John Nielsen-Gammon: Skeptics Are Not Deniers

N-G is hiding behind an ice free Antarctica…from 30 Mya ! ! !
I’m embarassed for the Lone Star state….we can’t guess albedo to +/- 0.5 but we detect a signal from +/- 0.000001 change in CO2….what happened to the concept of “significant digits” ? ? ?

Always willing to think the best of people, I admit to accepting his response/explanation as an apologetic overture and was magnanimous in my comments. I am exceedingly critical of someone’s science, and never critical enough of their motives or their personal explanations.
Live and learn
Thanks

I would be very hesitant to come anywhere near establishing criteria for who is and who isn’t a legitimate skeptic.

This is interesting. I was just settling in for a good long read when Part 1 ended. Can’t wait for Part 2.

If you think about it, there’s a lot of “marketing” going on with AGW. Don’t like what someone says, just throw out a label, “Denier”, problem solved. No need to think of consider another point of view, just throw our a marketing label and turn off the brain.
Someone published research the contradicts AGW, just call it, “junk science” or “research bought by the oil companies”, problem solved. No need to even consider any contradiction.

Chicken Little climatologists
How they label us is not important. What is important is for us to label them.
Eugene WR Gallun

I am a scientist. I have studied possible causes for climate change for the past 33 years, focusing upon biogenic methane releases from agriculture. I have published in the peer reviewed literature and am considered an expert in my field.
I am also a skeptic of wild, exaggerated claims by hyperventilating types (Hansen esp.) who have clear political agendas and those with overt economic motivations (Pachauri, Gore et.al). Most of the data they defend is trash, as exposed by the elegant analysis of Stephe McIntyre and others.
The global system is far too complex to define in the precise and concrete terms that they use. I don’t deny that there might be a relationship between man’s activities and climate, but I have yet to see this proven. Prof. Lindzen’s opinions on the subject are very much like my own. If they want to call me a “denier,” my feelings aren’t hurt. They are asses.

“N-G: Wrong. For eons, until about 30 million years ago, the Antarctic was ice-free. The climate state associated with the ice-free Antarctic was warmer by several degrees…”
Yeah, because the Antarctic continent was not yet at the southern pole! Being north of the southern pole gave it a better shot at being warm!
The Wikipedia has the South Atlantic beginning to open after the Cretaceous, circa 145 to 65 MA. . .
Over time, Gondwana gradually broke apart and Antarctica as we know it today was formed around 25 million years ago. Antarctica was not always cold, dry and covered in ice sheets. . .
About 65 MA, Antarctica (then connected to Australia) still had a tropical to subtropical climate, complete with a marsupial fauna. About 40 MA Australia-New Guinea separated from Antarctica, so that latitudinal currents could isolate Antarctica from Australia, and the first ice began to appear. . . Around 23 MA. . . ice began to spread, replacing the forests that then covered the continent. Since about 15 MA, the continent has been mostly covered with ice, with the Antarctic ice cap reaching its present extension around 6 Ma.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica
So, N-G is saying that continental drift had nothing to do with the change in climate faced by Antarctica?
Buy me another drink!

There are two peices of actual evidence that there is no recent third stable warm state. There are trapped bubbles of air in deep, as in 200,000 years deep, antarctic ice, that show the following:
1) Twice the carbon dioxide (at twice the atmospheric pressure to boot) as now.
2) Trapped in ICE.
This means that if we arrive at twice the amount of carbon dioxide as now, we will have ice in antarctica.
This is hard physical data. It shows that the models are flat out wrong.
X2 CO2 and ice, any questions?

Skeptics are normal people who expect others to do their jobs. Not enrich themselves by satisfying left wing academics and politicians with obvious nonsense.

“Sceptic” is a term that still retains an objective meaning. “Denier”, thanks to its chronic overuse by Holocaustians (not a real word), has acquired pejorative overtones that make it more a term of abuse than a word fit for polite discourse. Other words have copped similar treatment: you need to be careful who you describe as “gay” these days.
To appreciate the true quality of “denier”, just use “(crude equivalent of “rectal sphincter”)” instead to see the level of debate aimed for.
When science is reduced to what is, effectively, petty name-calling, it is not science.

Copied from: http://anotherviewonclimate.wordpress.com/2010/08/02/a-very-good-point-about-skeptics/
A Very Good Point About Skeptics
As Dr. Lindzen points out in the video, below, the term “skeptic” implies being skeptical about a plausible thesis. People in doubt (most of us) about the faked moon landing or the flat Earth are not referred to as skeptics. Since catastrophic warming (CW) is not a plausible theory then the word “skeptic” really should be dropped. Perhaps realist or rational thinker would be a better term.
What would be catastrophic would be for this planet to fall back into another ice age, a far more likely occurrence, though that’s likely to be way out in the future.

