An a-scientific paper, poor contribution of NGS to the enlightenment of its members.
Story submitted by Michel de Rougemont
I just finished reading the article « The age of disbelief » in the March edition of the National Geographic.
It is one of the most a-scientific articles about science that I ever could read.
Joel Achenbach, the author, pretends that sceptics have no place in the scientific debates because of their incompetence, their prejudices, their doubts in science, and, last but not least, their alienation to powerful lobbies, as for example the fossil fuel industry in climate matters.
First he makes a nice amalgam between deniers, as for example opponents to vaccine or flat earth believers, and sceptics. He may not have ever tried to learn what a sceptic is looking for, what are the motives of not being satisfied with generally accepted beliefs.
Then he looks for an authority, which we should all obey, that settles the scientific truth, or at least the correct way toward this truth. Here he demonstrates his inability to conceive that such authority cannot exist. Scientific societies can laugh about such pretension, well knowing how chaotic their progresses are. Only IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, not a scientific but a governmental institution created in 1988) and its followers have that arrogance.
Amazingly he affirms: “In this bewildering world we have to decide on what to believe and how to act on that”. I agree with this statement. But for him a sceptic who forged his opinion on contradictory evidences is just making the wrong decision. And since he wants to believe in approximate theories such as the anthropogenic nature of climate change, this is a settled “consensus” that no one dares question.
When he will have looked at disturbing facts that IPCC never explains, as for example that the glaciers began to melt long before the industrial age, that the rate of rise of the seas was already quite spectacular at the end of the 18th century, that two periods of warm have alternated with two cold ones over the past two millennia without having anything to do with the burning of fossil fuels, and that the rates at which temperature or sea level are varying show no correlation with the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, then he may ask why anthropowarmism has installed itself as indisputable dogma within the past thirty years.
He would like science to stay in the realm of rationality, but he is advocating dogmatic views. This article was a poor contribution of the National Geographic Society to the enlightenment of its members.
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If you agree with me you are rational. If you disagree with me you are irrational. Don’t you agree that my position is rational?
Dam, hope you left off the /sarc tag😠
Perfect encapsulation of the nutty argument I hear daily from Alarmists…
There is a TYPO in this article – alienation should be ALIGNMENTS or ASSOCIATIONS, perhaps?
Why? This word exists and means “Estrangement”. Or did I miss another problem?
OK, the context ist questionable. Maybe you are right…
It is a typo. Alienation means “being isolated from.” Instead, skeptics are being accused of being promoted by the fossil fuel industry. There’s a big difference. Neither the word “alienation” or its equivalent is in the text. This is what the original article says:
Clearly he is accusing skeptics of being aligned with the fossil fuel industry rather than being alienated from them.
Affiliation to?
That paragraph is a disaster on so many fronts …
Pointman
Not a typo, it comes from my French speaking: alienation meaning the situation of an individual who is under the subjection from outside constraints
“Not a typo, it comes from my French speaking:. . .”
It’s not the mot juste in English. It’s a faux pas.
Neither is it a faux pas.
As many English words have their roots in French, it’s never certain that they keep their original meanings.
Marx’s theory of alienation was based upon his observation that in emerging industrial production under capitalism, workers inevitably lose control of their lives and selves by not having any control of their work (Wikipedia). For Marxists an alienated person is a victim of the [capitalist ] system.
Similarly, Mr. Achenbach’s innuendo is that sceptics have no control of their opinions, these being dictated to them by the “fossil fuel industry” propaganda.
@michel
No, that is NOT what Achenbach insinuated. Here’s what he wrote:
IOW, skeptics came by their conclusions independently. Their minds weren’t colonized by think-tanks. He implied that the think tanks were secondary players.
—————–
Using “alienation to” as a synonym for “being deceived and deluded by” isn’t a usage found either in common speech, as comments here indicate, or in dictionaries. I’ve checked Cassell’s, Random House’s, and the OED. It’s not listed in any of them, even as an archaic usage. It’s a faux pas in current or long-ago English.
When did you stop beating your wife??
Why does everyone get that wrong?
The question is,
“Have you stopped beating your wife? Yes or no.”
When did I stop beating my wife?
When she began running faster than me.
dam, your post reminded me of this quote from Macaulay about bigotry:
“The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate truth; but when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1843)
This is the irony. By this admittedly somewhat obsolete definition of bigotry, modern liberals and environmental alarmists are among our most consistent bigots.
What is obsolete about it? It seems bang on to me.
The irony, actually, is that the fundamentally confrontational nature of bigotry is what eventually makes it choke on itself. This article in the once respectable National Geographic Society accomplishes nothing but to tighten the noose. Consider it. What can it possibly accomplish? I mean, of course, other than to harass its members…
Damm’ good dilemma.
Hans
no dilemma, damm, no coercion:
Me is / I am the agent / of my own free will.
the choice to
Think, we think for ourselves.
Hans
Here is rationality from the National Geographic. The unquestioning face of global warming alarmism at work for the Northeastern United States.
What would you NOT expect with climate change regarding snow in the Northeast? 🙂
Here is another from Nat Geo. Remember that in 2008 they blamed global warming for the lack of snow.
Is there anything carbon dioxide cannot do?
A year before, in 2013, the National Geographic went on…
Forgetting what they reported on in 2008, milder winters and less snow for the Northeast.
I hope this was submitted to the editor of that august journal. Not that we can expect acknowledgment much less publication.
Below is one reason why they want sceptics to shut up and go away.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/90-CMIP5-models-vs-observations-with-pause-explanation.png
http://www.oarval.org/90-CMIP5-models-vs-observations-with-pause-explanation.gif
Here is something on consensus and why it can be a dangerous thing. This consensus seems to have started in the 1950s. One of the studies below from the Annals of Internal Medicine was funded by the British Heart Foundation – an organisation dedicated to reducing saturated fat intake.
What did you expect from a warmist infested publication?
NGM had been like this for years. It used to be a pillar of scientific and journalistic wonder before it became poluted with CAGW dogma. Then it was lost forever.
‘Polluted’ is a good choice of words; ‘infested’ also would be OK.
I wonder if ‘association’ in paragraph three should be ‘association’ or ‘affiliation’. N’est-ce pas?
D’oh! I try to write French and lose the ability to read, apparently.
Ummm, scratch the first ‘association’ and install ‘alienation’ (if you know what I mean, and by now you probably don’t).
Um.
…sceptics have no place in the scientific debates because of their incompetence, their prejudices, their doubts in science, and, last but not least, their alienation to powerful lobbies, as for example the fossil fuel industry…
I think that the word ‘alienation’ is incorrectly used here. The word has a similar meaning to ‘dislike’. Sceptics are rarely accused of ‘disliking’ the fossil fuel industry – they are more often accused of having very close associations with the industry. So the word ‘association’ is much better – and should replace ‘alienation’…
Dodgy Geezer,
…
scepticsenvironmentalists have no place in the scientific debates because of their incompetence, their prejudices, their doubts in science, and, last but not least, their association with powerful lobbies, as for example the fossil fuel industry, Greenpeace, WWF, insurance industry, etc, etcThere, fixed it for you.
Probably meant ‘alliance’
I think they may have meant ”Alliance”
OOps, sorry Clipe. You got there before me.
