prefers this to said emissions taking place indoors. And yes, gawd… he feels so much better after letting one rip 😉
Why not comment on the original topic, namely the fabrication of a memo? Are you one of who approves of such tactics? Are you saying it’s OK to fabricate evidence if the institute in question ‘deserves it’ in your opinion? Is that the reason behind your questions?
Tom_R says:
February 16, 2012 at 9:06 pm
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 7:57 pm
Hey, I asked an honest question about the truth and reasoning being Heartland’s positions
Why not comment on the original topic, namely the fabrication of a memo? Are you one of who approves of such tactics? Are you saying it’s OK to fabricate evidence if the institute in question ‘deserves it’ in your opinion? Is that the reason behind your questions?
____
I don’t support any dishonest acts or tactics. Any lies, falsehoods, or other sorts of actions by anyone toward anyone else has no foundation no matter how much one might perceive that a group or individual “deserves it”. I honestly wanted to know something which is true about the Heartland Foundation considering how much which is clearly false and potentially false had been spread. Having personally been the victim of a rather nasty and nearly career destroying smear campaign several years ago, I know how damaging this can be for an individual or organization, and certainly how unjustified it is for any reason. Fortunately, I was completely exhonerated, and those who attacked me were completely, and rather devistatingly, discredited and “run out of town” so to speak. I would wish the same kind of fate for those who would commit any similar dishonest acts toward the Heartland Foundation, or any other person or group.
R. Gates and others of like mind may wish to attempt to answer this question. If no one does, then I’d say it’s cutains for AGW.
It is a fact that about half of the Sun’s incident radiation is in the infra-red spectrum. Carbon dioxide absorbs some of this incident IR radiation and sends at least half back to space – OK so far?
So this will prevent some radiation warming the Earth’s surface – just like the whole atmosphere does – so that the surface does not warm to over 100 deg.C like the Moon’s does. – Still OK so far?
So why don’t you deduct this cooling effect of carbon dioxide from the assumed warming effect?
PS At least one scientist calculated the cooling effect of carbon dioxide as about 7 times the assumed warming effect.
The Pompous Git says:
February 16, 2012 at 8:02 pm
My response was badly worded; I should have said I didn’t mind if you called me a fool 😉 However, we do disagree on the accepted definition of socialism. I can live with that. I do agree that socialism is an economic disaster. I do not agree that Australia’s conservative coalition are socialists, but they are welfare statists. Welfare statism is also an economic disaster. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.
###
I am thinking of abandoning the term socialist in preference for the term statist because that is actually much closer to what I mean most of the time.
Ric Werme says:
February 16, 2012 at 11:14 am
True. And to its detractors who spread falsehoods, it petrifies.
William Astley says:
February 16, 2012 at 8:21 pm
R. Gates,
I would recommend that you do not bet your life savings on the extreme AGW paradigm. It appears that there are cycles in the paleoclimatic record of warming followed by cooling and occasionally by extreme, rapid cooling events, that following a 1470 year pattern. The sun does appear to be acting strangely. If you are interested in the science this book is a good introduction.
________
I have read this book and am quite familiar with Bond events, the 1470 year cycle, astronomical cycles, and so forth, and, as I’ve stated many times here on WUWT, prior to the last century, and specfically prior to the last 50 years or so, I certainly am of the opinion the Sun played a major role in modulation of shorter-term, non-Milankovtich induced climate variability. But the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere is now like nothing certainly we’ve ever seen as homo sapiens, and probably like nothing the planet has seen since the mid to early Pliocene.
The next few years will be most interesting, as I’ve also stated here, this is probably the most interesting time imaginable to be a student of the climate. We’ve got front row seats to one of the most unique set of circumstances one could imagine (quiet sun vs. highest level of greenhouse gases in at least 800,000 years), and we’ll all be so much wiser 20 years from now, and I am very confident, one way or another, this bickering between warmist and skeptic will be quite over. But of course, some of us will find something else to argue about (though some of us won’t care to, or won’t have the ability to argue for multiple and obvious reasons).
One more question.for R.Gates et al …
Suppose you pass radiation from a slightly cooler object (surface area 5 sq.m, temperature 300 K) through a reflective funnel which concentrates the radiation onto a slightly warmer object (310 K) with the same absorptivity and emissivity of, say, 0.9 but surface area only 0.5 sq.m..
Please explain with suitable calculations how the Second Law of Thermodynamics would actually apply to ensure thermal energy only transferred from the warmer to the cooler object.
I will also post this on several other forums to see if anyone has a correct solution other than mine, which you should know by now if you’ve read my posts.
The publication of the book Die Kalte Sonne was a devastating blow to the AGW pyramid scheme. This followed a series of other devastating blows; The Delinquent Teenager, CG2, CG1, Glaciergate, and all thoser publications that all proved how and or why the AGW scam was being pushed down our collective throats. The HI and the GWPF, together with blogs such as WUWT and all the other blogs that continuously keep informing us on developments, scientific and politicial, have been in the forefront in the war against the Lie; and the Truth has won. The dragon has been mortally wounded and it can now only kick its strong dangerous tail while in its death throes. But die will.
Fake-gate is just part of the tail-kicking while the dragon is bleeding to death.
Thank you HI, thank you GWPF, thank you WUWT, thanks to all those who are dedicating themselves to the truth.
DesertYote said @ February 16, 2012 at 9:46 pm
I think I guessed that. The spectrum between libertarian and authoritarian seems more important to me than the left/right spectrum.
R. Gates says:
February 16, 2012 at 10:04 pm
So you say that the atmosphere was ‘there’ 800, 000 years ago? And what happened then? Where did you get that information? And, I’d like to know, are you a ‘student of the climate’? And about this ‘bickering’: do you think it will take 20 years for it to ‘end’? We’ve got a front-row seat, without a doubt, but the performance is not what you think it is!
Bart says:
February 16, 2012 at 4:20 pm
RobRoy says:
February 16, 2012 at 3:58 pm
“380 molecules get so heated up by reflected infra-red that they heat up the other 999,620 molecules.”
This is an argument from incredulity, like when the warmists sneer that there would have to be a vast conspiracy in order for the science to be so wrong. But, there doesn’t have to be a vast conspiracy, and besides, conspiracies do exist – that’s why there is a word for it.
The element you are missing in your argument is that of time. How long does it take for one of those 380 molecules to absorb and emit radiation? Microseconds? Then in one second, you have effectively millions of absorbing and radiating molecules.
——-
Wow, you have a perpetual motion machine there boy,
>>>Yesterday it was announced that the BBC need not disclose
>>>a report which the Corporation itself commissioned into the BBC’s
>>>anti-israel bias.
Amongst others, that was the infamously biased Orla Guerin, the BBCs Israel correspondent. She used to black up her eyes and cry into the camera with soppy-dog expressions, when Palestinians were killed. But when Palestinian suicide bombers killed hundreds of Israelis, she used to shrug her shoulders and the body language clearly said ‘they deserve it’.
Hers was the most outrageously biased reporting since PRAVDA or the media reporting for Pol Pot. After a campaign of complaints we got her shipped off to Afghanistan, where – try as she might – she could not find a single Israeli to blame for the mayhem. So as a second best, the Americans were to blame for everything.
As an aside – after headlining every explosion in Baghdad for 10 years, and blaming it all on the Americans ‘occupation’, the BBC have suddenly stopped reporting the continuing explosions and deaths in Iraq. Suicide bombings that cannot be blamed on America are just not in the BBC’s world view – it is just not possible that the Middle East is inheritently unstable due to its religio-political systems.
The BBC is now the most disgustingly biased media outlet in the world, and cannot be trusted in any of its reporting. Happily, pulling the plug on the BBC would be very easy – just get a government to reduce the licence fee by 50%, and stand back and watch the fun.
.
>> “The claim was *global* cooling.”
> Looks down to me.
Because you carefully avoided adding the trend line. Do so, and you’ll see that you’re wrong.
> The net effect being that the *global* temp anomaly has been trending down gradually for a decade, steeply for the past few years, and currently is lower than it has been in a decade or more.
Only if you ignore the data; see for counter example http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/2011-temperature-roundup/
> For the real data for the last 10 years see the downward trends
Only by very carefully selecting your dataset and time period. Try http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1980/plot/uah/from:2001/trend instead. Having a warming series with enough variability to show occasional cooling periods is nothing strange: its a feature of the real climate that the GCMs reproduce.
Doug Cotton> Please explain with suitable calculations…
There is no point asking for explanations if you’re not prepared to read the answers. You asked much the same on my blog; I answered you. You didn’t reply, you just asked the same question again. The basic maths behind (a simplified version of) the greenhouse effect aren’t difficult; they are outlined in my reply to you here.
> At least one scientist calculated the cooling effect of carbon dioxide as about 7 times the assumed warming effect.
Sounds deeply imaginary, but since you provide no cite it can’t be checked.
Doug Cotton said “so that the surface does not warm to over 100 deg.C like the Moon’s does”
Are you reading Rosco now? He already pretty much answered his own question. It has nothing to do with CO2 absorbing the Sun’s IR. Please tell me what causes cloudy nights to be warmer.