While Gammon appears to be follow the usual route of try to define ‘skeptic’ in way to suit his own stance rather an honest approach .
“did not believe the climate was changing” I have wonder if Gammon could actual name someone that claims that climate does not change , if he can’t they this group basically does not exist . Its use really is to try a label AGW skeptics as ‘deniers’ of all science as we see with claims their creationists to, this is part of the attempt to negatively label people with different views which got Gammon the well deserved flak in the first place .

it’s better then being told, to late for lunch

[SNIP. -REP]

This posting epitomizes something of the best of WUWT, and attitudes generally that help science progress by informed and courteous debate.
But it has me thinking. What has been missing from Science for so long, is a “scientific” handling of the human dimension, the experimenter, his co-workers, and his popularizers the media. Climate Science has showed the human dimension returning to hit with a vengeance, as fullblown serial corruption, as all suppressed matters will do, as any good psychologist knows.
WUWT works so well precisely because of its balance of interest between science and its human / social / political effects. This works to keep most discussions here flowing with “popcorn” interest.
But there have been exceptions. Always, in my perception, the handling of actual frontier science has been the area fraught with difficulties over discussion and courtesy. Sometimes it’s been managed, with a huge and I think well-earned sense of achievement; but sometimes it’s lost out.
I fear that without awareness of the times the debate here has lost out, and attempts to try again to open courteous discussion, the debate here will tend to stultify over time. I commiserate with Anthony here probably more than he realizes; I know what a psychic drain it is, for reasons I don’t yet really understand myself, to handle the NEW frontiers of science.
Yet this task is absolutely vital to Science, and to its recovery of integrity.
*******************************************
Little Mouse asking: Please sir, can you put Tallbloke’s Talkshop in a less demeaning category again? I don’t think he deserves to be bracketed with Climate Progress.
*******************************************
Having asked, this, I have also been glad to hide out in that less-frequented blog recently. I have been running a series at the Talkshop, which discuss a very sensitive frontier issue (latest post here). I simply could not have coped with the huge volume of traffic of WUWT, in responses, at that point. Yet this issue is not just important, it is vital, and it is vital to the very roots and foundations of Climate Science. And it has been underpinned by a lot of high-quality experimental work, albeit by one lone individual so far. Interest has been shown by a few capable academics, but no replication, which is essential, and which I am proposing (with a small team of supporters). What, noooooooob me? well, this work is really important IMHO and not just for Climate Science but for Physics and Astrophysics, and nobody else seems to be involved in the essential job of replication.
What I’ve found, indeed, is that frontiers of science do indeed attract “transcendental ranters” who will not talk about the subject on hand and look at the actual science, but use it as a springboard for their own “sciency” rants which generally are “appeals to authority” which may be the “authority of consensus” or the “authority of ego” or the “authority of counter-consensus” – anything but “nullius in verba”.
(If you are interested in joining a team involved in replication, please contact me.)
And thank you again, Anthony, for this pioneer work of yours which gives so many of us important opportunities.

joeldshore says:
July 9, 2012 at 7:51 pm
That’s a fair bit of spin on that study! The actual numbers are that “Based on current trends, 41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, compared to 13% who see relatively little danger. Another 44% rate climate change as moderately dangerous.” So only 13% see it as posing “relatively little danger”. “Moderately dangerous” does not seem like a skeptic to me. Presumably, most people would not believe that we should take no mitigating action to address something that is moderately dangerous!
*ahem*
From that same study: Former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” rates better than any traditional news source, with 26% finding it “very reliable” and 38% as somewhat reliable.
The egregious errors and bunk science in Gore’s slide show were well-publicized by the time that survey was made, yet 64% if those polled found it — pardon my chuckles — “reliable.”
The survey bias is obvious.

Skeptics are arguing that the contribution humanity makes to the interglacial warming, the numerous natural cycles (like the PDO) and the activity of the sun has not been quantified, has not been found to be significant and has not been identified as either harmful or beneficial and thus any output from climate research is not to be used to shape public policy.

@ Scarface
Dr Lindzens succint commentary on the use of the word skeptic is formidable. The term Denier is used by verbal bullies who are incapable of winning an argument with rational people. Hence I prefer the term rationalist.
As for Bains psychobabble that should be temporarily lodged in a cylindrical container for onward transmission to a suitable recycling plant.

a bright Marine Scientist at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns Australia by the name of Janice Lough, from James Cook University, obviously believes the Great Barrier Reef has never experienced “climate change” prior to CAGW!
10 July: ABC Australia: Climate change could make Barrier Reef ‘boring’
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-07-10/reef-risks-becoming-27boring27-scientist/4121970
give it up. either this usage of the phrase “climate change” is dropped, or we can give up on science right now.

Donald A. Neill, I am going to bookmark your comment as I feel it summarises the situation brilliantly.
John Neilsen-Gammon, you deserve much kudos for engaging in a civilized dialogue with climate skeptics. May I encourage you to continue and to urge others to do the same.
Evidently, though, we might disagree with you over what constitutes evidence. The existence or otherwise of a consensus is not evidence. Opinions are not evidence regardless of the eminence of the people holding those opinions. Assumptions are not evidence. The output of computer models is not real data and is not evidence of anything other than the assumptions and parameters built into the models. ONLY measurements and observations are evidence. Note also that evidence of an effect is not evidence of its cause.

Chris Hedges does a wonderful job explaining militant ideological extremism on both ends of the spectrum. The global warming religion, and its castigation of scepticism (heresy) is no exception.

