Contradictory contest criteria have been rectified via Keating “clarification” 
Guest post by Alec Rawls
At first glance retired physics teacher Christopher Keating’s challenge appears to be an obvious bait and switch. It opens as an invitation to “global warming skeptics” who charge that “the science doesn’t support claims of man-made climate change.” The central “claim of man-made climate change” is the IPCC’s assertion in AR5 that: “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century” (AR5 WGI SPM p. 17, upped from “very likely” in AR4 and “likely” in the Third Area Report). So wait a minute. All we have to do is demonstrate that this assertion of great certainty that human activity caused most late 20th century warming is clearly unsupported by the available reason and evidence and Keating will give us $30,000? That is easily done. But then the first stated rule of his contest asserts a very different criterion:
1. I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.
Ridiculous. There is hardly a skeptic alive who doesn’t think that human activity is causing some climate change, and in particular, some amount of warming. The question is whether one accepts the IPCC’s claim of extreme certainty that the human release of greenhouse gases is responsible for most late 20th century warming, and is on course to cause a dangerous amount of warming over the next century. Skeptics see this as unlikely, or as unsupported by the evidence, but it all comes down to the size of the human warming effect.
So Keating is putting forward two completely different criteria for gauging human influence on climate, one that pretty much all skeptics reject and one that pretty much all skeptics accept, and he is treating them as interchangeable. This raises an obvious suspicion.
When nobody can prove NO human-caused warming, will Keating claim vindication for the IPCC’s claim that MOST warming was human caused?
It would be a very crude switch, conflating two very different scientific positions, but we have been down this road several times already. Remember the bogus “consensus” study by Doran and Zimmerman that failed to distinguish skeptic from consensoid views, thereby lumping skeptics into their proclaimed “consensus”? According to their press release:
Two questions were key: have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures.
About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent the second.
Wait, one in ten scientists don’t think global temperatures have risen since 1800? That’s actually a pretty amazing lack of consensus, but on the role of human activity, there are very few on the skeptic side who would say that human effects are insignificant, thus their real finding is that 82 percent of scientists can be categorized as either skeptics or consensoids. They hadn’t distinguished the actual competing viewpoints at all, but they pretended they had, and declared the science settled:
…the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.
Ditto for Cook et al. 2013. As documented by Legates, Soon, Briggs and Monckton, the Cook study’s own raters found that only 0.5% of the climate science abstracts they examined supported the IPCC “consensus” position that most recent warming was caused by human activity. To claim a 97% consensus they added this 0.5% figure together with the numbers of abstracts that support weaker claims of some human influence, positions that encompass virtually all skeptics. From Christopher Monckton:
In defiance of the evidence recorded in their own data file, they had then explicitly stated, both in their article and in a subsequent article, that 97.1% had endorsed the IPCC’s proposition.
Again and again the alarmists try to pull off this trick, fabricating a phony “consensus” on the IPCC position by falsely classifying those who reject the IPCC’s position as supportive of it, and the yawning slip between Keating’s cup and his lip seems to be an obvious set-up for more of the same, which must have put off many of the skeptics who came across Keating’s challenge. It certainly put me off.
I belatedly looked further only because these bait and switches have been turning into big propaganda battles and I figured it might be worth getting ahead of this one. That’s when I came across Keating’s clarification page, where he promises to fork over the money to anyone who can prove that the available scientific reason and evidence do not support the IPCC’s claim of extreme certainty that most recent warming human caused.
Okay, that changes things. If these are the terms then Keating deserves to be taken seriously, not in any expectation that he would ever pay up, but because he might be an honest man who has simply never been properly exposed to the skeptic side. Of course that would have been self-selected but he is now self-forcing himself to engage with skeptic views and if he really is an honest man the result could be interesting.
Keating’s “clarification” page
Numerous commenters complained to Keating that there was no way to win his challenge because he was demanding proof of a negative: that human activity has no effect on climate (a negative that no skeptic ever claimed). This is what spawned his clarification page, where he lists “two different ways” that skeptics can win, with “Option #1” being:
The basic tenets of AGW are these two IPCC conclusions:
It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
Climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C and extremely unlikely (95-100%) less than 1°C.
So if someone was able to scientifically disprove these two extremely likely / unlikely statements, then that should suffice.
To “scientifically disprove” the IPCC claims of extreme certainty is to prove that they are not scientifically justified. It doesn’t mean proving that human activity did not cause most post 50’s warming. It just means proving that the available reason and evidence does not justify any high degree of certainty about the latest warming being mostly human-caused. “Proof” is generally not easy to come by in science but this one is easy, on multiple grounds.
So now we have a challenge worth answering, an opportunity to turn Keating’s publicity ploy into a positive episode for skeptic understanding. His clarification also means that his challenge needs to be taken seriously as a threat. Right on his clarification page, before anyone had seen it, Keating was already crowing how nobody could show that the IPCC’s radical attribution claims are rejected by science:
So, there you go. I set the challenge up to favor the deniers and have now even produced two separate ways they can win.
And, yet, THE DENIERS STILL CAN’T PRODUCE.
Oh yes we can. Keating is one of those “believers” who flings the “denier” label like plosive spittle, and having changed his contest rules to be able to more legitimately claim to that he is vindicating the IPCC’s most unscientific excesses he needs to be shadowed henceforth by an unrebuttable insistence that HE OWES US MONEY. Then he can raise the subject as much as he wants.
Keating’s contradictory statements about skeptic views prove that he’s never thought this through
How else could a physicist make the following contradictory statements about skeptic views, issued almost in sequence on his “clarification” page? First he is stunned by all the people trying to let him know that skeptics generally do agree that human release of greenhouse gases does cause warming:
Some have even gone so far as to claim that no one has ever denied that man made global warming is not real. I swear, I didn’t make that last statement up. This is such a brazen lie that I wonder if the people saying this have lost touch with reality. Seriously, I wonder if they have lost touch with the real world. One question to those people, if deniers have never said man made global warming is not real, then just what have you guys been saying all this time? There is a long record of your statements about how global warming is a fraud, etc. Once again, if you don’t like being held accountable for what you say, stop saying it.
No distinction between people causing some warming and people causing most warming, even though he is responding to people who are pressing him on this very point. It’s like the idea is so new to him that he can’t get his head around it. Then at the end of his “option 1” he includes this little admission, perhaps in response to his recent forced engagement with actual skeptic views:
That said, the climate debate has shifted a bit over the past decades I’ve following it into at least “skeptics” grudgingly accepting (1) that the planet is actually warming [that should be “was actually warming”] and (2) the physics behind sensitivity excluding feedbacks being 1.1°C.
On the CO2 forcing effect it isn’t the debate that has shifted, only Keating’s awareness of it, and he must have only learned very recently (not “over the decades”) about the broad agreement among skeptics and consensoids alike that a doubling of CO2 should cause a temperature forcing of about 1°C. How else could he have been flabbergasted just a few paragraphs above by the idea of skeptics who do not deny that human activity causes warming?
So we’re talking about a babe-in-arms here. This senior citizen baby is unaware that the actual debate is over the size of the feedback effect and whether it is positive or negative. He has certainly never thought through the implications of agreement on CO2 forcing. So what to do with our senior baby?
I’m going to give him two answers. A little later I will post a “taking Keating seriously part 2” that recounts a few of the prima facie ways that the IPCC’s radical attribution claims are highly unscientific, as pointed out by numerous people in recent years. Then early next week I will post part 3, detailing a train of specific unscientific and anti-scientific steps in the IPCC analysis that render it not just scientifically invalid but properly classify it as a hoax and a fraud.
I documented two years ago how the First Order Draft of AR5 was marred by systematic “omitted variable fraud.” That critique is past due for an update and Keating’s challenge is a good second bird to kill with the same stone.
Applying the scientific method to the AGW hypothesis clearly determines it to be false.
1. AGW contends that rising levels of atmospheric CO2 results in rising planetary temperature.
2. The average planetary temperature has remained constant for the past 18 years.
3. The level of atmospheric CO2 has continued it’s monotonic increase over the past 18 years.
4. The scientific method requires that validating the hypothetical requires that it always be true.
5. Since the AGW hypothesis isn’t always true, it is therefore false.
Trying to prove a negative is not science.
It’s still a moot point as AGW was never proven by the scientific method, but approved by concensus.
Technically, no one can prove or disprove CO2 caused global warming. Keating is just using this as a publicity stunt and laces every other sentence with some version of “deniers” deny science. He deleted some my comments regards Antarctica and then banned me from his site.
“1. I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.”
“When nobody can prove NO human-caused warming, will Keating claim vindication for the IPCC’s claim that MOST warming was human caused?”
I am not a scientist, so anyone out there is welcome to correct me if I am mistaken here. It is my understanding though that science cannot prove a negative. Correct? If so, isn’t that what Keating is requiring of science here….that a negative be proven? Isn’t he demanding the impossible of science?
Total nonsense.
YOU DO NOT PROVE ANYTHING by the scientific method. You simply fail to disprove your hypothesis. The pesky “p” is never zero.
Building a nuclear reactor and making it work is not science. It is engineering.
Building a machine to throw a ball into the air doesn’t prove the existence of gravity.
This alarmists are really, really, showing their ignorance. And, they are being insincere, as usual. They want the burden of proof to be on the skeptic. It never is, with the scientific method. The burden of proof lies with the proponent.
How about the bet as follows. If this fellow can’t prove catastrophic man made global warming exists, he gives 30,000 to the charity of my choice.
“a negative that no skeptic ever claimed”
(referring to the non-existence of skeptics who say there is no human caused warming)
Oh yes they have. There are those who say the Greenhouse Effect does not exist e.g. the “Slayers”, those who say human activity has contributed nothing to the rise in CO2, those who say it is all the Sun, those who say it is due to natural cycles all mysteriously adding in the same direction, or who say it is the movements of the planets, or that the temperature data has all been faked, and probably more. Some or most of these will turn up on this thread.
On the other hand, if you are going to argue that the Greenhouse effect is real, and that the rise in CO2 is (mostly) human caused, but that the net results is less than claimed, then this is a scientifically valid argument, but to prove it you would have to find firm evidence of the relative proportions of human and natural effects – which is of course what a lot of climate science is trying to do.
“1. I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.”
So he’s trying the age old trick of asking someone to ‘prove a negative’? Has he offered proof, via the scientific method, that man-made climate change IS occurring? The key ‘catch’ is ‘scientific method’. If I understand that correctly it requires proof by experiment. I would submit that this is impossible when dealing with the planetary atmosphere and I would further submit that he knows it.
The steps of the scientific method are to:
Ask a Question
Do Background Research
Construct a Hypothesis
Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
Communicate Your Results
It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. A “fair test” occurs when you change only one factor (variable) and keep all other conditions the same.
Exactly how does the science teacher propose that we ‘experiment’ with earths atmosphere?
“consensoids”
I like it!
@ Alec Rawls
This is going to be interesting. I will be watching for parts 2 & 3. I hope you win the cash prize.
Remember Keating’s original challenge, point 5:
“5. I am the final judge of all entries but will provide my comments on why any entry fails to prove the point.”
No matter what evidence is provided, Keating will reject it based on his own criteria.
The challenge is still bogus.
How about turning it around on them, and offer 30K to anyone who can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change will not be a net positive for the world.
LOL. If there is a single human being alive and breathing on the face of the earth, then there is some man made climate change.
Keating’s bet is as phony as his alarmism.
Exactly.
Besides, CO2 levels are rising, temperatures are not. CAGW R.I.P.
The challenge will be to get him to cough up the money.
