Yesterday, I received my advance copy of this book, and after spending about an hour with it, I Tweeted this:
Just received advance copy of book “A Disgrace to the Profession” from
@MarkSteynOnline all I can say is: Mann, that’s gonna leave a mark!
And today, after spending a full day with it, that statement still holds true.
I remember when Mann decided to sue NRO and Steyn for defamation, and despite all the laughing at the time there was this prescient thought from Dr. Judith Curry:
“Mark Steyn is formidable opponent. I suspect that this is not going to turn out well for you.”
Well, Part 1, or should I say, Volume 1 of that prediction is now in press. It’s a scorcher, hilarity, and a tale of science and politics gone awry all in one.
Steyn realized the word of a political pundit like himself can only travel so far in certain circles, and in a brilliant move, he has gathered a compendium of what other scientists have to say about Mann’s work on the “hockey stick”. And of course, he’s had it illustrated by Josh. My favorite is Mann as Yoda, wielding a hockey stick rather than a light saber, seen in this collage below:
The book has twelve chapters plus an introduction, prologue, and a postscript. In it. You’ll find quotes from scientists like this one:
and this one:
And there are many, many, more even harsher than that. Such as this one:
The final word of the last chapter goes to Dr. Judith Curry:
And there’s even a final chapter called:
…where you can read what the IPCC has to say about it. I’ll give Steyn credit, he strives for some balance here, but there’s just so few positive reviews that he could barely fill that chapter, much like there were no amicus curiae briefs filed with the DC Circuit Court on Mann’s behalf. I suspect many science professionals know what they are dealing with here, but fear coming forward. After all, who wants to be sued by Dr. Mann, and have discovery drag on for years?
I do like the chapter “Mann Overboard!” taken from one of our WUWT headlines by that name.
I quipped at the time this silliness with lawsuits all got started that “a Mann’s got to know his limitations” (With apologies to Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan). We’ll know soon if any of this has sunk in to Dr. Mann’s understanding of what he is really up against.
So far, Mann’s predictable supporters haven’t weighed in, except for the borderline Harvard man, Dr. Russell Seitz, who didn’t bother to buy the book (Amazon notes “Verifed Purchaser” in such reviews), but has plenty to say about it on Amazon (see below). Like the hockey stick itself, Seitz’s review is done by proxy, not by actually reading it. It’s sad and yet hilarious that this sycophant posted a review for a book that not only he apparently didn’t read, but wasn’t even available yet for shipping!
That right there symbolizes the whole problem of climate zealotry in a nutshell: it’s what they believe is there, and they won’t look beyond their own beliefs to form rational opinions, and so cling to the irrational tribalism that has polarized the climate issue.
I recommend Steyn’s book highly, because it really gets to the heart of the matter about that lack of scientific rigor in climate science that has become a poster child for “noble cause corruption”.
You can pre-order it on Amazon here, shipping starts August 14 15th.
The text from Amazon says:
The “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures is the single most influential icon in the global-warming debate, promoted by the UN’s transnational climate bureaucracy, featured in Al Gore’s Oscar-winning movie, used by governments around the world to sell the Kyoto Accord to their citizens, and shown to impressionable schoolchildren from kindergarten to graduation.
And yet what it purports to “prove” is disputed and denied by many of the world’s most eminent scientists. In this riveting book, Mark Steyn has compiled the thoughts of the world’s scientists, in their own words, on hockey-stick creator Michael E Mann, his stick and their damage to science. From Canada to Finland, Scotland to China, Belgium to New Zealand, from venerable Nobel Laureates to energetic young researchers on all sides of the debate analyze the hockey stock and the wider climate wars it helped launch.
After you buy it and receive it, I recommend posting an Amazon review based on what you’ve read, unlike the irascible Dr. Russell Seitz, who apparently posts fake reviews by proxy.
Buying the book will help Mark pay his large and growing legal bills, too.
That thought crosed my mind too.
This raises an interesting problem, Michael Mann can sue, BUT doing so means that he can be forced to testify under oath. In a civil case, you can be forced to testify. This could bring up some rather embarrassing things he has to answer.
I think that’s what everyone’s waiting for!
“Forced to testify under oath”
Under ‘oath’ of what,arrogance or ignorance?
Bob, it will never come to Mann testifying under oath, what he does is put his antagonists through the pain of the libel process. Dr. Ball has been in litigation with him longer than Mark Steyn. If it ever gets to court Mann will pull the plug before answering questions under oath. He is a truly awful human being.
Geronimo, Steyn has counter-sued, so even if Mann drops his end of the case, Steyn’s case will continue.
I can’t wait to see Michael Mann testifying under oath!
That’s right. In a civil case there is no protection against giving evidence that will lose the case for you (although you can plead the fifth if you will incriminate yourself).
It gets better. In the discovery phase of the case, you can be compelled to provide all your records including email. If you destroy the records (that’s called Spoliation of Evidence), you can get a variety of penalties including jail. If you have reason to believe that something may be required as evidence, you aren’t allowed to destroy it. This could get sticky for Dr. Mann.
Having said the above, this case could drag on forever. In 2003, SCO started a series of (losing) actions that ran on for the better part of ten years. As far as I can tell it was a scorched earth campaign designed to limit the penetration of Linux into the market. SCO’s lawyers produced crap briefs. IBM’s lawyers produced wonderful legal masterpieces. It didn’t matter if SCO lost everything as long as they could drag the proceedings out as long as possible and inflict the maximum amount of damage on the other parties. link IBM had no problem but I think Novell was badly damaged. In particular, one judge allowed SCO to squander money that should have been used to pay damages to Novell.
The ability to string out a lawsuit as long as possible is a serious flaw in the justice system. Mark Steyn knows what he’s up against. Kudos to him; everybody should buy his book.
I think we all know how it will turn out if Mann ever winds up in the witness chair:
https://youtu.be/sZeqHamjyjU?t=2m58s
What is the publication date?
Available NOW from Steyn Online, available Sept. 1st from Amazon and the rest of that crowd.
I bought an advance copy of the book from Steyn directly, partly for the same reason – to help finance his legal defence – but also because I enjoy reading him. I received the book two days ago and have read 116 pages so far. I find it remarkable, even being very familiar with Climategate, how many scientists think the Hockey Stick is junk science and I still have 184 pages to go!!!
I have to believe the revelations in this book strongly strengthen his defence against Mann.
Recommended reading.
I hope Steyn bankrupts the mighty Mann
I really doubt that Mann is paying the legal bills. It would be interesting to follow the money back to the sources to find out who is paying.
According to Steyn in May 2014: “Mann has, at last count, four white-shoe lawyers on the payroll in DC, plus his Canadian lawyers in Vancouver, all funded by some ideological “climate defense fund” or some such.” http://www.steynonline.com/6384/the-climate-of-fear
Every penny they waste defending Mann is that much less to spend on their other PR efforts.
As much as the Biggest Oil Rockefellers are pushing this “climate change” hoax, I wonder if their deep pockets are involved, if not directly, perhaps indirectly through their many projects or companies.
Definitely not the Koch, but maybe the Cook helps out from the tips his head waiter
Lewandowski’dcollected.Tony Rohl says.
I hope Steyn bankrupts the mighty Mann. I would hope so too but his cost are paid for by a defence fund,
BUT Mann is and will be totally exposed to the glaring fact he can’t support his data. That his castle built is built on a foundation of sand/conived data. It will be delightful to see this man fall!!!
Go Mark Go!!!!
[snip over the top -mod]
Isn’t it something when the whole of a scientific discipline has become so cloistered that it takes a sarcastic satirist to stand up and call them out? I can’t think of a better man for the job than Steyn.
It would be useful to reissue the cartoons with relevant quotes as postcards that could be sent to MP’s, Senators, NGO’s etc.
Tonyb
climatereason “It would be useful to reissue the cartoons with relevant quotes as postcards” They should be sold in Paris for the up coming party.
They would become collectors items with the postmark and date.
michael
Fabulous suggestions! Those will became collector’s items.
Great idea; only,
Calendars, definitely calendars with quotes of the day.
and
sticky notes.
Yes! I think it needs to go beyond Steyn, perhaps give him an “exclusive” on Mann cards.
If Anthony could sell several of Josh’s cartoon in North America, Bishop Hill in the UK, and Joanne Nova in Australia, they’d be great things to dash off a note to your congresscritter. They might even look forward to receiving them. (Umm, all mail to US congress may get routed through Anthrax and other detectors or sterilizers, but state reps need to receive some of these too.)
Wind turbine execs, EPA mine inspectors, John Cook….
The ICCC conferences could hand some out. Maybe someone could get the UN CoP organizers to pass out one of Lord Monkton….
@Ric Werme “Mann Cards” Ha! Love it! Make a full deck of them and come up with a game to go with them.
There are just so many things that these could be put on but I do like the idea of post cards to send to your local politician/warmista, so much of what heads to politicians ends up being dealt with by minions but something funny and to the point may well get through.
As for putting them on sale in Paris I’m sure the thought police would do all in their power to stop them. Who wants facts when the fate of the gravy train is at stake.
James Bull
““Mann Cards” Ha! Love it! Make a full deck of them…” With Mikey as all four knaves?
And of course, the obligatory free set sent to the character behind the caricature.
——–or a set of mugs* with said cartoons, greetings cards, *( mugs for climate mugs — get it??! Oh never mind!!)
Less Moonpig* than Mann-bear-pig, cards?
* https://www.moonpig.com/uk/
I disagree with climatereason. The subject should be taken seriously when communicating with those that have some influence in the matter. As much as I support Steyn, I regret that it will not help his very strong arguments to have included derogatory cartoons within its pages.
@george Lawson:
Well, the cartoons help solidify Steyn’s position as being a satirist.
Someone under the umbrella of “comedy” can get away with saying things that otherwise may not be considered proper.
Excellent idea. I’d like to send my legislative reps.
Postcards to legislators go through the Capitol Post Office. You’d probably get a call from the IRS!
Sorta like Trump. Seeing a pattern.
Even worse, the silence of the whole climate community puts the whole community in the position of supporting Man’s fraud by their silence. That silence shows that the entire climate alarm research industry if thoroughly corrupt.
I don’t need a book to see how corrupt this fellow is.
It is quite wrong to allow Mann and the rest of the CAGW brigade to be described as belonging to a profession.
Given they ignore the accepted scientific method and language, they have no place in the company of scientists who do adhere, OR doctors who ignore their Hippocratic Oath, Lawyers, who defraud or engineers who scam with phoney designs or work.
The entire ratbag army and the politicians and journalists who support and promote them should “tarred and feathered” then run out of town…
You don’t need it, but buy it anyway, because your support will help the cause of science, and science needs all the help it can get just now.