This statement from Joel Shore
” Because someone with no integrity or code of ethics stole private e-mails between climate scientists and published them on the web where a few out-of-context quotes have shown us that these scientists who are being harassed by other people sometimes say some impertinent things in their private e-mails, we can now disregard everything that scientists have to say?”
Shows that he completely lacks any honesty or integrity and cannot be trusted about anything he says. What he has stated is a laughable falsehood, with no basis.

ferdberple, slightly off at a tangent but, since you asked about the ice core CO2 history, I have come to regard this as the second hockey stick and no more reliable than Mann’s temperature reconstruction. I find the paper below very convincing :-
http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
The main points are :-
1. CO2 concentrations above current levels were frequently reported in studies published before the establishment of the global warming industry.
2. The air released from bubbles trapped in the ice is not the same composition as when the ice was laid down. Changes preferentially affect some gases more than others. Gases released by the crushing of ice at below zero temperatures show lower concentrations of CO2 than samples obtained by allowing the ice to melt.
3. The stability of CO2 readings from ice cores before the Industrial Revolution is spurious.
I am also suspicious of any CO2 reconstruction showing concentrations at certain times to be at or below 180 ppm because this would have resulted in serious global loss/degradation of plant life. This is something which is not observed in paleobotany.

Joeldshore,
Your characterization of the e-mails is deceptive.
These e-mails are in context, are not private, and do show collusion and deception to support the e-mailer’s positions, as well as to punish those who dare to disagree with them.
Why are you relying on deception to make your case?

One of the most dangerous aspects of Bain’s most recent response is he wants to limit who may engage in a discussion of AGW to the “properly credentialed.”
Since the same people who are pushing AGW regardless of the facts are generally affiliated with the groups that have a monopoly on who gets credentialed and why, this ends up being a form of censorship limiting access to facts. And then it also acts as a corruption mechanism. Push this and here are your credentials to climb aboard the grant/sinecure gravy train.

joeldshore says:
July 10, 2012 at 5:42 am
I also have to admit that I am confused by your logic here. Because someone with no integrity or code of ethics stole private e-mails between climate scientists and published them on the web where a few out-of-context quotes have shown us that these scientists who are being harassed by other people sometimes say some impertinent things in their private e-mails, we can now disregard everything that scientists have to say?
I am confused as to why you believe repeating the long-since-revealed-as-baseless canards makes you think you have rebutted something.
Oh. Joel Shore — okay, not confused about that anymore.

“with no integrity or code of ethics stole private e-mails”
Sounds like Peter Gleick is at it, again.

Bill Tuttle says:
July 10, 2012 at 7:46 am
Exactly!

dcfl51 says:
July 10, 2012 at 6:55 am
I find the paper below very convincing :-
http://www.co2web.info/stoten92.pdf
Completely outdated. Since the first measurements were made on ice cores, the drilling and analytical methods changed dramatically. The late Jaworoski’s knowledge of ice cores ended in 1992. Most of his objections were already refuted in 1996 by the work of Etheridge e.a. on three Law Dome ice cores. Three different drilling techniques were used and CO2 was measured top down in firn until bubble closing depth and in ice at closing depth and deeper. At closing depth CO2 measured in still open pores of the firn and aready closed bubbles in the ice were similar. See further:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
The main points are :-
1. CO2 concentrations above current levels were frequently reported in studies published before the establishment of the global warming industry
Most “high” levels were found where cracks allowed the intrusion of drilling fluid. At the same depth, different tests show a huge range of CO2 levels, from in the same range as the samples up and down the ice core to much higher. Thus the “high” levels were caused by contamination and don’t reflect reality,
2. The air released from bubbles trapped in the ice is not the same composition as when the ice was laid down.
Besides that the bubbles contain a mixture of CO2 levels from several years (8 years for the high accumulation Law Dome to 600 years for the Vostok ice core), there is very little migration in coastal ice cores and virtually none in the much colder inland ice cores. Thus the composition still is the same after 800,000 years…
Gases released by the crushing of ice at below zero temperatures show lower concentrations of CO2 than samples obtained by allowing the ice to melt.
It is the opposite, therefore ice melt measurements for CO2 are abandoned en mostly the ice crushing method is used. That gives the same results as the more accurate method of total sublimation and mass spectrometric analyses, which are used for isotope measurements.
See e.g. http://courses.washington.edu/proxies/GHG.pdf and
http://www.awi.de/de/forschung/fachbereiche/geowissenschaften/glaziologie/techniques/high_precision_d13c_and_co2_analysis/
3. The stability of CO2 readings from ice cores before the Industrial Revolution is spurious.
Where is that based on? Many ice cores with quite different average temperature and precipitation rates show the same (within +/- 5 ppmv) CO2 levels for the same average air age. See:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/antarctic_cores_001kyr_large.jpg
I am also suspicious of any CO2 reconstruction showing concentrations at certain times to be at or below 180 ppm because this would have resulted in serious global loss/degradation of plant life.
Land plants have the advantage of living on land: near ground CO2 levels over land are average some 40 ppmv higher than in the bulk of the atmosphere (as what is measured in ice cores), with night levels even hundreds of ppmv higher. Thus al least a few hours in daylight there is sufficient CO2 to cause some growth…

Smokey says:
July 10, 2012 at 9:21 am
If what Ferdinand says is true, then CO2 is not well mixed in the atmosphere.
CO2 is well mixed in over 95% of the atmosphere, that is all above the oceans and above a few hundred meters over land.
For the first few hundred meters above land, many sources and sinks are at work: at night plants exhale CO2 + bacterial and fungal decay of vegetation + human sources. During daylight plants remove lots of CO2 quite fast. That makes that one can measure any level of CO2 midst a forest or field or town, depending of the time of the day and the amount of sunlight. And that is one of the reasons that many historical measurements are worthless for the knowledge of the real “background” CO2 levels of that time…
If you get over 500 meter over land, the differences are much smaller to unmeasurable. Only the enormous intake/outgassing as result of the seasonal temperature swings needs some time to be distributed with altitude and latitude (weeks to months) and between the NH and the SH (months to 2 years).
See: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/inversion_co2.jpg for CO2 flight measurements below and above the inversion layer and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/giessen_background.jpg
where you can see the difference between the CO2 levels during a few summer days over land at Giessen (SW Germany, semi-rural) and at three “baseline” stations: Barrow, Mauna Loa and the South Pole. All data are raw measurements (hourly averages for the stations, 1/2 hour averages for Giessen).