In the 21st Century there has been no warming and CO2 has sky rocketed. Positive feedback beliefs were that of the Neanderthal 20th Century man, in the 21st Century we base things on observational data and CO2 has proven to be a bit player in temperature.
Bravo, Alec Rawls!
@ Gregory, I don’t necessarily agree that it’s moot. This is a method of engaging some of the AGW acolytes who seem to simply believe. It’s an article of faith, not science—even very highly educated, brilliant people like Keating have bought into it. I won’t go into the psychobabble about the dogma/faith etc. sort of syndrome many of these folks appear to exhibit. But here’s one who makes a statement which proves that he only just learned what the community of free-thinkers have been saying all along: yes, there’s warming, but to claim it’s a “crisis” that requires all the brouhaha that people like Mann and Hansen are demanding is nonsense.
Anyone who has read anything about the subject will agree that yes, the climate has warmed since 1850. I don’t know anyone who claims otherwise. But here we have a believer in the crisis and the need for dramatic, destructive measures, who has only just learned what free thinking people have been saying?
Is that not a breakthrough? Most of them ONLY read literature and opinions that are re-inforcing of their dogma—isn’t that true of nearly all religions? This—this is heresy in the church of global warming, almost. He’s flirting with apostasy.
And even if Keating remains unconvinced, it’s very likely that the commotion will attract the attention of some who aren’t died-in-the-wool believers in AGW, but haven’t read any other information—like children in high school, fed a diet of nonsense & lies like “An Inconvenient Truth”, and have never (apparently like Keating) been exposed to any other ideas at all.
The argument won’t be won overnight. There isn’t likely to be any single experiment or proof that answers all their arguments, and forces the UN et al to announce they were wrong.
Think of the lawsuits over THAT one! How much money have people made selling the scary story? How many people have gotten grants knowing that they’re hyping a non-issue? Think of Solyndra, et al, who made millions off taxpayer dollars due to what appear to be political favors?
The important thing here isn’t being right about is there is there not— We’re more concerned about the abuses being made in the name of AGW that are literally killing people and making them miserable in poor nations. It will take public influence to stop politicians from pursuing policies which are destructive and that will mean that instead of trusting the UN (and what school kid is taught to be skeptical about the UN or it’s motives?), they’ll have to first learn that the AGW Abusers aren’t the only source of information, and that they DON’T have all the answers. But that process will necessarily be gradual.
I humbly submit this is a very good place to start, and ironically fitting that one of theirs provided the opportunity.
Keating: “One question to those people, if deniers have never said man made global warming is not real, then just what have you guys been saying all this time? There is a long record of your statements about how global warming is a fraud, etc.”
I suspect one problem Keating has it that he has allowed Alarmist/Warmists to define the skeptical position.
A very naïve beginner level mistake.
You may regard this as semantics. If the temperature of the global is lower than the peak of this inter-glacial, which was lower than the peaks of previous how can
1. The climate said to be changing as it is within previously experienced levels?
2. If it is varying between previously experienced levels and CO2 is as high as it ever been for the last 800K years then how can it be connected to temperature.
3. Rates of change are within previously experienced levels.
4. Other things like precipitation, cloud, hurricanes, sea level etc. are also within previously experienced levels and rates of change so what exactly is changing.
This really puzzles me greatly, surely if something is changing then it must be doing something measurably different from previously experienced?
Could someone explain it to me in simple terms, I’m not stupid but simple is the only way I’m going to understand this.
Good article. I generally agree 100% with Alec Rawls. But I don’t think he will ever see a penny from this so-called ‘challenge’.
Regarding the “skeptical” position, since skeptics aren’t a close-knit, well organized group, there really isn’t an agreed upon, formally accepted position.
However, many accept:
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
from the Petition Project – http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php
oh good grief….
If you can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring….
…then you can prove that it is
They haven’t been able to prove that it is………
Bah. You could prove the Earth has actually been cooling for the last hundred years and still not get the money. He would simply say it would have been even colder without manmade warming. What else would you expect from someone who clearly does not understand the scientific method?
Part 2 not found WUWT ;>) it’s broken ;>(
@ lorne50 –
Uh, this is Part 1.
Part [2] will follow, as noted in the text.
Edit – “Part 2 will follow”
“consensoids”
Yes +100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ;>)
Alec Rawls:
I do not know what you intend to include in your Parts 2 and 3 but I write to make a suggestion.
[The global temperature rise in the first half of the last century was very similar to the temperature rise in the second half of the last century. Everybody, including the IPCC, agrees that human emissions of greenhouse gases(GHGs) were not sufficient to cause the rise from 1900 to 1950. So, there is no reason to assert that the very similar rise from 1950 to 2000 was caused human GHG emissions. And the rise has been so small as to be indiscernible this century despite the human GHG emissions continuing to increase.]
The above paragraph fulfils the falsification criteria as defined in your above essay.
According to your essay Keeting says
And in your essay you say
The similarities of the periods 1900 to 1950 and 1950 to 2000 does not justify ANY certainty about the latest warming being mostly human-caused.
Richard
Alec Rawls:
I sincerely apologise.
The most important paragraph in my post should have said.
The global temperature rise in the first half of the last century was very similar to the temperature rise in the second half of the last century. Everybody, including the IPCC, agrees that human emissions of greenhouse gases(GHGs) were not sufficient to cause the rise from 1900 to 1950. So, there is no reason to assert that the very similar rise from 1950 to 2000 was caused human GHG emissions. And the rise has been so small as to be indiscernible this century despite the human GHG emissions continuing to increase.
Very sorry for the errors.
Richard
What do those percentages ( extremely unlikely (95-100%)) mean, anyway? Are we to assume some sort of canonical distribution of universes so that Bayesian equations can calculate P( observed warming | no human influence) or P( no observed warming | with human influence )? How do we collect statistics in that? Please don’t say “models.” Are we allowed to present historical and pre-historical similar warming without human cause as counterfactuals?
Well, admirable that you have the time and the patience with such a case.
In my view, he is just another religious fanatic asking to disprove his bible through science, he being the sole judge.
Are there any climate models that work with a climate sensitivity in the range of –
Climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C and extremely unlikely (95-100%) less than 1°C.
– that model correctly current temperatures?
They are not able to model the current lack of warming.
Because the theory is right? Not even the lapse rate can be properly calculated with this theory.
The theory is wrong and cannot model the present or the past. To validate their failed theory they try to explain LIA through Genghis Khan, Younger Dryas through megafauna flatulences.
This is what their theory is.
This is the “theory” that he is trying to promote, insulting all who do not bow to his bible.
Claes Johnson has a nice series on the greenhouse effect and shows how much modelling and assumptions is in it:
http://claesjohnson.blogspot.co.at/search/label/greenhouse%20effect
Not to mention the sensitivity part and the very rudimentar and simple radiative model inside the atmosphere.
As did other endtime religions also CAGW religion will die slowly once the prophetized catastrophes do not happen… wondering what will the fanatics promote 10-15 years from now?
My bad on the timing of part 2. I originally said it would be posted immediately following but Anthony wants to give part 1 some time to soak (to use a phrase from “Deadliest Catch”). I have edited the post say that that part 2 will run “a little later.”
Part #2 is up above this post I put lorne50 says:
July 25, 2014 at 3:45 pm
because it doesn’t work and is on the site ;>(
I agree.
Never mind it is gone now mods what up ????
This is remarkable, I just posted the following on my second most daily viewed forum in response to a statement by the interviewer, and then I read this post that matches closely to what I wrote:
“The “Green House Effect” was mentioned in this video. Green House gases make the planet 30 C warmer than it otherwise would be. 95% of the “green house effect” is due to water vapor, a green house gas. When it comes to CO2 and its effect, the pre-industrial level of about 280 ppm is of course a natural effect, by which I mean the extra warming that quantity of CO2 causes has nothing to do with humans.
Charles, you took some math I understand in your college or university training, so you know what Logarithm means. CO2 has a logarithmic function to its warming effect. That is why in climate science the terms “doubling of CO2″ is used, to express this logarithmic function a little bit easier.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) says doubling CO2 causes about 1 C of warming, but feedbacks kick in to cause 3 C of warming. My nearly 5 years of research informs me that this feedback either doesn’t exist or is very low. My other problem with IPCC’s position that CO2 is the control knob on climate is that in the past there was CO2 levels of 7,000 ppm with global temperatures colder than they are today at 400 ppm.
I notice the day after I watched this video, the forecast for the high for [Seattle] was 67F or so.
My question to you Charles is, what year is Seattle going to have Santa Barbara climate?”
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Ian-Hays-Building-a-MultiDictionary-Collection-for-NET
Any progress reports on the 911 Crescent?
So I decided to offer Keating a counter wager on his site. This is it.
I will award, to Christopher Keating, 30,000 dollars of my own money, if he can prove via the scientific method, that humming bird caused global climate change is not occurring. The deadline for submission of proof is July 31, 2014.
In my comment Searle is what I get when I misspell Seattle and auto correct kick in.
Making bets on Her whims ?
I shudder at the very thought of Christopher Keating teaching physics to anyone given his evident inability to grasp the scientific method. Even worse, it was probably in public schools.
James Schrumpf says:
July 25, 2014 at 2:53 pm
Trying to prove a negative is not science.
—
That is generally true. In this case, however, it can be done. It can be shown that that the IPCC assertion that “most” (>50%) of temperature rise is unlikely due to human influence with 95% confidence. There is no total certainty in real science. We have degrees of confidence.
Not only have the screamers failed to reject the null hypothesis with 95% confidence, but yes, their models can be rejected with about 99% to 99.9% confidence. The “most” statement can be disproved with 95% confidence.
This won’t get any $30 000 off Keating, and frankly, I would be grieved if it did. That man is one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, his data are critical to real understanding of climate and physiology (both plant and animal) and he deserves every penny he ever made.
“When nobody can prove NO human-caused warming”?
I would say my submission to Christopher utterly disproved any warming from human emissions of radiative gases. (I can’t claim the same for land use issues)
Christopher Keating owes me $30,000 USD.
After much difficulty with his website, I did manage to get a submission posted, including links to the supporting empirical experiments.
The submission effectively disproved both AGW and the idea of a net radiative GHE by demonstrating that the surface temperature of the planet in absence of atmosphere would be far higher than the 255K used by climastrologists.
Christopher tried to debate, but ended up having to delete comments and censor to weasel his way out. I kept screen shots of everything including the replies he deleted. It was a great deal of fun. Christopher ended up shrieking that I was an “irrational troll” that needed to be “blacklisted”.
In the end Christopher couldn’t cope with simple, repeatable empirical experiments and fled to the “if it’s not peer reviewed and published in a known journal it’s not science” defence, which is no defence at all.
The little problem for Christopher is that even that weak argument was flawed. My selective surface experiments were actually replicating peer reviewed work for researchers from Texas A&M in 1965, and strangely, it turns out that my early 2011 experiment into incident LWIR and water ended up being published by others in an engineering journal.
I provided Christopher what he asked for, empirical disproof of AGW. He got what he asked for, plus the bonus destruction of the entire net radiative GHE hypothesis. While Christopher had thought to put a time limit on submissions, at the time he accepted my submission, he had not thought to put a time limit on payout…
Tick tock, Christopher, tick tock…;-)
We all know that while CO2 levels have risen, the globe’s temperature for 15-18 years has not.