Hey there! Steady on. In my profession, as a structural engineer, if we get something phoney or faulty, somebody could get injured, or worse killed! We take the profession very seriously. Apart from ruining lives, lawyers done do too much harm. Doctors only kill in ones. Engineers? Hell we could take out an entire block full of thousands, if we were useless enough! 😉
Alan the Brit:
Now that you’ve framed the human impact; climate scientists are responsible for $trillions wasted, many thousands whose lives are damaged or destroyed, along with climate activists apparently bent on world subjugation.
There are few satirists taking on the state and its knaves for the time being. Oh well, they should come back when a Republican is president. We will also be reading about little old ladies eating cat food.
Little old ladies able to afford cat food? That’ll be progress!
Mann oh Mann, thats gotta hurt!
Apparently it’s only Volume 1 …..
Well, there was Mel Brook’s “History of The World – Part I” – but we never got the other parts. Unless you consider “Space Balls” to be “Jews In Space”.
“The Lord has given me these fifteen– (CRASH) — ohhh, ten…ten commandments….”
Mark Steyn’s blog posting about his book:
http://www.steynonline.com/7091/a-disgrace-to-the-profession
“A guy can’t sit around waiting for litigious fake Nobel Laureates to agree to discovery and deposition. So, with the Mann vs Steyn Trial of the Century currently stalled in the choked septic tank of the DC court system, I figured I might as well put some of the mountain of case research clogging up the office into a brand new book – all about the most famous “science” graph of the 21st century and the man who invented it.”
It’s on my reading list. 🙂
Looks to be a good read. There is a typo in the jpeg of page 291, “disinlined” should be “disinclined”.
Any mug could have spotted that. Here’s mine: On page 289, there’s a double space between “sword” and “to”.
Of course, I’m a pro.
Good spot on the double-space Graphite – did you also spot the two widows, on pages 275 and 291? Another pro.
Are there still any good old-fashioned proofreaders out there?
I have done some proofreading and would be happy to go through a book like this. I do look forward to reading it.
>>did you also spot the two widows, on pages 275 and 291?
Unfortunately, due to ePub books, widows are no longer a factor. The ePub has selectable different sized text and so the publisher has no control over whether a widow is created or not. And this spills over to the print book, because few publishers want to keep a completely separate print-text and format, to the ePub text and format.
Sorry, but the whole ePub format was a disaster from start to finish, that has debased standards throughout publishing.
Ralph
Adrian, just bleed the widows into the gutter 😉
When my proofreading/editing career began, low-level work was produced on Linotype machines and high-class work on Monotype. The guys operating these machines were tradesmen, men who’d served five-year apprenticeships. They set marks of elision, or ellipses, as three full points with fixed spaces between (. . .), rules were either en rules (–) or em rules (—) and fractions were rendered as they should be (¼, ½, ¾).
Then the computers took over and the work of typists went straight into type without any input or oversight by typographical craftsmen. So now we have … for ellipses, — for rules and 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 for fractions.
The typesetting element of the printing trade has disappeared and proofreaders – pedants such as myself who know the difference between “effect” and “affect”, “who” and “whom”, “it’s” and “its” – are considered an expensive luxury.
I guess Steyn’s book is a product of its age. If he’s going to smack Mann about the head (metaphorically, of course, and an action I applaud), it would have been preferable to see him do it with something with a bit of class. The warmists will be looking for any reason to dismiss the work; you don’t want to hand them an easy out.
And brother, I miss those tradesmen.
Goodness me. Two hyphens do make a rule. Seems to be somewhere between an en rule and an em rule.
The entire thing is right justified, so the extra space is there to accommodate the justification.
Darn it folks. I have over 200 such goofs flagged in my own last ebook on climate and energy.. Despite 6 months proofing citations and text, not to mention a publisher’s editor for text. These days, digital stuff just happens. And MS Word spelling and grammer makes it worse, not better.
Like for the EPA in Colorado. Of course, happening stuff importance might also matter.
I am buying the Steyn ebook version as soon as available, since literally ran out of room for physical books several years ago. Plus, you can annotate, link, underline, xref,… ebooks. Saves a heck of a lot of post it notes and hilighters. Short 3M?
Rivers run through every page. A curse of poor leading and kerning. Appreciate the whimsy. Back to the topic, it must suck to be such a demeaned little Mann.
It would be nice to see a review of the status of the lawsuits (isn’t Steyn counter- suing Mann?)
Yes but basically Mann’s lawyers are blocking everything by saying that all parties that are being sued(think its 3 steyn personally, NRO and someone else) must agree and go on trial at the same time. However the other parties are still trying to throw the suit out on the simple fact its a purely fake lawsuit from the very start designed solely to threaten and harm them.
DC court keeps jumping through hoops to aid mann while at the same time trying to pretend to obey the law that strictly forbids the type of suit that mann filed.
Basically DC court is desperate to prevent steyn’s counter suit to make it to court because it has a near 100% of success and could result in some judges/court clerks going down with mann for the way they handled the case. Its a mess and typical of today’s very corrupt court system.
Part of the issue is that the DC Court has clearly been asked to delay any trial moving forward till after the “Paris Climate Show” in December….
Temp, been following this. The issue is complicated legally, but clear politically. Originally, joint defendant NRO filed to dismiss under the poorly drafted DC antislapp. Judge Green screwed up and denied the motion. NRO appealed. Steyn then severed and wanted to go to depositions and trial. Seperately. The appelate court decided with Mann that he could not severe until the appeal was decided, since originally joint defendants. The absurd issue is whether, under the DC law as drafted, Green’s decision is even appealable at this point in the process. Septic tank law is too polite, especially since Mann forum shopped. And has had to refile his complaint amending his claim to be a Nobelist. FUBAR.
I haven’t kept up with the legal details, but hasn’t NRO settled with Mann?
Louis: No
One would hope, but courts are courts and not subject to everyday common sense. In fact, if a case gets to a court you can be certain that common sense has already failed.
I seriously doubt the courts are quite that bad. Half the time, maybe. But I never saw anything so hated in all my life as Truth was hated in a Child “Protection” court room in California. And one in Colorado ruled that I have a divorce from my sister (I’m female, never married). An “acrimonious” divorce from my favorite sibling.
Steyn chose three quotes as promo material to represent the book’s contents. One of the scientists has recently co-authored a paper confirming Mann’s hockey stick graph, and notes that his quote only appears damning because it lacks all context. A second has worked on a major paper that also confirmed Mann’s hockey stick graph, and has stated that the attacks on Mann “have no justification.” The third quote is from a physicist who doesn’t work on climate change, so he can’t accurately be described as one of Mann’s scientific peers.
For all his quote mining, it seems like the best Steyn could do when it came to finding criticisms from Mann’s peers is write up two quotes from scientists who agree with Mann’s findings and one from someone who’s not a climate scientist at all. Looks like Steyn’s efforts here fall as flat as the handle on Mann’s hockey stick.
So, warrenlb, are you Russell S or do you simply feel that cutting and pasting his remark without attribution is the proper thing to do?
Way to go, johnWho. Despite the wayback connections to Daily Kos, etc. I’m thinking that you just outed warrenlb as Russell Seitz. Long- term participants in the conversation at WUWT will instantly recognize the identical style of both writers. “Both” post reams of meaningless logical fallacies and other forms of subterfuge, but nary a scientific truth to bolster their arguments.
Where are all the amicus briefs from these Mann supporters? Happy enough to mud-sling in the comments but shy about putting themselves into court on oath? Steyn is gagging for the trial. Mann and his acolytes, not so much.
Warren,
Would you please kindly provide citations for what you say? I’m not saying you’re wrong but it would be nice to verify please.
Andy
Andy,
Since warrenlb’s entire comment is a “cut and paste” from Russell S’s comment to his own “review” on Amazon, it would seem warren’s citation would be “Russell said”.
Otherwise, I agree, it would be helpful for either, both, or “one in the same” of them to provide your requested citations.
In your dreams, warrenlb. And are these your words? I saw the same words on Bishop Hill from a certain Russel and those words were attributed to the Daily Kos. Or maybe you are the Daily Kos. Anyway, the backfiring I hear is just a normal bodily function.
Thanks for the correction, Robert.
In that case, Andy, warrenlb’s citation would be that “Russell said that the Daily Kos said”, or something like that.
/more grin
Can we sue warrenlb for plagiarism?
Is it plagiarism if you are copying yourself?
I’m trying to find your references to quotes. Steyn on his blog only uses quotes from Judith Curry and Jonathan Jones. There are no quotes on the Amazon site for the book. So, where are you finding these quotes and to whom are you referring, as the quote from Curry is not taken out of context, as I have read that blog post.
Read the Customer Review and Comments content on Amazon, regarding Steyn’s book.
You can buy the paperback via Steyn now, or wait for the Amazon paper and ebook versions apparently next month. Nothing prevents nonverified Amazon purchasers drom flaming at will. Verify purchase, then review. Overwhelm the warmunists.
Warren, Warren, Warren. No one can “confirm” the hockey stick. It is a cut and paste of different kinds of data, a collage. No one, alarmist or sceptic, before Mann or after actually disputed that the globe had warmed since the 19th century. Mann was dead set on “proving” the warming of the late 20th C was greater than anything. After all he had “discovered” it – not. The tree ring data failed to confirm “warming” in the late 20th C, so Mann pasted in adjusted temperature data that fit his assumptions. That, Warren, is not science, it isn’t even journalism. It “might” be politics, but even many politicians seem to at least know what the word “integrity” means.
warrenlb it is normal courtesy to identify quotes from others (in this case Daily Kos) and attribute original sources (in this case Greg Laden’s Blog).
At least Russel did that when he posted basically the same comment as yours at Bishop Hill (he just got the year of the Daily Kos piece wrong)..
Sorry that’s “Russell”
Apologies, didn’t refresh when I came back to my computer – I’m an hour and half behind the times.
Some would say they are glad I’m finally catching up.
Warrenpoundsit russel:
All of manniacal’s ‘scientific peers’ are with him under the foulest rocks in the cesspool called agw.
Post the names, quotes and where the ‘quotee’ makes their comment about their quote, ya goof!
Besides, you’ve made this false claim before. Long before any copies were released.
False one, you’ve already posted a false review at Amazon, for a book you’ve never read and that you are unlikely ever to read.
Why lie to the whole world, warren? Is your ego so elevated it can’t carry the weight of truth? I’ve never seen such deception. You realize false witness is unacceptable in any profession, do you not?
“You realize false witness is unacceptable in any profession, do you not?”
Ummmm.. he is a climate alarmista… anything goes, fabrication, falsification, lies, fraud, deceit…..
All part and parcel of the job description..
‘One of the scientists has recently co-authored a paper confirming Mann’s hockey stick graph, and notes that his quote only appears damning because it lacks all context. A second has worked on a major paper that also confirmed Mann’s hockey stick graph, and has stated that the attacks on Mann “have no justification.”’