Greg House says: July 10, 2012 at 9:26 am
It is a matter of context, no? We don’t often discuss/define groups by their secretion/excretion processes, yet there is an appropriate context for that to occur. Your psychic perception in reference others’ internal context regarding “sceptic” is itself, ‘a different thing’. You have no clue what I mean if I call myself a skeptic, nor even the context to which that has applied for the past fifty years.

Has anyone gone to RealClimate and posted any of this? Would be interested to see if it would stay up or be snipped.

Smokey says:
July 10, 2012 at 10:35 am
So the ball is in Joel Shore’s court…
…with some added spin —
“…scientists who are being harassed by other people sometimes say some impertinent things…”
Like Ben Santer impertinently fantasizing about beating the crap out of Pat Michaels? *tsk* That young scamp.
“…in their private e-mails…
Any correspondence, written, electronic, or oral, originating from any publicly-funded organization is *not* private. If the taxpayers paid for it, it’s public property *unless* there is a compelling (read: national security) reason to classify it.

Dr Engelbeen, thank you for the courtesy of your reply and for the links which you have given. I will read them with interest but there is too much material for me to absorb quickly and still reply on this thread.
I am willing to be persuaded to your standpoint if the evidence is good enough. But there are a lot of diverse criticisms in Jaworowski’s paper and I will need to be convinced on all of them.
For example, Jaworowski argues that there is supercool liquid water in the ice and CO2 is significantly more soluble in this than oxygen or nitrogen. This implies that the remaining air pockets will be relatively depleted of CO2. In his paper Fig.2 shows a chart indicating that CO2 concentrations in ice melted for 7+ hours are much higher than in ice subjected to dry extraction or 15 minute melt extraction. Presumably this is because the dissolved CO2 is released on melting due to Henry’s Law. I will be interested to read why this should be regarded as a false result.
You also state that high CO2 readings can be rejected because the relevant samples are contaminated by drilling fluid. Again, I will hope to read that rejection followed an analysis of samples for contamination and that the high readings were not simply taken as a proxy for contamination.
In addition to questions over the ice core records, there are also stomata studies and the direct CO2 readings collated by Beck. These suggest that CO2 levels have risen and fallen by relatively significant amounts over a matter of decades and that historical levels above those of today are commonplace. I am aware that you have commented on these issues previously, questioning their reliability. However, the more confirmatory evidence that has to be refuted, the more inclined I am to invoke Occam’s Razor.
[Moderator, sorry I’ve gone a bit off topic.]

C.W. Schoneveld says:
July 10, 2012 at 11:57 am
@ Greg House
The problem is, that to deny something happening in the future is linguistically speaking non-sense. The verb deny is always connected with situations (events, facts, rights, responsibilities, etc.) connected with the past or the present, not the future., even a “consequence” can only be denied (however foolishly) after it has taken place. or while it is taking place. …
So Greg House has shown, against his apparent will, the ridiculousness of the use of the term “denier” for those sceptical about future CAGW.
=======================================================
No, the future is predictable in terms of probability in many cases, just think of the next sunrise. And your linguistic tool will not help, because you confuse the actual future event that has not happened yet with the (alleged) proof that this event will happen. Of course there can be disagreement on whether the proof is there or not.
So it is not about denying the future, it is about denying the (alleged) present proof. You need a better argumentation.

Gunga Din says:
July 10, 2012 at 3:05 pm
I can believe it! The truth is, that I was once a believer (not in the Mann et al sense – but in the accepted the ‘published’ material) and like many folk who find they were duped – I am totally distrustful of the ‘published’ stuff. The worst part of it is – that as a scientist – I accepted the published material – BELIEVING that the presenters had followed good scientific protocol, etc. My present anger, therefore, comes from the fact that I KNOW better, but didn’t have the time or inclination to check. This really sticks in my craw. You go to the doctor for medical advice – you do not expect to have to check his diagnosis? These people are supposed to be professionals? The fish in my desk top tank have a more professional attitude! So now, I have had to return to the first principles of the scientific method – which is basically to check the stuff for yourself – and the more I check, the less comfortable I become with the so called climate scientists…….enough said I think…

Rob Huber says:
July 9, 2012 at 10:30 pm
Greg House:
I really don’t give a damn what you call me.

They label us so as to justify disregarding us.