I read it as meaning 4 below, i.e. that the deniers had been sold to the fossil fuel companies.*
alienation http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/alienation?db=dictionary
noun
1. the act of alienating, or of causing someone to become indifferent or hostile:
2. the state of being alienated, withdrawn, or isolated from the objective world, as through indifference or disaffection:
3. the act of turning away, transferring, or diverting:
4. Law. a transfer of the title to property by one person to another; conveyance.
5. Statistics. the lack of correlation in the variation of two measurable variates over a population.
*I am still waiting for my check.
It also doubled down on molecules-to-man evolution solely from blind chance mutation and natural selection. The following year it uncritically accepted that fake fossil from China and it blew up on them. It then held a big “Is all the egg gone from my face yet” public exercise, but never examined its basic arrogant presumption that it was the holder of “settled science.” Until Nat Geo humbles itself and admits that Scientism is not Almighty God, they are doomed to remain fools.
A few years ago they went hog wild on peak oil. Now we have this. So much oil in the US there is hardly any place to store it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-12/oil-storage-squeeze-may-lead-to-another-price-crash
Interestingly, it was lost long before that in some arenas. When I was working on the theoretical linguistics of American Sign Language (ASL) back in the 1970’s, NG (Society and Magazine) had been supporting signed language research with apes, in order to show that ASL was accessible to non-humans, and therefore, ASL is not a human language. This was despite compelling information on the structure of ASL, as opposed to the “contact language” created by the non-signing researchers and the non-signing primates, including such facts that word order in ASL is systematically different from that of English, and that ASL is highly inflected–in some areas more complexly than Latin, Russian, or (of course) English. It also flew in the face of other primate research at the time which illustrated the existence of symbolic logic in the mental processes of Chimpanzees, indicating that chimps are more intelligent that we had previously thought, rather than that chimps are completely lacking in psychological processes related to language (so if they can do Sign, Sign isn’t language).
All this nonsense on the part of NGS was for the goal of eliminating ASL from education in America–in order to impose English on all Deaf people in the US, even in the majority of cases where English is simply inappropriate–which is just slightly stupider than eliminating the use of fossil fuels to save the planet.
I always wondered why standardised sign language isnt taught to children in school from a young age , in all countries. A global language if you will.
We [earth inhabitants] can’t do a standardised sign language unless we agree to an authority imposing a single language.
Which one?
“You shall all speak French [sign language].”……………somehow I don’t think so
And as with spoken language, a sign language will develop local dialects which will eventually evolve into separate languages. Even in these days of “inter-face -web-net” connectedness.
I actually prefer the Signing Exact English standard because the hearing and English-speaking parents have an easier time learning it and communicating with their deaf off-spring. It also facilitates learning to read, write, and otherwise communicate with the non-hearing impaired majority that they will be sharing their environment with. ASL is a wonderful language, but it does tend to isolate the deaf from the mainstream, and I for one have never felt comfortable with any group of people segregating themselves from the rest of society. Much mischief has occurred throughout history when this has been allowed.
After having grown up with science, the NGM and SciAM, it was tragic to see the latter two go senile.
I totally agree – I don’t recognize them anymore – they went from pillars of scientific thought to drooling sycophants of political correctness in just a few decades… Their ownership changed and that was the beginning of the end, I think…
From Wikipedia: “In 1986, it was sold to the Holtzbrinck group of Germany, which has owned it since. In the fall of 2008, Scientific American was put under the control of Nature Publishing Group, a division of Holtzbrinck.”
NATURE Publishing Group. Not SCIENCE. Ugh.
I agree. I come from a poor background, but I had access to encyclopedias and general science books. I educated myself on science and became very knowledgeable – to the point that I have argued with people on forums so well that they think I am a scientist. But ‘science’ has gone awry. We are entering a new dark age where, despite that we know consensus means nothing, the public is expected to ‘believe’ in spite of the flimsy evidence. It could have dire implications in the world of medicine. We need some ‘Spartacus’ scientists.
About 6 months ago the head of NPR moved over to be the head of National Geographic, because he felt he could make more of a difference there. It’s his influence that is responsible for NPR-worthy articles like this one of Auerbach’s.
Actually, it became polluted with Marxist propaganda just like Scientific American, who gave Jeffrey Sachs a monthly column to promote anti-capitalism. The CAGW is just one point of the agenda.
is this the Joel Achenbach whose main qualification is a B. A. degree in Politics from Princeton? Strange how people with no scientific qualifications make the most noise about CAGW and are nastier to those that criticism it.
I suppose it hide their own significant inadequacies! How sad.
as politics has hijacked science, it is only fitting that a politico that writes for Washington Post should publish non-science puff
I cancelled my subscription to Nat Geo years ago because of their position on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. They have sold their souls to become one more paid liberal mouthpiece, no better than ABC, CBS, MSNBC, etc.
It’s not just Global Warming, it’s whatever the left wing scare du jour is.
They bought into the ozone hole scare, hook line and sinker.
They were one of the major backers of the acid rain scam.
Nuclear winter had no better friend.
Yes like the article on The Sydney Olympics and how wonderful they were to be recycling water. I wonder if anyone at Nat Geo noticed that Sydney is on a rather large harbor? If they had to they could desalinate plenty of water. It narrow thinking that prevents Nat Geo from seeing possibilities. But the greens don’t want solutions they want problems, only problems lead to more funding.
Walt, I did too. A shame they got suckered into the phony hypothesis.
Popular Science magazine did the same thing many years ago.
Yes, It was with great sadness that I finally cancelled my NG subscription. I had it all my life, but misinformation and politically correct content finally made it unreadable. I hope someone at their head office begins to notice the cancellations of long held accounts. I do not think they can recover these old reliable readers. GK
” I do not think they can recover these old reliable readers. GK”
I cancelled my subscription as well. Unfortunately they have a whole generation of young bonehead readers to take their place.
What do you expect from a man with a BA in Politics.
To believe is to be un-scientific.
End of discussion.
This sort of crapola is why I cancelled my National Geographic subscription a long, long time ago!
“This sort of crapola is why I cancelled my National Geographic subscription a long, long time ago!”
Ditto
It is why I haven’t subscribed to National Geographic even at the “discounted” rate of $15 (US) a year.
“This sort of crapola is why I cancelled my National Geographic subscription a long, long time ago”
Double ditto, but i hung on until last year. Advertisements for fake jewels and scrap watches were a clear sign that it was time to move on.
But I do still pick it up in the Doctor’s waiting room. Neat pictures if you skip the captions. 😎
Simple solution. Cancelled subscription long ago. Ditto Sci Am. Ditto NYT. Life is too short to read drivel. And outrageous stuff worth punching back on, like Mann’s No Pause 4/14 piece in Sci Am, always seem to find their way to me via MSM hyperventilation. Todays fun example is BBC and FT articles about IEA now saying 2014 first year no CO2 rise because of energy conservation and renewables. Except if one checks the Keeling curve at Scripps.ucsd.edu, (one click away), the IEA ‘model’ based on estimated energy consumption is just wrong; observed CO2 increased as usual.
I spotted that too and thought whaaa??? Last time I looked at the mona loa data there was no change to the rise in co2 so where did they get this??