What is there to discuss? We all know the current administration in DC lies like a rug. Do we need further proof? We all know that the UN’s purpose in this crusade is not to stop global warming, which is not proven, but to redistribute wealth, which is happening. How do we stop this madness?
pokerguy says:
July 25, 2014 at 3:11 pm
How about turning it around on them, and offer 30K to anyone who can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change will not be a net positive for the world.
—-
That sounds good, but millions or billions of dollars have already been won for that one. The NSF and other grantors have funded science for years with the idea that any imagination you can cook up on how this might harm a living thing will get you funding. Telling the whole truth.– that most of the effects will increase the life on Earth–will get your grants cut off.
Since my purpose in Life is to increase the Life of Earth, including my own family and all mankind, as well as wildlife, I HATE those liars.
“Mike McMillan on July 25, 2014 at 3:18 pm
The challenge will be to get him to cough up the money.”
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
BTW, I assume you’re all familiar with the James Randi Educational Foundation and the $1M prize? I have not much respect for the JREF (for reasons completely irrelevant to this blog, although Randi is an AGW skeptic, so I bow to that). However, the JREF properly understands the principle of the scientific method. They will award the $1M prize to anyone who CAN PROVE the existence of ESP, telepathy and such phenomena.
LLG,
I fear you may have this particular Christopher Keating confused with a real scientist.
He seemed unable to understand that science is a method, not dependant on institutions, journals or policy statements of committees.
His “challenge” was essentially a marketing exercise for his book on the horror of of the coming AGW doooooom. (yes, it even has the traditional dried cracked mud baking in searing heat on the cover…)
Debating him was a lot of fun though, and a clear reinforcement of the old saying –
“Never try to explain something to someone who’s income depends on them not understanding it.”
I am afraid you misunderstand. The good professor probably knows the scientific method just fine, but he is not doing science — he is doing propaganda. He wants to see the science brotherhood rule the nations. What he does not know is that the politicians and other control freaks are just using people like him to take control and then “useful idiots” like himself will be disposed of.
If this was all about science they would have fired Hansen after a few months and Mann would never have gotten that last degree. Idiots.
It is impossible to win this prize.
Whenever I sneeze I alter the climate, infinitesimal, but measurable. It is a tacit argument so he shall never be obliged to pay.
I alter earths climate just by existing.
I chuckle at all the hullabaloo about co2, when it is agriculture and irrigation that are the major culprits.
This place should not be named earth it should be named water.
“…prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.”
— His money is safe. He’s asking skeptics to prove a universal negative that’s not even true.
1. I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.
“Ridiculous. There is hardly a skeptic alive who doesn’t think that human activity is causing some climate change, and in particular, some amount of warming.”
No 1] Consensus has nothing to do with real scientific principles 2] By his own definition all you have to do is show that CO2″climate change” is falsified [“not real”] by its failure to provide even one correct prediction derived from its hypotheses – one which distinguishes them from the Null Hypothesis. In other words *Keating* has to provide the one correct prediction!
Just by chance, I got Keating to talk to me in comments after I had put this idea up in comments and had to further explain it after he appeared to not even understand what I was talking about “???”! So in desperation and dismissiveness he referred me to a sickly UCS paper which I could rebut, first by using its own statement to show that the “scientists” admit they can’t even “reproduce” the temperature record from 1870 on, including the recent warming. They are “confident” that they “can”, or something to that effect. But no evidence was given that they have done it. Therefore they can’t predict the future, as already proven. And the other points relating to predictions raised in the UCS paper, I dealt with.
I haven’t checked back after about 5 days later, but I did demand my $30,000 and expect it to arrive anytime now. Not….He’s gonna weasel out of it regardless. I was going to go double or nothing with him on some other issue, but I’ve lost interest in Keating.
What has really got my attention in AR5 is this in BOLD in the quote. Why not say man-made greenhouse gases? Are they slipping in a fast one for future slipperiness? An escape clause? This thing needs pinning down.
I thought the whole big push was about man-made greenhouse gases. Also note the obvious change from global warming to climate change. These people have been defeated but they won’t back down. This is getting silly.
argue with an idiot and he’ll bring you down to his level and beat you with experience.
I still haven’t seen any proof beyond reasonable doubt that the CO2 leads temperature rise.
May I add to my last comment that I suspect the IPCC is hinting at land use changes. Yet we are not being told to act now on land use.
I like the idea of claiming victory and aggressively, persistently, and annoyingly demanding he pay up.
Mark Stoval (@MarkStoval) says:
July 25, 2014 at 5:10 pm
— he is doing propaganda
====
yep, I’m waiting on the cast of characters that tried to beat up the good Lord Monckton for his show of hands…..I’m sure they will be equally offended by this crap /snark
I will also award $30,000 of Keatings money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that non-man-made global climate change is not occurring.
This has to be one of the most pathetic stunts in the history of the sullied enterprise called climate science.
Watch out for this subtle shifting of the goal posts:
“It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Did you spot it ??
It’s not longer “most of ” ( >50% ) it’s now “dominant”, ie biggest of a large number of factors but [no] longer needing to be >50%.
That’s not Keatings, that got slipped into AR5.
Alec Rawls says:
July 25, 2014 at 4:08 pm
My bad on the timing of part 2. I originally said it would be posted immediately following but Anthony wants to give part 1 some time to soak (to use a phrase from “Deadliest Catch”). I have edited the post say that that part 2 will run “a little later.”
====
woops…..I still have it open in another window….read every word….it’s a good one!
[You must donate a “preview” tax to the WUWT kitty…. 8<) .mod]
The only item in the UCS paper I really had to work at was the idea that Myles Allen had predicted the “pause”, as per a Guardian graph. So I got whatever I could get from Allen’s work – luckily I could get some old stuff by “cube preview” which I didn’t have to pay for because these were only 2 pages long and I could preview almost the whole things – the lower field got really fuzzy.
Allen started to get his own prediction wrong right from the start of the test period and I couldn’t see that he ever talked about a “pause”. He seemed to be honestly interested in making some real, even falsifiable predictions, for a change, and in decreasing uncertainty.
Sure enough, the data immediately upticked from his prediction, then went sideways back to it, since he had predicted a “straight line up” about 30 degrees. Then the data, updated, continued through his prediction and became the later pause as it moved away from his prediction. The Guardian was touting it as ~”very close” [also had very large confidence limits], but that’s not what Allen predicted. Anyway, the data could have also made an equally small or much larger sine wave right along Allen’s prediction, making his 10 yr. interval correct. But did Allen predict a sine wave or anything else which would have worked out correctly as per his 10yr. interval?
The null hypothesis: Climate change/ warming is natural, hasn’t been disproven.
The whole thing is a farce.
You know damned well he will never cough up. He’s judge, jury and holding the kitty.
If he wants to be taken seriously he needs to lodge the money with a trustworthy third party lay down some clear rules and have an equally mixed jury of sceptics and warmists judge submissions.
Forget part 2 and part 3, you’re just lending credibility to his charade by even discussing it.
I took Keating’s challenge when it was at $10,000 and he backed down. So I don’t [think] his new $30,000 challenge is serious either.
I reminded Keating, as I remind all who claim superiority in climate science, that the entire point of Science is the ability to predict – that is – the ability to forecast.
There’s plenty of people out there with all kinds of ideas on how to practice ‘science’ – especially in the world of climatology and meteorology, but few are actually doing forecasting in the real world outside of 10 days and fewer still can do seasonal climate forecasting and even fewer still can forecast yearly and decadal climate and weather conditions.
Keating is just wasting time and he’s not forecasting either by the way. Talk is talk, but he’s not walking his talk.
[You must donate a “preview” tax to the WUWT kitty…. 8<) .mod]
=====
nope, I reviewed it…you owe me!
LOL…it is a good one!
[Lettuce knot get into a review of the unseen sight policy for reviews of the un-author-eyed preview of a not-yet-viewed view of the next view of a unposted post prior to posting the unposted post…. Else one or the other of us would owe a great of money to the WUWT kitty. .mod]
“1. I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.”
A fool’s errand by a shammer. The burden of Proof is upon those claiming AGW.
Greg Goodman says: “… you’re just lending credibility to his charade by even discussing it.”
Ding, ding! We have a Winner.
🙂
“There is a long record of your statements about how global warming is a fraud, etc. Once again, if you don’t like being held accountable for what you say, stop saying it.”
That’s not what I say. What I call a fraud is that CO2 drives the climate and all other cause are secondary. That’s the fraud within the IPCC’s claim.
When ever someone ask me if I believe in “climate change” or “global warming”, I ask them are you talking about “CO2 drives the climate hypothesis?”
Mark Stoval says: ” The good professor probably knows the scientific method just fine, but he is not doing science — he is doing propaganda. He wants to see the science brotherhood rule the nations.”
The longer Scientific community sits on the sidelines failing to denounce the Global Warming (scientist) Alarmists, the more damage Scientific community does to their current and future credibility. If Scientific community cares at all about their reputations, they would very publicly denounce and divest themselves of GW Alarmists. Starting with the Mann who falsely claimed to be a Nobel Laureate.
I just ran a graph of temps from 1900-2000 with 1980 as a base period on NOAA’s website. The original avg temp plots show that from 1900-2000, there has actually been a cooling trend.
I clicked the check box to add a smoothed time series. The smoothed series shows a warming trend.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
I took a screenshot I was going to attach, but I don’t know the proper html code to do so. Anyhow, that surely suggests an error in the smoothing technique, doesn’t it? Smoothing should not divorce the data from the actual trend, right?
To Keating: ” I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the
scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.” ……
The scientific proof that there is no man-made climate change, but solely a climate change
fully caused by Earth orbital variation is available since 2010. The booklet, 108 pages, is
offered on the German Amazon.de, ISBN 978-3-86805-604-4, “Joachim Seifert: Das Ende der globalen Erwärmung (“The end of global warming”). The Earth orbit variation caused global warming of the 20th century, is causing the temp plateau in the first decades of the 21st
century now, which will be followed by a temperature drop into the next Little Ice Age
thereafter. A variety of Earth orbital diagrams show the context sufficiently for readers
without German knowledge. The booklet remains unrefuted, is unrefutable and proofs that
ALL of global warming over the centuries is entirely caused by the pecularities of the unlinear, spiral-shaped foreward movement of Earth on its elliptical path around the Sun. Many easy to
follow calculations are included.
The IPCC keeps the topic Eath orbit oscillations under the table and confuses the public
with atmospheric circulation and air composition arguments, such as the CO2-content.
I am pretty sure that Keating will refuse to read the booklet to save his promised bucks.
JS
This just clearly illustrates that warmists / alarmist don’t understand (or care to understand) what the skeptic position is. The reality is that the skeptical position is the scientific, carefully considered position and the warmist / alarmist position is the political / non-reasoned / non-scientific position.
The warmists are running out of time to repeat their mantra. A significantly cooling planet is only possible if the majority of the warming in the last 50 years was not due to AGW.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
There are more than a dozen independent observations and analysis results that support the assertion that the majority of the warming in the last 50 years was due to solar magnetic cycle changes rather than AGW.
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_4096_4500.jpg
What was implied by those statements, as context usually would have made clear, was that the global warming SCARE is a fraud, or CAGW is a fraud. This is evidence that Keating has only been reading what alarmists say that contrarians say, not the original material.
richardscourtney says:
July 25, 2014 at 3:56 pm
Alec Rawls:
“The global temperature rise in the first half of the last century was very similar to the temperature rise in the second half of the last century.”