It never ceases to amaze one to see the contortions of reality the AGW fanatics seem to go through to justify fraud, lies and bad practices. Joel Shore is a prime example here.This shows that you can give someone education but it does not guarantee integrity or ethics.

joeldshore says:
July 10, 2012 at 5:56 pm
(2) How the Climategate e-mails got into the hands that they did is still unknown and I’m not really going to believe vague statements by Anthony and Steven Mosher that they have good knowledge of how it happened but can’t tell us.
The police investigation said there was no evidence the computers were hacked.
(That sounds just like the sort of lines we were fed before the Iraq war about how if we only had access to the intelligence, we would be convinced of the danger that Saddam posed.)
We found WMDs in Iraq. The DNC admitted that, then said “they weren’t the WMDs we were looking for.”
However, even if they were leaked by someone who had access to them, that is still in a sense stealing.
Knowingly, deliberately producing false information products to support a personal agenda when you’re paid to produce honest ones *is* stealing. Bradley Manning released classified government electronic communications to WikiLeaks, but the charges against him do *not* include theft.
I do not have the right to release private information that I might have access to at my employer and indeed could rightly get into serious trouble if I did so.
If you work for a private corporation and the e-mails are on that employer’s server, the e-mails belong to your employer. If you work for a taxpayer-funded organization and the e-mails are on that organization’s server, the e-mails are public property. If you work for an institution in either of those categories, you haven’t been paying attention during the mandatory Info Security classes the HR office circulates periodically.
Furthermore, it is known that the RealClimate site was hacked in an attempt to publish the e-mails there, another illegal activity.
So was Sarah Palin’s. What’s your point?

joeldshore says:
July 10, 2012 at 5:56 pm
I do not have the right to release private information that I might have access to at my employer and indeed could rightly get into serious trouble if I did so.
If the information is corporate proprietary information, that’s correct.
If the information involves illegal activity and you keep your mouth shut, you’ll be charged as an accessory after the fact if that information gets out.

Bill Tuttle says:

The police investigation said there was no evidence the computers were hacked.

Can you give a cite for this? Did they determine that the computers were not hacked or simply that they could not conclude one way or the other?

We found WMDs in Iraq. The DNC admitted that, then said “they weren’t the WMDs we were looking for.”

Look, even Bush admitted there were no WMDs in any real sense: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSN-Kku_rFE as did the commission that investigated the issue. We weren’t told that we had to invade Iraq because there might be a few old decaying shells of mustard gas still left around from the time of the first Gulf War. We were told that we had to invade because there were WMDs that posed a real threat to us, a claim the Bush Administration seems to have not even believed themselves (Or else their negligence in allowing the wholesale looting of depots where these WMDs were likely to be constitutes blatantly putting us in much graver danger than we were when the supposed WMDs were in Saddam’s hands…basically incompetence of mind-blowing proportions, roughly akin to if the TSA handed out weapons to suspected Islamic militants boarding planes rather than trying to detect and confiscate them!)
You extreme right wingers are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.

Knowingly, deliberately producing false information products to support a personal agenda when you’re paid to produce honest ones *is* stealing.

….Which no independent investigation has found occurred.

If you work for a taxpayer-funded organization and the e-mails are on that organization’s server, the e-mails are public property.

People who work for the government or taxpayer-funded organizations do not forfeit all rights to privacy in their communications. There are certain freedom of information laws that allow for the release of information because of the public’s right to it but those laws are not without limitations and they do not state that anybody who has access to certain information can release it at their own will to the public.

So was Sarah Palin’s. What’s your point?

My point is that there were violations of the law that were perpetrated by some of those who obtained and disseminated the Climategate e-mails.

dcfl51 says:
July 10, 2012 at 6:55 am
ferdberple, slightly off at a tangent but, since you asked about the ice core CO2 history, I have come to regard this as the second hockey stick and no more reliable than Mann’s temperature reconstruction…..
___________________________
You beat me to it.
The manipulation of the temperature record, and we have plenty of evidence of that, was the first BIG LIE. The manipulation of the CO2 record is the second BIG LIE. Even the idea that CO2 is “Uniform and well mixed” is a LIE. Unfortunately the CO2 lies are harder to show and very well defended.
Lucy Skywalker also has a good compendium of information on the CO2 lie HERE.

Gail
I don’t know if you ever saw my article on historic co2 measurements? It contained loads of background information and analysis
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
Ferdinand makes lots of comments as did Ernst Beck himself. I would like to see an audit of this material. Its difficult to believe everyone measured Co2 incorrectly for 130 years then along came Keeling and managed to get it right first time.
tonyb

Gail Combs says:
July 11, 2012 at 8:33 am
As explained before: well mixed doesn’t mean that any huge change of CO2 at any point in the atmosphere is instantly distributed all over the earth. Well mixed only means that a substantial change is distributed all over the earth in a reasonable time frame.
For huge changes in uptake and release as happens over the seasons (some 20% of all CO2 in the atmosphere is exchanged in a few months), that takes days to weeks to level off in the same altitude and latitude. Weeks to months for different latitudes and altitudes in the same hemisphere and months to 2 years between the two hemispheres (as the ITCZ hinders air exchanges between the hemispheres).
Thus in my opinion and that of anyone with some knowledge about gas mixing, CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere.
Further, it doesn’t matter if there is a lot of extra CO2 change in the lower few hundred meters over land. Even if that was 1000 ppmv over the first 1000 meter, the resulting increase in temperature is near unmeasurable, only the CO2 levels over the full air column are of importance.
The same for the small monthly and seasonal differences over the months (less than 2% of the scale!): these are not of the slightest influence on the greenhouse effect.
And the uptake of CO2 in the oceans has hardly any influence on the CO2 levels measured directly above the ocean surface, as the mixing speed in the atmosphere is much higher than between the atmosphere and the oceans.
In his latest work, Jaworowski only repeats his objections of 1992, as if there were no newer works which refuted his objections, to begin with, the work of Etheridge e.a. of 1996.
Including such incredible stupid remarks like that there is no difference between the age of the ice layers and the average age of the enclosed bubbles (even if that was measured top down in firn by Etheridge). And that CO2 migrates from lower to higher levels. That makes that, in my opinion, he had not the slightest shred of credibility left about his knowledge of ice cores. Thus please, please, never use his “knowledge” again, as that only costs you your own credibility.
About Glassman: I had several discussions with him. As he is a master in misinterpreting everything what others say, it is next to impossible to have a real good discussion.
See e.g. his Fig. 1 in the first reference, where he suspects a huge, deliberate, error from the IPCC, as the figure doesn’t add up to the huge flows back and forth of CO2 between the atmosphere and the oceans. Thus he “adjusts” the IPCC results, but what he forgets is that the figure shows the average of the fluxes over a year. Many mid-latitude areas are CO2 sinks in winter and sources in summer, adding to both the (seasonal) inflows and outflows, but with a small average result over a year. And so there are many misinterpretations…
And you forgot the heavy discussion with lots of comments of mine in your last reference:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/01/little-bubbles-part-2-firn-the-great-equalizer/#comment-785490 and following…