Doug, sorry, I didn’t see your other comment above namely: “And, by the way, if all other things are equal (including relative humidity and pressure) I see no reason why cloudy nights should be cooler or warmer than clear nights.”
That is not true. Clouds will almost always keep one station warmer than others in the DC area (DCA, IAD, BWI) if there are clouds at that station and not the others (based on many personal observations). For even more empirical results, see http://www.ba-pirc.org/pubs/nightcool/ where they show that cloudy night reduce the effectiveness of a passive radiative roof cooling system (essentially the roof cools more slowly based on the percentage of clouds).
William Connolley (and others):
I’m sorry I missed your reply at first, but, whilst I note you think my point 4 is wrong (and I’m sorry but I don’t accept Wikipedia as authorative on this issue) it is in fact right and proven computationally.
You cannot explain why the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies in all cases between any two points (containing matter) if you do computations with two-way radiation.
Maybe it all needs more explanation for some of you ….
Only radiation from hot to cold has any effect because it contains frequencies (in the upper extremes of its spectrum) which are above those that can resonate with the target when the target is cooler. The energy in radiation with these frequencies is thus retained and must be converted to thermal energy.
In contrast, radiation from a cooler source always contains frequencies which can resonate with a warmer target and thus be scattered without any energy left behind to be converted to thermal energy. So it does not warm anything which is warmer than its source.
The above can be easily seen from the first plot on this page http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/WiensDisplacementLaw.html
As you can envisage from this plot, as the temperatures approach each other the amount of overlap increases and so the rate of heat transfer decreases until it ceases when the temperatures match.
I know that you may get similar results making calculations with two-way radiation, but situations can be hypothesised which would lead to invalid results.
Consider my funnel experiment concentrating radiation from, say, a large but cooler surface of 5 sq.m onto a smaller but slightly warmer surface of 0.5 sq.m. Even when temperatures become equal you would then have 10 times as much radiation in one direction, or a net of 9 times – all without warming because, if it did warm, the Second Law would be broken..
Thus only the passage of radiation from hot to cold is relevant and it fully explains all that happens in regard to heat flow and temperature changes. More importantly, it explains how and why the Second Law is valid for radiation.
You simply cannot refute this example – equal temperatures and yet net radiation in one direction. Why no further warming?
It is little wonder that Claes Johnson was able to prove this computationally in his Computational Blackbody Radiation.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 1:39 am
Sounds deeply imaginary, but since you provide no cite it can’t be checked.
_____________________________
http://www.amazon.com/Slaying-Sky-Dragon-Greenhouse-ebook/dp/B004DNWJN6 Chapter 20
@William Howard M. Connolley says:
a link to the Daily Mail? Come now, the Daily Mail is a joke. No-one is silly enough to get their science from newspapers, particularly tabloids, are they?
===============
Fair comment on the link to the Daily Mail but do you see no irony in rebutting by linking to the assertions of an anonymous blogger? (Most of whose claims can be no more verified than the comments sections of climate blogs 😉
Although indirectly this blogger does link to:
Global temperature evolution 1979–2010
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022
But isn’t the point of this paper to demonstrate that natural variability overrules the effects of CO2? The paper states:
“When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability”
Or in other words, when we remove significant parts of the climate system and only measure *part* of the climate system that is warmer than the parts we exclude, this *part* of the climate system is still warming. Isn’t that… very very silly? And even if we put that point aside for a moment, is that consistent with the IPCC AR4 claim that CO2 drives climate? Is it consistent with data sets such as RSS or HadCRU or UAH which show little or no statistically significant warming for periods up to 15 years? There have been no major volcanic eruptions during that period. ENSO shows no long term trend. Solar activity only accounts for 0.1C amount of variability anyway…
Man Bearpigg says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:23 am
The element you are missing in your argument is that of time. How long does it take for one of those 380 molecules to absorb and emit radiation? Microseconds? Then in one second, you have effectively millions of absorbing and radiating molecules.
___________________________________________
Yes but you forgot to leave any energy for all that backradiation which, from the energy diagrams, considering half goes to space, has used up more than all the radiation they show coming from the surface. So there’s none left to warm the atmosphere as it all has to go back to the surface – and a bit more than all actually.
You see the IPCC gave up trying to claim that warmer air (ie less cold air) up there in the atmosphere somehow warms the surface. It doesn’t and they had to accept the empirical evidence that it doesn’t, so you’re behind the times.
What they now conjecture is that backradiation from a cooler atmosphere breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics and adds thermal energy to a warmer surface, even while the Sun is warming it up every sunny morning. Wow. Net flux into the surface, and still more from a cold atmosphere causing all the … er .. cooling.
Actually, carbon dioxide does have a cooling effect because it absorbs some of the incoming IR radiation from the Sun and sends it back to space. The IPCC “forgot” to mention that about half the Sun’s insolation is in the IR spectrum.
But then you’d need to forget such things when you’re spinning a hoax.
Aussie says:
February 16, 2012 at 4:54 pm
@myrrh, you are incorrect with regard to photosynthesis.
Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and they breathe out oxygen which is then breathed in by humans, who then breathe out carbon dioxide.
This is what I was taught in science class almost 50 years ago. The science has not changed since then!!
====================================
Aussie – that photosynthesis is plants breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen is a simplified version of the process, the second half of the equation doesn’t get mentioned – except through old wives tales, as I was taught it, not to keep plants in your bedroom…
Photosynthesis is not a continuous process, mostly happens in the am, the plants create their dinner of sugar out of carbon dioxide by converting the red and blue wavelengths of visible light to to chemical energy do so. The rest of time they breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, just like us. Remember, photosynthesis is using visible sun light – without that there is no chemical energy for food production.
I’ve just had a look for a better explanation of this and I tend to read as many links as I can, the first turned up a variation on the old wives’ tale I gave, not to sleep under trees. Why not? you may ask, because carbon dioxide is heavier than air and will displace oxygen..
How dangerous this actually is, plants in the bedroom competing for the oxygen supply and trees exhaling enough carbon dioxide to form a pool on the ground and suffocating you is a moot point, an open window and a breeze in a forest enough to disperse, but what these tales do is wait for the question, why not? The other half of the process and the danger of carbon dioxide pooling in the answers.
That carbon dioxide is heavier than air and can suffocate you is actually a danger in some industries, mining and brewing, so if you go for a p*ss up in a brewery don’t fall asleep on the floor, and something that people living around venting volcanoes will have been taught, to stay out of dips in the ground around the vents.
You can easily find pages which give the science behind this, but the old wives’ tales aspect is interesting, the page which gave the don’t sleep under trees tale here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070411014235AAFfFbd
and here’s another which which suggests that the old wives’ tales began from experience, we only now have the science to explain them: http://science.jrank.org/pages/1209/Carbon-Dioxide.html
“Like animals, plants breathe, using up oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. But plants also have the unique ability to store energy in the form of carbohydrates, our primary source of food. This energy-storing process, called photosynthesis, is essentially the reverse of respiration. It uses up carbon dioxide and releases oxygen in a complex series of reactions that also require sunlight and chlorophyll (the green substance that gives plants their color). In the 1770s, Dutch physiologist Jan Ingen Housz established the principles of photosynthesis, which helped explain the age-old superstition that plants purify air during the day and poison it at night.”
Doug Cotton says:
February 16, 2012 at 9:41 pm
R. Gates and others of like mind may wish to attempt to answer this question. If no one does, then I’d say it’s curtains for AGW.
______________________
So far no one on any forum has been able to explain computationally why the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies for radiation when they assume that calculations should include two-way radiation. The simple funnel experiment I described produces net radiation in one direction even when temperatures are equal. Yet we know there can be no heat transfer in such circumstances.
So, it seems, you should all accept my explanation that only the (one way) radiation from hot to cold should be taken into account in the calculations.
But I’ll wait another week and make a point in my book if no one proves me wrong.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:47 am
You two should stop arguing about trends. The long-term trend is a part of a ~1000 year natural cyclic pattern which may yet take another 200 years or so to reach a maximum. The rate of increase in moving 30 year trend gradients was about 0.06 deg.C / decade around 1900 to 1930, but is now less, namely about 0.05 deg.C / decade as at the foot of my Home page.
This would indicate a maximum of about 0.7 to 1.0 deg.C above the current trend within 200 years.
Meanwhile the 60 year cycle (superimposed) causes a very slight decline until about 2028, but rises will occur for 30 years after that, as in the 30 years up to 1998.
Perhaps someone should remind Mr Connolley of the difference between cherry picked data and a counterexample.
Hint: Cherry picked data does NOT prove a theory is true. A single counterexample DOES prove that a theory is false.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 1:39 am
Doug Cotton> Please explain with suitable calculations…
There is no point asking for explanations if you’re not prepared to read the answers. You asked much the same on my blog; I answered you. You didn’t reply, you just asked the same question again. The basic maths behind (a simplified version of) the greenhouse effect aren’t difficult; they are outlined in my reply to you here.
> At least one scientist calculated the cooling effect of carbon dioxide as about 7 times the assumed warming effect.