Indeed, Lindzen has shown that the slopes of these segments are essentially the same with his splitting of the graph, removing the temp and years on the graph. Surely if the we had an effect on the latter period, the upslope should be steeper and the the downslopes in cooling flatter. I’ve argued this before. If they are essentially the same, there is no need for the IPCC explanation of the latter as something different.
dccowboy says: “The steps of the scientific method are to: ”
Those [were] the pre AGW ‘steps of the scientific method’
The post AGW steps are:
Determine a Political goal
Research Public Fears related to goal and select
Create selected Crisis and call for Funding
Tie Crisis to related negative public observable events
Fabricate Data and make Exaggerated Claims on results
Issue numerous F.U.D. statements to Media
Stress dire need for additional Funding
Jeff L. says: “warmist / alarmist position is the political / non-reasoned / non-scientific position.”
To AGW Alarmist (cough) scientist, it is all about money.
Funding should be tied to producing verifiable results, along with showing ALL data, research, and work.
“It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Isn’t it “human influence” that made the bogus temp adjustments and resulted in poor temp station siting. So he would be correct!
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/noaa-temperature-fraud-expands-part-1/
I leave ‘people’ like Keating to die by their own hand and means.
Lets see Keating answer 3 challenges
1) what is the perfect temperature for the earth
2) demonstrate how 1.8 ppm/yr affects the climate
3) what is his forecast for the coming 20 years. cause lord knows the past 20 he an his ilk have wasted for more than 30k of the globes time and money
I don’t know for certain, and I am pretty sure Keating doesn’t know for certain, either.
So, you’re saying that this is like the story of the “Welfare Queen”.
While it is obviously true that not all welfare recipients are moochers on society, it doesn’t follow that there are no such persons in existence.
You need only to:
1. Show that it is >5% probable that non-human influences are >50% of the total warming.
I would ask him if proving #1 would be sufficient.
I would ask for using an agreed upon independent judge.
“The challenge will be to get him to cough up the money.”
Yup. Since he is the “final judge”, you might as well try to convince the Al Gore and the IPCC.
“If someone can provide a proof that I can’t refute, using scientific evidence, then I will write them a check.”
Why it is foolish to play his game, in his own words (just change ‘denier’ to ‘alarmist’):
[Please avoid “all capitals” in your future quotes. .mod]
Classic burden shifting. The burden of proof is on the scientists to show their theory is correct. Not for anyone else to disprove.
James Schrumpf says:
July 25, 2014 at 2:53 pm
Trying to prove a negative is not science.
##############
1. It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
To disprove this first you need him to define Dominant,
Say for example it has warmed 0.5C since 1950.
does dominant mean .25C is attributed to human influence?
proving that wrong is not proving a negative.
also, it might only be 90% confident.
but to do this the skeptic must explain the warming.
“Climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C and extremely unlikely (95-100%) less than 1°C.
So if someone was able to scientifically disprove these two extremely likely / unlikely statements, then that should suffice.”
Also not proving a negative
When Keating speaks of “climate sensitivity” is he talking ECS or TCR and does he know there is a difference? If ECS, can we try to pin him down to a timeframe? After all warming that takes 10,000 years to arrive just isn’t worth worrying about since by the time it gets here we’ll all be freezing our nuts off in the next ice age anyway.
Some fools think a model prediction is proof. Other fools think they can argue with those who believe such nonsense. The models are slowly and inevitably giving way to reality. It is up to those who truly support scientific investigation to reveal the facts as they are learned.
The clarification page is a total own goal. It’s almost too easy. You only need to present evidence that cast doubt on the IPCC’s extremely likely claims.
Superimposed on the secular trend is a natural multidecadal oscillation of an average period of 70y with significant amplitude of 0.3–0.4 °C peak to peak, which can explain many historical episodes of warming and cooling and accounts for 40% of the observed warming since the mid-20th century and for 50% of the previously attributed anthropogenic warming trend
Because this large multidecadal variability is not random, but likely recurrent based on its past behavior, it has predictive value. Not taking the AMO into account in predictions of future warming under various forcing scenarios may run the risk of overestimating the warming for the next two to three decades, when the AMO is likely in its down phase
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/22/1212471110.full.pdf+html
Done. It doesn’t if they got it right or not, but when there is doubt there can’t be high certainty.
Do you really think that any proof would be accepted? The mere fact that not one of the models came close to predicting ” the pause” with no explanation what so ever. If there is any proof, that is it. AGW is an invalid theory. He should pay up. There are plenty of very good scientific arguments as to why AGW is not the main driver. Everything from solar cycles to the thermodynamics of whether the heat from latent water vapor is released or retained.
I appreciate that fact that some people try to argue on the facts and provide detailed papers and references. However it is nothing but a distraction from the issue. AGW is not interested in any data or reasoning that you provide that they are wrong. That’s why he is so certain that he can bet his own money. If he was truly sincere, He’d put the money up with an arbitrator. Someone who understands the difference between ‘could’ and ‘is’. We are looking at 2004 in the review mirror.
RH says:
July 25, 2014 at 5:42 pm
“I like the idea of claiming victory and aggressively, persistently, and annoyingly demanding he pay up.”
Could somebody sue him for the money?
Does CO2 in the atmosphere warm the planet measurably? Sure, CO2 may have an absorption frequency in the infrared range, but the absorbed radiation will then be quickly re-emitted, and in what direction? Some emissions will be absorbed by other CO2 molecules (a very small amount), and some may find their way back down to the surface of the earth, but given the extremely small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, can such an effect be measured- especially with temperature apparatus on the surface? Also, CO2 absorbs infrared at a specific frequency, which further diminishes its potential warming effect. And all the while, CO2 molecules in the atmosphere block/reflect incoming solar radiation and prevent it from striking the surface and being re-emitted as infrared. It is just my opinion, but any temperature related effects of CO2 in earth’s atmosphere should be trivial/unmeasurable, and I’m curious as to any experiments that actually test the ‘green house’ effect of CO2.
What is the time limit, if any, on the award?
By 2020, with the incipient Solar minimum and a curretly negative PDO, a 1 degC temp decrease is more likely than not.
That would falsify AR5 pretty definitively.
But of course by then, $30k USD might be wheeled around in wheel barrow to buy a loaf of bread.
Agree with those who ask: why give credence to the charade? Let’s just sing poor ol’ Keating a little song…
Proving a negative is very difficult to do under the best of circumstances.
These are not the best of circumstances. The goal post has already been moved once, by the challenger.
And yet, it is worth the effort.
Keating is a fanatic. You are wasting your time.
Couple of days back, we got a fresh batch of green desperadoes claiming “both sides are lying” (Greenpeace is struggling, you see). Their claim is that there are (perhaps misguided but) honest activists and then there are greedy corporations. “Who can you believe?” They asked. The first love nature even if they don’t know what’s what but the second only want to rape the planet for “a pot of gold” (literal). Now, please consider for a moment the brutal degree of delusion such a simplistic and infantile world view involves. These first-worlders are so blind to their immense wealth, they take it for granted with such cruel disdain, that they believe computers and cars and stoves use faerie dust as fuel and that this faerie dust can be obtained by politely asking the clouds to fart it. There is simply no helping folks like that.
Here is an example of so many. An acquaintance has been going on for years about the greed of “big oil”, “big pharma”, “big agro”, “big whatever”, and finally decided to go self-sufficient and grow his own vegetable garden. Granted, he was in no way what-so-ever self-sufficient. He still drove his car, his van, and his motorcycle. He still had two flats. He watched tv, went out to dine. etc. In short, he lived the high-fly life of first-worlders. Anyway, two seasons after, he gave up on the garden because “it was too hard” and went back to talk about the greed of farmers…
I noted last time that it says a lot about this guy that he did not even realise that he was obliged to define falsifiability criteria at the outset. He has finally come up with some vague criteria but it seems that doing so struck him as a novel idea.
I am pretty sure he has left himself enough wiggle room to avoid ever having to pay.
Compare with Einstein – one single particle traveling faster than light and his theory was busted. No ambiguity there.
Mike Jowsey says:
July 25, 2014 at 9:27 pm
RH says:
July 25, 2014 at 5:42 pm
“I like the idea of claiming victory and aggressively, persistently, and annoyingly demanding he pay up.”
Could somebody sue him for the money?
—————————————————
In the United States anyone can sue anyone for anything. Whether you can win such a lawsuit or not is another question. You have to have a basis in law, and most states have consumer laws that prohibit deceptive behavior. You would have to show that his contest terms violate those laws. This feels like a fraudulent contest since there are too many undefined factors, and factors that can be spun numerous ways. There may be a legal basis to sue him, but I would not. Litigation is expensive for both sides, For that expense you run the risk of losing. I am not a lawyer, so please consider this information my point of view, and not legal advice. If you wish to sue, ask an attorney.
What you can do though, is use his stunt to discredit this particular promoter of CAGW by making a public scene via letters to the editor to your local media about the dodgy set up, your attempts to collect, and his rationalizations to avoid payment. His web pages show he has his mind made up already, and I’m guessing he will refuse to pay.
It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.
The two key words are “human influence”. Until he defines those two words, they can mean whatever the hell he wants them to mean. So, what is the definition in his challenge of “human influence”. Until the term is defined, you have no idea what he is talking about, and thus whatever evidence you present is irrelevant.
Keating is a piker. That’s right, $30,000? Cheap!.
I will personally write a check (on the Arkansas River bank) in the amount of $1,000,000 to any individual who can prove conclusively (peer reviewed, etc, etc) that climate change is not real.
Keating shows his true colors again.
“NEW: There is now a challenge deadline of midnight (CDT) July 31, 2014 for the challenge.”
Keating knows he is under fire, and he is losing. Thus the need for a New Goal Post.
Dear Moderators,
I just posted a comment flagged with the blog owner’s name, sending info, knew he could delete after reading, about 11pm.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/25/taking-keatings-30000-skeptic-challenge-seriously-part-1/#comment-1694707
Never got the “awaiting moderation”, I’ve been reloading for a while. Did it really show up in the filter or just get lost?
[Reply: Sorry, nothing in the spam folder. WordPress strikes again. ~mod.]
Mosher demands: “but to do this the skeptic must explain the warming.”
Yet that only applies in Hockey Stick World which his BEST boss Muller pointed out on video was utterly bogus science by people like Mann whose papers he would “no longer read.” In the real world we have an ideal, fully consistent, non-statistically nuanced temperature proxy going back tens of thousands of years from the main Greenland ice core and since it shows exact repeated precedence for today’s warming peak, the explanation needn’t be detailed in specific model alternative influences, especially in a likely chaotic and thus fundamentally unmodelable ocean fluid dynamic dominated system, but merely a finger pointing operation: “look, it’s just another one of those essentually random spikes caused by all manner of internal and external variation, just like before.” Is that not a perfectly valid explaination, given that so many systems are just noisy in a chaotic manner? His demand adds a vast assumption that the climate system is entrained by a few forcing inputs, and skeptics can’t beat computer modelers by making better oversimplified models. That’s a bogus assumption that biases the debate in the alarmist favor, the side of the debate that just celebrated to the media the ultimate example of a fake hockey stick only last year (Marcott 2013 with no blade in the input data), thus the side of the debate that represents criminal intent to profitably deceive.
Greenland slopes: http://oi61.tinypic.com/2cxbxw4.jpg
neillusion:
Your post at July 25, 2014 at 5:29 pm says in total
I commend you increase your education by reading the seminal paper of Kuo, Lindberg and Thomson, Nature (1991) then search all the subsequent studies that confirmed their work.
Changes to atmospheric CO2 concentration follow changes to global temperature at all time scales.
Richard
“It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”
Alex, you will greatly strengthen your case if you can get Keating to define how the IPCC arrived at that percentage. ( I have no idea.)