joeldshore says:
July 11, 2012 at 6:50 am
Bill Tuttle says: “The police investigation said there was no evidence the computers were hacked.”
Can you give a cite for this? Did they determine that the computers were not hacked or simply that they could not conclude one way or the other?
Good point. It seems they just quietly gave up on it because they couldn’t find any evidence that the server was hacked.
http://poosoft.web.id/norfolk-police-give-indications-that-climategate-investigation-is.html/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/26/norfolf-police-give-indications-that-climategate-investigation-is-closed/
“We found WMDs in Iraq. The DNC admitted that, then said ‘they weren’t the WMDs we were looking for’.”
Look, even Bush admitted there were no WMDs in any real sense[,] as did the commission that investigated the issue. We weren’t told that we had to invade Iraq because there might be a few old decaying shells of mustard gas still left around from the time of the first Gulf War. We were told that we had to invade because there were WMDs that posed a real threat to us.
Why we went — from Colin Powell’s speech to the UN, 5 February 2003:

First, you will recall that it took UNSCOM four long and frustrating years to pry — to pry — an admission out of Iraq that it had biological weapons…Iraq declared 8,500 liters of anthrax, but UNSCOM estimates that Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters. If concentrated into this dry form, this amount would be enough to fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons. And Saddam Hussein has not verifiably accounted for even one teaspoon-full of this deadly material.
And that is my third point. And it is key. The Iraqis have never accounted for all of the biological weapons they admitted they had and we know they had. They have never accounted for all the organic material used to make them. And they have not accounted for many of the weapons filled with these agents.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.transcript.05/index.html

Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.

http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.transcript.06/index.html
Now, what did we find in Iraq?

Third, some people claim that these weapons are pre-Gulf War munitions with a badly degraded chemical agent that is no longer lethal or even harmful. To them, I point to the declassified statement from the intelligence report that chemical warfare agents might degrade over time, but they still remain hazardous and potentially lethal. I also point to the Secretary of Defense himself, who expressed strong concern about these weapons just last week. Secretary Rumsfeld said, QUOTE “They are dangerous… They are weapons of mass destruction. They’re harmful to human beings. And they have been found. And they had not been reported by Saddam Hussein as he inaccurately alleged that he had reported all of his weapons. And they are still being found and discovered.”
Finally, there are some who insist that despite finding more than 500 munitions filled with mustard or sarin nerve agent, there are no WMD in Iraq. Allow me to quote statements made two weeks ago on the floor of the House during the debate on the Iraq resolution, straight from the Congressional Record:
• “Absolutely no evidence of any kind of weapons of mass destruction.”
• “There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
• “I am struck to hear people still defending the arguments about the weapons of mass destruction.”
• “We know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know that to be the case.”
• “I knew from the very beginning that there were no weapons of mass destruction.”
• “We are certain that Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction–and never did.”
This is patently not the case.