Sounds deeply imaginary, but since you provide no cite it can’t be checked.
=================
Whether the 7 times is accurate I don’t know, but since carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle any contribution it makes to ‘warming’ is in that process, which is the main greenhouse gas water vapour taking away heat from the surface and releasing it in the colder heights of the troposphere when it condenses out to water again and comes down as rain, all pure rain is carbonic acid. Carbon dioxide thus in warming becoming less dense will join with the rising water vapour and this makes greenhouse gases the cooling mechanism for the Earth. Without water the Earth would be 67°C – think deserts – greenhouse gases cool the Earth bringing the temps down to c15°C.
The basic maths behind (a simplified version of) the greenhouse effect aren’t difficult; they are outlined in my reply to you here.”
The basic maths of an imaginary greenhouse effect in an imaginary world where visible light heats land and oceans and the invisible heat from the Sun doesn’t reach the surface, are for science fiction fans. Any taking that seriously have zilch hope of understanding the real world around us.
Any pushing the meme that the AGWSF world is real while knowing the real physics, the real physical properties of light and heat and gases, are shysters.
@Ron House says: Trolling etc
Ron, my point is most of the content on WUWT – most notably that written by Anthony – steers clear of this kind of petty bitchiness. And that’s what sets it apart from the rest. When WUWT descends to the level of being a political advocacy forum, and kneejerks itself in alignment with an end of the political spectrum it loses credibility and alienates those who for whatever reason align themselves with another.
Heartland is clearly an extreme right wing advocacy group. When I say “far right” I mean small Government, but I also mean “USA Republican” and that brings with it a certain ill feeling from many who can only see that end of politics for its Christian Conservative and talk-radio ranting element.
The last thing we who believe in moving the science along need is to overtly align ourselves with groups that are easy to smear because of their dirty connections such as Tobacco companies and the morons who think having a public health system or being European makes you somehow a Communist.
If you jump into bed with the likes of Newt Gingrich expect about the same level of support, and the same level of hostility towards yourself.
I’m grateful Heartland is contributing to moving the science in more than one (settled) direction, but I can’t help but find it creepy.
The only way we can move the science forward is to keep up the fight to unbuckle it from partisan politics. When you stoop to belittling “Alarmists” or “Warmists” you merely sink to the lowest level.
WUWT when it works is above that.
> Sounds deeply imaginary, but since you provide no cite it can’t be checked.
The link is a 404, but from the pic I think you mean “Slaying the sky dragon”. That’s a pop-sci book; you spoke about science, I was expecting a proper journal paper.
> by linking to the assertions of an anonymous blogger?
Not really. Tamino is a pseudonym, but his real name isn’t hard to find. Indeed, you found it. And what he presents is the data. Indeed, if you want to download and play for yourself he makes it available.
> But isn’t the point of this paper to demonstrate that natural variability overrules the effects of CO2? The paper states: “When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations…
Well done. You’ve actually read something by someone you disagree with – that is better than 99% of the folk here. But you haven’t read it carefully enough: the key you missed is “short-term”. We know there is natural variability which complicates the assessment of trends. The traditional and easy way to solve this is just to look at trends over periods longer than the fluctuations – so, maybe 30 years. Foster and Rahmstorf try another way, which is to remove those short-term fluctuations that can be identified, which allows the longer term trend to be seen more clearly.
> is that consistent with the IPCC AR4 claim that CO2 drives climate?
Yes, entirely. If you can bear to look at someone else you disagree with for a moment, there is a helpful graph here.
> The long-term trend is a part of a ~1000 year natural cyclic pattern
You have no evidence for that. Compare that to the IPCC, who have actual evidence and analyses for their attribution.
> A single counterexample DOES prove that a theory is false.
Yes. But you have to know what the theory is. The std IPCC-type presentation of GW is *not* that temperatures increase monotonically. The theory is positive_trend+”noise”. Inevitably there will be times when the the “noise” is such that, if you carefully select your time period, you’ll find a negative trend.
> carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle
Pardon?
Eric (skeptic) says:
February 17, 2012 at 1:47 am
Doug Cotton said “so that the surface does not warm to over 100 deg.C like the Moon’s does”
Are you reading Rosco now? He already pretty much answered his own question. It has nothing to do with CO2 absorbing the Sun’s IR. Please tell me what causes cloudy nights to be warmer.
____________________________________________________
You don’t know what you are talking about. Of course the atmosphere keeps the world cooler by day. Just look at those energy diagrams and see how much solar insolation it absorbs and also reflects. (You can easily confirm that the Moon goes over 100 deg.C and is a similar distance from the Sun.) Carbon dioxide plays a very small role in this cooling process during the day, but certainly plays no greater role in any warming process.
When you produce statistically significant evidence of your claim that (all other things being equal) cloudy nights are warmer than clear nights then we can continue this discussion. But you probably won’t find any because there isn’t any to my knowledge. There is usually something else different, like warmer days beforehand before the clouds were drawn in, or higher relative humidity which feels muggy but isn’t actually hotter. Or it may have been raining that day so the rain brought down some thermal energy from the clouds. Or the relative humidity is higher so the adiabatic lapse rate is lower. Or, because the clouds don’t blow away it may be a calmer night.. Whatever you find, make sure it refers to the same location on different nights, not to wetter climates which can be caused by proximity to oceans which in themselves regulate climate.
R Gates,
Look here:
“The wind power industry is predicting massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects after a deal to renew a tax credit failed Thursday in Washington.”
Seems to me the wind industry is one of those big businesses profiting from the AGW wealth transfer. Or is this too “general” and not sufficiently specific for you?
@William Howard M. Connolley
” But you haven’t read it carefully enough: the key you missed is “short-term”. We know there is natural variability which complicates the assessment of trends…so, maybe 30 years”
==================
Where did you get the 30 years from? Because I’ve seen the NOAA report a few years ago (if my memory serves me), and they stated 15 years was required to falsify the current generation of climate models, and another paper recently stated 17 years. Yes I read that RealClimate blog post. Which basically confirms what the sceptics have been pointing out for a little while now–that the models aren’t doing well. Better images in more detail here:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/TrendsSince2000.png
And more information on calculations of trends here:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/la-nina-drives-hadcrut-nhsh-13-month-mean-outside-1sigma-model-spread/
IPPC AR43 using HADcrut, using even the modest claim of 0.2C per decade, has been falsified already… although things bounce around a bit, so it may “unfalsify” itself again at some point. But not looking good if you’re in the market for catastrophic warming and accelerating trends… but look, if temperatures jump up by a quarter of a degree in the next year or two, CAGW might gain some plausibility again. Although given the current atmospheric conditions, there seems little likelihood that we will see that happen in 2012.
As for anonymous bloggers – yes I know who he is. But he doesn’t put his real name to his claims. Why wouldn’t he, unless he was concerned about the academic fallout and his credibility in the scientific community? One can only speculate. Anyway, that should be a major red flag for anyone looking for credible sources of information, including yourself.
WMC @ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/16/the-anatomy-of-a-global-warming-smear/#comment-895279
i have studied Slaying the Sky Dragon and agree with some of the authors such as the Chapter 20 referred to and the work of Claes Johnson, Professor of Applied Mathematics which is excellent, answering questions that left Planck and Einstein baffled. Sorry the link didn’t work – I don’t know why, but I’m sure you could have Googled it before making a dismissive comment..
Th e IPCC do not have evidence that there is no ~1000 year cycle. There are ample historical records of warm and cold periods dating back several thousand years. If you dare to quote the “flat” handle of the “hockey stick” based on daytime land temperatures affecting tree rings … well I’ll really know you’ve fallen for Mann’s hoax.
The “noise” is mostly the effect of the superimposed natural 60 year cycle for which there is evidence – see the latest Scafetta paper recently on WUWT – a site which you would do well to read more. When you look at NASA satellite data from one year to the next you see a very tight annual pattern indicating that “noise” levels are in fact very ;low.
Now it’s 12.20am here in Sydney so don’t expect a prompt reply. ZZZZZ
Doug, as I answered Rosco above: the atmosphere keeps the world cooler by day for a variety of reasons that I outlined. We both agree that CO2 plays a very minor role in that, a far bigger role comes from the atmosphere’s heat capacity.
Doug, the evidence for warmer nights due to clouds is not depending on humidity, precipitation, or location (relative to water). It is very simple, if even a small patch of clouds are over one of our three local stations (DCA, IAD, BWI) during early morning, that station will be relatively warmer and I have to toss that day’s data from my nighttime cooling study (I also ignore all nights with precip or prior day precip). A patch of clouds generally keeps a station higher by 1-2F. A larger amount of clouds for a longer period of time can warm stations more, but in those cases all three stations get clouded over. There are at least 100 other stations (mostly at schools) that neighbor the three main stations so I can easily validate the main station temperature. My very modest results are backed up by centuries of similar observations.
Here is a relatively straightforward explanation: http://www.asterism.org/tutorials/tut37%20Radiative%20Cooling.pdf
> It is a fairly random number, but oft used in climatology. For example http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/ccl/faqs.html: “What is Climate?
Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the “average weather,” or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).”