Yeah, a midnight visit from the Gestapo tends to result in tergiversation. But, just as the Rorschach test depends on initial reactions to unearth the underlying truth, so their initial reactions reveal their true inclinations.
I’ve been a fan of Steyn for a very long time and I also predicted that Mr. Mann had vastly underestimated the difficulty of engaging in a PR battle with one of the preeminent satirists of the era. I recall Mr. Steyn’s long fight against the hate speech Nazis in Canada, who had an unbeaten string of unchallenged intimidations against offenses to political correctness, for which crimes even absolute undeniable truth was never allowed as mitigation. Like this conflict it dragged on for years but in the end it was the thought police who had their fiefdom closed by public outrage generated by Mr. Steyn’s devastating humor. If Mann were not such a completely objectionable person one might almost feel a little sympathy for him as someone in so far over his head in this contest.
Dang, Anthony, you made me do it – I “reviewed” Russell S’s “review”.
But, too be fair, I did read his review before I posted my remarks.
/grin
I “helpful” ed your comment. RS comment has lots of unhelpfuls.
Thanks. I need all the help I can get.
Seriously, RS’s “review” and then first comment about his review will probably promote more purchases of the book than not.
So, in a “backasswards” sort of way, his review IS helpful.
/grin
Nice!
…and Penn State University hired him.
with any luck, the state pen will be his next address
Careful – you could get sued for a comment like that! 🙂
Not if he uses the dyslexia defense. Why, anybody can now claim to be anything and at least the Democrat Party won’t object.
or worse … expelled.
>>…and Penn State University hired him.
Followed swiftly by State Penn…… 😉
I have my three signed copies (got to support Steyn some way, he is taking one for all of us) and agree with all of Anthony’s points. It is also a rollicking good read for those who enjoy a little dry snark with their science.
ordered placed.
I didn’t know Josh was from “England’s grim north”. Has somebody told Josh?
Hmm… does that mean that England has a cheerful south?
Just wonderin’.
England’s north (where I come from) has arguably some of the most beautiful countryside in the world – apart from the bits ruined by wind turbines.
It’s telling, isn’t it, that matey boy tries to bad-mouth Josh as being from England’s ‘grim north’ – as if that somehow negates his consumate skills as a cartoonist?!
And by the way, the north of England is not grim!
(Mostly, anyway, and when it’s not raining)
Russel Seitz maybe needs some help with where places are in the little old UK.
My Josh calendar has a return address of Kingston upon Thames which is only 10 miles from where I live which is about 16/17 miles from the center of London and Kingston is closer to London than I am. So not only is he climatically challenged he seems to be geographically challenged as well. As for “grim” I think that has more to do with your state of mind than where you are.
James Bull
Well I’m from England’s grim North, with its dark satanic mills and dark satanic discotheques (possibly too obscure of a quote). I may even be a true climate refugee, before it was fashionable even. Will someone give me some money please.
I’m guessing poster Billy Liar will get that quote !!!
Josh is not from “England’s grim north”. He regularly attends events in the London area to do his cartoons so he can’t live too far from there. Furthermore, England’s north isn’t grim, as PB points out. That statement is just as wrong as the rest of Russell’s bogus ‘review’.
Strictly speaking Josh can be from “England’s grim north” even though he now lives in the effete south. I live in East Asia but I’m still from England’s not quite north.
Mark Steyn is not just up against Mike Mann and his Climate Change/Global Warming/CO2 kills lie, he is up against the whole of the Media/Tax and Spend Two Party Evil Money Cult in Washington D.C..
All of it lie based, thus they can not allow any of the foundation of their lies to fail or the whole of all the walls will come tumbling down.
My current read is Mark R. Levin’s Plunder and Deceit: Big Government’s Exploitation of Young People and the Future.
Chapter 7 he devotes to the EPAs green agenda. An agenda Levin calls, “..an endless staircase of planned governmental actions intended to phase-outcarbon as an energy source, institute by coetcion majorparts of the degrowth agendathrough deindustrialization, drive up the cost of energy production and use, and ultimately drive down the quality of life and living standards of Americans – who are supposedly fouling the earth with their capitalist extravagances.” (pp 125-6).
I Highly recommend the book to understand how both sides (R’s and D’s) are plundering our children
From an article on Drudge, it seems that during Obama’s first three years in office, the IRS approved a grand total of one conservative group for tax free status.
That’s what the communists in Berlin belived, yet the wall came down. There’s always hope so long as there are good folk like Steyn to stand up and not be intimidated.
Not available for pre-order on amazon.co.uk strangely enough!
But Amazon.com will deliver to the UK – though at a slightly inflated price of c£17 delivered
Depends where your bank details are registered. If you have a UK Amazon registration, it will usually not allow the purchase of US books. But if you are an American living in the UK, it will.
It is all to do with VAT taxes. The big majors like Amazon, Star Bucks, Google, Apple etc: etc: were passing their VAT payments through low VAT nations, like Luxembourg. So the new rule is that the VAT must be paid where the item is purchased.
Ralph
The people promoting climate alarm over our CO2, whether in the political or the technical sectors, are a most unimpressive lot as far as character goes. They have been very impressive at orchestrating the panic, but that is nothing to be proud of.
Got my copy on order.
Will be fun, Fun, FUN, to cram some of book’s quotes in faces of Global Warming Scammers!
I received my (pre-ordered) copy Saturday afternoon and finished it around midnight the same day. It was just that hard to put down.
The striking thing is how little use even those who agree with him have for Mann. And the number seems to be shrinking daily.
What will it take for the hockey stick guy to admit that he’s well and truly pucked?
Seriously, an entire book devoted to attacking a person, does civility in science exist anymore?
Would the people on this blog sing the same tune if such a book was about a skeptic? This blog was better back in 2008 when there was a lot of general science discussion on the proper measurement of temperatures and the how the climate really worked.
Adam, Steyn isn’t a scientist. He’s a pundit, a writer, a commentator who expressed his opinion of Michael Mann in a blog, and was sued for libel as a consequence. I begrudge no man their freedom of speech, and this book is Steyn exercising that freedom. Anthony is also exercising that same freedom by letting people know that the book is available. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.
Civility in science .. Dr. Mann sued Mark Steyn, and he is getting a reaction. Adam, would you rather recommend a duel?
things were far simpler a couple of centuries ago . my solution would be to put them in one of those cages that seem popular for televised human duels today. my money would still be on steyn.
Assuming Mark Steyn is tall enough, I’d recommend the blacksmith’s answer to a challenge by a short duelist. For weapons he chose sledgehammers in six feet of water …
The book is part of Steyn’s response to a lawsuit. That lawsuit is a much more vicious attack than merely publishing words. The lawsuit entails real risk to the defendant and is expensive to fight.
Since when is exposing the truth about someone “attacking”? I think the word “self defense” is a far better term to describe when someone takes you to court, using millions of dollars donated by silent others, to “attack” you for having the audacity to call their fraudulent work fraudulent! Do you consider Mann and his flying monkeys to be “civil” to anyone who dares to disagree with them?
This blog STILL has a “lot of general science discussion on the proper measurement of temperatures and how the climate really works” every day. And yes, I very much suspect that if a “skeptic” was as “civil” and “honest” and “accurate” as Mr. Mann has been, the people on this blog would sing the EXACT same tune if such a book was written about them. Because it’s not about sides, it’s about FACTS.
It’s true that general science discussion goes on, but I have noticed how the blog has been slowly invaded by an ever-increasing number of political articles. These aren’t, say, the articles about data adjustments or the claims from scientific journals, but articles more or less simply devoted to snide commentary against the believing side with readers rushing to join in.
I’m not saying the other side is civil either, but this can be seen as a clear example where the so-called “Golden Rule” falls flat on its face and encourages others to tear down as a response to aggressive critique rather than build up. It in essence becomes a negative feedback loop where both sides feed ammunition to the other and ultimately leads to a situation where everyone loses.
“It’s true that general science discussion goes on, but I have noticed how the blog has been slowly invaded by an ever-increasing number of political articles. These aren’t, say, the articles about data adjustments or the claims from scientific journals, but articles more or less simply devoted to snide commentary against the believing side with readers rushing to join in.”
Wow. You started reading this blog in 2008 and yet you seem to have NO idea that this blog is NOT a science blog, but in Anthony’s own words, it’s about:
“News and commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news by Anthony Watts” (it used to actually say approximately that under the actual title of the blog on every single page…but its still on the “About” page)
Commentary means “to offer an opinion”, and while there are some political articles, those political articles are almost 100% directed at the politics of climate change/global warming. And as for your inclusion of the term “Golden Rule”, perhaps you need to familiarize yourself with the concept that it goes both ways. Surely the way you approached and judged others here is the way you wanted to be treated in return…right?
Global warming was never about science, as has been proven over and over again for years.
The battlefield these days is the political realm.
Adam:
Can you be seriously decrying the lack of science on WUWT after Bob’s blockbuster post today?:
“No Consensus: Earth’s Top of Atmosphere Energy Imbalance in CMIP5-Archived (IPCC AR5) Climate Models”
That is a 106 howitzer blasting CAGW science to pieces.
Adam, I have loved this blog’s very funny comments against believers ever since i first found this site in the aftermath of Climategate. btw–the site’s spell checker made me capitalize Climategate. It is officially a word.
Adam, you are not in Kansas anymore
Which of the last 10-15 articles have been just political pray tell.
This one is not. Face it Michael Mann has done for climate science what “[Piltdown]
Peking Man” did for Anthropology. Perhaps worst.No, Adam from Kansas; no one here is going to sing Kumbia with you, in a Greenie, warmist lovefest.
But do have nice day
michael
see civility
“Peking Man”
=========
Piltdown Mann
Erm, do you mean ‘Peking Man’ or the hoax ‘Piltdown Man’? For my money, Mann’s work is comparable to the Piltdown Man fakery, but with far less integrity!
ferdberple , Mod thank you
I remembered it wrong.
michael
Adam from Kansas,
Yes, everything was better in the old days!
There was even a time when the climate was perfect.
If only whining could return us to those halcyon days….
When Mr. Mann destroys peoples careers and urges government wasting of taxpayers dollars, etc, etc…It is a well deserved counter attack and a peek at the truth.
Adam, I find your comment to be completely disingenuous. Your words are typical of a particular type of troll behavior, feigning discontent whenever a CAGW crusader is pilloried and then bemoaning a descent of WUWT commentary, in general. There are many examples of virtually identical posts from known trolls. I suggest that you people update your playbook.
Alan: Down, boy! I have been reading Adam’s comments for a long time; he’s no troll. “Friendly fire” can do a lot of damage to one’s own allies.
Alan, I agree with you. I have noticed exactly the same, frequently from newbies claiming to be “disappointed” in political stories or social impacts and harping on about how WUWT should “stick to science”. The bottom line is, this blog has a huge audience and there are CAGW crusaders who don’t want unfavourable events to reach that wider audience. Pachauri’s exploits springs to mind. The EPA breaking the law is another example. There are more.