http://armedservices.house.gov/schedules/6-29-06WeldonOpeningStatement.pdf
Mustard gas is nasty stuff, and it doesn’t deteriorate much over time. In 2001 the town of Vimy, site of the Canadian war memorial, had to be evacuated because mustard gas was leaking from shells collected by the French authorities during their “Iron Harvest.” The gas was ninety years old, and still toxic.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2001/04/14/vimy010414.html
We found binary sarin nerve agent shells rigged as IEDs in Iraq. Not Iran-Iraq War leftovers – Saddam didn’t have binary agents then (not that he didn’t *try* to make them).
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4997808/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/bomb-said-holddeadly-sarin-gas-explodes-iraq/
Then, there’s that little matter of the 550 metric tons of yellowcake we found in Iraq — you know, that stuff Joe Wilson said Saddam hadn’t been shopping for?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/secret-us-mission-hauls-uranium-iraq/
… a claim the Bush Administration seems to have not even believed themselves (Or else their negligence in allowing the wholesale looting of depots where these WMDs were likely to be constitutes blatantly putting us in much graver danger than we were when the supposed WMDs were in Saddam’s hands…basically incompetence of mind-blowing proportions…)
“You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want.”
Eight years of Bill Clinton reduced the size of the military to the point where we wouldn’t have had the number of boots on the ground we needed to guard everything in Iraq even if we’d sent everyone we had in uniform. We didn’t win Gulf II with the Clinton military, we won it with what remained of the Reagan military.
You extreme right wingers are entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts.
“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
”Knowingly, deliberately producing false information products to support a personal agenda when you’re paid to produce honest ones *is* stealing.”
….Which no independent investigation has found occurred.
Two words. Michael Mann.
Or maybe you think he just keeps making honest mistakes.
”If you work for a taxpayer-funded organization and the e-mails are on that organization’s server, the e-mails are public property. “
People who work for the government or taxpayer-funded organizations do not forfeit all rights to privacy in their communications.
They do when they use that taxpayer-funded server to send e-mails, regardless of the content.
There are certain freedom of information laws that allow for the release of information because of the public’s right to it but those laws are not without limitations and they do not state that anybody who has access to certain information can release it at their own will to the public.
What is it about the term “whistleblower” that seems to escape you so?
”So was Sarah Palin’s. What’s your point?”
My point is that there were violations of the law that were perpetrated by some of those who obtained and disseminated the Climategate e-mails.
There were violations of the law, but it appears the authorities disagree with your personal and somewhat biased belief of who the actual culprits of Climategate were.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) decided the UEA failed in its duties under the (freedom of information) act but said it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late…”
http://www.climategate.com/climategate-professor-phil-jones-could-face-ten-years-on-fraud-charges
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/28/crus-climategate-finally-makes-the-news-in-norwich/
http://papundits.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/yes-climategate-scientists-did-break-the-law/

Bill Tuttle, good rejoinder. But it will be lost on the true believers of the AGW cult as these are people without honesty or integrity and will justify and do anything which suits their beliefs. They all know the facts and deliberately distort them with intent. But with facts being plain to everyone, they are the ones who look like fools.

Bill Tuttle says:

Good point. It seems they just quietly gave up on it because they couldn’t find any evidence that the server was hacked.

That is not even what is claimed on the biased websites that you cite as sources. All that is said is that the investigation is inactive. There are many reasons why an investigation runs dry…It doesn’t mean that they have no evidence that the server was hacked. They may have excellent evidence of that but can’t trace who did it. I am not saying that is the case…but it is as possible interpretation as yours. The difference is that I am not presenting it as if it were the only interpretation.
As for the WMD stuff, despite Kurth Weldon’s attempt to put lipstick on a pig even George Bush admitted that we didn’t find WMD there in any reasonable sense of the word. And, your link to a story about the yellowcake in no way implies that this was ADDITIONAL yellowcake to what Saddam was known to already possess, which is what the Plame/Wilson thing involved.

“You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want.”
Eight years of Bill Clinton reduced the size of the military to the point where we wouldn’t have had the number of boots on the ground we needed to guard everything in Iraq even if we’d sent everyone we had in uniform. We didn’t win Gulf II with the Clinton military, we won it with what remained of the Reagan military.

Frankly, that is a bunch of partisan nonsense. They seemed to have no trouble finding the necessary soldiers to secure the oil fields in special operations (I believe some even before hostilities officially commenced or at least in the very early hours.) If they were really so constrained by the state of the military that they couldn’t find the troops to secure a facility where it was known for a fact that Saddam had high-grade conventional explosives that could be used for nuclear weapons (since they had been locked and tagged as such by the UAE), then they shouldn’t have gone in at all. If the purpose of my mission is to prevent WMD from getting into the hands of terrorists, I have the CIA telling me that a control freak like Saddam is very unlikely to give up control of WMD to terrorists (particularly those who have such a stellar record of turning on their former allies as Bin Laden!), and I don’t think I have the necessary troops to secure facilities where there are most likely to be WMD so that they can’t be looted by any poverty-stricken Iraqi that can commandeer a truck and then sold on the black market, then it is pretty much a no-brainer of whether or not I choose to go to war!
Why would one start a war to prevent terrorists from acquiring WMD from Iraq when with a large degree of likelihood the outcome of the war would be to help vastly increase the likelihood of terrorists acquiring WMD from Iraq?

One of the most interesting unanswered question about the Iraq war is whether the Bush Administration was actually played as a pawn by the Iranian intelligence service, who succeeded in getting the Administration to depose their worst enemy and thus vastly increase their influence in the region: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2008/06/05/40080/did-iranian-agents-dupe-pentagon.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/25/usa.iraq10
Perhaps eventually the truth about all this will come out.

Tried to post again and got nothing yet my small inquiry post was received?

joeldshore says:
July 12, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Bill Tuttle says: “They do when they use that taxpayer-funded server to send e-mails, regardless of the content.”
No…They do not.
Good luck arguing that POV in court. If it’s on a publicly-funded server, it’s public property unless it’s been classified. From the DC FOIA (which mirrors the US FOIA):

http://www.rcfp.org/category/open-government-guide-table-contents/r1/r1c/r1c1?page=4
What is it about the term “whistleblower” that seems to escape you so?
“Whistleblower” laws are designed to protect people who report things that they perceive as abuses through proper channels, not to protect people who take the law into their own hands. In certain cases, self-styled “whistleblowers” have felt strongly enough to take things into their own hands (Pentagon papers, Wikileaks) but in that case these people have to recognize that what they are doing is likely not legal, may be prosecutable, and must be prepared to face the consequences.
Daniel Ellesberg and Bradley Manning were not charged with theft of public documents, they were charged with the unauthorized release of *classified* documents to the general public. Bottom line is that anyone using a publicly-funded server has *no* right to expect a :right to privacy.”
Gotta scoot for now — day job, and all that…