Well, my quick sleuthing showed IEA published a report on energy use/composition, from which they concluded from their model estimates that CO2 emissions did not increase in 2014 cause China slowed and renewables grew. They apparently never checked to see if that was true. MSM picked up the new IEA report and ran with wrong headlines. The official ( not government reprinted MLO Keeling Curve result since 1959 is available via Scripps Oceanographic Institute at UCSD. Google takes you there straight away. There is a very nice two year comparator in high resolution by week and month.
again the virtual world is “better” than the real one
Another typical model that doesn’t match observational data. How long before they begin to adjust the Co2 data to match the models.
Rud, well countered by a ‘AJB’ Posting from – March 6, 2015 at 5:31 am http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/06/it-would-not-matter-if-trenberth-was-correct-now-includes-january-data/#comment-1876593
But you have the wrong relationship of CO2 to temperature.
Try: dCO2/dt = ?T
i.e. relate the rate of change of CO2 concentration to temperature. Like this.
http://postimg.org/image/a153d8xan/full/
It shouldn’t need pointing out that despite consumption of fossil fuels accelerating, the rate of change of CO2 has remained static (i.e. has not accelerated) over the hiatus period either. But there are some who must believe that the Mt Pinatubo and Mt Hudson eruptions sequestered CO2. Or the Amazon basin, etc. held its breath for a couple of years. Maybe all SUVs, planes and powerplants were mothballed but I can’t say I noticed that 🙂
DD More,
There is a very good relationship between short term temperature changes, followed by similar CO2 rate-of-change changes, but that is only for the 2-3 year variability around the trend. This variability is caused by the influence of temperature on vegetation (uptake/decay), as is proven by the opposite variability of CO2 and δ13C.
That has nothing to do with the cause of the increase, as vegetation is a proven net absorber of CO2 over longer term as can be seen in the oxygen balance, the earth is greening… Temperature in the past caused not more than 8 ppmv/°C over the past 800,000 years, but the increase now is already 110 ppmv for only 0.8°C warming…
As human emissions are about twice the increase in the atmosphere, there is little doubt that humans caused the increase…
DD, you need to read my ebook Blowing Smoke. I know a bit more about all this than you presume. I prefer using absolutely bulletproof arguements in the climate wars. That CO2 does nothing is hardly bulletproof. Nor is the assertion that increased natural sequestration equals the rate of anthropogenic increase from FF. Cause the Mauna Loa data says that is not (yet) true.
No, Ferdinand. The differential relationship accounts for both the variability and the trend in dCO2/dt. You are just waving your hands around.
The only reason it isn’t bulletproof, Rud, is that bullets are useless against a swarm. Too few people in the swarm understand the phase relationships which indicate that there is unequivocally an integral relationship between temperatures and CO2, that the relationship holds across the entire observable spectrum, and that one cannot therefore pick and choose which parts of the CO2 increase are from temperature modulated causes, and which are from fossil fuel combustion as, e.g., Ferdinand attempts to do above.
Murry Salby will be discussing his latest findings in a couple of days. I’m expecting great things.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2015/2/24/salby-in-london-1.html
Bart, we have been there many times before. It is quite simple: the variability is a proven reaction of vegetation to temperature (and precipitation). The slope is proven NOT from vegetation.
Thus whatever the influence of temperature on the CO2 increase, the increase is not caused by the same processes as the year by year variability and there is no reason at all to use one-formula-which-fits-it-all.
CO2 rate of change variability is directly controlled by temperature variability, the total increase is hardly controlled by temperature variability, it is controlled by the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is caused by human emissions and where the sink rate is mainly (above equilibrium) pressure controlled.
It is not difficult to match the slopes of two straight lines, that is just curve fitting and doesn’t prove anything about cause and effect…
“The slope is proven NOT from vegetation.”
Nothing is proven here. What you have is a narrative, not proof. The slope is from a temperature dependent process. Of this there can be no doubt.
It is not only not difficult to match the slopes of two straight lines with an affine map, it is tautological. But, matching both the slope and the variability is quite a challenge.
When you attempt to map the slope of human emissions to that of atmospheric concentration, you are engaging the in the former tautology. But, you cannot match the variability of human emissions with the variability of atmospheric concentration.
You can only match both the slope and the variability with the temperature data. Which is why atmospheric concentration must be overwhelmingly a result of a temperature modulated process, and not human inputs.
Bart,
That the variability around the trend is caused by the influence of temperature on vegetation is proven beyond doubt: that can be seen in the opposite CO2 rate of change and δ13C rate of change lagging after a temperature rate of change variability:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/temp_dco2_d13C_mlo.jpg
That the trend is not caused by vegetation is proven beyond doubt, as the oxygen balance shows: the whole biosphere is an increasing sink for CO2:
http://www.bowdoin.edu/~mbattle/papers_posters_and_talks/BenderGBC2005.pdf
Thus any change in CO2 is the sum of two independent processes, which have little to nothing to do with each other, where one process is highly temperature dependent, but the other may be or not be temperature dependent. Anyway, your “common” factor for these two processes is just coincidence and not that good: if you make an exact match of the slopes, the amplitude of the variability is too small and if you match the amplitudes, the slopes don’t match. Besides an artificial match by choosing the right offset and factor, there is not the slightest evidence that the slope of the CO2 increase is caused by temperature, which anyway violates Henry’s law for the solubility of CO2 in seawater.
There is far more evidence that the slope is caused by human emissions: both show a slight quadratic increase over time, both show a 4-fold increase over time, the mass balance matches, the 13C/12C ratio change matches, the (pre-1950) 14C/12C sink rate matched, the oxygen balance matches…
Of course you can’t match the variability around the slope with human emissions: there is hardly any variability in human emissions, only an overall increase over time. All CO2 rate of change variability (+/- 1 ppmv) is caused by temperature variability and near all increase in the atmosphere (+70 ppmv) is caused by human emissions (+120 ppmv) since 1959…
The emissions didn’t rise, compared to the previous year for the first time in many decades, but the emissions still are about twice the rise as measured at Mauna Loa or other places…
Ferdinand, I have the greatest respect for your contributions. I always read your posts avidly and have been over your WEB pages many times. I have to say I’m not convinced by these arguments, there always seems to be large assumptions somewhere.
On the mass balance argument we don’t seem to have good isotopic data for the ~94% of annual contributions that are not due to fossil fuels. Heck, we don’t even know the size of the exchange from natural sources and sinks with any degree of certainty. There are just too many unknowns.
Your 8 ppmv/°C doesn’t make much sense to me either. This I assume comes from ice-core records which appears to be a heavily damped signal (with possibly underestimated diffusion), I cannot see how it could be otherwise. At this juncture Salby’s arguments (and maths) are more convincing I’m afraid – particularly the effect of lags on a spectrum of timescales up to ~800 years and beyond.
Which brings us to what is the cause of the underlying trend? How much of the current 2 ppmv/annum rise comes directly from fossil fuels? Sure, on the face of it we’ve put a finger on the balance by 4%/annum and the underlying rise is currently ~half of the fossil fuel contribution. But that still doesn’t tell us what it would look like without that 4%. How much of the remainder is due to temperature rise by natural variation, land use changes, irrigation, etc. over time and a direct relationship to Henry’s Law as far as the oceans are concerned, lagged etc? We simply don’t know. It seems to me don’t have and could never measure the data required to even make a tentative estimate. It’s all compounded assumption.