I love the science here, but I also love the social and political insights this site provides. It’s the political goings-on that have ramifications for everybody on the planet and I for one want to know what the dastards are up to. I also want to know when they trip up and the responses that generates.
So please (A.W. and all contributors), don’t let “disappointed readers” manipulate this blog away from reporting news stories that matter.
Sorry, that should be “the reporting of unfavourable events”…
I have a tendency to agree with you…it’s a bit over the top.
I love the way concern trolls try to change the subject.
Mann attacked first, and has been attacking anyone who disagrees with him for years.
MarkW,
What I find amusing is when someone who wants to appear so deeply concerned about “the science” never wants to discuss the facts or the evidence, but instead wants to moralize and condemn based on ethics that originated in “evil, anti-science” religious ideologies. (and often in a most obvious hypocritical manner as well).
Irony Fortified?
Seriously, an entire lawsuit (lawsuits) to attack a person (persons), does civility in science exist anymore?
Any step, including this book, to remove the politics and egos from climate science is a step in the right direction.
PS Who is paying for all Mann’s legal assaults on those who question him?
Adam from Kansas forgets that to the CAGW crowd, it’s 100% political. They avoid the science like the plague. So much for his devious attempt to be straight with the science.
Tell you what adam…
put together a collection of quotes regarding anthony, publish it and probably, someone here will give it an honest review.
” devoted to attacking a person”… last time I checked was the warmist attacking and forcing people to be sacked because they didnt agree with their religion. Steyn might be attacking a person, a person that has contrived a lie and still refuses to recognize that his results were made to fit a theory, a theory that has global repercussions, a theory that will destroy democracy, a theory that will cost all of us our livelihood and in the end it will be the destroyer of civilization bar a few supreme ones of the political class.
Devoted to attack the maniacal?
Or does Mark Steyn devotedly attack the falsehoods Manniacal is struggling so hard to keep in play by defaming and if possible ruining the careers of more honest scientists?
Adam, back in 2008 many of us believed CAGW was about science. That pointing out what was wrong with the science would correct it. Climategate proved us wrong. CAGW wasn’t about science, it was about politics. So the blog necessarily has to include politics.
+10 – So very much this. It is regrettable that what *should* be about science has turned into a political fight, but there it lies due to no fault but those proponents of the CAGW side; so of necessity it must at least in part be carried out in that arena because the ramifications are simply too consequential.
Shorter Adam: “How dare Steyn fight back after being attacked by Mann?”
Such an obvious troll.
@Adam:
“does civility in science exist anymore?”
“the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ falls flat on its face”
These are worthy concerns. However I must ask, are you posting similar comments on pro-global warming sites which are also characterized by a high level of invective? If so, providing links to such comments from you could increase the credibility of your comments here on this aspect of the issue.
The title says it all.
You’ve convinced me!
I note with interest that this book is “Volume 1”.
+
The trouble I have with this book’;s title is that in reality Mann’s’ poor professional and personal pratice is not “A Disgrace to the Profession” but normal even rewarded and celebrated with the profession of climate ‘science ‘
True he takes it to an extreme level , which is partly why so many on his own side cannot stand him, but much of what he does is typical of his profession.
When the profession is selling snake oil , then lying is the norm not the exception.
I believe the title is actually an excerpt from one of the quotes.
Just placed an order for ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ from the Steyn book store online at ‘Steyn Online’.
From the various reviews and from Steyn’s own descriptions of the book, I think it shows that Mann is an intellectual cross breed of: a) a mentally challenged Faust, b) a clueless Humpty Dumpty and c) the wacky con$piracist Naomi Oreskes.
John
If an injury has to be done to a Mann it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Sooner or later a second book is going to come out and it’s going to include you Mr Watts and Judith Curry and all the other Luke Warmers as well as the alarmists who doggedly hold to the notion that there is a “Greenhouse Effect”. Michael Mann has got what’s coming to him, but I advise you not to be so smug about it as the total extent of scientific incompetence is yet to be revealed.
Did you peer into a crystal ball or do you just randomly post predictions without any sort of evidence to back them up because perhaps you’re on some Scientific Competence Authority Committee?
Auditioning for a job with the IPCC.
That would be the “SCAC” my friend Aphan. Membership is limited, but for you, I can get you in for a mere 500 pesos. You would then have” Scientific Authority” my friend. A certificate for your “Wall” and a signed “welcome” by the esteemed Dr. Michael Mann to go with it.
WWF, study up. I did for now near 5.5 years. Your blathering just feeds ammunition to the other side. Get over it. CO2 is a GHG. Tyndall showed that to the RS in 1859. Now, Arrhenius got the details wrong. Fixed. The issues are feedbacks and sensitivity. Models fail at that, recently previously posted as to inherently why. Stop making really ignorant comments. Please.
If you are going to quote Tyndale at least get him right he identified. H2O as the only significant greenhouse gas. CO2 was an also ran.
Max
“CO2 is a GHG. Tyndall showed that to the RS in 1859.”
“If you are going to quote Tyndale at least get him right he identified. H2O as the only significant greenhouse gas. CO2 was an also ran.”
If you’re going to correct ristvan you should:
1. At least correctly spell the name of the scientist you are talking about.
2. At least understand what an actual “quote” is, and when someone else has actually used one.
2A.- Saying “CO2 is a GHG” is accurate, and has no bearing at all on the significance of H2O as a greenhouse gas.
3. Use punctuation where it makes sense.
The Hockey Stick:
http://a-sceptical-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Comparison-charts.jpg
The Truth:
http://www.ancientdestructions.com/greenland-once-a-viking-paradise/
It only took 11 years to rewrite 1000 years of climate history. No wonder Michael Mann thought he won the Nobel Prize.
Thanks for the comparison – I sent the link out on email
If Mann had a beautiful smile like Naomi Oreskes, I would like him more.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/thisweek/2006/dec/images/senate01.jpg
Did you have permission for a camera in the the mann’s room?
Great pic. Looks like the height markers in a line-up.
Is it just me, or does it look like he has a giant nail through his head?
Why do these guys all have little devil beards? Or as we call them in the joint ” prison pussies””
@Aphan, yes, That explains everything ( and +100).
What a beautiful mug. [trimmed, excessive]
If I had no honor… And was a much better liar without a good conscience, i would be tempted to join his fellows… The group think, brainless, followers of his, and screw over my fellow citizens, like he and his ilk has for the money. The tax money that us citizens have no choice of in forking out for the brainless, political idiocy that this ass promotes.
AArgh!!!
Fine pic … but what’s that copper spike in his one ear, coming out of the other?
*shudder*
Wouldn’t Mann first have to be professional, before he can be said to be a member of any profession?
“Just received advance copy of book “A Disgrace to the Profession” from @MarkSteynOnline all I can say is: Mann, that’s gonna leave a mark!”
Would have been even better had you capitalized “mark”.
From personal experience, I know that you don’t even have to be a climate scientist to have your job ended because you dare to dispute the global warming gravy train.
I wrote this a few years back. Truth ages well.
MICHAEL MANN –THE HOCKEY STICK
There was a crooked Mann
Who played a crooked trick
And had a crooked plan
To make a crooked stick
By using crooked math
That favored crooked lines
Lysenko’s crooked path
Led thru the crooked pines
And all his crooked friends
Applaud what crooked seems
But all that crooked ends
Derives from crooked means
Eugene WR Gallun
Hey, Steyn, yours to use as you want if you decide
your next volume could use a little poetry in it.
And you may also use this if you think it will advance “the cause”.8-)
Stopping by Yamal One Snowy Evening
What tree this is, I think I know.
It grew in Yamal some time ago.
Yamal 06 I’m placing here
In hopes a hockey stick will grow.
But McIntyre did think it queer
No tree, the stick did disappear!
Desparate measures I did take
To make that stick reappear.
There were some corings from a lake.
And other data I could bake.
I’ll tweek my model more until
Another hockey stick I’ll make!
I changed a line into a hill!
I can’t say how I was thrilled!
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.
Now all we need is a short opera, say, “Yamal and the Night Visitors” (apologies to Giancarlo Menotti)…
Very good. I have added your two fine poems to my collection here: http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/p/climate-culture-poetry-and-song-from.html
Mann’s on the run…
And a little limerick . . . . at Mann’s expense . . . .
Enjoy . . .
John
Not much arguing going on here, lol. Pan the Mann.
Here is something of interest (if the mods would like to consider).. unless its been covered before. A suite of satellites monitoring where our “agw” gasses are coming from, or not, as the facts now remain.
http://fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Sect16/Sect16_10.html
.
Well, it made me smile 🙂
Will there be a Kindle release soon? I no longer buy books I will use a reference in paper form. I Like carrying my reference library on my smart phone.
Per Steyn, Yes. Soon. Next month.
***Mann gets corrected in The Guardian today – LOL:
11 Aug: Guardian: Scott Walker wants to fire academics with whom he disagrees politically
Universities are the latest target of conservative politicians with an agenda to push
by Michael Mann and Randi Weingarten
The work of scientists often produces facts that are uncomfortable and inconvenient to the interests of those in power…
In discussions about climate change, for example, ‘think tanks’ like Wisconsin’s Heartland Institute use their well-financed public relations machines to create the impression that the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change is still debated…
CORRECTION: The original version of this piece stated that the Heartland Institute is in Wisconsin. It is in Chicago. The piece has been amended to reflect this.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/11/scott-walker-wants-fire-academics-disagrees-politically
Sorry, I’m a little late to this party, but …
It’s also somewhat amusing to note that in his more visible public pronouncements, for some reason – perhaps best known only to himself – Mann teams up not with other “climate scientists”, but with the likes of 3rd rater, Lewandowsky [See: here] and – for his latest and greatest whine – with a US.labour union boss; i.e. Randi Weingarten who, according to the Graun, is “president of the American Federation of Teachers, the largest higher education faculty union in the US.”
To the best of my knowledge, neither Weingarten nor Lewandowsky has any expertise pertaining that oh-so-noble discipline known as “climate science”.
Makes one wonder … How low can the little bully, Mann and his stick schtick, go, eh?!
Okay, why would Seitz give TWO stars to this book, which he hasn’t read, and which he disdains. ‘Polemicism’ people!! Shouda stuck to one star, the big mealy-mouthed phony.
By giving it two stars he is likely to get more people to read his review. Think about it: many 1 star reviews are rants. People know this. So they are less likely to pay attention thinking it is just a disgruntled person. I know I do. I only consider 1 star reviews legitimate if there are many 1 star reviews (and the subject is not political). By giving it two stars people will think Seitz actually read the book and thus is giving an honest opinion. It is a mind game.
Seitz’s review was even worse than a rant. It was pure deception. He hadn’t even read the book!