joeldshore says:
July 12, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Bill Tuttle says: “Good point. It seems they just quietly gave up on it because they couldn’t find any evidence that the server was hacked.”
That is not even what is claimed on the biased websites that you cite as sources. All that is said is that the investigation is inactive. There are many reasons why an investigation runs dry…It doesn’t mean that they have no evidence that the server was hacked. They may have excellent evidence of that but can’t trace who did it. I am not saying that is the case…but it is as possible interpretation as yours. The difference is that I am not presenting it as if it were the only interpretation.
The usual procedure in the event that they have evidence, but no leads, is to release an official statement that “the investigation is ongoing.” If they have no evidence, they usually put it into the Cold Case file.
As for the WMD stuff, despite Kurth Weldon’s attempt to put lipstick on a pig even George Bush admitted that we didn’t find WMD there in any reasonable sense of the word.
Interesting that you guys spent eight years claiming “Bush lied” and then you pull out a Bush quote to “prove” there were no WMDs in Iraq. And you must have a very exclusive definition of “reasonable” —

WASHINGTON, June 29, 2006 – The 500 munitions discovered throughout Iraq since 2003 and discussed in a National Ground Intelligence Center report meet the criteria of weapons of mass destruction, the center’s commander said here today.
“These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes … they do constitute weapons of mass destruction,” Army Col. John Chu told the House Armed Services Committee.

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15918

Citing the United Nations resolutions that called for destruction of all of Hussein’s banned weapons, Hunter added that “the verified existence of such chemical weapons” proves they were not destroyed and “in part because of such violations, we voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/30/AR2006063001528.html
From your U-Toob link, it’s clear that Bush was referring to Saddam’s nuclear program. Did we find any nukes? No.

Several hundred chemical weapons were found, and Saddam had all his WMD scientists and technicians ready. Just end the sanctions and add money, and the weapons would be back in production within a year. At the time of the invasion, all intelligence agencies, world-wide, believed Saddam still had a functioning WMD program. Saddam had shut them down because of the cost, but created the illusion that the program was still operating in order to fool the Iranians.

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/topten/articles/20070128.aspx
And, your link to a story about the yellowcake in no way implies that this was ADDITIONAL yellowcake to what Saddam was known to already possess, which is what the Plame/Wilson thing involved.
I didn’t say it did. What I *did* say was that there’s fifty metric tons of yellowcake unaccounted for, and we found the centrifuges which Saddam was using to enrich it – the same exact make and model the Iranians were using until Stuxnet ate them up.
“Eight years of Bill Clinton reduced the size of the military to the point where we wouldn’t have had the number of boots on the ground we needed to guard everything in Iraq even if we’d sent everyone we had in uniform. We didn’t win Gulf II with the Clinton military, we won it with what remained of the Reagan military.”
Frankly, that is a bunch of partisan nonsense.
Frankly, I find that amusing, coming from an armchair academic with no military background.
They seemed to have no trouble finding the necessary soldiers to secure the oil fields in special operations (I believe some even before hostilities officially commenced or at least in the very early hours.)
The SF lads were securing the airfields and the surrounding buildings within direct-fire range. The oilfields themselves were bypassed, not secured, because a good part of them were on fire.
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/burning-oil-wells-signal-that-iraq-is-on-retreat/77524/1
The oilfields weren’t secured until civilian contract security teams moved in along with the firefighters, months later – the military had its hands full being a police force in the main cities.
If they were really so constrained by the state of the military that they couldn’t find the troops to secure a facility where it was known for a fact that Saddam had high-grade conventional explosives that could be used for nuclear weapons (since they had been locked and tagged as such by the UAE), then they shouldn’t have gone in at all.
You made the assumption that Saddam had all his eggs in one basket. He didn’t – he had small arsenals and dispersed facilities to make them more difficult to target during the Deny Flight years. Read some history books.
If the purpose of my mission is to prevent WMD from getting into the hands of terrorists, I have the CIA telling me that a control freak like Saddam is very unlikely to give up control of WMD to terrorists (particularly those who have such a stellar record of turning on their former allies as Bin Laden!), and I don’t think I have the necessary troops to secure facilities where there are most likely to be WMD so that they can’t be looted…
First you said that Saddam just had *a* facility and now you’re multiplying them to fit your narrative. And there were several other reasons (which you’re rather conveniently ignoring) for going into Iraq.
…by any poverty-stricken Iraqi that can commandeer a truck and then sold on the black market, then it is pretty much a no-brainer of whether or not I choose to go to war!
Cheney admitted he underestimated the number of troops they’d need for peacekeeping. That was a residue of believing the DoS-centric view that the mere presence of US troops would automatically ensure stability. The realization that the striped-pants set didn’t know what it was talking about and they’d need more boots on the ground was the reason for the Surge.
Which worked.

Ooops. Credible source #3 slipped through the cut’n’paste process (just in case you have a quibble about my citing WUWT or BH as a credible source) —

In a statement, Deputy Information Commissioner Graham Smith said it was an offence under section 77 of the Freedom of Information act “to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information”
He said the requests were made by a climate change sceptic in the 2007-2008 period and as the case was more than six months old “the opportunity to consider a prosecution was long gone” under existing legislation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8484385.stm