The "well funded" climate business – follow the money

Accuse the other side of exactly the things you are doing before they get to do it 1st. It’s probably one of Saul Allinsky’s rules. The sad part is that It often works.

It is actually amazing that climate skeptics by using the internet and basically crowd sourcing of information have had such an impact on the debate….despite the funding of the climate change industrial complex by the various governments around the world.

I think the words, “Follow the money” apply here.
I would be interesting to see the comparison of how much government money is being spent on any research that might show the opposite of the CO2 AGW theory.

Here is the wake up call for all Americans, well past time the media recognised this, and did its duty to bring this rort to a halt. Trenberth can call travesty because his heat is missing. just like the data they hid and distorted. But what is really missing is the integrity of science mired in a trough of money that corruptly bought many Climate scientists body and soul.
Thank goodness that we have had a few outstanding sceptical scientists that stood against the tide of corrupt influences, fought to unravel the web of deception and hypocracy. Time to reform science under new leaders.
The deception started in America, was refined in the UK , corruptly spread to serve the agenda of those who want to destroy the great economies of the world. It will take decades to undo the vandalism to our world temperature historical records and restore respect to climate science..
Not to mention the vast waste of monies driven by the ego and agenda of those who stood to profit by this misadventure. That money could have done so much more if properly and wisely used.
Time to metaphorically tip them out of their self promoted false temples.

izen, are you referring to the PR site, realclimate?

Izen: When you only spend money on research to PROVE AGW, all that is considered to be money spent to promote AGW.
And if you want to cut to the chase, look at the IPCC’s mandate.

That would be flak jacket. Flap jackets are filled with pancakes, not kevlar. They are quite useful when caught behind enemy lines ’cause you can eat them when you get hungry. Kevlar, not so much.

Actually, my first attempt at pancakes many decades ago could have been used as a substitute for kevlar.

To even better put it in context, $6BB a year buys you a new carrier not counting the NRE of new classes like the Gerald Ford or their air wing. We presently have 11 commissioned carriers. That means that over the last 4 years we could have completely recapitalized the core of our surface navy with this money. If that doesn’t make you sick, I’m not sure what will.

Would anything really have been any different with McCain?
Archived-Articles: An open letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html
Tires, steel and now solar panels. Trade wars in the past have actually cost jobs.
http://articles.businessinsider.com/keyword/tariffs/recent/3
And Romney just regurgitates talking points from Donald Trump. Best to never trash your trade agreements that protect your businesses in the first place.

Notice the dramatic jump from $20 million per year under Reagan to $1 billion per year under Big Bush for ‘climate endangerment findings’. This is a bi-partican rip off where earmarked ‘green’ tax dollars get laundered to be campaign contributions. This has never been about honest scientific inquiry, but ONLY about slave science providing the Carbon shackles and chains for the, admitted by Big Bush, “New World Order”….and that ‘order’ is all-powerful, unelected, one-world feudal government.

Redemocrats are a dime a dozen. McCain being one of them, and Romney. So no, it would not have been better. My voting dilemma is that Obama is hoping for a split vote among those of us entirely disenfranchised by the current president as we vote for the other side, literally in desparation. If Romney wants my vote, he will have to put Ron Paul on his ticket. Otherwise, no deal.

…the Obama administration has been focused on “green” defense projects to the detriment of the military.
And the taxpayers. SecNav Ray Mabus purchased 450,000 gallons of biofuel for $12 million to “help reduce the Navy’s dependence on Middle Eastern oil.” We’re paying over $26 per gallon for something that the Navy *can’t burn* in its turbines until it’s cut 50/50 with JP-8 — jet fuel — which costs about $3 per gallon.
The kicker is, you can run a ship’s turbine just as efficiently on #2 heating oil that costs about $2.79 per gallon…

@- JimB says:
” When you only spend money on research to PROVE AGW, all that is considered to be money spent to promote AGW.”
I find it difficult to see how something like the GRACE satellite system which measures small gravity changes can be construed as specifically intended to ‘PROVE’ AGW. Proof is for liquor and mathematics.
That much of the data supports AGW that comes from the GRACE projects is just a result of reality having a well known liberal bias….
[grin]

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 8:58 am
it will STILL be warmer than all my teenage years, all the years of my twenties, all the decade when I was in my thirties and all of my forties…
============================
You felt a 1/2 degree!!!!…………………….rotfl

Tsk Tsk says:
May 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
And then there are these two items for consideration:
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/05/18/americas-aging-aviation-force-father-son-flew-same-fighter-jet-30-years-apart/
and
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-face-genocidal-eco-fascism

AGW advocates are the suckers W.C. Fields laughed about, they just keep coming back to be kicked. It seems they take turns showing up here with their half truths and wild speculations and expect some to believe them. We, on the side of true science, have long ago learned to examine everything and accept nothing at face value. By the way, we in northwest Oregon , are experienceing a beautiful and average spring. We have had decent pollenization and the weather to promote good fruit crops. I thank a loving God for that. I believe all science leads back to him.

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 8:58 am
@- Werner Brozek says:
“You say AGW is a significant problem? And you say it is expensive to back up the claim that it it not a significant problem? That is no problem! Here is proof that warming has stopped between 10 years and 7 months to 15 years and 6 months ago, depending on your source.”
I admire the effort you have taken to show that there is little evidence of a warming trend in the last 10-15 years of some temperature indices. Personally I keep an eye of the seal level, ocean heat content and SSts as they represent over 80% of the energy that will shape the climate.
But there is another reason I find your numbers unpersuasive.
I am a little older than ten years old, Its 40 years since I was a teenager and I do remember those decades. I would be much more sanguine about the possible future trends in the climate if every decade since I was 10 years old had not been warmer than the last. However cold 2012 may be, and wherever in the rankings it may end up (ENSO will have a big influence), it will STILL be warmer than all my teenage years, all the years of my twenties, all the decade when I was in my thirties and all of my forties…
Do you think there is ANY prospect I will see a winter as cold as the years of my youth again ?

So let us understand your position. Personally you think it is getting warmer (in your particular part of the world). There are some in the Mongolia area and some in South America who have lost many many head of cattle which froze to death who may disagree with you; however, for you it is warmer.
Yet when the figures are eventually pulled out of the unwilling hands of the climate ‘scientists’ who have used public money to collect them, it is found that they do NOT show hockey sticks or runaway warming. NONE of their expensively produced predictions/projections/forecasts have come true; there is no tropical tropospheric hotspot, no billions of refugees. Not only that but the emails that have been leaked – and accepted as genuine – show that these ‘scientists’ spent a lot of time knowingly misusing statistics and doctoring the figures with ‘tricks’ when they found that the proxies they had been using were not validated by actual measurements.
Tell us here Izen why such people who hide and manipulate their data should be trusted when their results have been used to justify reducing the energy available to people such that energy poverty exists even in rich countries like Germany? .Up to 200 old people a day dying due to energy poverty in UK (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/22/older-people-cold-energy-bills). And why? Because politicians convinced by the published ‘research results’ of climate ‘scientists’ are spending huge amounts of money on windmills and closing viable power generation systems. And in the USA the EPA is using these ‘convincing research results’ to close down entire industries.
Yet at the same time, in the real world which you ignore – “A child dies every 3 seconds, a mother every minute”:, Of these “Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.” and $1 can save a life.(so that means by the time you have read here probably 20 children and 3 mothers HAVE DIED)
Now Izen justify why — with the total failure of climate ‘science’ to forecast anything correctly and the continual and continued hiding of data these people have obtained using public funds — why they should be provided any further funding? How many of those lives could that $68Billion have saved? Why should anything they say be trusted? Why should the world do _anything_ about climate change when the anomaly over 30 years is less than a degree centigrade (even that increase has leveled off in the last 10 years)?
(And of course as there is a world wide drop in humidity – that entire ‘global temperature anomaly’ could be due just to the lower atmospheric enthalpy and nothing to do with trapped energy at all! ).
In another 20 years time I would hope that your memories are not regrets.

izen, if that half of a degree is not irrelevant, then what about the ten degrees (C) difference which occurred during the Holocene Climate Optimum? Why did it not precipitate the catatastrophic consequences we keep being told about, for 2 degrees of change?