I just ordered mine. I’m thinking of buying another to send to Greg Laden.
Don’t. You’ll just have to explain all the big words and cartoons for him if you do. 🙂
Your comment about verified buyer says my comment will carry more weight if I am a “verified buyer”–through Amazon. But I want to buy mine from Stein to help him more.
Please give these two men a break. Russell Seitz would never do such a thing. Look at all of the love that Russell has showered on Anthony and this site. You know he has the respect of the 97% for his idea of geoengineering the oceans with Lawrence Welk bubble machines. I just hope they play a little champagne music at the same time. As far as Mann goes, you must remember that he got his physics degree at Berkley. Berkeley, being a progressive school, must teach progressive physics. His heart, black as it may be, is in his work. Lighten up guys. Why worry about truth, honesty, and trillions of dollars.
Ric…snicker…the tin Mann has no heart, R. Seitz has no brain, and neither one has the courage to admit their mistakes.
…..and I don’t think that going to see the Wizard will do them any good.
And they’re both lion…
I am buying one for our Alberta Premier and one for our Alberta Environment Minister aka Minister of “Climate Change” aka Minister of Truth. (and one for me.)
Is there a way to purchase this book via a Paypal account? I’m currently unable to use my bank account to purchase anything due to some mess with fraudulent charges (last I checked, I’m ~$200 in the hole because of them), and my only other alternative at the moment is Paypal. As far as I can see though, there’s no way to use that. Mark Steyn’s site doesn’t seem to offer it as a payment option, and Amazon never has.
Best response to R. Seitz on Amazon so far:
“Amazon Customer says:
It is traditional to read a book before reviewing it.
Or is the review based on a modeled simulation?”
Cannot. Stop. Laughing.
+1,000!!! That. Is. BRILLIANT.
Ha ha! “Volume 1” is a nice touch.
I received my book a few days ago. I’m LOVING it!
My signed copy from Steyn reads, “Wow, Mann – put that in your pipe and smoke it!”
Steyn used three quotes by Scientists to promote his book: (for full text from my source, see link at the end)
1) “Do I expect you to publicly denounce the hockey stick as obvious drivel? Well, yes.”
-Jonathan Jones, Professor of Atomic and Laser Physics, University of Oxford
2) “Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred …because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.”
-Eduardo Zorita, Senior Scientist at Germany’s Institute for Coastal Research
3) “Did Mann et al get it wrong? Yes, Mann et al got it wrong.”
-Simon Tett, Professor of Climate Science, University of Edinburgh
“…Simon Tett, a mainstream climate scientist, contributed to the Hockey Stick reconstruction by advancing research on the role of aerosols. Tett and Michael Mann published together on this issue.
Simon Tett said, “I think my criticism was that it was likely missing some variances. My view then and still is that recent warming is very likely outside the range of natural variability.” This is an argument over variability in Mann et al’s reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the last thousand years.”
“Tett’s contribution to climate science has been to address that variability. He has recently co-authored articles with Mike Mann that confirm the Hockey Stick pattern of temperature changes and seek to understand that pattern in terms of natural and human drives of climate. Clearly, he is one of the nearly 100 percent of scientists who view global warming as real and caused by human greenhouse gas pollution.”
So, Steyn got it wrong.
On Zorita: He said the quote is essentially accurate, and that he has put it on his personal web page several years ago. He was concerned about the perception of objectivity in the IPCC process, so perhaps these researchers should not be part of the process given the controversy at the time caused by the famous Climategate hacked emails.
However, he was careful to note that his statement was “not related to the quality of their scientific work. Actually, my statement was a suggestion to isolate the IPCC process from the credibility crisis linked to Climategate.”
So this is about perception, not about the quality of the science or the validity of the Hockey Stick.
He went on to say, “I feel that those political attacks, especially those against Michael Mann in the US, have no justification.”
Jonathan Jones, at Oxford, the third quoted scientist, is a physicist in an area of physics that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. He published a few things many years ago then seems to have trailed off in academic activity, but nothing on climate science.
The original quote by Jones was a lengthy screed critical of the climate science and the scientists in which he explicitly implores Richard Betts to denounce the hockey stick. (Betts is a climate scientist at the UK’s Met Office, and a lead author for the IPCC 4th assessment report and other IPCC documents.)
Jones indicates that the whole global warming thing is pathological science, will eventually go away, and he hopes he can soon get back to his own research in an utterly unrelated field. Which, I think, he may have done. Maybe Jonathan Jones, as a non-climate scientist who is also a climate science denier, is an appropriate person to quote in Steyn’s book. One in three … not a very good result.
“I’m thinking this is not going to be a very big book. Certainly not a very good one. Maybe Steyn is counting on a lot of pre-orders.”
So two of the three quotes were taken out of context by Steyn, from Climate Scientists who supported and even worked on the hockey stick results. And the third is by a scientist who has done no work in Climate Science.
In other words, Steyn’s new book is a trashy screed, without the Scientific support he’s claimed.
full text here: http://www.desmog.uk/2015/06/24/mark-steyn-s-newest-attack-michael-mann-and-hockey-stick
Thank you for your insightful comment with a plenty of reliable links. Do you publish on desmog frequently?
The article being referenced was authored by “guest”.
“guest” says he/she contacted each of those three noted people.
Hey, when “guest” talks, it appears desmog listens.
I supposed he/she “guessed” we would, too.
johnWho “guest” is Greg Laden. See http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/06/22/mark-steyns-newest-attack-on-michael-mann-and-the-hockey-stick/ for the original source.
warrenlb is still having difficulty reporting primary sources despite all the help he’s been getting.
warrenlb says:
“Clearly, he is one of the nearly 100 percent of scientists who view global warming as real and caused by human greenhouse gas pollution.”
Nonsense. As always, warrenlb makes an assertion as if it is based on verifiable measured data, quantifying a specific amount of global warming due to human CO2 emissions. But as always, he cannot produce any measurements of man-made global warming (MMGW). He is winging it because he lacks testable (falsifiable) data.
MMGW is no more than an opinion. A conjecture. Because there are no verifiable, testable measurements quantifying the supposed fraction of a degree of MMGW, out of total global warming from all sources, including the natural recovery of the planet from the LIA — one of the coldest episodes of the entire Holocene. It would be astonishing if the planet had not warmed up. The current cycle of global warming over the past century is no different than numerous other global warming episodes, which occurred before any significant rise in CO2.
So after wasting untold $billions of taxpayer dollars paying highly educated scientists to find, measure and quantify the extent, if any, of MMGW, there are still NO such measurements! No one has ever produced a single verifiable measurement, after many decades of diligent searching. What does that tell us?
People like warrenlb are nothing more than True Believers. Their view is based on their religious eco-faith, not on verifiable, testable scientific measurements. Because there are no such measurements. If MMGW exists, it is ipso facto so minuscule that it should be completely disregarded for all public policy questions. At this point, MMGW has become nothing more or less than a deliberate hoax on the taxpaying public.
In science, data is everything. Measurements are data. But because he has no measurements quantifying MMGW, warrenlb has to fall back on the only kind of argument he has left: his baseless assertion that MMGW exists; that it is significant; and that is leading to a climate catastrophe. That is mere snake oil. Anyone can make assertions. But they mean nothing without supporting data.
As you well know, there are 10s of thousands of peer reviewed research papers published with all the evidence needed for every scientific academy on Earth to conclude AGW. Your inability, or refusal, to consider that evidence is a deeper problem than I , or any mere mortal can solve. Perhaps a long vacation, to view the vanishing arctic sea ice or glaciers. would help.
warrenlb says:
As you well know, there are 10s of thousands of peer reviewed research papers published with all the evidence needed for every scientific academy on Earth to conclude AGW…&blah, blah, etc.
Just more baseless assertions, which mean nothing.
If you want credibility, post a testable, verifiable measurement, quantifying the specific fraction of man-made global warming, out of total global warming from all causes — including the natural recovery from the LIA.
If you can do that, you will be the first, and on the short list for a Nobel Prize.
Or, you can continue making your baseless assertions and endless appeals to corrupted authorities. So far, that’s all you’ve got.
dbstealey: “the natural recovery from the LIA”
..
What is physics and/or physical process that causes a “natural recovery?”
Jerzy S,
Good question. Negative feedbacks enter into it. And of course it is a natural recovery; it happened, and it may be continuing to happen — and it certainly is not un-natural, is it?
However, I am interested in finding a testable measurement quantifying “MMGW”. So far, no one has been able to provide any such measurements, and I’ve been asking for years.
That tells me that either MMGW is so minuscule that it is unmeasurably small, or that it doesn’t exist. Personally, I think human emissions may cause a very small rise in temperature. But that increase in temperature is so tiny that it can be completely disregarded, since it is too minuscule to measure. Thus, it is not worth worrying about.
dbstealey: Since you do not know if it is or if it is not natural, and you have no physical/physics explanation, you better not call it “natural”
…
You don’t have a clue in other words.
Jerzy Strzelecki Wrong. Just because you cannot identify the boundaries of a natural process does not prevent you from identifying it as natural.
That is truly a lame attempt to score coup.
michael
Warrenlb and Jerzy Strzelecki:
You each dispute the correct and true statement of dbstealey concerning man-made global warming (MMGW) which said
There is no empirical evidence of any kind for anthropogenic (i.e. manmade) global warming (AGW); none, zilch, nada.
Three decades of research conducted worldwide at a cost of $5billion per year has failed to find any such evidence. If you were to find some then you would certainly be awarded at least one Nobel Prize and probably more. In the 1990s Ben Santer claimed to have found such evidence but that was soon revealed to be a result of his having selected data from the middle of a time series and the ‘evidence’ collapsed when all the data set was used.
The issue is the inability of climate data to indicate difference from the Null Hypothesis. I again explain this for the benefit of onlookers who don’t know.
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 in the Holocene, no recent climate behaviours are observed to be unprecedented 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 local 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 local 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 (and can distort temperature measurements). 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.
Richard
But . . . [appeal to authority], [appeal to quantity of government-funded studies], [appeal to peer-review a process that may in the past have been credible], [appeal to the government-funded “scientific academy” that somehow toes government lines and is populated with people skilled at honing in on the best grant-receiving opportunities, sinecures, big houses, nice cars, and free first-class or private jet travel to the best confabs], [ad hominem], [ad hominem], [appeal to authority], [ad hominem], [ad hominem]. I win! You lose! See?
Jerzy S,
The warming 1910-1945 was as high and fast as the warming 1976-2000. CO2 increases in the first period were 10 ppmv, in the second period 50 ppmv. The warming in the second period was not 5 times faster…
In the period 1945-1976 there was a small cooling with increasing (15 ppmv) CO2 levels. In the period since 2000 there is no statistical warming with increasing (20 ppmv) CO2 levels.