Whacking an extra 4% per annum in one direction ought to have an effect but as you say the Earth has greened and vegetation is a proven net absorber. With sinks that are slower to take up the slack but still dependent on temperature who can tell? Back to Salby’s analysis and spectrum of lag timescales again.
However, look at my graph. The thin blue line is the year-on-year delta using monthly ML interpolated data *without* the seasonal correction. That is: dCO2(n) = CO2(n) – CO2(n-12), times ten for units in ppmv/decade which most people like to refer to. The thick line is simply a 13-month centered running mean of that. So what you’re looking at is as near as damn it the rate of change at monthly intervals with the annual variability removed. You could argue that it ought to be dCO2n = CO2(n+6) – CO2(n-6) which would shift it left. Fine, it makes little difference and reality is probably somewhere in between.
The orange temperature plot is simply UAH LT anomaly values with a similar 13-month smoothed thick line. While it is disingenuous to plot one over the other like that, the linear trends of both unsmoothed series are perfectly aligned. The relationship is pretty obvious but the interesting bit is in the detail.
What happened when those big volcanoes went pop? Never mind that they probably added a little more CO2, the underlying trend got all but wiped out over the following two years. Why? Similarly, when the El Nino let rip the instantaneous rate more than doubled. Where did this CO2 come from and what was it’s isotopic ratio? Further, if there is that much pressure on sinks from fossil fuels that it is pushing 50% of the annual rise, why hasn’t the underlying rate accelerated since 2002?
In 2002 global emissions were reckoned to be 24.3 and we’re currently estimated to be at 32.3 billion tonnes of CO2/annum. That’s an increase of 32% so it ought to show up. Sure, half that could get buried in the noise but a linear trend over that part of the data is flat. It just seems to follow temperature as before, almost spike for spike.
So I don’t know, Ferdinand, none of it adds up. Persuade me otherwise if you wish, I’m waiting to see what else Salby has to say on the 17th in London. The interesting bit being: “an upper bound on the contribution from fossil fuel emission”. How has he arrived at that?
Can anyone explain how data collection at Mauna Loa accounts for variations in emissions and variations in wind direction from nearby Kilauea? USGS uses “metric tons” per day as the unit of measure, and describes CO2 making up just under half of the gas emitted.
AJB,
Ice cores are a quite reliable CO2 storage for over the past 800,000 years. There is hardly any (theoretical) migration of CO2 in relative warm (coastal) ice cores and none in deep inland extremely cold ice cores. The main drawback is the resolution: a smoothing between 10 years (for the past 150 years) to 560 years (for the past 800,000 years), depending of the snow accumulation rate.
If there was any long term migration, the 8 ppmv/°C between interglacials and glacial periods would fade for each interglacial 100,000 years back in time, which is not observed.
The repeatability of CO2 measurements in ice cores for the same core is 1.2 ppmv (1 sigma) up to +/- 5 ppmv between ice cores with extreme differences in accumulation rate and average temperature. The current increase is 110 ppmv over a period of 160 years. Even if that was part of a huge natural cycle of over 600 years, the current increase would be detected in all ice cores even with the worst resolution.
What would happen if humans stopped all emissions today? As the current CO2 levels are about 110 ppmv (~μatm) above equilibrium, today that pushes ~2 ppmv CO2 into the oceans and plant alveoli. That doesn’t stop if humans stop their emissions, as the sink rate is total pressure dependent, not emissions dependent. Thus the first year after the emissions stop, the levels in the atmosphere will sink with ~2 ppmv, etc. until the original temperature driven equilibrium is reached again. The e-fold time is slightly over 50 years and the half life time ~40 years.
According to the literature, Henry’s law gives between 4 and 17 ppmv/°C for a new equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere. Thus the 8 ppmv/°C is in the middle of the theoretical and measured influence of temperature on global CO2 levels. The 0.8°C temperature increase since the LIA is thus good for ~6 ppmv CO2 increase. The rest of the 110 ppmv increase is from human emissions…
Then where Salby goes wrong:
To prove his theory of CO2 = integral of temperature, Salby calculates the theoretical disappearance of the CO2 peaks in the ice cores: according to him, the peak CO2 of 100,000 years ago was originally 10 times higher than what is measured. But migration doesn’t stop after 100,000 years, it only stops when all peaks are completely flat. That means that, according to his theory, back in time the 200,000 peak was originally 100 times higher and the peak of 800,000 years ago was originally 10^8 times higher. Or more CO2 than the whole earth contains as carbon…
Last year he did give a speech in the London Parliament, where he evaded several questions like the above I had. Never received a direct or indirect answer…
About the isotope ratio’s: there are only two main sources of low 13CO2: fossil organics and recent organics. All other sources are higher in 13C/12C ratio than the atmosphere. That includes oceans, rock weathering, volcanoes,… That effectively excludes the oceans as source of the recent increase of CO2. Recent organics neither are the source: the biosphere as a whole (plants, microbes, molds, insects, animals) is a net absorber of CO2 and preferential 12CO2, thus leaving relative more 13CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus not the cause of the fast decline of the 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere and the oceans surface or the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere…
About your graphs: nobody disputes that the variability around the trend is caused by temperature variability. But that is mainly caused by the influence of temperature and precipitation on tropical vegetation. But that is not the cause of the overall increase, as vegetation is a net, increasing sink for CO2.
Temperature and other natural influences give a variability of +/- 1 ppmv, while the slope over the past 55 years was over 70 ppmv and the rate of change increased a 4-fold from 0.5 ppmv/year to 2 ppmv/year in lockstep with a 4-fold increase of human emissions and a 4-fold increase in sink rate. I don’t think that any natural process can mimic human emissions at exactly the same ratio increase and timing…
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em4.jpg
The red line is the theoretical increase in the atmosphere, from the calculated sink rate for the temperature and the CO2 pressure above equilibrium for each year.
Besides that all, human emissions fit all known observations, while every single theoretical alternative I have heard of violates one or more or even all observations…
Ferdinand,
Have you written to Dr. Salby and discussed your objections with him?
zack aa
Can anyone explain how data collection at Mauna Loa accounts for variations in emissions and variations in wind direction from nearby Kilauea?
If the wind is downslope from the direction of the volcanic vents, that results in peaks of ~4 ppmv and a large variability within an hour. These values are marked and not used for daily to yearly averages. The same for frequent upslope winds from the valley in the afternoon, which are slightly depleted of CO2 (also some 4 ppmv). The difference from including or excluding the outliers doesn’t make more than 0.1 ppmv in average or trend over a year.
See the different rules and calibration procedures as used at Mauna Loa and other “baseline” stations:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
dbstealey,
Not yet, as I expected some open discussion about my (and others) objections, but as far as I know he never enters any discussion…
I have posted now on Bishop’s announcement of Dr. Salby’s lecture, let’s see what happens…
Ferdinand’s plot above is disingenuous. He has performed a best fit of the entire data record. All that this demonstrates is the robust efficacy of least squares fitting, something which is well known, but has no bearing on the debate.
Even though emissions and concentration seem to track somewhat in this plot overall, if you focus on portions of it, you see that the fit is really not so good. If you fit the data to an earlier portion, and extrapolate it forward, you find that you are continually having to adjust the fit to keep on track.