> the NOAA report a few years ago (if my memory serves me), and they stated 15 years was required to falsify the current generation of climate models,
Sorry, don’t know what you’re talking about. You need to provide a reference.
> rankexploits
They’ve got their uncertanity ranges wrong. You can tell that by comparing to the RC plot.
> even the modest claim of 0.2C per decade, has been falsified already
You can’t falsify something you don’t understand. The prediction wasn’t 0.2 oC/decade. The “headline” version was For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Obviously, that hasn’t been falsified, nor could it be, since we aren’t a decade away from 2007. But the language there is vague, so you’d need to follow the links they give you if you want to know details.
> answering questions that left Planck and Einstein baffled
Classic! I need say no more about that, then.
@William Howard M. Connolley says:
“They’ve got their uncertanity ranges wrong. You can tell that by comparing to the RC plot.”
“You can’t falsify something you don’t understand. The prediction wasn’t 0.2 oC/decade.”
“Obviously, that hasn’t been falsified, nor could it be, since we aren’t a decade away from 2007.”
=============
The RC model spread is wrong, not the Rank Exploits spread. This has been discussed before, with the RC spread being unreasonably large.
I would hate to accuse you of obfuscating but if you look at:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-1-1.html
You will see that the average of model projections from 1990-2000 was approx. .2C per decade. The IPCC states it is very happy with earlier forecasts:
“Since IPCC’s first report in 1990, assessed projections have suggested global average temperature increases between about 0.15°C and 0.3°C per decade for 1990 to 2005. This can now be compared with observed values of about 0.2°C per decade, strengthening confidence in near-term projections”
If you wish to argue that 2000-2010 should mysteriously be less than .2C per decade then can you cite where this claim is made in the IPCC report’s projections? Look it’s OK, the AR4 is a long and complex report, and I find many individuals get confused over it’s contents.
Also I am curious to know why you ignored my question about where you got the idea that it requires 30 years to falsify the IPCC model ensemble?
> The RC model spread is wrong
You’ll need to provide evidence for that. Since anyone actually interested is inevitably going to point that out, wouldn’t it be better to short-circuit the back-n-forth and provide the ref first?
> I would hate to accuse you of obfuscating
Oh good. You realise, of course, that the shading in that pic doesn’t represent uncertainty.
> If you wish to argue that 2000-2010 should mysteriously be less than .2C per decade
There is nothing mysterious about it. As I’ve already said, it is natural variability, as expected. As the graph you provided shows, the trend is indeed about 0.2 oC / decade. It won’t be that for every single pair of years you pick that are 10 years apart, of course. Sometimes it will be more, sometimes less. How could it be otherwise?
> why you ignored my question
I already told you where I got 30 years from. Look it’s OK, this is a long and formless thread, and I find many individuals get confused over it’s contents.
But since we’re on unanswered questions:
>> the NOAA report a few years ago (if my memory serves me), and they stated 15 years was required to falsify the current generation of climate models,
> Sorry, don’t know what you’re talking about. You need to provide a reference.
I’m not sure what you’re really on about with this falsifying stuff. Please provide a reference / link.
@William Howard M. Connolley
This is the quote I was thinking of. However please note, you were the one making the 30 year claim so in future I would appreciate it if you include citations for *your* claims rather than expect citations from others who may question your claims. (Fair is fair.)
“Ensembles with different modifications to the physical parameters of the model (within known uncertainties) (Collins et al. 2006) are performed for several of the IPCC SRES emissions scenarios (Solomon et al. 2007). Ten of these simulations have a steady long-term rate of warming between 0.15° and 0.25ºC decade–1, close to the expected rate of 0.2ºC decade–1. ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2–25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
– NOAA’s Annual State of the Climate Report, 2009.
As a side note it is also appears that the climate scientists at NOAA are also “confused” about the 0.2C per decade claim as they are considering that warming rate over the current decade and not starting from 2007 as you’ve suggested. Maybe you should send them an email. You can start by writing to them: “Dear Sirs, You can’t falsify something you don’t understand. The prediction wasn’t 0.2 oC/decade…” 😉
William M. Connolley says:
> even the modest claim of 0.2C per decade, has been falsified already
You can’t falsify something you don’t understand. The prediction wasn’t 0.2 oC/decade. The “headline” version was For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Obviously, that hasn’t been falsified, nor could it be, since we aren’t a decade away from 2007.
This is the sort of dissembling that lost you your wiki gig.
It wasn’t the “headline version”. It was an accurate interpretation of IPCC predictions, made by IPCC based on IPCC model runs. The interpretation was accurate, but the prediction was not. One does not need to be 10 years from 2007 to demonstrate that it was wrong . The model runs upon which that statement were based used 2000 as their start date. They predict a 0.2C/decade trend for the entire period 2000 to about 2050, and the observational data upon which those model runs were built extends the slope of that prediction back into the latter years of the 1990s.
Per HadCUT3, temps have been approximately flat for the last 15 years, and have been slightly declining for the last decade. To catch up to the 0.2C/decade prediction for the 25 year period ending 2022, the next ten years are going to have to warm 30% faster than has been achieved for any previous ten year period in the entire 162 year long instrumental record – including during the glory days of “global warming”. Good luck with that.
Face it, the 0.2C/decade is bust. And that would have had to be continued for 100 years to hit the low end IPCC scary story. Three or four or six degrees C by 2100? Please. But the politics accepted those extraordinarily stupid numbers, and has been pushing to cripple the world’s economy with draconian energy and tax policies, and that has been sold on the basis of “2 degrees! We have to hold to 2 degrees per century or we will all die!” We are not on track for 2 degrees doing what we are doing. Inconvenient Truth.
@JJ
It’s not “bust”. It’s just not looking particularly good right now… There could be a big surge of warming over the next few years and then the IPCC models *could* be back on track. On that theoretical possibility, I have no disagreement with Connolley.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 6:15 am
“You can’t falsify something you don’t understand. The prediction wasn’t 0.2 oC/decade. The “headline” version was For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Obviously, that hasn’t been falsified, nor could it be, since we aren’t a decade away from 2007. But the language there is vague, so you’d need to follow the links they give you if you want to know details.”
Winston, you can’t falsify ANY projection. By definition. A scientific theory makes predictions, not projections. Predictions can be falsified. Projections can’t.
That is the reason why the IPCC consensus climate scientists make projections, not predictions.
“But the language there is vague,”
On purpose. You wouldn’t give up such a profitable gig as well. Well, profitable compared to what these people would earn if they had to find themselves honest work.
WN: your original claim, unsourced, was “15 years was required to falsify”. Given that you’ve now provided a quote – but not a citation – I think its pretty obvious that your source isn’t the report itself, but http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/07/noaa-explains-global-temperature.html. But RP Jr isn’t a climatologist, and often gets this stuff badly wrong.
What your quote now tells us is that the actual claim is “The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”, which is different.
That is saying that a trend of zero (or less) for 15 years is enough for a discrepancy. But the 15 year trend is clearly above zero (people round here seem to like woodfortrees, so presumably http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1996/plot/uah/from:1996/trend will be an acceptable source to you). Even if you switch to starting the trend from 1998 the trend is still positive. So no, by the criteria you’re quoting, the models/IPCC are not “falsified”.
Vince Causey says:
February 17, 2012 at 5:14 am
R Gates,
Look here:
“The wind power industry is predicting massive layoffs and stalled or abandoned projects after a deal to renew a tax credit failed Thursday in Washington.”
Seems to me the wind industry is one of those big businesses profiting from the AGW wealth transfer. Or is this too “general” and not sufficiently specific for you?
————
I would say that there is potentially some truth in that, but finding alternative energy sources to fossil fuels is motivated by far more than fear of AGW. But in general, certainly there are probably some who use fear of global warming and climate change to try and make some money, and in this regard are no different than those who profited from the the exaggeration of the dangers posed by Iraq prior to the second gulf war.
Doug Cotton says:
February 16, 2012 at 9:41 pm
R. Gates and others of like mind may wish to attempt to answer this question. If no one does, then I’d say it’s curtains for AGW.
______________________
So far no one on any forum has been able to explain computationally why the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies for radiation when they assume that calculations should include two-way radiation. The simple funnel experiment I described produces net radiation in one direction even when temperatures are equal. Yet we know there can be no heat transfer in such circumstances.
So, it seems, you should all accept my explanation that only the (one way) radiation from hot to cold should be taken into account in the calculations.
But I’ll wait another week and make a point in my book if no one proves me wrong.
———-
Honestly, I have not paid attention to this. Give me the quick review of your contention related to the 2nd Law, and I’ll be glad to give feedback.
On another point and in another post you made the contention that all things being equal, a cloudy night is not warmer than a clear night and that is quite incorrect. Downwelling longwave increases on cloudy nights (especially with a thick layer of clouds) and temperatures on the ground are higher. What in your thinking would lead you to believe this is not the case?
Will Nitschke says:
It’s not “bust”. It’s just not looking particularly good right now… There could be a big surge of warming over the next few years and then the IPCC models *could* be back on track. On that theoretical possibility, I have no disagreement with Connolley.