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 9:38 am
Because while the temperature difference may be too small to sense with my skin or a household thermometer it has easy to sense, and experience the effects on my surroundings.
===================================
The preceding public service announcement was brought to you by Smith Kline…….

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 9:38 am
The type of animals and plants change, and when they flower or migrate.
Nature is doing what nature always does — it changes. We live on a dynamic planet, not a static one. When I was a kid, there were still groves of birch trees on Long Island. My father told me that they would be gone within a decade, because they were “cold soil” trees, and the world had been getting warmer since the 1800s. He told me that back in 1954.
Winter sights and sports are changing.
Yes, they are. Luge wasn’t an Olympic event until 1964. As for winter sights disappearing, did I miss the news that it didn’t snow anywhere it normally snows? We had snow covering most of Iraq in 2008 for the first time in a century. There’s still snow on the south face of the mountains around Kabul, and it’s the middle of May — I’m told it’s usually gone by the last week in April.
And changes in rainfall associated with the warming are altering whole regions.
From your link: “Wintertime droughts are increasingly common in the Mediterranean region, and human-caused climate change is partly responsible, according to a new analysis by NOAA scientists and colleagues at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).” and ” ‘The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,’ said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.” First, NOAA is a governmental agency, and in this administration, it has a vested interest in keeping up the fiction of AGW. Second, anyone who claims that something is “too great to be explained by natural variability alone” is talking through his hat — not all that long ago, the largest desert on Earth was a huge savannah interspersed with boreal forest.
With such obvious, and large-scale changes in the physical and biological environment the inadequacy of the human skin or a household thermometer to record these decadel changes seems… irrelevant?
Yup. Irrelevant. The climate has been changing since Earth first had an atmosphere, and not always in tenths of a degree per decade, and some of the temperature swings that happened before humans ever appeared make the IPCC’s scariest predictions look like a goldfish in the orca tank at Sea World by comparison.

I guess the sum total of Smokey’s comment is this: If Sen. Inhofe posts something from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) then we can believe it without question but if Richard Lugar posts something straight from the CRS we can ignore it because, although Richard Lugar is a Republican, he is not ideologically-pure enough to satisfy Smokey.

@- Otter says:
“izen, if that half of a degree is not irrelevant, then what about the ten degrees (C) difference which occurred during the Holocene Climate Optimum? Why did it not precipitate the catatastrophic consequences we keep being told about, for 2 degrees of change?”
But that is rather the point. The massive rise in temperature from the previous glacial period into the Holocene climate optimum was catastrophic for the human social system of tribal hunter-gathers with nomadic pasturalism which had been ticking over stably for several tens of thousands of years through a couple of ice ages.
By the way, if you think the paleoclimate record indicates a ten degree C rise at the Holocene melt then you would need to adjust climate sensitivity upward accordingly and allow for a ~3degC rise from the energy imbalance produced by rising CO2.
It was replaced with intensive agriculture and cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants with all the civic governance and specialization that generates. The emergence and evolution of agriculture based societies and the subsequent development of industrial – technological civilization has happened during a uncharacteristically stable period of inter-glacial warming.
Its a question of timescales.
True over millions of years the climate may change far more. But the present complexity, and value of human civilization is rooted in its agricultural infrastructure. That in turn is built around an assumption of stability. It is all that has been known for the total history of agriculture. On those occasions when the climate did become unstable, or change it could destroy a society. (Chaco canyon, Mayan, Viking!)
I rather like living in an advanced technological society. I believe ( I have no proof) that it would be a good thing for more people to share my advantages both now and in the future. Doing that with finite resources and risks to the stable climate which underpins the agricultural foundation of the social complexity providing those benefits is difficult. One obvious problem that all reputable scientific advisory bodies have indicated poses a threat to the progress we have made since the Holocene maximum is the large geochemical change we have made to the atmosphere and the implications that has for the climate.
That change is happening is undeniable.
But it is uncertain how much more change will happen, and how robust or adaptable our agricultural infrastructure will have to become.
Thirty years ago many people made predictions about what the present would be like based on the knowledge they had at the time. Here’s one example. –
Summary. The global temperature rose by 0.20C between the middle 1960’s and
1980, yielding a warming of 0.4°C in the past century. This temperature increase is
consistent with the calculated greenhouse effect due to measured increases of
atmospheric carbon dioxide. Variations of volcanic aerosols and possibly solar
luminosity appear to be primary causes of observed fluctuations about the mean trend
of increasing temperature. It is shown that the anthropogenic carbon dioxide warming
should emerge from the noise level of natural climate variability by the end of the
century, and there is a high probability of warming in the 1980’s. Potential effects on
climate in the 21st century include the creation of drought-prone regions in North
America and central Asia as part of a shifting of climatic zones, erosion of the West
Antarctic ice sheet with a consequent worldwide rise in sea level, and opening of the
fabled Northwest Passage.
Science as a body of shared knowledge has become almost unanimous in recognising this prediction as accurate. It is based on textbook physics on energy transfer that has been unchanged for at least two generations of undergraduate students in the physical sciences.
Whatever reason that 99% of scientific research attributes as the CAUSE of global warming and climate change, 99% agree temperatures, sea level, rainfall and weather extremes are all going to increase. I understand that some dismiss that as the result of group-think, fraud or political collusion. But given the necessicty of adapting to the present climate changes, the conspicuous abscence of any coherent hypothesis justifying a return to the climate of the past and the other problems of finite fossil fuels, reducing reliance on CO2 emitting energy production appears rational.
At least.
@- Smokey says:
“Warming isn’t the problem. Cooling is.”
ANY change that exceeds the adaptability of our agricultural infrastructure is a problem.
Sea level rise will impact coastal trade and farming too.
Cooling would certainly be a problem. But it seems to be conspicuous by its absence. Do you know of any credible source with a cogent argument that cooling is likely, or even possible ?

@- Latitude says:
“The real shame is most of that money was wasted on duplicate studies…
….I’m sure most of the money went for duplicate studies”
I think it is highly unlikely that any studies where exact duplicates.
Almost always there are differences in the raw data, the processing or the interpretation between different studies even if they are studying the same thing. And that is usually considered beneficial in the rest of science….
After all, if the Mann hockey stick had not been ‘duplicated’ but with many different sources of data and methodologies such as this recent example –
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/news/news/2012-05-17_1000years_graph.html
It would not have the credibility it has from the validation of similar results from different data and methodologies!
-grin-

Mickey Mouse Science!! LOL!