The fact is that atmospheric concentration is rising only linearly, with an essentially constant rate, ever since temperatures fell flat more than a decade ago, while emissions have been continuing to accelerate. There is no tracking of that acceleration in atmospheric concentration since that time.
Moreover, there is no match whatsoever between the variability in emissions and the variability in atmospheric CO2, as there is with the temperature data. There is a remarkable concurrence between both the trend and the variability of the temperature data and the rate of change of CO2.
The very strong correlation holds across the entire frequency spread, and shows no signs of distortion which would necessarily be evident if the trend in temperature were to fail to manifest in the CO2. The trend in CO2 must be the result of the trend in temperature – there is no way around it. Emissions also have a trend. But, they cannot be responsible for the trend in the rate of change of CO2 because it is already accounted for by the temperature relationship. Result: emissions cannot be the driving force in the rise of CO2.
Here is a less disingenuous plot of emssions and CO2 rate of change.
http://i1136.photobucket.com/albums/n488/Bartemis/CO2_zps330ee8fa.jpg
Here, the fit to the early portion clearly diverges from the latter portion. Emissions are accelerating. Atmospheric concentration is not.
All,
As an illustration of the fact that variability and slope have nothing to do with each other, have a look at Bart’s “match” of the slopes at Wood for Trees.
Or alternative, with real matching slopes, look at the “match” of the amplitudes.
Ferdinand’s plot above is disingenuous. He has performed a best fit of the entire data record.
Bart, the above plot is simply the emissions as estimated from fossil fuel use an cement manufacturing and the 12-month running mean of Mauna Loa CO2 data. The dark blue line are the emissions x factor 0.53, that is the average “airborne fraction” over the full record and the red line is the calculated remainder of the emissions taking into account the change in equilibrium (8 ppmv/°C) with temperature and the sink rate as function of the pressure difference between measured CO2 pressure in the atmosphere and equilibrium CO2 pressure (2.15 ppmv sink rate for 110 μatm pressure difference). That is all, nothing is artificially matched, everything is plotted in the same units on the same scales.
In contrast, your plot is a typical example of “how to lie with statistics” (a nice book to read!): using different units (while it is easy to convert both data series to the same units) and different scales with an offset for one of them. That gives an impression of a diversion, while the real increase in the atmosphere still is largely within natural variability…
As a further illustration that Bart is wrong, here a plot of the variability and slope over the past 18 years.
According to the Mauna Loa data, the trend of the CO2 rate of change over that period is slightly negative, while the RSS satellite temperature plot shows a slightly positive trend over the 18 year “pause”. That results in a negative factor to match the slopes, which makes that the “match” of the variability is upside down.
Conclusion: variability and slope have nothing to do with each other. Even if the slope was temperature caused, that needs a different temperature factor than for the variability.
Ferdinand Engelbeen @ur momisugly March 14, 2015 at 3:15 pm
“…have a look at Bart’s “match” of the slopes at Wood for Trees.”
This is statistically inept. The series do not stop and start at the same times, and are not sampled at the same times. Moreover, the relationship is not expected to be perfectly one-to-one, the error is not iid, and a uniformly weighted least squares fit is not the optimal estimator of the slope.
As you point out later, even UAH and RSS do not match slopes, let alone GISS or HADCRUT. Why do you demand a better match of slope between dCO2/dt and a given temperature set than you do between the temperature sets themselves?
“That is all, nothing is artificially matched, everything is plotted in the same units on the same scales.”
Yes, it is artificially matched. The starting point is selected, and the “airborne fraction” is selected.
“…using different units…”
Nonsense. Converting from one set of units to the other is a simple linear transformation. You can effect the transformation by simply using whichever scaled axis you prefer. The data are simply tuned to fit in the first half, and it can be plainly seen that we would have to continually adjust the slope to match the continuing acceleration of the emissions with the stasis in atmospheric rate of change.
‘In contrast, your plot is a typical example of “how to lie with statistics”…’
If you are going to hurl accusations of lying, then I am going to respond that your plot is a lie. It is a superficial match of slopes, something even you admitted above is not at all difficult, and not even close to being conclusive.
Ferdinand Engelbeen @ur momisugly March 14, 2015 at 3:39 pm
“That results in a negative factor to match the slopes, which makes that the “match” of the variability is upside down.”
I want to point out that, as you say, you have inverted the temperature plot to get your arbitrary match to the slope, lest anyone get the impression that the series are 180 deg out of phase. But, UAH hasn’t got the inversion, so all you’re really doing is pointing out the variability of the temperature sets themselves. If you cannot match even the slopes of the temperature sets, why would you expect that you can match perfectly with the rate of CO2?
You are demanding too much precision of stochastic data series with large measurement errors. Admittedly, one could make the same critique of my detraction from your superficial match of the emissions data with the atmospheric concentration. But, there are two reasons that my criticism is more apposite:
1) You only have a superficial match with the general trend, after you have scaled the series to produce a similar trend. You do not even attempt to match the variation about the trend, because there IS no match in the variation about the trend.
2) The lull in the rate of change of CO2 of the last decade does not match the emissions data, but it does match the temperature data.
Bart, you still don’t see that what you do is mixing two completely independent processes where the variability has a different T to CO2 factor than the slopes, if the slope is influenced by temperature at all.
In the past 18 years, every temperature series is (slightly) positive, I used RSS as that has the smallest slope, while the CO2 rate of change is (slightly) negative. Here the same for the UAH series since 2001 (since 1996 it is even worse). as the CO2 rate of change slope approaches zero, the amplitude of the temperature caused variability approaches zero too…
No matter how you shift and torture the offset and factor, that gives an opposite variability and a range of amplitudes compared to what reality shows. Thus only splitting the two processes with their own factor can help you out.
Yes, it is artificially matched. The starting point is selected, and the “airborne fraction” is selected.
The starting point is the start of Mauna Loa, but that doesn’t make any difference, the slope is about the same if you compare the ice cores CO2 with the emissions 1900-1959:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/acc_co2_1900_1959.jpg
The match with the “airborne fraction” indeed is just coincidence, it is the result of the linear relationship between increased CO2 pressure in the atmosphere and sink rate at one side and the fact that the emissions (and sinks and increase in the atmosphere) increase more than linear on the other side. The net result is a quite fixed ratio between emissions and increase in the atmosphere, which is far from obvious for temperature: warming 1910-1945 and 1976-2000 and flat for 1945-1975 and 2000-current while CO2 simply follows human emissions over the full period.
The calculated increase, based on the temperature influence on the equilibrium pCO2 of seawater and the the pressure difference air-seawater does match the overall increase even better. Even so good that you thought that it was the “best fit” trend, which it wasn’t, but it fits best…
Nonsense. Converting from one set of units to the other is a simple linear transformation. You can effect the transformation by simply using whichever scaled axis you prefer.
Bart, if your plot suggests a “problem” which disappears when you plot both variables in the same units on the same scale, then its your way of plotting which misleads people – and yourself (and the book “How to Lie with Statistics” nicely explains that). The straight plot shows that the airborne fraction for yearly averages is between 10% and 90% of human emissions. Some longer periods like 1976-1996 were slightly negative, even excluding the 1992 Pinatubo extra uptake, while temperature and emissions were rising. Thus the current period of higher uptake is nothing new and nothing special…
You only have a superficial match with the general trend, after you have scaled the series to produce a similar trend. You do not even attempt to match the variation about the trend, because there IS no match in the variation about the trend.