What is the contribution of CO2 in the whole temperature series based on this variability in effect? If “something natural” (ocean oscillations?) countered the warming from CO2 since 2000, may that same “something natural” not responsible for (most of) the warming since 1976 or even since 1850?
“Perhaps a long vacation, to view the vanishing arctic sea ice…”
Oops…no ice free arctic this year…lot of ice in the Hudson bay too. All in all, a pretty dangerous vacation.
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/plots/icecover/icecover_current_new.png
Jerzy Strzelecki says:
“You don’t have a clue…”
Jerzy, you have admitted before that you don’t have an eduction in the hard sciences. IIRC, your specialty is sociology and psychology. You also wrote that you read this site to learn. Instead, you’re arguing without providing any supporting evidence.
May I suggest that you take the opportunity to study the comment by Richard Courtney above? If you can understand it, you will see that the claims of warrenlb and others like him are not science, they are simply logical fallacies like his constant Appeal to Authority fallacies, and similar pseudo-science.
Science is rigorous. In order to falsify the Null Hypothesis (thus showing conclusively that MMGW exists), you must provide verifiable, testable measurements, quantifying the specific amount of global warming directly attributable to human CO2 emissions. You must be able to quantify the change due to human emitted CO2.
But so far, no one has been able to quantify man-made global warming. It has never been measured. Thus, the Null Hypothesis has never been falsified. The alternative hypothesis of MMGW remains an unproven conjecture; an opinion.
You can accept the scientific method, or not. But if you reject it then I suggest you read about the famous 1950’s psychology experiment conducted by Dr. Leon Festinger, who studied a group called the “Seekers”. Despite overwhelming contrary evidence, their belief in what they had been taught by their leader, ‘Mrs. Keech’, became much stronger even as the evidence falsifying their beliefs became more obvious. Once they accepted their original belief system, all the facts in the world were not sufficient to change their minds. We see this same effect throughout the climate alarmist world. Facts do not matter, only their belief matters.
You reject the climate Null Hypothesis, just like the Seekers rejected the fact that the flying saucer did not appear as predicted. (A more recent example is the Rev. Harold Camping, who predicted the end of the world — several times. But his followers still believed him.)
So look in the mirror, Jerzy. A strong belief means nothing in science. Facts, evidence, testability, data, and measurements are what matter. But the MMGW crowd lacks those things. Like warrenlb, they rely on assertions and logical fallacies instead of verifiable facts, data, and measurements.
dbstealey….I see from your response that you indeed have no clue. If you did, you would have explained what caused the “recovery” instead of delegating it.
Jerzy Strzelecki,
Why are you being so obnoxious? Several of us including Richard, Mike, me, Ferdinand, and others have sincerely tried to help you understand the problem here. Your repeated response is to call people “clueless”, but you offer no evidence even though I’ve repeatedly asked you, or anyone else, to post verifiable measurements quantifying man-made global warming (MMGW).
You asked what caused the recovery from the Little Ice Age. If we had widely accepted answers explaining everything happening with the planet, that issue would be settled. But the fact is that no one knows for sure what caused either the LIA, or the subsequent recovery. There are various hypotheses, but there are still more questions than answers in the climate debate.
Eventually we will get most, if not all the answers. The only way to do that is by using the scientific method, and falsifying every possible conjecture and hypothesis. Then only the scientific truth as it currently exists will remain standing, after all the debunked conjectures have been discarded.
You don’t have the answers and neither does warrenlb, yet you don’t demand that he must give you answers to your questions. Labeling others as “clueless” indicates that your mind is made up. MMGW is an emotional issue with you.
Science works like this: when a scientist makes a conjecture, he designs an experiment to test it. If the experiment supports his opinion (his conjecture), then other scientists try to replicate his experiment, and also design their own experiments for further refinement. If enough experimental evidence accumulates to support the original conjecture, then over time it becomes an accepted hypothesis.
However, no matter how many experiments may support a conjecture or hypothesis, it only takes one experiment to falsify it. That has happened with the CO2=CAGW conjecture, as several commenters here have tried to explain to you.
The conjecture that a rise in CO2 will lead to rapid global warming has been decisively falsified. Despite the recent large increase in CO2, global temperatures have not risen in almost twenty years. So that conjecture has been falsified. Human CO2 emissions cannot be the cause of rapid global warming because emissions have risen substantially, but global temperatures remain in stasis. In fact, all the available evidence indicates that the rise in CO2 has been completely harmless, and in fact, very beneficial to the biosphere; the planet is measurably greening as a direct result of more CO2.
If you accept falsifiability and the scientific method (and for that matter, Occam’s Razor and the climate Null Hypothesis), you have no choice but to agree that the claims of man-made global warming are either flat wrong, or that any MMGW is so insignificant that it should be completely disregarded as a waste of resources. In either case, the claims made by the climate alarmist crowd have been thoroughly debunked by the only Authority that matters: Planet Earth.
As the climategate e-mails made clear, peer review has been corrupted to the point of meaninglessness.
Of course the useful idiots will continue to proclaim their lies hoping that this time someone will believe them.
Jerzy, since it’s easy to demonstrate that man didn’t cause it, then it has to be natural.
Unless you want to posit that it was a supernatural cause?
Jerzy, let me see if I have your argument straight.
Are you arguing that unless we can prove that man did not cause the recovery from the little ice age, we must assume that man is causing the current warming?
db stealey said: “I’m still waiting for a verifiable MMGW measurement that is accepted by all your ‘authorities’.”
This has been published before, including on this site: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/
Chris August 13, 2015 at 12:34 am:
Seek and ye shall find. Seek hard enough for what you’re looking for and you’ll find it – even if it is a mirage or an anomaly.
As I understand it, Desmog is a paid propaganda site, paid for by D Suzuki, with funds from TIDES, a political lobby fund, who have a contributors J Kerry’s wife, plus wind and solar interest billionaires. The money even is said to flow to band chiefs to oppose pipelines.
So I think Desmog is the propaganda face to a network of green activists with green capitalists paying the bills..
In other words, imo Warren is posting trash talk here, and he is likely being paid to do it.
Yes, I became a zillionaire. Its obviously the only reason one would have to post real facts on this website.
So, warrenlb, when will you begin to post those “real facts”?
I’m still waiting for a verifiable MMGW measurement that is accepted by all your ‘authorities’. I’ve made that same request of you for a few years now, but you’ve never produced a single measurement. The reason is simple: there are no such measurements. Thus, your baseless assertions…
Actually, warrenlb and his tribe of incompetents and assorted nitwits are better off not having any verifiable evidence for any causative effect of CO2 going from 280 ppm to 402 ppm on any global climate parameter. If they did, it would only go to show mathematically how pathetically small the effect was, and they’d be out of business instantly.
They’re way better off with the actual effect being hidden down in the noise and ready, for the first time in the history of the universe, to disobey the Second Law of Thermodynamics and spring out on us at some point in time that is only defined within the tops of their heads.
warrenlb
Okay lets start with your statement;
“Jonathan Jones, at Oxford, the third quoted scientist, is a physicist in an area of physics that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. He published a few things many years ago then seems to have trailed off in academic activity, but nothing on climate science.” By the same token, Michael Mann is not a historian, and is not qualified to speak on historical records. Such as the climate records encompassing most of the hockey stick. He clearly did not follow any of the methods of verification a trained Historian would have used. Nor that of an Paleontologist. He is a hack and would have served the human race better as a meat cutter in a butcher’s shop.
Oh and the last part of your statement “but nothing on climate science” the same cam be said for Michael Mann. What has he done other then muddy the waters? Nothing but a waste of endeavor
michael
“a physicist in an area of physics that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change”
You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?
The scam they are trying to pull is the claim that only those recognized as “experts” on climate science are allowed to talk about climate science.
And of course how do you get yourself to be declared an “expert” on climate science? The only acceptable method is for those who have already declared themselves to be “experts” in climate science to declare that you to are an “expert”.
Here’s another comment from Tett:
A few more choice one’s from The Team that I believe are in the book (H/T Paul Matthews at Bishop Hil)l:
What have you got to say about these Warren?
For years, warmists such as yourself have been promising thermal armageddon (50 million climate refugees, ice-free arctic, New York flooded, etc.) and none of it has happened. That is why the public ain’t listening to the CAGW rubbish anymore and also why governments such as the Conservatives in the UK are starting to dial-back on the massive subsidies given to useless ‘green’ tech.
Hi Anthony
I don’t know any way to reach you other than through this vehicle.Some many months back you ran a special edition posting on your experience obtaining Starkey hearing aids and the tremendous help they were to you. As one that has a disability very similar to yours – you showed your test chart – your piece set me off on a three month project trying to improve my situation. I tried 3 different products, including Starkey but could not find an aid that outperformed what I was already wearing in a hearing-in-noise situation as in a normal restaurant. Essentially all the top brands have the same limitation as to what they can do with just a hearing aid.
I finally came across a product called the Roger Pen, by Phonak, another large aid manufacturer and the brand my current aids were made by. This little device makes eating out in a restaurant with for instance your wife a doable thing again. Your partner wears the Roger Pen, a highly directional microphone, on a lanyard around their neck. When they speak to you, their voice overpowers the background noise and you can clearly hear what is being said through a wifi circuit direct to your aids. You might still struggle with what the waiter says, but your wife you will hear clearly. Phonak have a way of adapting this device to other brands of aids. Any aids dispenser that handles Phonak could fit you with this excellent product.
If it weren’t for running that piece on your disability solution, I probably would not have come across this particular solution. Thanks so much for running that post last fall.
I really feel for you. My brother in law has serious hearing impairment, and when he’s out at a restaurant or other place with lots of background noise, his hearing aids fail him, and he is basically cut off from any meaningful contact and hence very isolated. It’s painful for him AND his loved ones.
I’ll pass this on to him 🙂
Under the About menu there is a Contact form for Anthony:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/contact-2/
/Mr Lynn
Actually, I have starlet hearing aids and they also have a device much like the lanyard pen you use. It’s great for meetings too!
I also have starkey aids. I purchased a remote that also acts as a lanyard-attached directional microphone. It works well in restaurants (and meetings)
Doesnt the USA have the category of “vexacious litigator” to protect again such as Mann?
There is an “Anti-Slap” law in DC that does not work as intended. Litigation is designed to feed lawyers and the system. Justice has little to do with the process IMO.
“Justice has little to do with the process”
That’s why it is properly called a legal system, not a justice system. The good news is, according to Instapundit Glenn Reynolds (who should know, being a professor of law), being a lawyer is no longer seen as great a career as it used to be. Fewer law students, some firms cutting lawyers. Here’s hoping…
California does, but I don’t know about DC or the other States.
http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/CCP/3/2/3A/s391
from BH
https://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/climategate-2
warrenlb sez: “Steyn used three quotes by Scientists to promote his book: (for full text from my
source, see link at the end)”
I think there are somewhat more than three such quotes within the book itself. Do you plan on addressing each one in similar detail?