Izen, the globe has been warming since the Little Ice Age. It is not shocking to find recent years the warmest.
ALL of my tallest years havew been since I was eighteen!

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 8:58 am
Personally I keep an eye …..ocean heat content and SSts as they represent over 80% of the energy that will shape the climate.
I see that others have responded to other parts of your post, but I would like to comment on the above. First of all, with regards to sea surface temperatures, that was one of the seven I mentioned and it happened to be one of the longer ones with a slope of 0. See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1995/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997/trend
Its slope for the last 15 years and 3 months is:
“#Selected data from 1997
#Least squares trend line; slope = -0.000155319 per year”
And if you look at the last data point, 0.242, and where the flat line is, 0.33, I am confident that when the April and May numbers are in, that the time will be extended to 15 years and 5 months with a slope of 0. But we will have to wait and see to be sure.
Now as for ocean heat content, I assume you saw the recent WUWT post at:
wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/16/trenberths-missing-heat-still-missing-new-paper-shows-a-flat-ocean-temperature-trend-0-09c-over-the-past-55-years
So if the temperature went up 0.09 C over 55 years, it would take over 1200 years to go up 2 C at that rate. Where is the “significant problem” with that?

@- Solomon Green says:
“izen is probably a little too young to remember the forecasts of the climate community in the sixties and seventies. This site might help him”
On the contrary I lapped it all up as a scifi devouring geek!
But there were claims from BOTH directions at the time, in fact the mainstream scientific opinion then was predicting warming.
However I always liked the iconoclasts and remember reading Fred Hoyles book ‘Ice’ on the dangers of a new ice age.
While I would claim some precociousness in my reading as a child, I was certainly NOT capable of reading this which was published just about 4 months after my birth! –
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/weekinreview/warm1956.pdf
@-Werner Brozek says:
“First of all, with regards to sea surface temperatures, that was one of the seven I mentioned and it happened to be one of the longer ones with a slope of 0.”
Only if you are selective with the start date.
try using the year of your birth… ?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1956/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1956/trend
It may be arbitrarily subjective, but it provides a good indication of what has happened in ones own lifetime.
@-“Now as for ocean heat content, I assume you saw the recent WUWT post at:
wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/16/trenberths-missing-heat-still-missing-new-paper-shows-a-flat-ocean-temperature-trend-0-09c-over-the-past-55-years
So if the temperature went up 0.09 C over 55 years, it would take over 1200 years to go up 2 C at that rate. Where is the “significant problem” with that?”
I think you have mistaken the claims made in that case.
The rough magnitude of the increase in the ocean heat content is not really in doubt, even if the ability and accuracy of our measurement methods is uncertain.
Sea level rise puts hard constraints on the changes in heat content. There is only so much land-ice that can melt to cause a rise, and only so much evaporation and extra land flooding to offset the rise from thermal expansion.
You can reduce the amount of energy the oceans have gained by attributing more of the sea level rise to ice melt and reduced precipitation on land, or slower water cycle. But observational data on both global ice melt and precipitation limit the ratio ascribable to those causes.
That just leaves ‘Waters from the Deep…’ ?!

izen said (May 19, 2012 at 8:58 am)
“…However cold 2012 may be, and wherever in the rankings it may end up (ENSO will have a big influence), it will STILL be warmer than all my teenage years, all the years of my twenties, all the decade when I was in my thirties and all of my forties…
Do you think there is ANY prospect I will see a winter as cold as the years of my youth again?..”
In your limited life-span, you’ve seen warmer years as you’ve gotten older.
Look at GISS. If you had made that statement in the 80’s, you would have compared it to temps in the 40’s. Your question would have rightly been “Do you think there is ANY prospect I will see a summer as warm as the years of my youth again?”.

izen, your response to my question suggests you would prefer to go back to the ice ages. I’d rather it got a bit warmer.

Proud to be an Oklahoman… where common sense still reigns.
Please help voting Obama and his ilk out of politics. It is very clear they are systematically destroying our great country, across the board, and to the detriment of all who actually like this country.

It looks like these expenditures definitely outclass the apparent misguided Nixon-Ford-Carter era spending on the doomed liquid metal cooled, fast (plutonium) breeder reactor project . . .
Ref: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/11/if-obama-is-going-to-kill-coal-he-has-to-hide-the-body/#comment-985305

@- Werner Brozek says:
“And if the warming was the same 70 years ago as now, then the sea level rise should have been the same as well. ”
Interesting point.
But if the causes were different it does not follow that the rate of sea level rise would be the same. In fact it goes to the matter of attribution. A change in solar energy would have caused thermal expansion of the oceans but less land based ice melt at the poles because its dominant effect is in the tropics.
CO2 warming on the other hand has the ‘fingerprint’ of more warming at higher latitudes where the glaciers and ice-caps are. So sea level rise would be greater because the thermal expansion is accompanied by more ice-melt rise.
The historical data is not definitive, but does indicate a small rate of rise in the beginning of the 1900s after several thousand years of minimal variation. Followed by a much faster trend when temperatures started to rise again in the 70s.

“”””” drugsandotherthings says:
May 19, 2012 at 8:25 am
ah yes- the same CRC that states:
Virtually all scientists conclude that most of the recent warming is due to human activities, driven by emissions of such greenhouse gases (GHG) as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and other air pollutants, as well as land use changes…..models project GHG-driven change to have important impacts on regional economies, human safety and health, and ecosystems, with the potential for surprising and abrupt shifts.
And wow really? The “poor military”. 68.4 billion on climate in over 4 years- which is 1/10th of the military budget- not including the military related costs that can more then double actual expenditures. “””””
Well druggy, the explanation is quite simple, and readily available for anyone to read, in Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution; first paragraph even.
The “poor military” is one of only two things the Congress is authorised to raise taxes to pay for; the other being to pay the national debt.
Sorry; nowhere is the Congress authorised to levy one penny of taxes to pay for climate activities, nor for that matter, for drugs and other things.
We’d all be able to afford to live high on the hog (those of us who work), if we were only paying for the “poor military”, and leave the rest to private enterprise; including drugs and other things. Climate can take care of itself so it needn’t cost us a penny.