Bart, again, I didn’t scale anything, I used the same units for emissions and increase in the atmosphere and plotted both on the same scale. That is all. That shows what is obvious: human emissions are about twice the increase in the atmosphere over the full 55 years period of accurate measurements. All variability is a variability in natural sink rate, not in source rate. That is caused by the influence of temperature and humidity on tropical forests, mainly due to ENSO (El Niño / La Niña) en huge volcanic explosions (Pinatubo). But forests are net sinks for CO2 over all periods longer than 2-3 years…
Thus the variability around the trend has not the slightest interest, as it is not the cause of the trend and it is only +/- 2 ppmv, just natural noise, while the trend is over 70 ppmv in the past 55 years.
The lull in the rate of change of CO2 of the last decade does not match the emissions data, but it does match the temperature data.
The lull in the rate of change of CO2 over the period 1976-1996 doesn’t match the emissions data and is opposite to the temperature trend>/a>…
“Bart, you still don’t see that what you do is mixing two completely independent processes where the variability has a different T to CO2 factor than the slopes, if the slope is influenced by temperature at all.”
I do not see it because it is not true. What you are suggesting is something you have made up in your mind, but the evidence does not support it. There is a smooth correlation of temperature to rate of change of CO2, across the entire spread of frequencies with no phase distortion, and no basis whatsoever for your claiim.
“No matter how you shift and torture the offset and factor…”
This line of argument has no merit. I have explained why above.
“…the slope is about the same if you compare the ice cores CO2 with the emissions 1900-1959…”
This is just a superficial match of slope of two close-to-linearly increasing processes, something you have yourself stated is not difficult. You cannot match the variabilty without the temperature data. And, the temperature data already has the slope in it needed to match the acceleration in CO2 when it was accelerating. Now that it is no longer accelerating, the temperature data matches that, too, while emissions do not. The odds of this agreement between temperature and dCO2/dt, the slope, the variability, and the current plateau, happening spontaneously with no cause-and-effect link are vanishingly small.
“Even so good that you thought that it was the “best fit” trend…”
It is just about the best fit over the entire period. If you worked out the best fit over a different period, it would not be the same. It is the same with temperature versus rate of change of CO2. Those fit excellently at any time in the modern era with the same scaling and offset parameters. They track each other in the slope, the variability, and the current plateau.
“Bart, again, I didn’t scale anything… “
Yes you did. You scaled emissions by 0.53. And, you started both at the same point at the beginning. That is an affine fit.
Ferdinand, you really have nothing at all to recommend your point of view except your assertions. They are merely assertions of how you want things to be. But, they have no rigorous foundation, and are blatantly contradicted by the data before us.
Bart, if you don’t want to accept that variability and slope are from different processes, then any further discussion doesn’t make sense.
The variability is certainly caused by temperature variability. The slope is not caused by the same process that caused the variability in CO2 rate of change. Thus while variability of T and CO2 have a direct correlation, that says next to nothing about the cause of the trend. There is no phase distortion within the 2-3 years variability as the processes which cause the slope and the variability are simply additive and hardly influence each other.
Your one-factor-explains-all is based on the assumption that the same temperature dependent process causes both the trend and the variability around the trend, which is proven false. That is what causes the problems with the non-match of slopes or variability if you look at the 20 year period 1976-1996 or 2001-current.
This is just a superficial match of slope of two close-to-linearly increasing processes, something you have yourself stated is not difficult. You cannot match the variability without the temperature data.
Both increases even in the earlier 1900’s are slightly quadratic. Both also fit all other observations like the 13C/12C ratio decline, the pre-nuclear tests 14C/12C decline, etc.
Again, the variability is of not the slightest interest, it doesn’t influence the trend and is just natural noise caused by the influence of temperature on the sink rate, not the source rate.
Now that it is no longer accelerating, the temperature data matches that, too, while emissions do not.
The temperature and CO2 rate of change slopes in the period 2001-current are opposite to each other for all datasets. Even stronger for the period 1976-1996: strong increasing temperatures, negative slope of the CO2 rate of change. Only over the full range it gives some superficial match of variability and slopes…
Even the superficial 53% “airborne fraction” still is widely within the natural variability.
If you worked out the best fit over a different period, it would not be the same.
The calculated trend works for all periods in time, from 800,000 years ago to today. Your factor and offset must be adjusted for every part of the 55 period, is even sometimes negative and completely lost outside the past 55 years: imagine the slope over the past 10,000 years of the Holocene…
Yes you did. You scaled emissions by 0.53. And, you started both at the same point at the beginning. That is an affine fit.
As said before, the 53% average is what the data show over the whole period, but indeed that is pure coincidence. The calculated trend is what can be expected from the change in equilibrium caused by temperature changes and the resulting pressure difference between atmospheric CO2 and ocean pCO2 at equilibrium. The calculated trend starts at the first year of Mauna Loa measurements and is the theoretical airborne fraction for the seawater temperature and CO2 pressure difference of that year. Nothing to do with arbitrary scaling or offset or the 53% average.
“Bart, if you don’t want to accept that variability and slope are from different processes, then any further discussion doesn’t make sense.”
Why should I accept it when there is absolutely no proof of it, and the data tell a different story?
“There is no phase distortion within the 2-3 years variability as the processes which cause the slope and the variability are simply additive and hardly influence each other.”
No, you are wrong. To remove the influence of the slope in T from CO2, you would have to have a high pass filtering process. Any natural high pass response would leave a marked phase distortion. The distortion is not there, ergo the trend in temperature is causing the trend in the rate of change of CO2.
“Both increases even in the earlier 1900’s are slightly quadratic.”
As is the integral of temperature. This is still low order polynomial fitting, and not particularly difficult. It’s basically a 50/50 coin toss that the curvature happens to be in the same direction.
“The temperature and CO2 rate of change slopes in the period 2001-current are opposite to each other for all datasets.”
As I have stated, this is a faulty metric.
“The calculated trend works for all periods in time, from 800,000 years ago to today.”
No, it does not. Emissions are currently accelerating. Atmospheric concentration is not. And, neither is the the integral of temperature.
“As said before, the 53% average is what the data show over the whole period, but indeed that is pure coincidence.”
Yes, by matching the starting point of integration and scaling by 0.53, you are performing an implicit affine fit. It only matches superficially to low polynomial order. You cannot match the variation. The temperature record fits both the slope and the variation, as well as the current plateau.
Bart:
Why should I accept it when there is absolutely no proof of it, and the data tell a different story?
If you don’t accept any observation that contradicts your theory, then it ends here.
Yes, by matching the starting point of integration and scaling by 0.53, you are performing an implicit affine fit.
Bart, there are two lines on the plot: the dark blue line is the 53% line, the red line is the calculated airborne fraction based on temperature and pressure difference. The latter is direct calculation for each year, no integration, no curve fitting.
You cannot match the variation.
I can match the variability, as good as Pieter Tans has done, as the variability is from a different process, independent of the slope which is not temperature dependent. Both simply are additive and don’t affect each other. No filtering necessary, no phase distortion. See:
http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf from slide 11 on.
The temperature record fits both the slope and the variation, as well as the current plateau.