And, what difference, at this point, does it make? The point is that Mann sued Steyn for libel. To prevail he must show Steyn knew, or should have known, that Mann was a Nobel-caliber scientist beloved by (nearly all.) On the other hand, for STEYN to prevail, he must merely show that, as a reasonably well-informed layman, Mann as a scientist was NOT beloved by all, and that Mann’s famous graph had come under some criticism. Steyn does not have to prove the graph wrong, he simply has to prove that a reasonable layman may have reasonable grounds to exercise a constitutionally protected right to speak his mind. A list of quotes by scientists about Mann and the graph — an appeal to authorities — is not logical or scientific BUT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE AS A MATTER OF LAW.
Steyn is exposing his mind. Perhaps it can be argued that Steyn has filled his mind with trash. Fine. Such an argument doesn’t prove malice, or reckless disregard for the truth, or negligence. Steyn summarized what not only he, but many other layman, believe (however correctly) about Mann and the graph.
The outcome of the lawsuit will not settle the science. But the public IMAGE of the science will be seriously degraded as a result of this trial. And it is Mann’s fault.
The outcome definitely will affect the ability of us all to challenge or otherwise to jeer at the orthodox government and government-promoted university sock-puppet line in this antihuman endeavor to make us all poorer and to seek to prevent the (truly) poor from rising on nothing more than speculation and deep propaganda.
My best wishes for Mark Steyn, “A Disgrace To The Profession” is wish-listed, ready to order.
Thanks, Anthony.
Ordered mine from Steyn’s website. He’ll autograph, too. Congrats to Josh! He’s got the haughty goateed Mann down perfectly, I love to hate his drawings. Judith Curry’s note that Mann may not realize what he’s getting into is bearing fruit indeed.
This is the authentic Brian.
This is the book I wish that I had written.
I had written to the Director of BES of DOE to reject any support for Mann ten years ago. Michael Mann has disgraced science for an hundred years. Mann is nothing but a stain that will be bleached out and unforgiven
Luckily so.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/12/2/tim-barnett-on-the-hockey-stick.html#comment16080991
No one would find “climate” particularly interesting, since it has been the same everywhere since a hominoid has been able to perceive it.
Climate has been a good money making venture, however, I would advise selling short.
I grieve for science, which will withstand the sickening filth of a “Michael Mann” or anyone else who stand in it’s way
bgvalentine@verizon.net
I was about to order a signed copy, but Steyn has a text box that says
Hmm. I need a short, pithy comment, but what? Help!
The Tipping Point is coming sooner than they expect.
A Hockey Stick makes a lousy foundation.
The taller the pedestal, the harder the fall.
Don’t wait too long. Mark Steyn’s fingers are due for extended rehabilitation after signing so many.
Just tell Mark you’d love a Dr. fraudpants witticism.
Mark chose a good one for my advance copy – “What a piece of work is Mann” 🙂
Received mine a few days ago. Came priority mail with Mark Steyn’s autograph plus a one line Manny joke.
Just reading through the foreword and contents gets one smiling and laughing.
The text reads easily and yes it is hard to stop; as one sentence leads so naturally into the next sentence that choosing where to actually stop is hard.
warrenlb August 11, 2015 at 7:18 pm
As you well know, there are 10s of thousands of peer reviewed research papers published with all the evidence needed for every scientific academy on Earth to conclude AGW.
This is the kind of stuff that really irks me.
I suspect the majority of either scientists or layman that frequent this site would agree that when all of the possible actions of humanity are considered, they will show a net warming of the atmosphere, and by extension, the climate.
However, the total amount of that warming is not an agreed upon amount – agreement is not even close.
Moreover, the claim that human CO2 emissions are causing atmospheric warming is addressed cautiously. While the physics says it should, actual measurements and observation have not shown it conclusively. The possible amount – around 1 degree C per doubling of CO2 – may be so overwhelmed by other, natural, processes as to not register by any measuring process, at least, not so far.
The CAGW by CO2 concept has not been shown to be a conclusion of “10s of thousands of peer reviewed research papers published”.
And that is the ball upon which we should keep an eye, not on warrenlb’s, as the British would say, “rubbish” AGW proclaimation.
Actually, all we need to do is keep an eye on the thermometer on my deck here in the outskirts of Melbourne.
Each of the past four summers, and each of the past four winters, has been successively colder than the previous one. This winter, so far, has been miserably damp and cold. Both of my cats refuse to go outside, and my kitty litter bill has gone through the roof!
Despite this our totally corrupt Bureau of Meteorology periodically issues press releases proclaiming “the hottest since…..”
So what do we believe: our lying eyes or our lying governments?
Have your thermometer adjusted.
Keep in mind “the physics” really only address a container with a fixed vo!ume. Beyond that, “the physics” get exceedingly difficult to evaluate.
Mark
Mark – The “Berthold-Klein Mylar Balloon (pdf) experiment” was really quite conclusive. I don’t know of any successful refutation.
I think you are too charitable …
Anyone trying the ‘ten thousands of papers have shown […]’-gambit reveals himself as an uninformed waffler. It’s just an appeal to (believed, and of course false) authority and majority/large numbers.
Firstly, no one has read ten thousands of papers somehow labelled as ‘climate science’ so he could make such an assertion. And secondly, and far more importantly, only i tiny tiny fraction of all those ‘climate science’ publications do actively address and scientifically the function of the atmospheric system, and also try to attribute the change in temperatures to GHG:s. Som put out this as a hypothesis, yes, But they are having a very very hard time getting support for it past flailing arm waving. And for CAGW, there is no scientific support at all.
All that ‘ten thousand papers’ meme does, is to prove how clueless the claimant is.
It’s as revealing as using any variety of the ‘denialist’-meme in one’s argument.
You say ‘rubbish”? Then lets get more specific:
Every Institution of Science on Planet Earth concludes, and publishes, “Earth is Warming, Man is the Cause, and the net effects are likely to be strongly negative.’ Or equivalent. No exceptions.
Find ONE Academy, Scientific Professional Society, or major University that maintains a published contrary position. ONE.
Above post addressed to JohnWho
“Every Institution of Every Institution of Science on Planet Earth concludes, and publishes, “Earth is Warming, Man is the Cause, and the net effects are likely to be strongly negative.’ Or equivalent. No exceptions.
Find ONE Academy, Scientific Professional Society, or major University that maintains a published contrary position. ONE.Science on Planet Earth concludes, and publishes, “Earth is Warming, Man is the Cause, and the net effects are likely to be strongly negative.’ Or equivalent. No exceptions.
Find ONE Academy, Scientific Professional Society, or major University that maintains a published contrary position. ONE.”
Capitalizing words inappropriately, and repeating yourself tediously does not make your statements credible. The fact that it doesn’t scare/shock you that all these supposedly credible institutions would do such a thing without ANY SOLID EVIDENCE to support such claims only proves that you value “authority” more than facts. You good little sheep you! So, by default, you must still believe that the Earth is flat, the Sun orbits the Earth, there is no such thing as plate tectonics, and Einstein was right about a static universe! (Since “Science on planet Earth” pretty much all concluded and published those things in the past)
One group of politicians agree with the politicians that are paying their bills.
And this impresses you?
PS: The Russian Academy of Science disagrees.
So once again warrenlb is shown to be a pathetic liar.
@MarkW
You lose: http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
warrenlb’s link says right in the first line:
CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL
Really? Climate change is real? Why hasn’t anyone told me??
The guy in the link above is more credible than the co-signers in warrenlb’s self-serving link.
The guy says he wants to “save the earth from climate change” — while warrenlb’s rent-seekers simply want to line their pockets with taxpayer loot, using the ‘dangerous man-made global warming’ hoax as their preferred scam.
I’m still waiting for warrenlb (or anyone else) to post a verifiable, testable measurement, quantifying the specific fraction of global warming putatively caused by human CO2 emissions. I suppose I’ll have to wait just about forever for that kind of real world evidence, since global warming has stopped. In the mean time, all we have are Mr. lb’s baseless assertions.
OK, we now return you to warrenlb’s usual logical fallacy: his measurement-free appeal to corrupted, bought-and-paid-for international ‘authorities’… ☺
dbstealey: ” to post a verifiable, testable measurement, quantifying the specific fraction of global warming putatively caused by human CO2 emissions.”
…
Classic strawman.
..
Can’t you do better?
Jerzy S says:
“Classic strawman.”
Since you’re weak in English I’ll give you a pass, and explain: someone asking for a simple, verifiable measurement is asking a very reasonable, straightforward question. It is not a “strawman” argument, it is a reasonable question. If you don’t have such a measurement just admit it, instead of playing word games. But if you have verifiable measurements, post them here. You will be the first.
Measuring supposed ‘man-made global warming’ (MMGW) goes straight to the heart of the entire debate. The assertion is constantly being made that human CO2 emissions will cause runaway global warming. Therefore, it is entirely reasonable for scientific skeptics (the only honest kind of scientists) to say, “Prove it.”
So either post verifiable measurements quantifying the amount of MMGW, out of total global warming — or admit that your belief in MMGW is a baseless conjecture.
A great day for Mr. Steyn. Reprisals are often just and satisfying. Congratulation!
Thanks for the preview and review, Anth*ny … as I patiently wait for the virtual version to come online. One thing that particularly amused me about your review and intro above, was your observation that:
So Seitz is echoing/emulating Peter Gleick who succeeded in making a name for himself** by writing a “review” of a book he clearly hadn’t read, either!
** Mileage of others may vary, but I certainly hadn’t heard of Gleick prior to his fact-free – and indefensible – “review” of Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager …. Clearly Seitz was emulating a trick™ first perfected by Gleick! [See: <a href="https://hro001.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/odes-for-peter-gleick/" title="Odes for Peter Gleick" target="_blank"]
Can't help wondering if – for his next act – Seitz will follow the yellow-mud road to even greater notoriety subsequently paved by Gleick, when he fraudulently obtained documents from Heartland which he then flogged to his unnamed pals (including the smoggies and the non-fact-checking crowd in the MSM) for circulation during a 2012 Valentine’s Day massacre!
Oh, well … never let it be said that these notorious sycophantic third-raters haven’t figured out how to … well … recycle, eh?;-)
You forgot Gleick ‘creating an document trick ‘ and yet he is still held in high regard within climate ‘science’ so Mann acting unprofessionally , sorry not in the area he works given that Gleick’s behaviour caused this profession no trouble at all.
He fraudualently obtained some documents, but others he made up whole cloth when the ones he stole weren’t damning.
Mods/Anthony: re my post in moderation
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/11/a-review-of-steyns-scathing-new-book-about-michael-mann-a-disgrace-to-the-profession/#comment-2005791
… I know that I did not mess up that URL with an ‘"’ – because I had tested the whole thing locally, before hitting post here:-(
So, trying again: … Last sentence of para beginning “** Mileage of others may vary …” should read:
[See: here]
Thanks,
Hilary
Is Mann’s case against Tim Ball resolved yet? How long has that been dragging on?