There is possibility, and there is probability. The fundamental purpose of modeling is to move from the theoreticality of the former to the practical utility of the higher, tighter end of the latter.
While a surge over the next ten years that would bring the trend for the previous 25 year period up to the predicted 0.2C/decade rate is possible, so is a plummet that would pull that trend down to –0.2C/decad over that same period. Based on observed ten year gradients over the entire instrmental record, the latter is perhaps more likely than the former. I wouldn’t put my money on either.
For the next ten years to result in a 25 year trend of 0.2C/decade or higher, it will have to produce a ten year surge that is 30% greater than any observed to date. A mechanism that would produce that, yet be probalistically consistent with observations to date? Lets see it.
On the other hand, if the next ten years produces a rise equal to the average ten year trend of the “global warming era” (~1975 to present) then the 25 year trend will be about 0.6C/decade. That is only one third of the IPCC predicted “global warming” rate, and we haven’t had a “global warming era” average ten year trend since 1996.
Hansen gets this. That is why he is cooking up predictions that differ dramatically from the 50 year constant 0.2C slope of previous IPCC models. He is currently pushing a prediction that is conveniently much flatter over the next couple of decades, with the obligatory hockey stick function dominating just far enough out to be scary yet unverifyable during the remainder of his expected lifespan.
Corrrecting myself:
Hansen’s prediction is for sea level, not temp.
Doug Cotton,
I’ve read your post from 2:27 a.m., and I would absolutely agree that a cooler sky could never warm a warmer ground, if that is what you’re getting at. But this misses the point of greenhouse warming, just as those who talk about DWLWR not penetrating beyond the skin layer of the ocean miss the point. The greenhouse properties of gases in the atmosphere has nothing at all to do with them radiating heat back to the surface, but rather slowing the rate at which the surface loses heat by altering the thermodynamic gradient between ground and sky, i.e. a warmer sky means the ground will cool more slowly. This, by the way, is exactly what is also going on in the skin layer of the ocean, where DWLWR does penetrate the top of the skin layer of the ocean, and alters the thermodynamic gradient of that layer, and thus, the ocean loses heat less rapidly with the result being that overall ocean heat content increases because of the presence of increasing greenhouse gases– even though those gases don’t directly heat the ocean. Greenhouse warming is an issue of thermodynamic gradients become less steep because of the presence of greenhouse gases, both from ground to sky and at the ocean skin layer.
“The models teach us this, children.”
The only thing I have ever learned from models, is that beautiful women, who wear very little clothes, can make lots of money.
William M. Connolley says:
February 16, 2012 at 2:30 pm
No, the planet continues to warm [snip]
You’re having a laugh!!!!!!!!!!
William M. Connolley says:
February 16, 2012 at 3:01 pm
>a link to the Daily Mail? Come now, the Daily Mail is a joke. No-one is silly enough to get their science from newspapers, particularly tabloids, are they?
What do you read? NYT??
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 7:47 am
But the 15 year trend is clearly above zero
It depends on your data source. UAH and GISS are above zero for 15 years. But the MET office has said there has been no warming for 15 years. RSS also confirms this. See the RSS graph for 15 years. (slope = -9.04377e-05 per year)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2000/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
Natural gas producers are making a lot of money as electrical generation with coal is being phased out in favor of natural gas.
“and the morons who think having a public health system or being European makes you somehow a Communist”
Believing in the truth makes one a moron?
Interesting take on the world there
Of course, the other side of the spectrum also tends to believe that unless govt provides health care, or charity, or scientific research, then obviously none of those things exist.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:47 am
“Because you carefully avoided adding the trend line. Do so, and you’ll see that you’re wrong.”
Not even close. I did do the trend line. I just couldn’t make them both appear at once, for some reason. But, the trend over the last 12 years is decidedly down.
“Only if you ignore the data; see for counter example…”
Please stop quoting Tamino on this board. His credibility is less than zero.
“Only by very carefully selecting your dataset and time period.”
As you do here? Yet, you seem to block out the distinctive change in the slope from the period before your trendline.
Look, a linear trend is inappropriate for this data anyway. There is a pronounced ~60 year cycle which is readily evident. It all but leaps out of the page. To not see it, you have to not want to see it. And, that ~60 year cycle just peaked. We are heading down.
“…so, maybe 30 years”
That is absolutely the WORST time period to select. Because of the pronounced ~60 year cycle, when you do a trend on the upswing, you get the maximum upward bias. And, conversely on the down swing. Which is why we keep having alternating cooling and warming scares every 30 years. This is just stupid.
Man Bearpigg says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:23 am
“Wow, you have a perpetual motion machine there boy,”
Throw in everything cranked out by Doug Cotton here.
I hope you warmists are happy. This is what happens when you pervert the science for political ends. When your little AGW panic comes a cropper, pseudoscience like this will reign supreme. You people have set science back decades because of your obsessive-compulsive, mentally unbalanced crusade against modernity.
DesertYote says:
February 16, 2012 at 6:01 pm
The Pompous Git
February 16, 2012 at 5:15 pm
You talk about both sides of the political spectrum. What you mean is both sides, as in the terms left and right, which are just either end of the SOCIALIST spectrum as defined by lefties. Conservatives are learning to abandon the term “right” as it really is a trap designed by socialist and overloaded with meaning that is contrary to conservatism.
The greatest good for the greatest number of people has been made possible only because of a limited government with limited ability to intrude into the market. Socialist have to destroy that in order to bring about their great socialist utopia, which has little room for individual freedom. That is why ever single thing socialist do is target at destroying society and its infrastructure.
It was Stalin who created the term “right” as a term of abuse to distinquish his opponents within the Communist Party as “enemies of the poeple” and of “democracy” in USSR. Thus both ends of the “Socialist” sppectrum are, in reality, Fascists or Totalitarians. However, this is moving away from the purpose of this thread and thus this particular discussion has gone far enough.
>> No, the planet continues to warm; e.g. http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/2011-temperature-roundup/
> You’re having a laugh!
Was that intended as a reasoned rebuttal? Well, I admit, your devastating logic defeats me. In which case, try http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1996/plot/uah/from:1996/trend instead.
> What do you read?
The Grauniad, of course, like any good left-winger. But I don’t get my science from there, as I said.
> Please stop quoting Tamino on this board. His credibility is less than zero.
You mean, you don’t like what he is saying and can’t refute it.
> the trend over the last 12 years is decidedly down
No, it isn’t. Lets use WFT, since you folks seem to like that: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1996/plot/uah/from:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1996/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2000/trend
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:41 am
> carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle
Pardon?
You heard.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 10:00 am
“You mean, you don’t like what he is saying and can’t refute it.”
Like you don’t like the Daily Mail and cannot refute it? Look, Grant Foster is not a scientist. His site is a joke. He alters and frames data to promote his points, he censors inconvenient posts, and he is caustic and offensive. I’m not going to debate it – it’s been amply documented in threads on WUWT and elsewhere. If your object is to convince me of anything, quoting Tamino detracts from that goal.
“Lets use WFT…”
I specified HADCRUT3 and 12 years. Let’s quit playing games with starting points and data sets for an inappropriate regression, shall we? READ MY PREVIOUS POST:
Bart says:
“…the trend over the last 12 years is decidedly down.”
That is a fact. Here is 2002 – 2009.
And enough of Connolley’s short term cherry-picking. Let’s look at the longest term trend [the green trend line] that Wood For Trees can provide; from 1840. It is crystal clear that the long term natural global warming trend is slowing, and that the modern rise in CO2 has done nothing measurable to accelerate temperatures. Thus, the CO2=CAGW conjecture touted by Connolley and his ilk is falsified.
In fact, the long term natural recovery from the Little Ice Age [one of the coldest episodes of the entire Holocene] is continuing, in fits and starts. But as shown conclusively in the graphs above, CO2 cannot be more than a bit player, if that. The natural warming trend has stayed within very specific parameters, without any acceleration. If a 40% increase in [harmless, beneficial] CO2 can’t cause more warming, then the alarmist crowd needs to work on a new conjecture, because their demonization of “carbon” has been decisively falsified.
An honest person would now admit that there is something seriously wrong with the repeatedly falsified claim that anthropogenic CO2 causes global warming. But as we see time after time, the alarmist crowd is not honest; they totally ignore the scientific method, and transparency, and the null hypothesis, and Occam’s Razor. The truth is simply not in them.
Smokey says:
February 17, 2012 at 10:59 am
And, mark you well that the ~60 year cycle, as I stated before, practically leaps out at you in all of Smokey’s plots. There are more than two whole cycles in the record. Only an idiot (like Tamino) would refuse to admit the significance of it.
@Ron House – “I agree with your disagreement, but not with your “respectfully”. ;-)”
Well I was trying to make a point regarding civility, so I felt that it warranted being so. But I understand your view. Feeding trolls is an exercise in futility (I have an analogy that involves wind and bodily fluid directed into it). However, not being familiar with the many commenters here, I will err on the side of being generous.
I did recognize the patronizing “…would do well…” I was up for an extended type, so ignored it.