Don’t need peer reviewed papers to prove that AGW is not currently happening. Seeing as how there is ample EMPIRICAL evidence that there has been no global warming of any sort for at least the last 10 years.
If there has been no global warming, therefore it is difficult to see that there has been any anthropogenic warming.
I noticed that this perfectly sound reasoning (valid of course only for the period of nil warming as recorded by NASA and NOAA etc), was summarily dismissed by Dr Keating (does he really have a PhD?) by saying that the Anthropogenic warming was been swallowed by the sea.
Seeing as how he can find any excuse real or imagined, not neccesarily proven and even conjectural and so long as Dr Keating is the arbitrator of his game, his money is safe.
Cheers
Roger http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
ps
Alan Robertson
Your million is quite safe as we all know that climates change naturally and in fact it would be worrying if they didn’t.
I’m not sure how serious you are, but I’m sure many would appreciate a rewording of your comment.
Christopher Keating: “Again, deniers are trying to change the challenge in an attempt to get out of a corner.”
Talk about your hypocrites. Keating modifies his challenge then points fingers.
Keating in his comment also tip his hand his challenge is rigged, being he has already placed challengers in “a corner”. You can forget any fairness with this one.
Christopher Keating: “When deniers go around making their statements without any supporting evidence, that is not allowing people to make an informed decision.”
Yet it is okay for AGWers to go around making their statements without any supporting evidence? And when AGWers are challenged for work, they hide behind claims of “Privacy” or “Proprietary”, and when pushed, they Lawyer Up.
A policy based consensus can’t be neither validated of falsified.
UNFCCC is politics, not science.
“Christopher Keating: “The consensus among climate scientists is real.”
More evidence that any response to Keating’s challenge will fail, being Keating still clings to “the consensus” claim, which has since been shown to be anything but.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/13/the-ipcc-consensus-on-climate-change-was-phoney-says-ipcc-insider/
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/
rogerthesurf says:
July 25, 2014 at 11:29 pm
“I’m sure many would appreciate a rewording of your comment.”
________________
Very well. Since Keating has given everyone until end, July 31, 2014, I shall be equally magnanimous and grant such a deadline. Also, should any qualified claimant(s) appear and should they prefer it, I would be equally comfortable writing the check on
the Cimarron River bank.
Per Keating: “The scientific method is a never ending” process ….
There will “never” be an affirmative to his challenge.
Keating is a weasel.
David A says:
July 25, 2014 at 11:23 pm
“It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”
Alex, you will greatly strengthen your case if you can get Keating to define how the IPCC arrived at that percentage. ( I have no idea.)
=====
He also needs to define the word “dominant” mathematically.
This is totally ill-defined and subjective, since it depends how much you break down the various causes.
Does this simply mean:
anthop > natual
OR
anthrop > ENSO
anthrop > solar
anthrop > PDO
anthrop > AMO
anthrop > lunar
anthrop > vulcanism …..
AR5 now uses this word but in the associated text is still using “most of” . So which is it?
He pretends to lay down a scientific challenge but does not demonstrate enough scientific competence to define what is to be proven.
Christopher Keating: “First, climate science does not rely on models, it relies on data and science. Second, the models have been shown to be quite accurate.”
If this is what Keating claims is “quite accurate”, you can Forgetabout any unbiased judging of submissions to his challenge.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c017ee88df70e970d-pi
Latitude @ 6:54 pm:
Mod’s comment: That was worthy of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Prime Minister! It gave me a good laugh..
according to CAGW theory, it’s not man that warms the planet, it’s water vapour GH effect
the water vapour is released after a tipping point
the tipping point is caused by rising CO2 GH effect
rsing CO2 is caused by man
there is no increase in water vapour
there has been no tipping point
there has been no noticable CO2 GH Effect
CO2 is rising due to man
The entire chain of cause and effect is broken at every stage
From Keating’s website,
“But, I am sure I will never have to [pay up] because it can’t be proven. The scientific evidence for global warming is overwhelming and no one can prove otherwise.”
This is almost childish. I had a quick look at his website and his “complete profile” but didn’t find what level of physics he taught or where.
The quote above should be warning enough that he doesn’t have a clue about the Scientific Method.
I’m surprised anyone is giving him the time of day.
From the clarifications page : “The two challenges are in response to deniers claiming that man made global warming is not real and that the science to support them is conclusive. My challenge to them is to show their claims are true. That is all it is.”
He is attempting to invert the null hypothesis !
He demands a scientific proof but abandons science at the outset.
The $30.000 is a red scarf.
More “clarifications”:
“Some have said the challenge should be to the scientists to prove their claims. Scientists, unlike the [denyers], have to prove their statements every step of the way and have to do it every day. All of their work is submitted to refereed journals for review before it can become part of the scientific literature. After publication, their work is still examined and reexamined over and over. That is part of the scientific process – it has to be reproducible by other people. So, I don’t need to issue a challenge to the scientists because they already have a challenge much more rigorous than anything I could issue. The [denyers] should be held to the same level of accountability, but they aren’t. They are getting off very easy with my challenge.”
No, seriously, where has been for the last ten years.
He is either totally ill-inforrmed and ignorant and thus incompetent to judge anything, or he is an out and out liar.
Yeah right. He will provide “comments”. He is so obviously such an objective, open-minded and fair arbiter as to whether he loses $30000 of his own money , what could possibly go wrong?
WHAT A JOKE.
Keating: “First, climate science does not rely on models”
He is totally ignorant of the subject. Period.
“A little later I will post a “taking Keating seriously part 2″ that recounts a few of the prima facie ways that the IPCC’s radical attribution claims are highly unscientific”
By all means deal with IPCC failings, but drop Keating from the title. He cannot be taken seriously. Even suggesting that may be possible gives him more credibility that he merits.
I would recommend you do another post about NOT taking Keating seriously blow his false challenge out of the water before he declares himself winner in a few days. I’m sure he’s already written the text for that.
“…that man-made global climate change is not occurring.” and “There is hardly a skeptic alive who doesn’t think that human activity is causing some climate change, and IN PARTCICULAR, SOME AMOUNT OF WARMING” (my emphasis).
////////////////////////////////////
There you have it. Since when has climate been defined in terms of a few tenths of a degree of temperature?
Climate is regional (not global) and climate is a range of conditions, quite a wide range at that, within which there is much variability from year to year.
The classic classification/demarkation being the Köppen classification, since then there have been a number of varitions and different classifications but still broadly on a common theme. The important point is that climate is assessed over very long periods of time, not 30 years, or 100 years but really on a millennium time scale.
Personally, I consider that there is a strong case that climate change is not happening. And that is no doubt the reason why the IPCC report does not seek to detail what climate change is said to be taking place, and to which countries and to what affect. Indeed, it does not even tell us whether it is the highs that are getting higher, the lows getting a little less low, whether and where there is more rain, less rain, how the seasons are altering, are they starting later, lasting longer etc. etc
To get to the nub, which country now in 2014, has changed says its 1980 Köppen classification to a different one?
Look at the United States. This is a young country so the records are not long, but look at the records from say 1650 through to 1950 and the range of weather experienced over those years. Is what we are seeing in the United States today outside those bounds. Is it warmer than it has ever been, are winters harsher than they have ever been, is it wetter than it has ever been, is it drier than it has ever been, are there more storms than there have ever been, are the storms more violent than they have ever been. The answer to all of this is no. What we are seeing today is within the natural variability of its Climate.
The same is true of the UK (where records go back to Roman times). A few months ago there was a very good programme on the TV (except for the last 5 mins with the usual homage to climate change). It detailed the UK weather over the ages and showefd that in the past it had been warmer, it had been colder, it had had mild winters, it had had harsh winters, it had been dry, it had been wet, it had had worse floods, it had had worse storms etc etc. It showed and even said that the recent weather seen by the UK these past 20 years had been seen before in the past and that in the past there had been more extreme events etc. The last 5 minutes of the programme then said due to climate change we can expect to see extreme weather happening more often, blah blah blah.
On a global level, the only climate demarkation is glacial or interglacial. Of course there can be epochs within that but what we are seeing today, is not outside the bounds of the Holocene Optimum. It is exactly the sort of Climate that one may expect to see in an inter glacial period..
Of course, I am not saying that there has not been a little bit of warming, but then again there was some warming in the 1930s, the 1880s, in the UK in the 1500s, coming out of the LIA, the MWP, the Roman Warm Period, the Minoan Warm Period. Seeing a little bit of warming is not climate change.
On a micro level, man can have an impact at the micro climatic level, as seen by large scale urbanisation, deforestation, damming of valleys etc. But then again, that is not the issue that we are talking about, although it may have some impact on why we think it is warmer etc
Presently we are talking about warming not climate change. The AGW thoery of the properties of CO2 as a GHG is that it produces warming, not that it causes, per se, climate change.
We should not allow the debate to be reframed. It is very difficult for the science to deal with climate change due to the fact that climate is not stasis but rather a wide band within which there is much yearly variability. The science on the other hand can easily address temperature and ascertain whether this is happening, and the extent to which there is strong evidence that CO2 is a driver (rather than perhaps a response).
As I say, we should not allow the debate to be reframed in this manner. We should stick to the science on the manner in which CO2 is bahving in the real world environs of our atmosphere here on planet Earth..
This is a resend, 1st attempt confirmed lost.
Anthony,
I checked your “blog spawn” list. You said of “whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com”:
I had identified Peter Miesler of Durango, Colorado, with evidence trail of information freely available on the internet, back here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/16/wegman-paper-retraction-by-journal/#comment-662862
He still updates at his previous blog, more than the new one, lots of posts without comments.
http://citizenschallenge.blogspot.com/
At the blog spawn site, there are some recent comments, practically all his own.
I think he’s lonely.
Greg says:
July 26, 2014 at 12:11 am
“He pretends to lay down a scientific challenge but does not demonstrate enough scientific competence to define what is to be proven.”
Precisely!
I can’t believe that this is what physics has sunk to.
I don’t know about the science but from a sociological point of view I find it very disturbing that Christopher Keating was allowed to teach children when he has such a nasty way of referring to people who disagree with him. Classifying people as deniers is invoking the rejection of the Jewish Holocaust as a tool to discredit an opponent not an argument. While this is an acceptable practice in the rough and tumble of politics and blogging and adult interaction I think it is a vile and disgusting attitude when perpetrated by teachers.
Anyone know where the $30,000 is being held? If it’s sitting in his personal accounts, there might be some concerns about the sincerity of the challenge. If it’s been placed in a separate escrow account with some publicized criteria regarding the conditions under which it will be released, it could look more credible.
“all time scales” – apart from the last 150 years.
John Finn, wrong.
As you can see in that chart, CO2 follows T, right up to the present time.
I understand why you don’t want to admit that ∆T is the cause of ∆CO2. If you admit that evidence, it contradicts the CO2=AGW conjecture.
Richard Verney: A very nice summary indeed, and a breath of sanity. It’s a favourite observation of mine that we have been told that ‘pre-industrial’ levels of CO2 were 280ppm, now it’s about 400. That’s an increase of almost 43%.
The Central England Temperature Record (CET) tells us that in 1900 the average temperature was 9.56 C, and in 2013 it was, wait for it, 9.56 C!
In between of course, there have been warmer and cooler average years (but never ever reaching 11 C anywhere in the record). These averages don’t of course tell us anything about the year’s weather.
As you say, a bit of warming isn’t climate change. I’m 65 years old, and have lived in the UK for all of those years. The climate hasn’t changed. Warm summers, cool summers, cold winters – and so on, there’s nothing new here.