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 12:01 pm
After all, if the Mann hockey stick had not been ‘duplicated’ but with many different sources of data and methodologies such as this recent example –
http://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/news/news/2012-05-17_1000years_graph.html
It would not have the credibility it has from the validation of similar results from different data and methodologies!
======
I’ll give you that one…….because they duplicated mann’s hockey stick….including splicing real temp measurements onto the end of a paleo reconstruction
You see anything wrong with that?……………..

trbixler says:
May 19, 2012 at 7:41 am
Obama’s green agenda will leave the U.S bankrupt and defenseless.
_____________________________
Of course. That is the plan. How else are you going to impose “Global Governance” where the USA abandons its sovereignty? The goal is to convince people that the US Constitution is subordinate to “treaties” and global governance.
….Secretary of State John Foster Dulles promulgated what some call the “Dulles Doctrine” that treaties, executive agreements, and votes in the United Nations, could effectively amend the U.S. Constitution and expand the powers of the federal government without limit….
Is International Law Really Law?
Heck the CIA is even in on the plans of moving the USA towards “Global Governance” This was found using FOIA. Here are some links:
Original url: http://www.foia.cia.gov/2025/2025_Global_Governance.pdf
Foia Cia Gov Global Governance 2025 At A Critical Juncture Inquiries Regarding This Report May Be Made To Mathew BurrowsCounselor To The National Intelligence Councilon 703 May 19th, 0711 Download and Read Online Of PDF Files http://www.freeownersmanualpdf.net/ebook/foia-cia-gov.pdf
The National Intelligence Council also released a copy with an explanation: http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_home.html
Who the “The National Intelligence Council” is: http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_about.html
Who is the “Intelligence Community”: http://www.intelligence.gov/about-the-intelligence-community/
On the one hand they say:
“The men and women of the Intelligence Community (IC) are the frontline of defense against hostile actions aimed at the United States. Our workforce collects, analyzes and distributes information to America’s decision makers that saves lives and secures the Nation.” Source
And on the other hand they say: Our Community:A global network of thousands of people working together
Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, at a speech at Oxford University on March 8, 2012: Spotlight on Sovereignty
Lamy calls for strengthened system of global governance 15 March 2010: http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/sppl_e/sppl149_e.htm
Our Global Neighborhood: Report of the U.N. Commission on Global Governance
Analysis: link
From Carroll Quigley to the UN Millennium Summit: link
If the USA is economic and militarily weak then she may be forced into giving up the US Constitution and become a “member state” of the UN instead of a sovereign state, where either the United Nations or the World Trade Organization becomes an overarching body similar to the European Union only more so. Pascal Lamy explains exactly what the plan is.
https://theglobaljournal.net/article/view/56/
Other references:
Global Network Schools: http://globalschoolsnetwork.org/

@- AJB says:
“Izen, an old Chinese proverb for you: 三十年河東,三十年河西
You’re only forty. Give it another couple of decades and check your perspective again.”
Check your math, four more years in the middle, not waving but drowning!
-grin-

Pamela Gray says: @ May 19, 2012 at 8:26 am
….This report by the honorable Senator has me dander up and red hair flaming!!!!!
______________________
My hair isn’t red but I am behind you 100%. One of the few legitimate uses for my taxes is to support a standing army. However I am not happy we are over their in the first place.
If the USA had spent the piddling little amount to follow through on the research on thorium back in 1964 instead of tossing Dr. Alvin Weinberg out, we would not be having to fight wars over resources.
http://energyfromthorium.com/history.html
LFTR in 5 Minutes – THORIUM REMIX 2011 (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbucAwOT2Sc

George Daddis says:

Even if there were actually claims from both sides in the 70s (which does not seem to be supported by scientific literature or the popular press of the time, but I’m open to correction), does it not worry you that those most vocal on the “it’s getting colder!” side included John Holdren, the President’s current science Czar, his mentor Paul Ehrlich, a current science “advisor”, and Erhlichs mentor, the late Steven Schneider, a hero to the current climate change crowd?

You are right in the sense that the claims were not evenly split in the scientific literature on both sides in the 70s. In fact, there were more scientists talking of warming than cooling: http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/Myth-1970-Global-Cooling-BAMS-2008.pdf
As for Schneider, he published one paper in the early 70s, the first of its kind that tried to quantify the various climatic effects using a primitive model. And, their first attempt at quantification did predict that the cooling effects of aerosols would be larger than the warming effects of CO2. However, it is important to remember that in the early 70s, it was not obvious that the U.S. and other Western nations would adopt the Clean Air Act and other legislation that put aerosol emissions from those nations on a totally different path than what was true up until then. (In addition to this, they apparently made another error that underestimated the warming effect of CO2.) Within a year or two after that, Schneider realized his prediction was erroneous and did what any good scientist does when confronted by evidence that contradicts their hypothesis.
When the National Academy of Sciences was asked to weigh in on climate change in the mid 70s, they issued a report that cogently outlined the various cooling and warming effects on climate and then stated that it was premature to be able to predict which of these effects would win out and thus what the future course of climate would be. They called for more research but no direct action to try to mitigate climate change. This is in direct contrast to what they are saying over 35 years later, which is that we now have a much better handle on the problem and that global warming is a serious threat that we must address with meaningful actions.
So, what lesson does should people take away from this history? I think one learns a few things:
(1) Don’t take Newsweek or other popular media as your source of scientific information. Ask the scientific community (through, e.g., NAS) to give you their expert opinion.
(2) While a few individual scientists might have had strong opinions about where they thought the climate was headed, the National Academy of Sciences correctly distilled that information to produce a report that has held up very well over time…and they were not shy about saying where the uncertainties were simply too large to make a prediction.
Overall, we can see that the scientific community as a whole came out looking quite good in retrospect…although popular journalism not so much.

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 4:03 pm
Can you think of any candidates ?
Yes, around that time, the US and USSR were testing many bombs and then treaties were drawn up to limit them. But I do not know how relevant this is since climate seems to go in 60 year cycles anyway. See
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/akasofu_ipcc.jpg

@- Werner Brozek says:
“Yes, around that time, the US and USSR were testing many bombs and then treaties were drawn up to limit them.”
Discussed before –
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/04/claim-nuclear-tests-stopped-global-warming-in-the-20th-century/

@- Smokey says:
“Here -[link]- are Phil Jones’ trends in chart form.
And the red arrows are very pretty.
Do they have any (mathematical?) relationship to the data they are drawn over ?
They don’t correspond to the list of dates and trends in the bottom left of the graphic…
This (tinyed) woodfortrees link however does have a mathematical relationship between the two flat and two steep trend lines that can be imposed on the Phil Jones’ temperature data.
http://tinyurl.com/ck7xk8j
But unless there is a physical explanation for specific date selection such arbitrary parsing of the data is meaningless.

“The Congressional Research Service estimates that ‘since 2008’ the federal government has spent nearly $70 billion on “climate change activities.”
———-
Shouldn’t that read “through 2008….”
I hope.

izen says:
May 19, 2012 at 7:45 am
………………………….
Its cheap to post articles and print essays rejecting the statements by every national science advisory group that climate change/AGW is a significant problem.