It doesn’t fit the period 1976-1996, over one third of the slope, with increasing temperatures and decreasing CO2 rate of change, while the calculated trend fits the whole period within natural variability…
“If you don’t accept any observation that contradicts your theory, then it ends here.”
There is no observation that contradicts my theory. Your assertions do not constitute proof.
On the other hand, there are observations which contradict yours. The trend in temperature must result in a trend in dCO2/dt.
“The latter is direct calculation for each year, no integration, no curve fitting.”
Which you have adjusted by offset and scaling to match. A trivial, superficial, low polynomial order curve fit.
“See: http://esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/co2conference/pdfs/tans.pdf from slide 11 on.”
Chart 11 is only measured atmospheric CO2, no comparison to emissions. Chart 22 shows the match between temperature and CO2 growth rate, but with the trend removed, which is cheating. Chart 8 shows the emerging divergence between accelerating emissions and steady rate atmospheric CO2, though it is not up to date. The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 flatlines in the past decade, while emissions keep accelerating.
“It doesn’t fit the period 1976-1996, over one third of the slope”
It fits it perfectly fine. Your metric is faulty. There is no law that says the slope estimate of a least squares fit of noisy data over a finite interval has to match precisely. Use different temperature sets, and you will get a different answer. The agreement is within limits of statistical variability.
We’ve been over and over this, and neither of us is saying anything new. I will let you have the last word if you like.
OK, last words…
On the other hand, there are observations which contradict yours. The trend in temperature must result in a trend in dCO2/dt.
Yes, there is a trend caused by the small increase in temperature. Over the past 55 years that is maximum 5 ppmv for the 0.6°C temperature increase, according to Henry’s law for a steady state equilibrium between oceans and atmosphere and an observed linear ratio of 8 ppmv/°C over the past 800,000 years. The rest of the 110 ppmv increase is not caused by temperature.
Which you have adjusted by offset and scaling to match.
Bart, again: direct calculation of the increase in the atmosphere, nothing adjusted, no offset or scaling and still a match:
Pre-industrial baseline 295 ppmv.
Change in pCO2(eq) of the ocean surface due to temperature: 8 ppmv/°C,
Sink rate = 2.15 * [pCO2(atm) – pCO2(eq)] / 110 ppmv.
All above figures based on observations:
– ice cores for baseline and long term T/CO2 ratio.
– literature for T/CO2 ratio: Henry’s law coefficients for seawater temperature.
– sink rate: current sink rate for current pCO2 difference between atmosphere and ocean surface. That ratio hardly changed over the past 18 years, which points to a rather linear first order (pressure related) process.
Forgot to add:
The contribution of temperature to the trend in dCO2/dt thus is a small offset from zero: less than 0.1 ppmv/year where the dCO2/dt slope increased from ~0.5 ppmv/year to ~2 ppmv/year and human emissions increased from ~1 ppmv/year to ~4.5 ppmv/year…
Just one last note:
“All above figures based on observations:
– ice cores for baseline and long term T/CO2 ratio.
– literature for T/CO2 ratio: Henry’s law coefficients for seawater temperature.
– sink rate: current sink rate for current pCO2 difference between atmosphere and ocean surface. That ratio hardly changed over the past 18 years, which points to a rather linear first order (pressure related) process.”
This is just a fancy way of saying “scaled and offset”. It is your rationalization for scaling and offsetting.
This is just a fancy way of saying “scaled and offset”. It is your rationalization for scaling and offsetting.
Of course, calculations based on observations which give a best fit of the observed increase in the atmosphere is just coincidence, but a theory based on fitting two straight lines with an arbitrary offset and factor which violates all known observations must be right…
But, you don’t have the best fit. I do. You don’t fit the variability. You don’t fit the current plateau.
Rud. It sounds like the plan to declare victory is now under way.
Thanks for reminding me why I stopped reading Nat Geo. (As I gaze sadly at about 50 years’ worth in my bookcase.)
I too have National Geographic copies going back to 1964 (thanks to my Dad). I have kept up my own subscription simply because my autistic son really adores them. However, this last issue is last straw – I will not be renewing.
I had copies of Nat Geo going back to 1906, vigilantfish; 1906-1996. I read them all. My grandparents and parents never threw away a copy and an annual subscription was given to me and my siblings when we left the nest. I’m the one that got the back issues in, oh… 1982 or 1983. Bottom line is that I had, shall we say, a good overview of how the magazine had changed over time and by 1996, I’d had enough.
I’m with Gunga Din, I look at the marvelous pictures in waiting room copies, but I skip the
articlespropaganda.Do you have the 1976 mags? There was one issue which has a feature article on Global Cooling and the future. A key graphic showed the temperature from 1880 to 1976. Then from 1976 on, two projections, one going up, and the other continuing down, with a big question mark. The other feature is that it shows warming from 1910 to 1937, then cooling from 1937 to 1976. The important thing is that the depicted cooling, by 1976 brought the temperature all the way down to where it was in 1910. This is radically different from the way the 20th century is portrayed today. The graphic is a 3-page foldout, and is sometimes referred to as “Mathews 1976”. We could really use a high resolution scan of that image. I am sure the WUWT crowd would be interested in how the temperature history was portrayed just before the CAGW thing hit. I think it was in the June, July or Aug. issue.
Dang! TonyL, I just saw your request after replying to vigilantfish.
All gone… sigh. Sold a few of the oldest copies in a yard sale and recycled the rest.
an image search of that found this-
http://www.navlog.org/global_cooling_3.jpg
If you dare challenge the religion of AGW, you will be declared a heretic. The Nat Geo article is the inevitable attempt to ‘burn the heretics at the stake’.
The reason I no longer get the National Geographic magazine is: “it no longer concerns itself with presenting just information its readers might not have known before. It has become a propaganda machine.”
The fact that so many magazines, papers, organizations, and other organs which might reach the public have become propaganda machines shows the power and the corruption behind the syndicate.
There’s also the mad scramble for eyeballs as “traditional media” viewer and readership declines. Since conflict, drama and doomsday scenarios tend to attract attention and advertising dollars … well the rest is no surprise is it.
The climate zombies are also seeking brains (missing their own), but they must be converted to a palatable format first via propaganda and agitprop.
Its a-science if you believe the argument is about science. It is not. this is about the preservation of ideological fanaticism. “Othering” is the preferred method for driving out all dissent.
O2BNAZ2
Thank you for being aware of the concept and practise of ‘othering’. It is a technique practised long term when planning genocide. Several governments have used it in the past 100 years as a way to divert attention from crises and to appeal for national unity if the face of an artificial, non-existent threat from within. It’s your neighbour, it’s the guy with the funny hair, it’s the guy with the beliefs that will kill your children.
Linking in desperation as NG has allowed this author space to do, the lunatic fringe with those of sufficient intelligence and independence of thought to see that there is an expensive boondoggle being sold as salvation, is NOT science. It is not even some sort of valid political path. It is doomed because it relies on conning most of the people all of the time. That has never worked.
There is a fundamental sociological reason for this: Eastern and Southern societies are not guilt-driven. They are shame cultures. Appealing to a sense of original carbon sin, which is what CAGW guilt relies on, doesn’t work in shame cultures. They will respond to me-to-ism but not to guilt so much.