But thanks for the comment. 🙂
I’m astounded how this thread has blown up with so many rabbit trails: moon temp, CO2, water cycle, lawyers, criminal lawyers, lawyers-who-might-be-criminals, so-and-so is a poopoo-head, etc. 😀
Thanks to the mods, you all have the patience of Job!
> Look, Grant Foster is not a scientist
You mean, you don’t like what he is saying. He meets all the usual definitions of scientist: he knows what he is talking about, has original ideas and is capable of publishing in high-quality journals. Whether he is caustic or not is irrelevant. If you don’t understand the concept of trying to understand an underlying trend by removing noise then, fair enough, but it means you’re in no position to understand his work, which means any criticism you make of it will be meaningless.
> I specified HADCRUT3 and 12 years
Yes, as I said, you can only see what you want if you carefully specify your endpoints. But even your carefully cherry-picked data fails you; it still shows warming, not cooling.
William M. Connolley said @ February 17, 2012 at 4:41 am
Oh dear, fake statistics — whoda thunkit? Do you have a cite for this Mr Connolley?
David Jones says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:51 am
Stalin was involved in the post revolutionary government of France? Wowsers! Did Doctor Who take him there?
What makes you think that opposing coercion equates with totalitarian?
MarkW said @ February 17, 2012 at 9:42 am
Australia has a public health system and lots of Europeans. What makes you believe that Australia is a communist state?
From an October 2008 email:
The Climategate emails are full of similar deceptive shenanigans. And the graphs I posted upthread show that global temperatures continue to decline. So who should we believe? Connolley? Or Planet Earth?
What is truly unconscionable is the fact that these unethical scientists clearly want the climate to cause widespread deaths – so they can say, “We were right!” And of course, so they can keep their snouts deep in the public trough. Unfortunately for their scam, the planet isn’t cooperating. They have been 100% wrong. About everything. Time to eliminate their funding.
Please get back on topic.
IMO People like Mr Connolley have their OWN place to play post-normal science…and distract from the topic.
William M. Connolley says:
He meets all the usual definitions of scientist: he knows what he is talking about, has original ideas and is capable of publishing in high-quality journals.
Those are all of the definitions of scientist?
Explains a lot.
R. Gates says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:05 am
The greenhouse properties of gases in the atmosphere has nothing at all to do with them radiating heat back to the surface, but rather slowing the rate at which the surface loses heat by altering the thermodynamic gradient between ground and sky, i.e. a warmer sky means the ground will cool more slowly.
__________________________________________________________
That is the “old” argument which the IPCC had to abandon because there was no empirical evidence. The atmosphere cools faster than the surface at night, for example, and is always colder even at the start of the night. So thermal energy cannot jump the gap and travel by convection, diffusion or conduction against the flow. At the surface interface it would be like water going up a waterfall..
If you catch up with your reading, you will find that they invented a process whereby they postulated that “backradiation” would warm the surface in the morning and slow its rate of cooling in the evening by adding thermal energy to the surface. They assumed it would do this because they assumed (wrongly) that any radiation striking the surface would do this no matter what the temperature of the source of the radiation. Well, the Sun’s radiation does, but not that from the atmosphere.
Firstly, “heat” does not get radiated. Electromagnetic radiation transfers energy. That energy (under certain circumstances) can be converted to thermal energy, just like some of the kinetic energy in your car will be converted to thermal energy when you prang it. When thermal energy is converted to radiating energy, it can then re-appear as thermal energy in another object if and only if that object is cooler than the source of the (spontaneous) radiation. Then we say we have observed heat transfer and such heat transfer is always from hot to cold as per the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
So, radiated energy is not always converted to thermal energy just because it strikes a target. If backradiation warmed a warmer target, you could warm your home at night with a few sky-heaters in your roof with funnels focussing radiation from warmed up plates on your roof onto smaller plates in your ceiling which you would assume would get even hotter than the ones on the roof, because they would get more radiation per square whatever of area. So you could make millions selling these sky-heaters. Indeed they would make your house hotter when the Sun shines, but not from radiation at night I’m afraid.
Just for my own satisfaction I have performed backyard experiments which prove to me at least that backradiation does not slow the rate of cooling of the surface at night. To do this yourself, buy two identical wide necked vacuum flasks and fill them to the brim with sand, leaving the lids off. Also buy a thermometer with a metal probe. Shield one flask from backradiation all night (using a couple of silver car windscreen screens suspended nearly, but not quite, horizontally, just above the flask) and check the temperature differences if any just before dawn.
I have explained in other posts exactly how and why radiation transfers thermal energy at a molecular level, due to the non-overlap of the higher frequencies in the spectrum radiated from the warmer body. Where there is overlap (as there always will be when the radiating body is cooler) then there is no conversion to thermal energy because all radiation merely resonates and gets scattered without leaving any energy behind.
Now, you seem to think that the rate of cooling can be slowed without the addition of extra thermal energy. That is not correct. To slow the rate at which the water level in a bath lowers when the plug is out you could add extra water by turning the tap on. You should also remember that the IPCC in effect claims backradiation converts to thermal energy day and night, so it would also have to be warming the surface even more when it is already being warmed on a sunny morning.
Sorry, but your arguments fail, as does the whole greenhouse conjecture which is contrary to the laws of physics.
For more information, refer to my funnel experiment wherein two plates at the same temperature are connected by a tapering funnel, one plate having, say, 10 times the surface area of the other. Hence there is net radiation towards the small plate, but such radiation cannot warm the plate because that would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For computational proof of what happens read (if you can understand the mathematics) what a certain Professor of Applied Mathematics has published – links are on the Radiation page of my website.
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:50 pm
I specified HADCRUT3 and 12 years
Yes, as I said, you can only see what you want if you carefully specify your endpoints. But even your carefully cherry-picked data fails you; it still shows warming, not cooling.
I will confirm that William M. Connolley is correct here. The slope is #Time series (hadcrut3) from 1850 to 2012
#Selected data from 2000
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.000850904 per year
Of course, once the January numbers are out, that may change, but at the moment, the slope is very slightly positive for the last 12 years of HadCrut3.
Following is the longest period of time (above10 years) where each of the 4 data sets is at least slightly negative (or flat for all practical purposes).
(By the way, even though HadCrut3 is negative for 14 years, 10 months, it IS positive for 12 years, 0 months due to the way the graphs and numbers work out.)
RSS: since December 1996 or 15 years, 2 months
HadCrut3: since March 1997 or 14 years, 10 months
GISS: since February 2001 or 11 years, 0 months
UAH: It never quite reaches a negative value but it might with the February or March numbers.
Combination of the above 4: December 2000 or 11 years, 1 month
Sea surface temperatures: February 1997 or 14 years, 11 months
See the graph below to show it all.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.17/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1980/plot/gistemp/from:2001.08/trend/plot/rss/from:1980/plot/rss/from:1996.92/trend/plot/wti/from:1980/plot/wti/from:2000.92/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.08/trend
@William Howard M. Connolley says:
WN: your original claim, unsourced, was “15 years was required to falsify”. Given that you’ve now provided a quote – but not a citation – I think its pretty obvious that your source isn’t the report itself, but http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2009/07/noaa-explains-global-temperature.html. But RP Jr isn’t a climatologist, and often gets this stuff badly wrong.
==========================
I didn’t quote any commentary of Pielke. And if you googled around you could have skipped Pielke’s blog which I never linked to anyway, and directly accessed the NOAA report in PDA format with small effort, which is what I directly quoted. Why attempt a poison the well tactic by rubbishing an academic who has nothing to do with what we were discussing?
Now I applaud Warmists who come here to “tackle the deniers head on” or whatever your thought processes on this are. It does make the comments sections of climate blogs more interesting, and it seems the Warmist “filter and ignore” strategy hasn’t worked out very well. But I do wish to remind you that you are a major representative of the Warmist side, so when many of your responses are obfuscations, dodges or logical fallacies, you’re not going to win many fence sitters who may be reading our exchanges. That’s the point of you posting here, right? Here is my suggestion: spend less time “making stuff up” and more time focusing on the science, and even if your claims are more modest in nature, you will win far more credibility than your current tactics.
Doug Cotton, do you have an exact explanation of why the radiative roof cooling doesn’t work as well on cloudy nights? http://www.ba-pirc.org/pubs/nightcool/ Your rough explanation is that all things aren’t equal, e.g. there is more ground level humidity on the cloudy night. But they account for dewpoint (table 3). They account for wind, emissivity of the roof surface, temperature, etc.
And they account for cloudiness in table 7. They say “A cloudy sky during nighttime hours is a known factor in reducing the potential for nocturnal cooling – a fact evident from the fact that frost or fog most readily occur following a clear night, but not often following those that are overcast. Clouds, particularly, low stratus and cumulus clouds, emit radiation through the entire long-wave spectrum so that under a completely overcast sky, nocturnal radiation is largely eliminated. On the other hand, clear sky conditions allows night sky radiation to reach its maximum potential, although also influenced by atmospheric moisture content.”