[my bold]
Off course they do. Now look again at the amounts of money involved and that’s not to mention countries around the world and you will understand why there is a consensus. Finally, consensus has absolutely nothing to do with science.
Please go look up information on Continental Drift / Plate Techtonics and Helicobacter Pylori and you should understand that consensus has nothing to do with science. Authority has nothing to do with science.

izen says:
May 20, 2012 at 4:36 am
“But for a mainstream condition, well understood and explained with solid evidential support for over fifty years we would be extremely foolish to reject the consensus and authority that has accumulated around the problem.”
The only problem is that the CO2+water vapor AGW theory has made only the prediction that water vapor content should rise as a consequence of rising CO2 and that the tropospheric height should rise. And both of these are falsified. This means: Theory kaput.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/simple-disproof-of-runaway-greenhouse.html
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2012/03/simple-disproof-of-runaway-greenhouse.html?showComment=1332558067400#c2031512486689428024

izen says:
May 20, 2012 at 4:36 am
Both consensus and authority are key aspects of science and we all use them to inform our understanding and decisions.
Consensus is a political concept, not a scientific one. All it means is that — regardless of the presence or absence of evidence — a majority of some defined group believe something. Consensus necessitates having a belief in something, and that belief need not be proven. I remember when the “medical consensus” flipped from “coffee is okay” to “coffee is bad for you but decaffeinated coffee is okay” back to “coffee is okay.” There was no *evidence* for the “coffee is bad for you but decaf is okay” belief, but that was the consensus.
And that consensus was formed by advertising agencies who were hired by the makers of Decaf to push their product. Those who believed the consensus were somewhat shocked a few years later when they discovered that coffee beans were soaked in formaldehyde in order to neutralize the caffeine, and they’d essentially been drinking dilute embalming fluid in order to “be healthy.”
The way we attribute authority to someone can be tricksy — someone whose field of expertise is the novels of Charles Dickens and the Bronte sisters may not know squat about Christina Rosetti, but he’s very likely to have the press designate him as an authority on Victorian literature based solely on the fact that your average MSM scribbler equates Dickens and the Brontes with “Victorian Literature.”

izen: “ANY change that exceeds the adaptability of our agricultural infrastructure is a problem.”
I’ve done a fair share of farming during my life. Let me tell you that if the climate would suddenly turn 2 degrees warmer, (even during a few years), farmers would greet it as a positive thing. The results would be increased productivity.
We choose what we produce, based on the climate. If it is warmer, it gives us bigger harvests and lets us choose from a wider variety of grains. If it is colder, we choose grains that can cope with a shorter growing season. If it gets really warm, we can even start getting two harvests in a year instead of one.
There’s absolutely no point in being scared of a warmer climate because of agriculture.

_Jim says:

Joel D. Shore – is this __THE__ ‘Joel Shore’?
Why the image change … a ‘repackage’ for some reason?

Because this website has been asking me to log in with my WordPress account. And, when I do that, that is what WordPress puts up as my id.

But, what if they are quoting a source or citing a reference? You know, a living source like a Michael Mann, a Keith Briffa, a James Hansen or a Gavin Schmidt?
What then? Is it still “Don’t take Newsweek or other popular media as your source of ______” (fill in the blank as required)?
What then if it is a Steve McIntyre or Lindzen that is quoted or their work that is cited?

I think that quotes from anybody in the popular media should not be taken too seriously The science is best summarized in reports produced by reputable scientific organizations like IPCC, NAS, Royal Society, etc.

Gail Combs says:

joeldshore says…..
Trying to rewriting history again Joel?

I gave you a peer-reviewed paper that surveys the peer-reviewed literature of that time. If you don’t believe it to be correct, find all of those peer-reviewed papers that they left out.

I was alive and reading Scientific American and Popular Science etc back then. Even the science fiction magazine Analog had a “Snowball Earth” short story that was rather gruesome. All the stories back then were about the coming Ice Age. Heck Kukla and Mathews warned President Nixon and the CIA looked into it.

I was talking about the peer-reviewed literature, not the popular media…although as pointed out in the paper that I linked to, the discussions in the popular media were more split than those who really are rewriting history would have one believe. For example, the 1973 movie Soylent Green had as one of its premises that we had caused global warming. And, the book “Hothouse Earth” was published in 1975.

Joel you lose all credibility when you try to pedal propaganda meant to rewrite history. Even “Your Side” agrees that we are at the tail end of the present interglacial.

Actually, there is considerable debate on the issue of whether we are really that close to the tail end. The best analog for the current interglacial in terms of the various orbital parameters is one several (~400?) thousand years ago that lasted considerably longer.
However, it is also not contradictory to anything I was saying. While most scientists agreed that the long term natural trend would be toward a new ice age, they also recognized that this was over longer timescales and in the absence of anthropogenic effects. For example, Hays et al.’s pivotal paper in Science in 1976 on the Milankovitch cycles and climate ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/194/4270/1121.abstract ) made it clear that their prediction of cooling was over long timescales and ignoring any anthropogenic effects:

Future climate. Having presented evidence that major changes in past climate were associated with variations in the geometry of the earth’s orbit, we should be able to predict the trend of future climate. Such forecasts must be qualified in two ways. First, they apply only to the natural component of future climatic trends-and not to such anthropogenic effects as those due to the burning of fossil fuels. Second, they describe only the long-term trends, because they are linked to orbital variations with periods of 20,000 years and longer. Climatic oscillations at higher frequencies are not predicted.
One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in an exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar’s (39) astronomical projections, the results indicate that the longterm trend over the next 20,000 years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate (80).

People like George Will have quoted part of the last sentence while ignoring the rest of what they said because it is inconvenient for their myth.

tjfolkerts says: @ May 20, 2012 at 7:44 am….
_________________________________
Then how do you explain Dr Jaworowski being refused funding when he wanted to look into CO2 measurements done in ice cores and whether they were valid?

Until now such a scrutiny was not done. A project on such experimental study in Norway was dumped before it started in 1994, because it was defined as “immoral” by a high rank governmental bureaucrat (see Chapter 7 in: (Solomon, 2008).
http://www.co2web.info/NZCPR-08.pdf

Caspar and the Jesus paper is another example.
Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing Resigns from Fallout Over Our Paper is an additional example.
There are also all the Climategate e-mails were “The Team” discussed how to keep skeptics from publishing and how to keep skeptic papers out of the IPCC reports.
So yes some of that funding might have gone to actually funding science but it was still twisted to suit the agenda or trashed.
The Goat ate my homework
“Adjusting” data graph

Kev-in-UK says:
May 20, 2012 at 9:01 am
Those commenters that have tried to respond to izen have seemingly wasted their efforts! He just izen’t getting it!
Sure, he iz — %$#@! — is. That’s why he talks about Revell and ocean surface tension being a barrier to CO2 absorbtion, then nips behind the curtain for a quick change into “woe is me, I’ll never see another cold winter” and then pops behind thoe Ormolu screen to emerge spouting such nonsense as consensus being a crucial element in science.
He’s flailing.

izen:
Careful of the trump card.
Eventually, all your sources cited could become invalidated in this comment thread if someone claims all peer reviewed journals/organizations are corrupted and only contrarian blogs are acceptable citations.

Then how do you explain Dr Jaworowski being refused funding when he wanted to look into CO2 measurements done in ice cores and whether they were valid?

Where have we heard these sorts of complaints about discrimination before? Oh, I know, we’ve heard it with every scientific hypothesis or pseudoscientific hypothesis which has lost in the scientific competition of ideas: http://executableoutlines.com/cc/cc_08.htm
We explain Dr Jaworowski not getting funding by the fact that his work is ridiculous nonsense.