Thus the East in particular will play along to save face and carry on as they see their needs continue to be met. They will ‘cave’ over the small stuff as a tactic as long as they, like Iran, get to keep the nukes.
The same mass media that is othering CAGW skeptics, vaccine skeptics, opponents of Common Core schooling, opponents of same-sex marriage, 9/11 skeptics, gun-ownership advocates, etc., have also been busily othering Muslims/Islamists, the nations of Iran, Syria, Russia, etc., and making remarks about those countries’ leaders that are even less complementary than sort of things they are fond of saying about Anthony. Even supporters of homeopathy are coming in for shaming in the UK these days. In fact, there’s so much othering going on that if you haven’t been othered yet, you are in the minority. One doesn’t have to support the stances of any of these othered people or groups to appreciate that subtlety has been replaced by shrillness as Western mass media generally has taken on an overtly Orwellian aspect that bears a fair comparison with that of Pravda in the Soviet era.
We have had a continuous subscription to NGS since our first child was born in 1961. It ended when I read the article behind the cover headline, “The War On Science.” This once great publication has left us, not the other way around. How sad.
Also cancelled Nat Geo subscription. They keep sending renewal notices. Up until now I just shredded them. I will now start returning this explaining why I will not renew. Will be sending it back postage due. Not that I expect that they will actually comprehend the “rationale” as it seems they understand only one type. Theirs
NatGeo is no another run of the mill Enviro group, that prefers doom and gloom over factual information. I can’t speak about this warming stuff, but can speak about the dogmatic hyperbole on fishery issues, which is the parallel denier issue. Bad science is ruining our fisheries.
Scientific American stopped being both, a long time ago.
Oops, meant National Geographic. But of course my statement is still true regarding both.
Yup, cancelled NG about 4 years back. Won’t even give it a look in the dentist’s office.
I’m surprised that there are so few alternatives in media and journals to this warm-mongering. Yes the internet blogosphere and cable has some but there’s basically zero high-profile, mainstream media and journals. Seems there is a need and a pent up market share clamoring for it (balance and debate and some truth, that is). Many people know when they are being lied to.
Or, am I the one in the echo chamber…
Glanced at a copy at my doctor’s office, and couldn’t believe how badly it has fallen in quality in even the last few years since I last looked.
It actually reflected the changes to the TV channel (i.e., reality shows that are only slightly above “Honey Boo Boo”.
Nice pics, though, can’t take that away from it.
National Geographic is the contra Playboy magazine…..I pick up a Playboy to read the articles, NG to look at the pictures.
Who’s your Doctor? Mine doesn’t have Playboy in his waiting room. 😎
>Only IPCC and its followers have that arrogance.
Their arrogance is absurd. Their back models are just perfect, but in their 2013 report they plainly write that 94 out of 113 models didn’t even model the direction of the “no warming” of the past 15 years. As someone commented on a prior thread, we are living in the Twilight Zone.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf
page 29 of pdf (769)
No matter how much lipstick ya put on it, if accurate, actual data does not support it, your model is a pig.
Utterly sad that Nat Geo could fall so far, and it falls right in line with the “Climate communication needs to be less optimistic, more ‘climate disruption’” post here yesterday.
Even so, the CAGW doom mongers would actually be amusing if it were not for the political motivations thinly hidden behind their imaginary catastrophe scenarios.
The most convincing argument I’ve used (when dealing with someone at least partially literate) is to ask what they know about the Chicxulub impact. That event delivered an estimated energy equivalent of 100 teratons of TNT or 4.2×10^23 J (very roughly a month worth of solar energy in a few seconds, or about 6,700,000,000 Hiroshima weapons, for the more dramatic… based on a Little Boy yield of 15KT or 63TJ.) CO2 release from the event was estimated at between 360 to 1700 GT (more than the total fossil fuel release from 1750 to now, possibly 4 to 5 times as much) from smashed carbonates (possibly more from rampant global wildfires, rampant volcanism and maybe methane hydrates and etc.) Also hundreds of GT of additional water vapor, sulfur compounds and probably a lot of NOx as well.
After all that, did the oceans boil? Not after the crater cooled. Did the Earth die? Well, no. Earth licked her wounds and recovered nicely. Did all life vanish? Hardly. The species that survived those first few years of (real) catastrophe thrived, evolved and eventually some became us, a hardy and modestly intelligent species that has survived a few million years of the coldest climate – EVAH! (last 200 million years, anyway…)
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/impacts97/pdf/6095.pdf
National Geographic magazine used to be a wonder-filled snapshot of the natural world that stimulated imagination and curiosity. That’s my recollection from 50-60 years ago.
Now it has sadly been corrupted into a trite propaganda vehicle. Dropped my subscription in about 2010 when the pro-CAGW bias was just too obvious to ignore.
Once again, if those on the alarmist side are SO CERTAIN THEY ARE RIGHT about human impacts, why will they not eagerly debate the “science” with those who doubt the magnitude of human influence?
Conversely, now that we have experienced 18+ years of “hiatus”, 8+ years of low Atlantic hurricane activity, significant declines in tornado events, massive growth of Antarctic ice, rapid and steady recovery of arctic sea ice, stable and growing polar bear populations, 10-15% increases in vegetative cover worldwide, etc., etc., – – – – why are they not declaring Victory and moving on to really problematic issues (like energy starvation in the third world?)
Because, it is Klimate Séance.
I don’t always look to an authority to settle matters concerning science or the philosophy of science, but when I do I always look for one with a BA in Politics.
/sarc
We have also cancelled – quite a while ago. We have many issues through the 50s at camp that are wonderful evening and rainy day adventures into distant lands.
Anyone happen to know when NG (and other now rags) shifted away from discovery and into propaganda?? Planning to ask on open thread to help create a timeline of this CAGW infestation.
It was already complete when the Nat Geo editor wrote the famous editorial telling the readership to stop criticizing neo-Darwinian molecules-to-man evolution, that the issue was forever settled and they didn’t want it mentioned ever again by skeptics. That was about 15 years ago, and that’s when I bailed. For a few years my mom bought it for our kids, but about 10 years ago I asked her to stop. I didn’t even want it free.
After declaring themselves to be so wise that they were above listening to skeptics, they became royal fools and were easy prey for the Marxists and their CAGW hustle. They are also easy prey for animal personhood and every other profoundly anti-human ideology coming down hell’s highway. But that road sure is nice and wide and paved well, isn’t it? National Geographic will sell you a slick glossy magazine to keep you occupied until you reach the end.
Posted earlier in the thread (2:00pm) but (unfortunately) not by me:
“I totally agree – I don’t recognize them anymore – they went from pillars of scientific thought to drooling sycophants of political correctness in just a few decades… Their ownership changed and that was the beginning of the end, I think…
From Wikipedia: “In 1986, it was sold to the Holtzbrinck group of Germany, which has owned it since. In the fall of 2008, Scientific American was put under the control of Nature Publishing Group, a division of Holtzbrinck.”
NATURE Publishing Group. Not SCIENCE. Ugh.”
I have been a Life Member for quite some time. Love the pic’s and most of the articles but this blind faith in AGW and not wanting to acknowledging even the testing of the hypothesis with real time data is bring me close to sending the LTM Cert back with a curt message. Sad that the NG has been taken over by the German Flat Earth Society. Control the press, one controls the debate.