William M. Connolley says:
February 17, 2012 at 12:50 pm
“If you don’t understand the concept of trying to understand an underlying trend by removing noise…”
Considering it’s a large step down from what I do for a living, and I specialized in stochastic modeling during my PhD years, I rather think I understand it, and you do not. Apparently, you think it is valid to fit a straight line to any data set, calculate the confidence intervals based on an assumption of uncorrelated noise, and boom, you’re a scientist!
Run along. You’re wasting my time now.
Werner Brozek says:
February 17, 2012 at 2:57 pm
“I will confirm that William M. Connolley is correct here.”
I will confirm that it is meaningless, as there is an obvious ~60 year cyclical component in the data, and no basis for assuming it should evolve linearly. It’s worse than meaningless. It’s just plain dumb.
Eric: Just prior to the reference to “clear nights” they were talking about nights with high relative humidity, so perhaps their “clear nights” have lower relative humidity. It is well known that the moist adiabatic lapse rate is lower than the dry one, so the temperature gradient is less. Most of this is about weather conditions, not what we call climate.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the radiative roof cooling is that it does in fact cool better on clear nights – the very nights when you would expect all that hypothesised “backradiation” from the whole atmmosphere, not just the clouds, to be slowing the rate of cooling.
Whatever the reasons for whatever happens, they have nothing to do with radiation from the sky or clouds, because as I have explained and tested myself (and Prof Johnson has proved computationally and Prof Nahle has proved in a peer-reviewed published experiment done in September 2011) radiation from a cooler source cannot transfer thermal energy to a warmer target. To do so would be in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
If anyone with tertiary background in physics wishes to debate this point, after reading my post above, then be all means do.
Doug Cotton says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:31 pm
“If anyone with tertiary background in physics wishes to debate this point, after reading my post above, then be all means do.”
I sure don’t. You’ve had the logical fallacy in your thinking pointed out on numerous occasions. Rather than coming to grips with it, you prefer to repeat over and over what everyone has already heard dozens of times from you and rejected. So, what’s the point?
Bart says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:58 pm
You’ve had the logical fallacy in your thinking pointed out on numerous occasions.
_________________________________________________
Incorrect. I have demonstrated that all such reasoning was in itself incorrect.
If you can’t be more specific and you don’t understand the physics and mathematical computations involved, then please don’t bother to reply.
People, why do you talk to W. M. Connolley?
It’s like shaking Goebbels’ hand.
Eric:
clear sky conditions allows night sky radiation to reach its maximum potential
_________________________________________
You have a strange idea as to what controls the power of radiation leaving the surface or the roof of the house in this example. All that matters is the emissivity and the temperature difference between the top of the surface (or the roof) and the first millimetre of the air. Molecules in the surface don’t “know” whether the sky is clear or not.
After diffusion, conduction and evaporation have brought the temperatures very close to each other, you can then get an idea of how much might be radiated by using the Steffan-Boltzmann equation, provided you use it correctly and deduct a term based on the temperature of the air. So the closer the two temperatures (perhaps 1 to 2 degrees different) the less is the radiation.
As the relative humidity reduces the lapse rate, and as calmer conditions reduce temperature differences that can be caused by wind, you will get less radiation leaving the surface. So what? This is weather, not climate which is averaged over long periods. But I repeat, it has nothing to do with any radiation from the clouds which makes its way back to the surface where it is merely scattered and has no effect. How many times do I have to explain this to you?
Bart says:
February 17, 2012 at 4:27 pm
I will confirm that it is meaningless, as there is an obvious ~60 year cyclical component in the data, and no basis for assuming it should evolve linearly. It’s worse than meaningless. It’s just plain dumb.
See the graph below. Sorry, I cannot do a sine wave with this tool. So in other words, if I were to ask you what the trend was according to Hadcrut3 since 1996, would you say down since the blue line goes down at the end from 2003.5? I am well aware of the 60 year cycle and agree with you about how meaningless a straight line is. But the warmists would disagree that the last 16 years are down just because the last 8 or so years of those 16 years are down. I agree that we do need better tools. In the meantime, we have to use what we have.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1996/to:2003.5/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2003.5/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1996/trend
Alexander Feht said @ February 17, 2012 at 5:39 pm
Do you know that personally, or did your best friend tell you? 😉
Seriously: “People, why do you talk to W. M. Connolley?” Because of the following:
1. We don’t want to give the impression that we don’t have adequate responses to the points he makes.
2. Countering his arguments, and how that is done, is instructive for the many people here who don’t post comments, but do want to learn what this is all about.
I’m sure that if you give this some thought, and I know you are capable, you should be able to come up with further reasons to engage Connolley and his ilk.
Git,
Nonsense.
Connolley is a professional agent provocateur. He has made those points, and heard all kinds of arguments against them hundreds of thousands of times. He is not interested in arguing any points. He knows better than you do that he is lying through his teeth. He is trolling here, side-tracking attention and choosing targets for web site hacking, smear attacks, creating employment problems, and generally make your life miserable elsewhere. This is his occupation in life, and you will learn nothing but grief from this AGW KGB officer.
P.S. Be careful joking about being personal with Goebbels, Git.
I know several people who were, and they could be very, very offended by what you said.
CROSS POSTED COMMENT – I found a website with “resources related to content analysis and text analysis” that might be useful to crowd source the origin of the “fake but accurate” Heartland document. Think of it like those statistical studies of words/letters used in Shakespeare’s plays to determine who the author really was. Would obviously have to obtain some texts from the leading suspect authors of the “fake but accurate” Heartland document.
I also still think it would be useful to find some sort of barely visible “Yellow Dots of Mystery” forensic pattern in the “fake but accurate” Heartland document (e.g. no “yellow dots of mystery” but perhaps shifting of pixels to code the make, model & serial number of the Epson document scanner). Someone with better contacts than I needs to contact a law enforcement evidence technician or the like. Perhaps a local community college forensics program?
> It’s like shaking Goebbels’ hand.
Godwin. You lose.
Alexander Feht said @ February 17, 2012 at 11:14 pm
I will mock Goebbels all I want you silly person. My father was a “guest” at one of his “holiday camps”, though happily he managed to escape. Please keep your paranoia to yourself; it’s far from amusing.
William M. Connolley said @ February 17, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Mr Connolley, you (the collective you — warmists) lost the day you called us “denialists” and called for “Nuremberg-type trials”.
Git,
A bit of paranoia helped me to survive in some more than unpleasant situations.
And, let me assure you, your amusement is not among the goals I would pay any attention to.
You don’t even understand that it wasn’t Goebbels that you “mocked.”
Life is not a game. It is war.
Alexander Feht said @ February 17, 2012 at 11:14 pm
and @ February 18, 2012 at 1:23 am
Your veiled threats have been recorded Mr Feht; just in case you follow through on them. Meanwhile laissez les bons temps roulez as they say…
Forget about your vulnerable ego for a moment, Git (whatever your real name is). There are no threats here, veiled or unveiled. But you are badly mistaken in your approach toward Connolley.
Let us apply some simple logic here:
You must agree that Connolley has heard all our arguments many times, as we heard many times all the arguments environmental fanatics are capable to concoct. You must agree that Connolley will never concede any of our points, and that finding the truth, scientific, moral, or otherwise, cannot be his goal here.
Ask yourself, then: what is his real goal? What is he doing here, and why?
For me the answer is clear: he is here to make trouble, because his side is losing badly, and he knows it. Powerful establishment machine, with all its money and media resources, still hasn’t found another worthy cause to claim global domination, and Connolley still relies on its support. But now his masters, feeling how weak their position has become, demand more and more from their knaves. Connolley spent most of his adult life in forum flame wars and arcane Wikipedia censorship; he is known to be one of the most skillful trolls and hypocrites among green totalitarians.
Therefore, as his only possible goal here is to cause damage, the best policy would be to ignore him (if Mr. Watts insists on allowing this despicable person to post here). That is all.
The Pompous Git says:
February 17, 2012 at 9:39 pm
Alexander Feht said @ February 17, 2012 at 5:39 pm
It’s like shaking Goebbels’ hand.
Do you know that personally, or did your best friend tell you? 😉
Seriously: “People, why do you talk to W. M. Connolley?” Because of the following:
1. We don’t want to give the impression that we don’t have adequate responses to the points he makes.
2. Countering his arguments, and how that is done, is instructive for the many people here who don’t post comments, but do want to learn what this is all about.
I’m sure that if you give this some thought, and I know you are capable, you should be able to come up with further reasons to engage Connolley and his ilk.
===============
Worries me when people recommend ignoring an aggressor.. Perhaps Mr Feht doesn’t know the joke, ‘how far is it from Lubyanka Square to Siberia?’ One step.
3. From being in the of the forefront of the attack and hierarchy to boot, he will have the latest, if any, misinformation memes as produced by their science fiction department.
Has he shown any such here? Maybe he’s not as hierarchy as he thinks himself. The ‘useful idiots’ were always the first to go once the ‘change of mind’ had been established, knew too much of the workings..
Re: ‘how far is it from Lubyanka Square to Siberia?’
I was born in Siberia, and spent some time on Lubyanka Square.
I don’t find this joke to be funny, and never heard it in Russia.