The money is really important but I notice that the chart stops around 2009. Would it be possible to regularly update this data? Say quarterly?

joeldshore says:
May 20, 2012 at 5:47 pm
Actually, the media have given way more “play” to people like Patrick Michaels and Richard Lindzen than they get through legitimate scientific means. It is because of the media’s desire for “balance”.
Which media? The media’s desire is to be *perceived* as balanced, but most of the fishwrappers — the Scripps-Howard chain, in particular — don’t even make the effort to pretend anymore. The NYT is bleeding circulation numbers because it is so obviously in the tank for the Democrats and their agenda, including pushing the notion that AGW is an established fact rather than just one more unproven theory.

joeldshore says:
May 20, 2012 at 5:38 pm
“Then how do you explain Dr Jaworowski being refused funding when he wanted to look into CO2 measurements done in ice cores and whether they were valid?”
We explain Dr Jaworowski not getting funding by the fact that his work is ridiculous nonsense.
Nice. You disagree with Dr. Jaworowski’s premise that the sun, rather than an increase in CO2, warms the Earth and then link to a creationist paper as an example of how ridiculous you consider his premise?
Are you always this intellectually bankrupt?

Joeldshore
Nice to see you again Joel.
I have often commented that you-and many on the cagw side -appear to lack a solid knowledge of history, its players and the various works and observations that have become the basis of climate science over the centuries. Unfortunately the Lambian view of the world-of which I am a minor strand- became unfashionable 20 years ago and were replaced by computers,maths, models and the more far fetched ideas that the current climate is unprecedented. Its not.
This stands out time and time again and I witness personally as I work through the physical records in the Met office and such places as Exeter Cathedral- I take the trouble to physically go there in order to research material for my articles and actually look at what our ancestors tell us. It would be useful if more people took their heads out of their computers and did the same. Really, your comment about Zbigniew Jaworowski is not one I would expect to see from you.
tonyb

Richard
I guess the Olympic flame went close to you on Saturday and it passed behind our house yesterday.
I think few of the more alarmist warmists would win gold medals and some shouldn’t even be in the team. The trouble is they have a very narrow view of the world and are fixated on co2 and ignore other factors, so are ill prepared for the competition .
In that respect, whilst Joel would not win any medals in the climate change olympics he ought to get a mention for at least turning up here to compete.I certainly wouldnt call him a troll.
tonyb

Richard, tonyb: I must admit that I tend to mix up Jaworowski and Beck and did so in this case. Jaworowski is probably not as far out on the “crackpot scale” as Beck is…and so perhaps my words were a little strong. However, his views on this subject of CO2 and ice core measurements are still pretty far out there…and not accepted by the scientific community and even the more science-based “AGW skeptics”, like Willis Eschenbach and Hans Erren.

joeldshore says:
May 21, 2012 at 7:41 am
Bill Tuttle says: “Are you always this intellectually bankrupt?”
Let me help you with the logic here:
You do that. Then I’ll help you with your English comprehension.
A claim was made that the fact that Jaworoski could not get funding for his work claiming that everybody else in the field was wrong about ice cores and CO2 is evidence of some nefarious plot by which research of good quality is suppressed if it disagrees with a certain point-of-view
Jaworowski didn’t claim that everyone else in the field was wrong, he said it was disturbing that that so much of what was then being published was at odds with earlier findings. His proposal was to re-examine the cores to confirm the validity of the original data. Show me one ethical scientist who doesn’t periodically review his work.
(or something like that).
Translation: “I didn’t read the proposal and I didn’t read tjfolkert’s links, so I pulled my answer out of my… uh… hip pocket.
However, another interpretation is simply that it is evidence that the research proposal was a poor one.
Whose interpretation, aside from yours? And yours wasn’t an interpretation, it was an assumption.
And, the point in linking to the creationist paper is to point out that this claim of bias in the scientific community is made all the time by people who support scientific hypotheses that have lost in the rough-and-tumble world of scientific research.
The point in linking to the creationist paper was to equate Dr. Jaworowski’s proposal with a statement by a “non-scientific” religious group, and thereby hold up his ideas to mockery.
That is just the way things go.
No, that’s just the way the worms in your brain twist.

%$#@!
Memo to self: check for open code before posting.

richardscourtney says:
May 21, 2012 at 3:03 am
Joeldshore…..
Say what!?
The late Zebeniev Jaworwski is the ‘father’ of ice core studies for determination of environmental effects. He conducted dozens of expeditions to obtain ice-cores and devised most of the techniques now used to analyse ice-cores….
__________________________________
Thank you very much for your information on Dr. Zebeniev Jaworwski, we have lost a great man.

Prof Mann has past history of getting figures upside down. When he cannot get it right in his scientific papers, there is little hope anything better outside of his area of expertise.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/27/told-ya-so-more-upside-down-mann-in-his-latest-paper/
I might be getting a tad cynical, but no matter how much the errors are exposed, they will continue to be recycled and used as a basis for policy.
http://climateaudit.org/2011/11/13/the-epa-and-upside-down-mann/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/10/29/upside-down-proxies-baffle-the-team/

richardscourtney says:
May 21, 2012 at 10:27 am
@ me: In particular, in your post at May 21, 2012 at 9:06 am you defend Jaworwski against the outrageous implication by Shore that Jaworowski was a creationist.
Thank you, sir, but I can’t take credit for that. My defense was aimed at Shore’s unfair comparison of the proposal of a man whose scientific work was not influenced by his inherent beliefs with an outline of Christian talking points.
am a socialist and a Christian who is proud to say that Jaworowski and I were friends. Any assertion that he was a creationist is an insult to the honesty of his adherence to atheism.
I am a knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, somewhat-to-the-right-of-Attila-the-Hun conservative and what’s known in my circles as a Roamin’ Catholic. It matters not what his religion was, or was not — judging from his proposal, he was an ethical man with a passion for doing what was right, and your defense of him confirms that for me.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Yanno, Joel, if it hadn’t been for your gratuitous insult, I’d never have read Dr. Jaworowski’s paper — thanks for the extra ammo…

Joel Shore said
“Richard, tonyb: I must admit that I tend to mix up Jaworowski and Beck and did so in this case. Jaworowski is probably not as far out on the “crackpot scale” as Beck is…and so perhaps my words were a little strong. However, his views on this subject of CO2 and ice core measurements are still pretty far out there…and not accepted by the scientific community and even the more science-based “AGW skeptics”, like Willis Eschenbach and Hans Erren.”
Yeah come on Joel, I cant keep defending you when you’re not around. I still remember that time I sided with you regarding Hansen and his Mars program 🙂
You really ought to read Jaworowski. He is far more lucid on the subject than the dubious ice core material which has such severe problems with fractionation. As for Beck, he was also very lucid on the subject of co2. I had the privilege of him dropping in to an article I wrote on co2 when he was very ill, just a few months before he died .I have still never had a satisfactory explanation as to how Keeling (who I also defend here as a fine scientist) despite having no expertise in the field, managed to immediately get his co2 measurements correct whilst his peers had apparently been getting them wrong for the previous 120 years. Perhaps you can tell me?.
By the way, when you say Hans Erren are you sure you don’t mean Ferdinand Engelbeen? I will also have to defend him in his absence. I met him when we went to a talk given By Dr Iain Stewart (of Tv’s ‘climate wars’) Ferdinand is very knowlegable and very patient and a sceptic. I happen to think hes wrong on co2, but even then Ferdinand does not believe that the stuff can cause the problems that the warmists believe.
tonyb

tonyb says:

By the way, when you say Hans Erren are you sure you don’t mean Ferdinand Engelbeen?