‘The Weather of Britain’ by meteorologist Robin Stirling is a fascinating book – highly recommended!
My comments on Keating’s challenge were too long (because they included two relatively long quotes) to include on this thread and I wanted to have them as a reference, so I wrote them up as a blog post:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2014/07/26/on-keatings-challenge/
Bottom line: Keating’s challenge is a waste of your time.
A warming world is a world that grows ever greener. Plant life likes “warm”. Since plants give off CO2 as part of their living we should expect more CO2 to be produced in a warming world. As Richard pointed out, this is seen in the record at all time scales.
Mankind’s activities release a tiny bit of the CO2 that mother nature has stored up over the epochs. (sequestered is the sciency term) I have seen no credible evidence that the sensitivity to CO2 by this planet’s climate is different from zero by an amount large enough to measure.
I think that the following link to a post at Europe’s best weblog of 2014 is worth anyone’s time to read. (and the comments by various people are just as good as the post) http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/what-back-radiation-does-and-doesnt-do/
Climate “science” will never recover from the debacle of the last 30 years until it stops the war on CO2.
Mods
I do try to avoid any words that would cause my comments to go to moderation. Could you please tell me what it was about this comment that got it moderated?
TIA ~ Mark
A sucker’s challenge made by a lying cheat. What could go wrong with that?
jimmi-the-dalek writes “Oh yes they have. There are those who say the Greenhouse Effect does not exist e.g. the “Slayers””
Fair enough, there are extremists who don’t agree with any of the science. Even the science which is pretty robust. But by the same token the are extremists on the AGW side too. After all James Hansen has stated that we could be on the verge of runaway warming leading to Venus-like conditions.
So I’ll see your fringe “sceptics” and raise you an alarmist scientist.
How long is this competition open for???
Wait for the Negative PDO and AMO to take full effect in the next 10 to 15 years………
“I do try to avoid any words that would cause my comments to go to moderation. ”
It’s pretty hard to discuss anything that Keating says without hitting moderations because he manages to get the D-word into just about every sentence. Suggest editing his words with a spelling change: eg ” Keating is an anti-science, natural variation deenier”
In fact the guy’s a bigot, best to ignore his flase challenge and all the garbage he spouts.
I tried to post a comment at Keating’s joke site but no comments are allowed.
I wanted to ask him a simple question which was for him to name the deniers who state that mankind has no influence on climate. I doubt whether he has a pot yo piss in hence he’s defence lawyer, judge and jury in his own specious case.
Empty vessels make the most noise
Prof. Keating
You said:
“It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. Climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C and extremely unlikely (95-100%) less than 1°C. So if someone was able to scientifically disprove these two extremely likely / unlikely statements, then that should suffice.”
Take a refresher course on physical science particularly the scientific method. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You need to prove, not disprove, the above statements. I correctly predicted the outcome of a coin toss. I challenge you to disprove my ESP power. Anybody can replicate my feat but that does not disprove my ESP. It only proved it can be done by chance.
Dr. Strangelove:
re your post at July 26, 2014 at 4:10 am.
Scientists do not try to “prove” anything because they cannot.
Scientists seek the closest possible approximation to truth by attempting to find evidence which falsifies existing understanding.
Pseudoscientists attempt to “prove” their ideas.
Pseudoscientists try to prove their ideas by attempting to find evidence which supports their understanding.
Most of ‘climate science’ is pseudoscience.
Richard
Is there a time limit? If not the coming ice age should pretty much put to rest the idea that CO2 is a climate driver.
Ralph Dave Westfall says:
July 26, 2014 at 2:22 am
For the last 150 years we have been coming out of a little ice age. I would expect CO2 levels to rise under those circumstances.
LewSkannen says:
July 26, 2014 at 2:04 am
I CAN believe this is what politics has sunk to.
Ralph Dave Westfall says:
Anyone know where the $30,000 is being held? If it’s sitting in his personal accounts, there might be some concerns about the sincerity of the challenge. If it’s been placed in a separate escrow account with some publicized criteria regarding the conditions under which it will be released, it could look more credible.
======
You’ kidding, right? It’s a bluff. The sucker probably couldn’t even find 30k.
Whatever _anyone_ comes up with, he will always find some “comment” about how it does not conform to his ill-defined terms of what it is he wants “proven”.
He has not the slightest intention of losing 30 grand and rule no. 5 says he will decide what qualifies a proof.
What more do you need to know?
Please be extremely polite to this old fella making the challenge. Perhaps this will convince him to stop using the “denier” label. Point out to him that lumping everyone into two categories is a “strawman” and is more a political maneuver than science. And also point out to him that to pick a few extreme outlier arguments in the skeptical community and arguing against those can be done in any field of human endeavor and is another type of strawman argument. Many skeptics are scientists, engineers, computer programmers, former astronauts and NASA employees, or otherwise technically literate. Over the years the skeptical argument has changed as the mainstream argument is also beginning to do. Perhaps in ten years there will be even more convergence and perhaps this is the way to engage this man and not even try to win the bet.
“Thomas Jefferson 1809 : Snow Is (Nearly) A Thing Of The Past”
The idea (and fear) of “climate change” has been around for a long time. Here is a long list of “climate” concerns dating back to the early 1800’s.
Part of the problem is that human memory is rather short. What we see as “climate change” are short-term fluctuations. We tend to ignore history as well. Then there is the tendency to want a scapegoat. With a scapegoat, we feel more in control, instead of at the mercy of mother nature. Of course, with the advent of CAGW, the biggest lie in human history, all kinds of agendas could be satisfied. Fortunately, the lie is unraveling, thanks in part to mother nature herself, but it is so heavily entrenched in our institutions and in government that it will take some time to completely root out. The climate wars will drag on unfortunately, but the liars’ influence, and thus the damage they cause will slowly diminish.
“Steven Mosher says:
July 25, 2014 at 8:41 pm”
Nah, in the practice of real science, no one has to disprove 1] subjective statements which are 2] Consensus based and 3] are therefore totally irrelevant to the principles of real science to begin with.
Post Normalism has taken over your mind. Res ipsa loquiter.
As some of the statements in the IPCC summary are based on “expert opinion”, there is not a clear target for where they get their 95% from and therefore it will be hard to disprove. Also, he now has a deadline of July 31, 2014 so it is kind of a farce. I posted earlier (in moderation) to be nice to him but then I went and read his site. Too many people making to many long rambling posts for more posts to do much good. And it seems he can not write a response without throwing his favorite insult word that begins with “d” out there at least once so he may be a lost cause.
From Mark Stoval (@MarkStoval) on July 26, 2014 at 2:46 am:
It wasn’t a plain word, it was a name in the URL, which identifies a site of “Transcendent Rant and way out there theory”. Invoking the name invokes the extra scrutiny. If you want to link to the site, get a short URL without the name. To try to keep my posts from getting hung up, I’d refer to it as ShortSheila’s Gabfest.
JPeden writes “Post Normalism has taken over your mind. Res ipsa loquiter.”
Agreed. Mosher is writing as though it were necessary to disprove “most of the warming” when in fact the warmists are yet to give any evidence whatsoever for “most of the warming”. But then again Mosher at his heart thinks models are evidence.
Alex, you write “On the CO2 forcing effect it isn’t the debate that has shifted, only Keating’s awareness of it, and he must have only learned very recently (not “over the decades”) about the broad agreement among skeptics and consensoids alike that a doubling of CO2 should cause a temperature forcing of about 1°C.”
Let us be quite clear. It is IMPOSSIBLE to MEASURE this 1 C rise. This is a completely meaningless number in physics.
I shudder to think of the amount of valuable time that will be spent addressing this stupid publicity stunt. Wagers on future temperatures is the only way to shut these people up.
Jim Cripwell:
Your post at July 26, 2014 at 5:59 am says in total
At this point in the thread it seems sensible to again remind of the Null Hypothesis because it alone provides all that is needed to demand that Keeting pays the $30,000.
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.
The Null Hypothesis is a fundamental scientific principle and forms the basis of all scientific understanding, investigation and interpretation. Indeed, it is the basic principle of experimental procedure where an input to a system is altered to discern a change: if the system is not observed to respond to the alteration then it has to be assumed the system did not respond to the alteration.
In the case of climate science there is a hypothesis that increased greenhouse gases (GHGs, notably CO2) in the air will increase global temperature. There are good reasons to suppose this hypothesis may be true, but the Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed the GHG changes have no effect unless and until increased GHGs are observed to increase global temperature. That is what the scientific method decrees. It does not matter how certain some people may be that the hypothesis is right because observation of reality (i.e. empiricism) trumps all opinions.
Please note that the Null Hypothesis is a hypothesis which exists to be refuted by empirical observation. It is a rejection of the scientific method to assert that one can “choose” any subjective Null Hypothesis one likes. There is only one Null Hypothesis: i.e. it has to be assumed a system has not changed unless it is observed that the system has changed.
However, deciding a method which would discern a change may require a detailed statistical specification.
In the case of global climate no unprecedented climate behaviours are observed so the Null Hypothesis decrees that the climate system has not changed.
Importantly, an effect may be real but not overcome the Null Hypothesis because it is too trivial for the effect to be observable. Human activities have some effect on global temperature for several reasons. An example of an anthropogenic effect on global temperature is the urban heat island (UHI). Cities are warmer than the land around them, so cities cause some warming. But the temperature rise from cities is too small to be detected when averaged over the entire surface of the planet, although this global warming from cities can be estimated by measuring the warming of all cities and their areas.
Clearly, the Null Hypothesis decrees that UHI is not affecting global temperature although there are good reasons to think UHI has some effect. Similarly, it is very probable that AGW from GHG emissions are too trivial to have observable effects.
The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate variability is much, much larger. This concurs with the empirically determined values of low climate sensitivity.
Empirical – n.b. not model-derived – determinations indicate climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. This is indicated by the studies of
Idso from surface measurements
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/Idso_CR_1998.pdf
and Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satellite data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/OLR&NGF_June2011.pdf
Indeed, because climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of CO2 equivalent, it is physically impossible for the man-made global warming to be large enough to be detected (just as the global warming from UHI is too small to be detected). If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a discernible existence that has effects (observation of the effects would be its detection).
To date there are no discernible effects of AGW. Hence, the Null Hypothesis decrees that AGW does not affect global climate to a discernible degree. That is the ONLY scientific conclusion possible at present.
And that scientific conclusion is all that is needed to warrant Keeting paying the money.
Richard
This is silly.
CO2, being a greenhouse gas is likely causing some modest beneficial warming. Why would I waste my time trying to prove otherwise?
CO2 also plays a key role in photosynthesis. This is irrefutable. I would challenge anybody to prove that increasing CO2 has not resulted in massive gains in plant growth, vegetative health, crop yields and world food production.
The science is crystal clear and overwhelming, regarding increasing CO2. It is producing tremendous benefits to life on this planet.
Having the debate twisted so that it is over catastrophic global warming and extreme weather that is not happening is like debating over the catastrophic results of drinking water and calling it pollution.
Sure, drinking gallons of water can kill you but water is essential to life and almost everybody does better when they have more access to clean water.
I have a feeling that the purpose of Keating’s ruse is to sucker in some of the worst skeptics (yes, there are many that have crazy ideas). He could be planning on writing a book and incorporating those ridiculous claims as evidence that ALL skeptics are nutters. By doing this he is hoping to be promoted from just another member of the AGW flock, to the level of AGW priest. Fame and fortune to follow. Not a bad plan if you are an immoral sociopath.