Alexander Feht said @ February 18, 2012 at 2:48 am
My ego is far from vulnerable nor am I likely to forget it unless I lose consciousness. Since you appear incapable of following the hyperlink, my name is Jonathan Sturm. You can also find me by Googling “pompous git”.
Fine by me.
I doubt that we have heard all their arguments; they appear capable of inventing new ones, otherwise OK.
This is entirely speculative. While it may be true, it is also entirely irrelevant. You haven’t addressed the reasons I gave for allowing Mr Connolley to post here:
1. We don’t want to give the impression that we don’t have adequate responses to the points he makes.
2. Countering his arguments, and how that is done, is instructive for the many people here who don’t post comments, but do want to learn what this is all about.
Anthony allows all sorts of people to post here, “despicable” or not; it’s his blog and his right. The only thing he seems to “insist” on is following the blog rules. Your manifest contempt for people who disagree with you greatly weakens the credibility of anything you might have to say.
The Pompous Git says:
February 18, 2012 at 2:03 am
Alexander Feht says:
February 18, 2012 at 1:21 am
“You don’t even understand that it wasn’t Goebbels that you “mocked.”
I take that to mean that the Nazis were so bad that comparing anyone to them mocks those who suffered. Which is precisely why the Warmists’ use of the “denier” phrase is so offensive.
You guys are on the same side. Stop squabbling.
Personally, though, I agree with The Git – you cannot leave the playing field open to the opposing team. They are classic bullies, and will only retreat when confronted.
Bart said @ February 18, 2012 at 11:57 am
I don’t believe we are. Both Connolley and Feht want opposing views suppressed. I don’t.
I don’t think that people who ban skeptics on their site or within their authority should be given an opportunity to speak here. I think that they should be given the taste of their own medicine.
Yes, it’s Mr. Watts’ business to decide, how he wants to apply his own rules on his site. However, I don’t have to agree with everything he does, and I can express my opinion.
While WUWT is extremely useful and informative most of the time, lately there are developments on WUWT that I find deplorable. Seeing Connolley trolling here, and the unmistakable favoritism toward Mr. Eschenbach, who cajoles outside the rules applicable to everybody else, are among these developments.
Bart, unanimous position is impossible among thinking people. “Consensus” is the opposite of thinking.
Alexander Feht says:
February 18, 2012 at 6:47 am
Re: ‘how far is it from Lubyanka Square to Siberia?’
I was born in Siberia, and spent some time on Lubyanka Square.
I don’t find this joke to be funny, and never heard it in Russia.
I did. In Lubyanka Street.
Or the one, ‘there’s a great view from the Lubyanka’ ‘You can see all the way to Siberia.’
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/1576826
“Yes, it’s Mr. Watts’ business to decide, how he wants to apply his own rules on his site. However, I don’t have to agree with everything he does, and I can express my opinion.”
This is why I like this site. Because, all sides ca express their opinion. Without that there is no debate, no discussion. When I first started investigated this for myself I spent a considerable amount of time just reading such arguments, and checking up on both sides…
Alexander Feht said @ February 18, 2012 at 3:55 pm
Nobody is asking you to agree with everything Anthony does. And you seem to have no problems expressing your opinion. The only problem is you demanding others act on your opinion. And if you find Willis and Connolley so distasteful, you can always go away.
Good Lubyanka joke as told by Putin:
A man came to Lubyanka and said:
– I’m a spy and I want to surrender.
– Who’s spy are you?
– I’m an American spy.
– Well, then you ought to go to room #5.
So he went to room #5 and said:
– I’m an American spy and I want to surrender.
– Do you have any firearms?
– Yes, I do.
– Then you have to go to room #7.
He came to room #7 and said:
– I’m an American spy, I want to surrender and I have a weapon.
– Go to room #10.
He came to room #10 and said:
– I’m a spy, I want to surrender and I have a weapon.
– Do you have a communication device?
– Yes, I do.
– Then go to room #20.
He comes to room #20 and says:
– I’m a spy, I want to surrender, I have a weapon and a communication device.
– Do you have an assignment?
– Yes.
– Well, then go and do it – don’t interrupt people’s work!
Alexander Feht says:
February 18, 2012 at 3:55 pm
“I don’t think that people who ban skeptics on their site or within their authority should be given an opportunity to speak here. I think that they should be given the taste of their own medicine.”
That’s like saying, “I think we should beat ourselves with tire irons, so that they can see how painful it is to watch someone do that to themselves.” One of the biggest reasons the wheels are currently falling off their wagon is that they refuse to engage with critics, and their wits have become as dull and flaccid as their arguments through mental rust and lack of exercise.
If I want to hang out at a site where I can pleasure myself with fantasies of intellectual superiority without any inconveniently lucid commenters barging in to shatter the mood, there are a plethora of sites I could choose from already. We absolutely do not need another, and I would not bother coming here if this were such a site.
There is such a thing as winning the battle but losing the war. The Warmists have won quite a few battles. The war is going very badly for them.
Bart says:
February 18, 2012 at 6:04 pm
That’s like saying, “I think we should beat ourselves with tire irons, so that they can see how painful it is to watch someone do that to themselves.”
No, it’s like not giving out visas to the people who declared war to your country, and keep your citizens in jail without trial. How polite are you going to be to a bandit who robs you at the point of the gun? Stop pretending that we and them are equal in any respect.
Alexander Feht says:
February 19, 2012 at 12:13 am
No, it’s like not giving out visas to the people who declared war to your country, and keep your citizens in jail without trial.
So we shouldn’t let any Americans post here?
How polite are you going to be to a bandit who robs you at the point of the gun? Stop pretending that we and them are equal in any respect.
No it’s not at all like that. It’s like a snake-oil salesman coming into a market place and making his pitch – and those in the crowd, who can see his sleights of hand and understand his conniving spiel, by engaging him directly show him to be what he is. And the rest of us are then educated to the tricks of his trade. We know better why we shouldn’t be buying from him and his ilk.
Myrrh,
You are being disingenuous. We are being robbed, and you know it.
No, I’m certanly not being disingenuous, these are honestly my thoughts on this. Yes of course we are being robbed! My fuel costs have sky-rocketted, not just the car, I’m on oil heating. But he’s one of the ‘useful idiots’, as the Communists dubbed them, he’s not the brains behind this, there’s heavyweight industrial and banking interests playing their own ego trip out on the world stage – even politicians are ‘useful idiots’ for these – they get fobbed off with a few million and think they’re in with the in crowd, but they’re just dupes, puppets, the real manipulators think billions is small change…
How did Connolley get back onto wiki when we were told he was chucked off because of the stink people raised about him changing entries and deleting anything alternative to AGW? He’s back because some want him there doing just what he does, he’s useful to them, he’s altered thousands of entries and still doing so. These people pulling Connolley’s strings want to destroy our non-mega industries, get rid of the ‘middle class’, think the working class shouldn’t be taking holidays abroad.. They’re just your bog standard dictator mindset, kept in power by the useful idiots, and if we don’t point out just how their fictional science doesn’t stack up, then people will think they’re honest and have the people’s best interests at heart and so will continue to believe them..
Let them come.
If they stick around long enough they might even get interested in real science..
http://bigjournalism.com/fross/2010/08/06/the-bbc-takes-a-look-at-soviet-communisms-useful-idiots/
http://www.blacklistednews.com/Occupy_Wall_Street_Protests_Full_Of_Useful_Idiot_Communists_And_Socialists/15972/0/38/38/Y/M.html
> How did Connolley get back onto wiki when we were told he was chucked off because of the stink people raised about him changing entries and deleting anything alternative to AGW?
People haven;t been telling you the truth. Of course, the decision is available in full public view so you could just read it yourself, but you won’t.
[REPLY: Dr. Connolley, maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but a link would be nice. -REP]
Incredible that so many posters to a “science blog” can support such utter nonsense about science. Really, so you really believe that the fact that CO2 is is a small component of the earth’s atmosphere precludes it from acting as a greenhouse gas? Do you really need to attack the simplest scientific facts. It’s posts and responses like this one that strain your credibility
BillD says:
February 20, 2012 at 3:24 am
Incredible that so many posters to a “science blog” can support such utter nonsense about science. Really, so you really believe that the fact that CO2 is is a small component of the earth’s atmosphere precludes it from acting as a greenhouse gas? Do you really need to attack the simplest scientific facts. It’s posts and responses like this one that strain your credibility
================
What sort of thermal blanket do you use? One which is practically 100% holes? It’s your view that strains credibility…
Carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle, the main greenhouse gas is water – without water the Earth would be 67%deg;C, can you do the arithmetic? This means that greenhouse gases cool the Earth. Think deserts.
Earth without atmosphere: -18°C
Earth with our atmosphere: 15°C
Earth with our atmosphere but minus water: 67°C
= Greenhouse gases cool the earth by 52°C.
Just what warming do you, rationally and logically, think that carbon dioxide which is a trace gas has against the great cooling effect of the greenhouse gas water?
All rain is pure clean carbonic acid. Any carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will join with rising lighter than air water vapour taking heat away from the Earth’s surface and condensing in the colder heights, releasing its heat to come down as rain or snow.