Probably…Those are two other names that occupy the same brain cell for me! I seem to be a bit dyslexic with names today.
Richard S Courtney says:

In particular, in your post at May 21, 2012 at 9:06 am you defend Jaworwski against the outrageous implication by Shore that Jaworowski was a creationist.

Since there was no such implication, you are just posturing (or you have severe reading comprehension problems). What I was pointing out was that the claim that the scientific community is discriminating against scientists with certain views is a claim that is made by nearly all of the losers in scientific debates and I was noting how you can find the same sort of claim made by creationists.

However, nobody should be allowed to smear reputations of the recently deceased in a public forum without very good reason, and a desire to hear all view points should not lead to such smears going unchallenged.

I did not smear them…I gave my opinion of their work that is relevant to the current discussion, an opinion that is likely shared by most of the scientific community. (And, to be honest, I haven’t kept track of whether they were recently deceased or not.) If you want to see smears, I suggest you look at any thread where commenters mention Michael Mann or Jim Hansen (which, come to think of it, doesn’t narrow things down much!), where you will find all sorts of nasty things stated , and the ones of which that make specific factual claims (including claims of fraud and what-not) are almost invariably completely unsupported by evidence.
By contrast, I haven’t said that Beck and Jaworowski are frauds. I have just said that their work regarding CO2 measurements was nonsense.

joeldshore says:
May 21, 2012 at 7:45 am
Jaworowski is probably not as far out on the “crackpot scale” as Beck is…
And then
joeldshore says:
May 21, 2012 at 2:18 pm
“Richard S Courtney says: … a desire to hear all view points should not lead to such smears going unchallenged.”
I did not smear them…I gave my opinion of their work that is relevant to the current discussion, an opinion that is likely shared by most of the scientific community.
That first quote wasn’t an opinion of their work, it was an opinion of their mental capacity. And kindly point me to the link for the announcement that *you* had been appointed spokesman for “most of the scientific community” — I missed that in the thread.

@- theOtherJohninCalif says:
“I have to agree with izen. In my youth I had to wear a coat, a hat, and boots (for the snow) to school. Now, I can’t even remember the last time I had to wear a hat!
Of course, then I lived in the Colorado Rockies. Now I live in Southern California.”
Haha
If you had not moved you might have noticed less warming, but as this data shows you would have noticed some…
http://nature.nps.gov/ClimateChange/docs/NCPN_CC.pdf
I see the defenders of the ridiculous are emerging. Jaworowski, Beck, Morner…. Next it will be Virial theory, G&T or the bary(ec)centrics. It shows a lack of discrimination of judgement. Or perhaps a judgement that only measures the degree of contradiction it has with mainstream AGW theory and uses that as the criteria.
To try and drag things back to the thread topic, however tenuously, the same lack of discrimination is apparent in the judgement of what is spent on ‘promoting’ AGW. The 60billion claim obviously includes things that are not AGW promotion, posters here have already mentioned the military use of solar and wind turbines for mobile power for infantry. Comparing like with like would clearly take a good deal more discrimination to identify the ‘promotional’ elements from the research, development and implementation aspects.
While something like Heartland has none of those costs.
Just as a matter of perspective, the 60billion total mentioned is around 2 months of exxon profits. Thats the relative magnitude, and influence, of the interests against AGW compared to the total spend researching it.

izen says:
May 22, 2012 at 2:04 am
The 60billion claim obviously includes things that are not AGW promotion, posters here have already mentioned the military use of solar and wind turbines for mobile power for infantry.
Major League FAIL. The post clearly states, “The report revealed that from fiscal years 2008 through 2012 the federal government spent $68.4 billion to combat climate change. The Department of Defense also spent $4 billion of its budget, the report adds, on climate change and energy efficiency activities in that same time period.” My emphasis.
Which brings the total to $72,4 billion spent on solely on “climate change and energy efficiency activities.” The solar and wind projects for the ground-pounders are *projects* and are separately funded.

izen
You do realise that Ferdinand is a sceptic don’t you?
tonyb

@- tonyb says:
“You do realise that Ferdinand is a sceptic don’t you?”
Yes.
Thats why I cited him rather than the many more mainstream peer reviewed sources that refute Beck, Jaworowski, and Morner. I thought that might overcome the resistance that some here have to ANY view contary to their own! {grin}
I find his analysis of Jaworowski, and Beck, cogent and convincing, certainly much more so than Jaworowski and Beck, published {but not peer reviewed!} opinions.
Morner of course confirms his ‘crackpot’ status without the need of close scientific analysis. The water and metal divining and the racial/archeological beliefs put him in with the cranks.
Becks claims about high CO2 levels, interpriting local measurement as global, fail on the ground of the consevation of mass. Unfeasible amounts of carbon would need to appear and vanish by ‘magic’ if those numbers were accurate global levels.
Jaworowski claims fractination and diffusion processes which are dependent on physical parameters just happen to give the same results for ice cores with very different physical parameters which would have very different fractionation and diffusion rates – if these were altering the data.
Its reliance on the sort of easily refuted nonsense that comes from people like these that destroys the credibility {such as it is} of much of the ‘skeptic’ side.

izen says:
May 22, 2012 at 6:06 am
However the excellent work for which they are recognised is NOT the opinions they express about aspects of the evidence for AGW which get them so extensively quoted by those rejecting AGW. Here are some links that show what the scientific opinion is of their contrarian positions.
You *do* realize that you just said “when the subject is AGW, opinion trumps science,” don’t you?
…it is the reason it is wise to look at ALL opinions and discriminate on criteria other than conformity with your own prejudices. One reason for attending to blogs and sites that conflict with your own views!
Place your opinions in one hand and spit into the other one — see which fills up first.
That’s how much opinion counts for when you’re discussing *facts*.

tonyb says:

Come on Joel, you have been around long enugh to know that equating creationists (and tobacco lobbyists) with climate sceptics makes us just roll our eyes. However you did say something very interesting in the quote I excerpted above.

Well, if AGW skeptics don’t want to be equated with them, then they ought to stop stealing the creationist arguments, i.e., arguments like, “The scientific community is discriminating against us and so that is why we can’t get published in the peer-reviewed literature” or “They refuse to publicly debate us”.
I think you need to do a little soul-searching and ask yourself, “Why are we being equated with creationists, not just by some members of the scientific community like Joel, but also by the most important group that was working to fight to defend the teaching of evolution in our schools and has recently expanded their work to include fighting to defend the teaching of climate science (as understood by the scientific mainstream) in the schools?” ( http://ncse.com/news/2012/01/ncses-climate-change-initiative-launched-007149 )
I am really trying to help you guys turn away from pseudoscientific nonsense and at least try to make coherent scientific arguments that won’t be laughed off by the scientific community. Unfortunately, there seems to be great resistance to this.

Richard S Courtney says:

The most rapid change indicated by Beck’s data (not really his, but he collated it) is the fall from 440 ppmv in 1942 to 320 ppmv in 1952. That equates to a fall of 240 GtC over the ten years or 24 GtC/year.
In each year of the Mauna Loa data the natural emission and the natural sequestration is each observed to be over 150 GtC/year.
So, the most rapid change indicated by Beck’s data would result from a variation of natural sequestration or natural emission of less than16%. And if both varied to create the fall then the needed natural variation would only be 8%.