BTW, the criteria he laid out has already been met within scientific journals. The Knight et al paper (BAMS 2009) demonstrated that models which show moderate or dangerous warming require warming within periods of 15 years at the 95% confidence level. Although 15 years had not been reached at the time of their publication, it has been reached now. Models are the encapsulation of the physics of AGW. They are the basis of the IPCC claims.
Game over.
I vote the $30k goes to Richard, for his excellent comment above.
Reblogged this on Aussiedlerbetreuung und Behinderten – Fragen.
Thanks KD. I was unaware that the “best European weblog” (and recommended for my vote here by the way) was one of “Transcendent Rant and way out there theory” sites.
If I link to it again I think I’ll just take the moderation as I detest hiding a site in a shortened URL. Knowing that just a link to “ShortSheila’s Gabfest” is not welcome here comes as somewhat of a surprise. I will keep that in mind. Again; thanks for the clarification.
By the way, does anyone know where I can read a list of those words, names, and sites that I am not supposed to mention here?
~Mark
Richard:
This is the way they taught it in college back in the dark ages when I attended school. Watching modern “climate science” as well as a host of other modern “science” fields I am beginning to think one would only stumble across Richard’s assertion in a history text. Most likely in a chapter on “cranks” like Karl Popper.
“It is extremely likely (95-100%) that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
Not sure why Keating wants someone to ‘disprove’ a statement using the Scientific Method when that statement was not constructed as a result of the application of the scientific method. The above statement represents a group opinion (and it is described as such in IPCC AR5), it does not represent a fact. Opinions can neither be proved nor disproved by any method.
“Climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C and extremely unlikely (95-100%) less than 1°C.”
This statement is also not ‘provable’ nor ‘disprovable’ in the scientific sense. The use of terms ‘very likely’, ‘likely’, not likely’, etc are not expressions that lend themselves to ‘disproof’ because, again, they are expression of opinion, not fact.
Also, again, asking anyone to prove a negative, “that man-made global climate change is not occurring” is unscientific, ambiguous, and a well known debating ploy. It is why the judicial system does not allow prosecutors to challenge defendants to ‘prove you didn’t murder X, and, if you can’t, you must be guilty of murdering X”. It is pretty interesting to see Keating using the same logical fallacy about ‘global climate change’. “Prove that there is no man-made component to global climate change, and, if you can’t, it means there IS man-made global climate change.”
I could propose that “I will give anyone $50,000 of my own money if they can prove that aliens did not help with the construction of the Great Pyramids” and I will be fairly safe in the belief that no one will ever collect.
Jimbo says:
“July 25, 2014 at 5:27 pm
What has really got my attention in AR5 is this in BOLD in the quote. Why not say man-made greenhouse gases? Are they slipping in a fast one for future slipperiness? An escape clause? This thing needs pinning down.
“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century” (AR5 WGI SPM p. 17, upped from “very likely” in AR4 and “likely” in the Third Area Report).
I thought the whole big push was about man-made greenhouse gases. Also note the obvious change from global warming to climate change. These people have been defeated but they won’t back down. This is getting silly.”
Interesting. Another slippery word is “observed”, as in “observed warming”. “Human influence” is certainly the cause of urban heat islands. At some future time they could fall back on that.
I don’t think you guys know what you are up against.
Keating ACCURATELY PREDICTED the world was not going to end in his book “Dialogues on 2012: Why the World Will Not End”
http://www.amazon.com/Dialogues-2012-Why-World-Will/dp/1457503832
And PLEASE don’t try to bring up the fact Keating was denied tenure at the University of South Dakota because of “long-term problems of tensions and hostilities” with the faculties. Just because he sued them and lost proves nothing!!
https://dlr.sd.gov/wagehrs/decisions/unfairlabor/1_keating.pdf
The author falls in the trap and accepts the battfield in the enemy territory giving all weapons to the enemy.
If there are a way to be more clueless i doubt.
@richardcourtney
neillusion:
I still haven’t seen any proof beyond reasonable doubt that the CO2 leads temperature rise.
richard:
‘Changes to atmospheric CO2 concentration follow changes to global temperature at all time scales.’
Technically can’t be true because no warmer for 18 yrs yet increasing CO2
I would attend to ‘at all time scales’. (never say never, all or forever)
So why is CO2 still rising? (human contibution small compared to planet’s CO2 processes)
If CO2 heats things up why aren’t things heating up?
Whilst I appreciate some sort of timelag, that CO2 will follow temperature is well established and intuitively satisfying (to my way of thinking).
The models run on equations and iteration. The equations must be constructed in a way that says if a goes up then b will go up as some function of a. That function has to be input as positive or negative, you can’t have both. The assumption has been that CO2 rise results in temp rise. I know there are many other variables and functions, but, with my limited background in programming, the equations must start somewhere and ‘in the beginning ‘ ipcc said …
It has to start with establishing CO2 causes temp rise before the ipcc can justify themselves in any sane way. It cannot, in my humble opinion, be done.
I think human caused global warming is not possible via CO2, a rough idea comes to mind – if you are ill in bed and have 500 duvets on you and someone comes in and puts another one on top, will you get warmer?
There are so many other significant variables in the planet’s climate, some not even realised yet, that to demonize CO2 is just, well, idiiotic.
thanks for the links, will look
neillusion:
At July 26, 2014 at 8:36 am you assert
Technically and in reality, it is true that changes to atmospheric CO2 concentration follow changes to global temperature at all time scales.
You are assuming that each temperature change provides a correlated change to CO2: but temperature changes of the same magnitude may not provide CO2 changes that all have the same magnitude.
Or, to put it another way, you are claiming that although it works in practice it cannot work in theory.
I do not know why CO2 is still rising and I wish I did.
The most likely cause is a slow adjustment towards a new equilibrium of the carbon cycle as a result of the temperature rise from the Little Ice Age (LIA); see
Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005)
I keep explaining that the effect of additional atmospheric CO2 from present levels cannot have discernible effect on climate. I yet again explained it on WUWT as recently as today in this thread at July 26, 2014 at 6:14 am and that post is here.
The remainder of your post is your opinion that is not comment on anything I said so there is no need for me to comment on it.
Richard
I took ‘follow’ to mean – if a goes up b will go up, if a goes down b will go down and if a stops b stops – and ‘at all timescales’ to mean instantaniety included. This phrase implies no time lag, which is my point, ‘all time scales’ means down to seconds, as in if temp starts going up, co2 will follow it and start going up, possibly immediately – and I don’t think you mean this. Therefor said I technically not true.
neillusion:
Your post at July 26, 2014 at 9:42 am says in total
The lag at Mauna Loa is ~ 5 months and varies with latitude so is longer elsewhere. So, at Mauna Loa when temperature rises (or falls) the CO2 rises (or falls) 5 months later. This is what I meant by “follows”.
These changes are the shortest time scale. At longest time scale the lag of CO2 changes after temperature changes is typically about 800 years.
I do not understand how my saying “Changes to atmospheric CO2 concentration follow changes to global temperature at all time scales” can be thought to mean I suggested there is no lag.
Richard
richard verney said:
This is good. All the endless talk of Climate Change is about what could happen. Are there any documented cases of changes in the Köppen classification of any region since the Little Ice Age ended? The term Global Warming was better because we can see tiny little changes in temperature (we just can’t predict the trend or the future). A few degrees of temperature change is not necessarily climate change.
AlexS says:
“The author falls in the trap and accepts the battfield in the enemy territory giving all weapons to the enemy”
This is exactly the main point of this battle over catastrophic global warming and extreme weather/climate change that is not happening.
The planet shows widespread benefits from modest warming(some from increasing CO2) and atmospheric fertilization of plants as it greens up.
But the battle, continues to be fought over global climate model projections that are proving to be much too warm vs reality.
A theory that projects catastrophic warming and all sorts of bad consequences based on mathematical equations fed into computers to represent the physics of the atmosphere and project the future of it and the planet.
All sorts of papers, studies and research to confirm the consequences……….but all based on the assumption, that the theory is correct.
If the theory is not correct……….and the models, which are the only proof, are showing less and less skill with time, then the entire debate about catastrophic global warming is over.
But the theory lives on and continues to be debated. One side defends it, the other side tries to use empirical evidence, much of it from the last 15 years to show it’s wrong.
The battlefield is on the theory(accepted by many) and future projections.
If I got to pick(as an operational meteorologist for over 32 years that uses weather models all day long and understands climate models) model projections would only carry significant weight they were showing decent skill.
It’s blatantly absurd that the one absolute, well known aspect related to increasing CO2……. the booming biosphere, increasing plant growth, crop yields and world food production, is getting very little weight.
An enormously beneficial reality with overwhelming, irrefutable evidence.
Even as we scream about it, the other side refuses to let the battlefield go anywhere but where they have the advantage……………global climate models projecting catastrophic warming(that isn’t happening)
“I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.”
Forget about proving that man-made global climate change is not occurring. Can anyone prove that man made global climate change is occurring? Even if 100% of those who give it any thought believe that it is. The conjecture is not provable or disprovable.
First, let us understand that I am not one of those lukewarmists who allow some warming to be caused by carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide does not cause any warming whatsoever as I will demonstrate by the scientific method.
First, let us look at the claims for the alleged greenhouse warming attributed to it. James Hansen started the ball rolling in 1988 when he told the Senate that he had detected the existence of the greenhouse effect. Up to that time it had been a theoretical concept that no one had determined experimentally. Hansen claimed to have observed it but he cheated. He pointed to a 100 year warming curve and said it proved the existence of the greenhouse effect. Turned out that 30 years of his 100 year warming was certifiably not greenhouse warming.
You cannot use non-greenhouse warming to prove greenhouse warming. The closest to experimental measurements was Arrhenius who observed that carbon dioxide gas absorbed infrared radiation and thereby became warm. He calculated that if you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere you will increase global temperature by 4 or 5 degrees Celsius. Later, more accurate calculations put the increase st about one degree Celsius.
So what is wrong with that? What is wrong is that carbon dioxide is not the only GHG in the atmosphere. It is not even the most important one. The most important one is water vapor and the interaction of these two is what we need to understand. The only greenhouse theory that can actually handle such multiple GHGs, simultaneously absorbing IR, is the Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT). According to MGT the GHGs present in the atmosphere will jointly establish an optimum absorption window that they control. The greenhouse gases in the earth atmosphere that count are water vapor and carbon dioxide. The optical thickness of their joint absorption window has a fixed value of 1.87 in the IR, calculated by Miskolczi from first principles.
If you now add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it will start to absorb in the IR just as the Arrhenius theory predicts. But as soon as this happens, water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. Absorption by the introduced carbon dioxide is still active, of course, but its warming effect is just balanced by reduction of atmospheric water vapor that is happening simultaneously.
This of course needs some experimental confirmation. In 2011 Miskolczi used NOAA database of radiosonde observations going back to 1948 to observe the absorption of IR by the atmosphere over time. He found that absorption was constant for 61 years while carbon dioxide at the same time increased by 21.6 percent. This is the exact equivalent of what is happening today. It so happens that there has been no greenhouse warming for the last 17 years despite a simultaneous, constant increase of carbon dioxide. As a result, Arrhenius greenhouse theory has been predicting warming for 17 years while nothing happened.
If your theory predicts warming for 17 years and nothing happens, you as a scientist know that it is worthless and belongs in the waste basket of history. There is spot for it there right next to phlogiston, another failed theory of heat. This takes care of the current absence of warming, but what about warming that happened before? What is at work here is the operation of laws of nature. They cannot be manipulated or changed and any previous warming thought to be greenhouse warming is nothing more than natural warming, misidentified by pseudo-scientific “climate” scientists in the hope of proving global warming.
Clearly the claim that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere causes anthropogenic global warming or AGW has been nullified. And with it, alarmist demands for emission control become irrational and irrelevant, a waste of public resources that must be stopped immediately to curtail any further waste.
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Here is Keating again:: ” I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.”
OK, Keating — PAY UP!
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Mr Keating:
You have allowed your fellow travelers to define, to stereotype, and to caricature skeptics. Assume, just for the sake of argument, that most skeptics are intelligent people who really do care about the earth, the environment and bequeathing our children a better planet.
I stopped believing in CAGW *because* of the science. By about 2008 it was quite obvious to anyone who cared enough to objectively look at the facts, that there was something seriously wrong with the CAGW theory. Most, if not all, skeptics agree that we are experiencing some degree of AGW. Going from 300+PPM to 400PPM of CO2 surely has some effect.
As a layperson with only a passing interest in this subject, I understand the debate to be around these questions:
1. By how much does a doubling of CO2 increase temperatures?
2. What is climate sensitivity to that increase?
3. Will it be good, bad, or indifferent to the planet as a whole?
We still do not have answers to the above questions. Only widely ranging estimates.
And once those are answered, the question will then be, what to do about it.
Most of us learn in grade school not to stereotype. We learn as children that different groups are not monolithic. Why do you (and so many others) leave your senses when it comes to global warming?
Religion and government should not mix. Same principle for this issue. Science and politics are toxic together.
You should have checked 2 weeks ago. Of course, up in the PNW, we don’t want a Santa Barbara climate, that’s why we’re here.
Oh, and Seattle is set to hit mid 80s all this week.
Solomon Green quotes Keating:
I will award $30,000 of my own money to anyone that can prove, via the scientific method, that man-made global climate change is not occurring.
Green comments:
The conjecture is not provable or disprovable.
True. What Keating avoids is the fact that the AGW conjecture has been put forth by Keating’s own alarmist clique. Therefore, Keating has the onus of showing that CO2 causes AGW. Skeptics have nothing to prove.
Skeptics are skeptical because to date, there is no scientific evidence showing that human-emitted CO2 is a driver of temperature. So far, that is a baseless conjecture.
But all this is moot; Keating is a scoundrel, and he will never pay no matter how much evidence is provided. He is just trying to rescue his derailed tenure track by out-alarming the alarmist crowd.
dbstealy says:
But all this is moot; Keating is a scoundrel, and he will never pay no matter how much evidence is provided.
As far as I can tell, Keating has not published a single climate-related peer-reviewed article. In fact, I can’t find a single peer-reviewed article to his name.
One might wonder – Does Keating even have the necessary skills to adequately assess an entry to his challenge? There is absolutely no evidence that he does.
@Kozlowski
Sensible and true… yet the very issue at hand. Remove these abnormal psychological traits and there is no Keating. In all truth, this whole “challenge” is so insubstantial that it is likely to be no more than a random, desperate cry for attention. And he’s got it. So kudos to him on that. He must be feeling very special right now fending “evil” right and left, infantile as it sounds (and is).
It’s the “Have you stopped beating your wife” question.
One day Tokusan told his student Ganto, ‘I have two monks who have been here for many years. Go and examine them.’ Ganto picked up an ax and went to the hut where the two monks were meditating. He raised the ax, saying, ‘If you say a word I will cut off your heads; and if you do not say a word, I will also cut off your heads.’ Both monks continued their meditation as if he had not spoken. Ganto dropped the ax and said, ‘You are true Zen students.’
If we throw in finding evidence that the Yeti doesn’t exist do we get an extra $20,000?
“There is hardly a skeptic alive who doesn’t think that human activity is causing some climate change, and in particular, some amount of warming.”
How do you explain the lack of warming for the past 2 decades?
Alec Rawls – An interesting challenge. I suggest that you spell out very clearly in your answer all the exact rules of the challenge in your own language, so that there can be no misunderstanding about what it is that you are addressing. The risk of using Keating’s rules is they can be misinterpreted, and hence your answer could be rejected based on something that you were not in fact addressing.
Dr Burns. That’s a very strange comment of yous (3:45pm). Of course there can be some human influence and still no warming. Natural factors such as orbital variations, solar activity, ocean oscillations, atmospheric oscillations, etc, etc, are the main drivers of climate, and we don’t have any idea how some of them work. Yes, there’s some human influence, but no, it doesn’t rule the climate.
The point whether implied or specifically asked is that co2 is the main driver on this planet. The answer is NO. After close to 18 years the warming stopped while co2 continued to increase. What is he providing as proof that AGW exist? Good luck with those papers and studies. Maybe he can keep warm burning them during the next downturn in temperatures. (if he hasn’t bought beach front property where it is warm all the time, Like Mr. Gore. Is his property still above sea level? Of course it is)
This entire debate will go down as one of the biggest boondoggle of all time. AGW is a waste of time, talent and money.
pokerguy
There is such a challenge
See http://climateguy.blogspot.se/2010/11/10k-climate-challenge.html
Rather more commendable than Dr Keating’s (although Keating never replied to my request to see his PhD thesis), as there is an independany arbitrator appointed to judge and handle the cash.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
“One might wonder – Does Keating even have the necessary skills to adequately assess an entry to his challenge? There is absolutely no evidence that he does.”
He does not need “adequately assess” , all he needs to do is refute for some reason that pleases him and keep his money.
Rule no.5 says he’s judge and jury but he will release “comments”. That means NOTHING. So he does not even need to a proper rebutal of any credible claimant. He just decides what HE wants to accept and whether he wants to lose 30 grand. YEAH, RIGHT.
He’s also now imposed a deadline. Since when did science work to arbitrary deadlines?
This whole exercise is a political game and Alex was a fool to lend it a shread of credibility with “Taking Keating’s $30,000 skeptic challenge seriously”.
Arno 11:21am: “Carbon dioxide does not cause any warming whatsoever as I will demonstrate by the scientific method….AGW has been nullified.”
No. What you write is true only because CO2 uses up no fuel thus added CO2 alone cannot cause increased temperature (warming) in total planet atm. Added CO2 ppm and any IR active gas ppm in part enables the sun using up a fuel to cause planetary global increase in near surface Tmean above satellite measured Tmean due optical depth physics of an atmosphere.
Arno has simply made up an incorrect straw man and easily stabbed it to death i.e. nullified it. IR active gas is only one factor in global surface Tmean; there are many other factors each acting independently.
“If your theory predicts warming for 17 years and nothing happens, you as a scientist know that it is worthless and belongs in the waste basket of history.”
Agreed. However the basic text book theory of planet wide atm. optical depth does not predict this; only the GCMs do & in ensemble are shown incorrect by the past 17+ years observed surface Tmean. The obvious basic reason is current GCMs do not independently model from text book 1st principles each & every other global Tmean component factor.
The top post clip below is more correct in explaining results of scientific method and Arno’s straw man clipped herein above is incorrect explanation:
“…means proving that the available reason and evidence does not justify any high degree of certainty about the latest warming being mostly human-caused…the actual debate is over the size of the feedback effect and whether it is positive or negative”
Soooo… the IPCC lists low levels of consensus and understanding for ALL variables EXCEPT co2s influence. They are 95% sure about that one. Meanwhile they ignore empirical data on feedbacks that were supposed to cause 2/3 of the warming, except they arent. With co2 as a major factor we cannot model the present or even most of the last 100 years, nope just the few decades this glorious theory became prominent, until of course the last 1-1.5 decades. Well over a dozen major papers try to explain this lack of warming (many of them do this by altering some other variable and there is a wide range of implications from the various attempts) while still implying co2s effect is strong, because like the IPCC says were totally sure its correct, the world just isnt actually warming, nor is the ocean, and we cant explain the bulk of the last 100 years with co2 as a major factor so CLEARLY there is some other factor that we cant find that keeps co2 as a major factor. right? because the IPCC is 95% sure!! LOL. This isnt science, it is a social agenda that wears the mask of science.
wait I hear someone at the door, their uniforms say ministry of co-2ruth… Ill be right back.
I believe!!! clearly only people who are anti science could question the power of the one true climate driver, the rest are just climate heretics. have you heard the good news brothers and sisters!!! We might all be climate sinners, but co2 loves and forgives you!! Ignore the heretics, they will bow before the one true climate driver in the end for their final judgement.
Richard
I say to “prove” in layman’s term whose meaning in science is to demonstrate that a theory or hypothesis is consistent with all observations and/or established scientific laws, Strictly speaking proofs are meaningful only in mathematics, not in science, because scientific theories must be falsifiable. Hence you cannot really prove they are true. However there is no need to disprove or falsify a theory that has not been “proven” to begin with.
What we are really facing here is a form of coercion by fundamentalist climate modelers.
They’ll continue saying whatever it takes to keep the cash flowing and their jobs (researching a case they claim is closed) until they retire and collect their pensions.
The only way to get them to change would be to offer them more money than they are getting from us (through taxation or inflation) already.
After all, 100% of all fundamentalist climate modelers will create whatever output you want….for the right price.
The American has no friend in this fight – no representation in our government – no power that operates in our best interests.
Dr. Strangelove:
Your post at July 27, 2014 at 11:28 pm says in total I think to me
I absolutely, strongly and vociferously agree! Over the years I have repeatedly pointed out on WUWT that ‘proof’ has no meaning in science, pseudoscientists try to prove their ideas but scientists try to falsify ideas.
Indeed, in this thread I wrote saying to you at July 26, 2014 at 4:24 am
However, Keatings “challenge” is NOT science. It is a political ploy. And failure to respond to it would offer him the political ‘win’ on a plate.
It is important to note that Keating is likely to claim a ‘win’ whatever happens because he is the sole arbiter of responses to his “challenge”. But his refuting reasoned replies can be ridiculed, while no replies would offer him – and other warmunists – the opportunity to proclaim that climate realists ‘cannot dispute the science’.
And there are several ways to fulfill his challenge which he says is
There are several ways to do that, and the obvious one is to apply the Null Hypothesis. That is the method I have adopted to answer his challenge. My submission in answer to the challenge and Keating’s acceptance of it can be read here and I anticipate Keating providing a facile excuse to reject it.
Richard
In rejecting the “disproofs” Keating will claim to have proven his theory. He reversed the process that’s why it contradicts the scientific method. Even if his rejections are valid, that does not prove his theory. The ploy will succeed. The accused failed to disprove the theory that he is guilty. Therefore he is guilty. IMO the best response to Keating is laugh at his challenge because it is pseudoscience.
Keating, challenge accepted.
I claim that GW is occuring because such is the mighty and holy will of Invisible Pink Licorn (IPL). IPL can, of course, decide to stop, resume, reverse or accelerate GW, at will (or by the magic vertues of His holy manure and its gas), and whatever will be, will be.
I challenge anyone to disprove this fact by the vary same rule that Keating decided to apply to his challenge, except for the deadline, which shall be 2014-07-30 at 00h00 GMT.
Obvioulsy no one will be able to scientifically challenge this Holy truth, so by 014-07-30 at 00h01 GMT it will be a well established fact (“consensus” )
According to the law of excluded middle, the deeds of IPL are not the deeds of Man, which scientifically proves that AGW doesn’t exist.
QOD
(PS : it may be, or not, that IPL or “Invisible Pink Licorn” are ill translated as “CO2” or “Homo sapiens” in some foreign langage. This is utter blasphem )