That’s quite the impressive variation given that nothing nearly like that has happened once Keeling starting measuring CO2 accurately! I guess this is the quantum theory of CO2 in the atmosphere: It varies like crazy when we don’t look at it but all of a sudden settles down and behaves completely differently once we start measuring it!
Basically, what you are saying is this: If we abandon everything we know about how CO2 transfers between different reservoirs, based on a half century of good empirical data and 3/4 of a million years of ice core records…And, if we believe measurements that we know for a fact were not taken in ways that make them accurate measurements of background CO2…And, if we believe that the CO2 variations magically average out in ice cores to give a very flat signal, on multiple time scales (since the various ice cores have very different snow accumulation rates and thus very different times over which they average)…Then, one might be able to justify Beck!
Yes, I will now apologize for comparing such arguments to those of Young Earth creationists. The Young Earthers that I have interacted with actually have some more compelling arguments!

Joel said;
‘Well, if AGW skeptics don’t want to be equated with them, then they ought to stop stealing the creationist arguments, i.e., arguments like, “The scientific community is discriminating against us and so that is why we can’t get published in the peer-reviewed literature” or “They refuse to publicly debate us”.
There you go, putting all of us who disagree with the cagw proposition into one large box you conveniently like to label ‘mad sceptics-do not open.’
Have you EVER heard me say this about peer review etc? No. The variety of views sceptics hold is at once our greatest strength and our greatest weakness, but the majority of us are not knuckle dragging neanderthals. We are rational people-many of whom once held your views-who have actually taken the time to examine the evidence.
Where have I been recently trying to do this in order to research my next two articles? Sitting reading reports about creationsust or admiring the tactics of the tobacco lobby? No. I have breen spending my time and my money visiting the Met office library. The Met office archives. The library of Exeter Cathedral. The excellent records office which has documents back to the 12th Century. Next month I am off to the Scott Polar institutre in Cambridge. Plus there is a massive amount on line. Indeed, I have accessed some 500 polar articles over the last few months and had to pay for some of them. I’ve been in contact with the librarian of Universities in the polar regions and talked to explorers out there. When I was researching my sea level article, did I sit here wondering about creationism or did i actually visit several sites to look at what was happening?
Joel, the problem I have is that-despite the expers saying otherwise- what we are experiencing is not unprecedented, sometimes its not even unusual. There is a load of evidence out there -anecdotal and scientific- that says otherwise.If the physics are so sound why do warnists persist in trying to redraw the past?
Way up the thread I asked you this, perhps you could answer it now as you have touched on it with Richard in your last post.
” As for Beck, he was also very lucid on the subject of co2. I had the privilege of him dropping in to a (thread) I wrote on co2 when he was very ill, just a few months before he died .I have still never had a satisfactory explanation as to how Keeling (who I also defend here as a fine scientist) despite having no expertise in the field, managed to immediately get his co2 measurements correct whilst his peers had apparently been getting them wrong for the previous 120 years. Perhaps you can tell me?’
Ps For the record I do not believe in creationism, the tobacco arguments, the conspiracy theories surrounding Princess Diana and 9/11.That the moon landing was faked or that aliens create crop circles. I am an entirely rational modern person who has taken the trouble to read and research widely and who thinks that tree rings should never have been used to create a climate story not borne out by many other sources.
tonyb.

Richard
I was interested in your earlier comments on the potential amount of outgassing and the specific examples you gave of a peak co2 reading in the 1940’s and 1820’s
I don’t know if you ever caught the article I wrote on co2 some 3 years ago which was carried over at the Air Vent? The article was primarily intended to look at the historic and social background to co2 readings from 1820 to the advent of Mauna Loa rather than their accuracy.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/historic-variations-in-co2-measurements/
Ernst himself eventually participated in the discussion although even at the time he must have been very ill. Although my interest initially was in the background to the measurements it soon became clear the measurements were considered to be so accurate that British legislation was passed in the 1880’s in order to regulate co2 levels in cotton factories. References were also made in popular novels of the time and patents on the measuring equipment passed. The levels were also considered matter of fact in science journals of the time (which at the least demonstrates that science is never settled)
That so many people apparently managed to get it so wrong for so many years until Keeling came along and did it right first time (even though he had no prior expertise in the subject) has never been satisfactorily explained to me. That the start point of the pre industrial era levels of co2 were cherry picked to be on the low side was abundantly clear from reading Callendars archives.
I came to think that the methodology, equipment and people were often so good that large mistakes were unlikely, and believe that an audit of the more credible scrutinised readings would be worthwhile and dispel the queries either way once and for all.
Going back through my article again with your comments uppermost I was struck by two items in the bloggers responses
“NASA/GISS is broken down by hemisphere, and several latitude bands. Graph them all and it is spaghetti. So here’s just global and another graph showing just arctic zones. The scale on the left is temperature anomaly in 100′ths of degrees:
http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/arctic-zones-vs-global.png “
So, unusually in the record, both the polar regions warmed at the same time which presumably would have an effect on outgassing. This period was exactly around the time –the 1930’s- that the high measurements were recorded .
Someone else commenting after I announced Becks death on the thread said;
“I also wanted to send him some interesting links:
For example, this with: ‘Global and European temperature (CSI 012) – Assessment published Jun 2010’,
showing that the land (Europe) temperature changes during the period 1910-1950, were “shockingly” abrupt (this a propos: “cannot explain the rapid decrease after 1940”).
Sure enough this abrupt spike in temperatures can be seen.
As for the 1820’s co2 spike, this is surely connected with the rapid warming of the arctic around that period that I wrote about here?
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice-tony-b/
tonyb

Richard
Thank you for your kind comments. As I say I was initially interested in the historical and social background to co2 and started to write it on that basis . It became clear that there were many other issues all mixed in with the subject which meant anyone writing about Beck without being extremely rude about him was automatically a crackpot. It was consdered so highly controversial that I understand that the Air vent was advised not to run it.
I thought the input from supporters and enemies alike was fascinating and I subsequently added links to other threads on the subject which i think makes the article an invaluable resource whichever side of the fence you sit.
Ernst was not always good at expressing himself-not surprising as he wrote in a foreign language- and I think he came to regret launching his papers as he did, complete with some rather old fashioned looking graphs and some bold assertions that were guaranteed to get up the nose of the climate establishment.. He very substantially upgraded hs presentation in later years but by that time the damage was dome. Ernst rowed against the tide and I hope that someone out there is continuing his work and pushing for an independent audit of the material. I for one would make a small financial contrubtion to that end, as I think this matter needs to be settled once and for all, one way or the other.
Incidentally I am currently writing Part two of ‘historic variations in arctic ice’ and it is clear that through the Holocene there have been some seven substantial arctic meltings and no doubt many minor ones. Whether they coincided with the antarctic warm phase I dont know, but clearly the relative steadiness of the co2 in the atmosphere seems somewhat at odds with nature, which normally progresses in fits and starts rather than a slow steady predictable change.
tonyb.

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