+1
Have purchased the book
And am waiting to read it,
From what I can see
We definitely need it;
The pseudo-science
Is getting out of hand,
Real science forever defamed
If we don’t make a stand!
http://rhymeafterrhyme.net/climate-science-is-surely-building-its-own-funeral-pyre/
Russel Seitz desperately needs the world to believe in catastrophic global warming.
This so that he can present himself as saviour, with his entirely bonkers idea of reflecting the sun’s rays by turning the sea into white froth.
Yes, that’s Russel Seitz’s masterplan for the salvation of all the people of planet earth.
He makes Steyn look like Einstein.
Here is his big idea: http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/29/new-geoengineering-proposal-br
Russel used to bless National Review with his presence. Insulting everyone who didn’t agree with him.
He finally left in a huff when he determined that we were never going to take him a seriously as he took himself.
Kindle version , please…
Received my copy yesterday 11th Aug in New Zealand from Steyn’s Bookstore. Guess what I have been doing today. Very good read, full of scathing comments from a range of scientists. Well worth the price.
Nice. But a book on WUWT will do nothing. This needs a concerted campaign. And campaigns do work.
Write to every national and local newspaper, and every editor in that newspaper. But not just yourself, get everyone else to do so too. Assemble all the email addresses into a list, and pass them on to friends, family and colleagues, to make it easy for them.
Write to all your political representatives, both national and local. And again pass on those email addresses. Remember many of these stupid AGW rules are being made at the local level. Those at the bottom of the food-chain are influence by those higher up, of course, but the policy is still being devised at the local level. So email all those councillors who are making those stupid decisions.
And this book will be had for them to reject.
Anything from WUWT results in: “follow the science, not a blog” or “97% of scientists agree” etc: etc:. But this is a book about quotes from real scientists. The lower food-chain administrators cannot dismiss this one quite so easily.
This book needs to be in the Amazon top 100. Not the Amazon top science 100, but the Amazon top 100.
Ralph
I can make a prediction about this book, which will demonstrate the political polarisation created by this whole AGW phenomina.
The Amazon reviews will all be 1-star or 5-star, with almost nothing in between. That is what AGW has become – a battle between believers with faith and rationalists who question. And precious little room left in the middle for doubt.
Ralph
At home, in my childhood, we had book of Dutch art and some of the pics were by a painter called Avercamp. They depict the extremely cold winters in the Low Countries in the Little Ice Age.
When I read the original hockstick paper I realized that the LIA was not to be seen in it. I knew there and then that it was a nonsense, if not a fraud. Now I know that not only his work is, but also the man himself.
Ed_B
August 11, 2015 at 7:05 pm
” In other words, imo Warren is posting trash talk here, and he is likely being paid to do it.”
—————-
You’re right, Ed, it’s very likely that warrenlb is indeed one of the propagandists paid to post his trash talk here and elsewhere.
Please consider the following example:
warrenlb
August 11, 2015 at 7:18 pm
“As you well know, there are 10s of thousands of peer reviewed research papers published with all the evidence needed for every scientific academy on Earth to conclude AGW. Your inability, or refusal, to consider that evidence is a deeper problem than I , or any mere mortal can solve. Perhaps a long vacation, to view the vanishing arctic sea ice or glaciers. would help.”
—————————-
It’s been argued in this thread that warrenlb and Russell Seitz are the same person and Russell Seitz has claimed to be a paid “science book reviewer for the WSJ”. Their writing style is exactly the same, i;e. again, as in this example, warrenlb uses Russell Seitz’s tactic of employing unverifiable scientific red herrings and meaningless logical fallacies of “appeal to authority” and “ad hominem attack” to make his case, with no scientific merit to his words, whatsoever.
As dbstealey pointed out, from warrenlb’s “10s of thousands of peer reviewed research papers published”, not a single one of them can show a clear CO2 signal in any temperature record.
note: Russell S’s admission of being a paid book reviewer has disappeared from Amazon comment section, at this time.
Alan –
If you mean Russell S’s statement regarding a “Wall Street Journal science book reviewer”, it is still there, under “[Customers don’t think this post adds to the discussion. Show post anyway.]” as a “reply to your (my) post on Aug 11, 2015 2:23:23 PM PDT.
I have one question. In an age of neo-liberalism why has the world media and most right wing governments the vatican and other organisations support the idea of climate change which in my view is directly opposed to their agenda. WHY?
$$$$$$$$$$$$$ for them.
Does that answer your question?
.
.
P.S. “[…] world media and most right wing governments the vatican and other organisations […]”
That’s the short list.
H.R. is correct AND to the impressionable, low information types, it paints them all as benevolent, earth caring saviors who can be trusted to protect and defend humanity against whomever they choose to vilify. “Trust us! Now send money, tithes, votes…”
Sometimes I can’t help but comment before reading the entire post. This is one of those days. Michael Mann is a hack. This has been proven again and again. Okay. Back to the essay. It really is a very good read. But feeding upon M. Mann seems like easy picking these days 😉 KEEP IT UP!
No Kindle version? This is 2015. All books should be published with a Kindle version. I hope the Kindle version is just not ready.
There are many people like me who find it hard to read a digital book, think dyslexia, glasses and bright computer screens. I always prefer a paper copy that has a slight dull finish on the page. But, after all, we are taking nasty and dangerous CO2 out of the air in the form of re-processed trees (Paper) and putting it to good use.
Bright screen is definitely NOT an issue with a Kindle. They are designed to be easy-to-read, black letters on a dull white screen, no gloss.
To Marv’s benefit, he did say “with a Kindle version” not “only in a Kindle version”. As C.J. pointed out, Kindle IS designed to be easy on the eyes and easy to read. But I still prefer actual books. I want to hold them and dog ear the pages and write notes in the margins. I’ve also never had to plug in and recharge a book, or dropped one and had it stop working, or had to track down my 10 year old to get my book back because he’s reading another story on it. *grin*
Actually, I have the opposite problem. I need glasses for reading and I can no longer read books comfortably due to a combination of the curve of the page and my progressive bifocals. The Kindle offers a completely flat page, so the focus point is the same across the page. With a book, I have to constantly move my head or the book to get it to be the exact same distance from my eyes. In other words, I can only see about 1/3 of the page in focus at any given time.
The Kindle or even the Kindle on my tablet make reading possible and enjoyable. Also, many people who try to read Kindle on tablets have issues with brightness because their screen is not adjusted properly. Two things help, turning down the brightness and reversing the print. (white on black). Also the Kindle allows font size to be changed on the fly, which is also very helpful.
As a bonus, I got a paperback book once that was printed on paper that was a bit yellow and the ink was some soy based stuff that wasn’t exactly black. The end result was a very low contract print. I found it almost impossible to read without very bright lights. I basically stopped reading after that book as it was simply too difficult. It wasn’t until the Kindle came out that I started enjoying reading again.
>>No Kindle version? This is 2015. All books
>>should be published with a Kindle version.
The ePub format was a disaster from day one, with nobody thinking of how this would be achieved.
The result is that most ePubbing is done in India, because it is labour intensive and Indian labour is cheap. But there are so many books needing epubbing, there is a backlog of orders for epub books. Amazon does offer instant computerised Kindle translation, but it is absolute Carp.
The result is probably that the Kindle version of this book is still in a queue.
On the UK Amazon site, the Kindle edition will be available from 1 September, price £4.80. Mine is pre-ordered.
On the US site, the release date is the same, the price $7.48.
I received my copy yesterday and am fully involved in reading it at the moment. Very enjoyable. The infamous graph made me angry on behalf of the real scientists who have been working hard to discover our climate history as part of our general history.
In reply to:
William,
The back drop for this surreal discussion, in response to an astonishing period/amount of scientific hanky-panky, countries are mandating forced spending on green scams that do not work to fight CAGW when the planet is about to abruptly cool (there is observational evidence to support the assertion we are going to experience a Heinrich event.)
There is evidence that the Hockey Stick graph was fabricated. There is evidence to support the assertion that incorrect ‘scientific’ analysis was done purposely to eliminate the medieval warm period, to create a hockey stick temperature rise. The scientific hanky-panky to push the CAGW agenda continues. There is evidence of inappropriate temperature adjustment of current temperature data (last 150 years). There is evidence of hanky-panky in the IPCC work concerning extreme weather, climate sensitivity to forcing, hiding of the fact that planetary temperature warms and cools cyclically correlating with solar changes, economic calculations concerning any warming, predicted future warming, and so on. The hockey stick fiasco is only one of the astonishing long list of fibs, lies, and, untruths done to push CAGW and to justify forced spending on green scams that do not work.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/publications/papers/pdfs/197.pdf
http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/publications/papers/pdfs/197.pdf
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
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Yes, science has a black eye over all things related.
The book should be included in climate education texts from “kindergarten to graduation.” A useful compendium of scientific thought on the subject.
As long as it is right next to:
Climate Change: The Facts
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Change-The-Facts-J-Abbot/dp/0986398306/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=0TMNN7Y5XZ8CJATA8FH8
Duly purchased, now I have to wait for delivery ..
Such Big Lies, for such a tiny Mann.
When you mess with Steyn
you play with a lighted stick
of dynamite. Boom!
Whoa! All the reviews for the book have been “disappeared” on Amazon as of the last few hours with the disclaimer:
“This item has not been released yet and is not eligible to be reviewed.”
Is this standard practice for Amazon?
Dunno – but I’m a bit pissed off since I did an honest review based on the advance copy I ordered from Mark. Maybe Mann’s little helpers have been at work again.
Agreed. Advance copies of the book are already “in the wild” and a review such as yours is reasonable.
Geez, the fact that you (and others) have actually seen the book puts you ahead of the absurdities of Russell S.
Lol! Knowing Amazon, since THEY can only sell “orders” at the moment, and THEY want the profits from book sales, they probably figured out that anyone who has a physical copy now could not have purchased it from THEM and didn’t want people reading reviews and hot debate to choose to order it from Mark instead of waiting for a pre-order copy.
Out of sheer curiosity, I went to WSJ.com and searched both “Russell Seitz Book Review” and just “Russell Seitz”. Nothing came up. Zip. Nada. How odd…..
Unbelievable!
The reviews are back!
I guess it must be August 15th somewhere in Amazon land.
/huh?
Ah, but now there are only 12 comments to Russell S’s “review” and many of ours, including mine, are gone.
Strange, those Amazonians.
Trying looking in your history on Amazon, maybe the comment is there and can be reposted.
Excellent review of another great book by Steyn.
I received my autographed advance copy a couple of days ago and am enjoying it immensely.
I encourage everybody to BUY a copy and support Mark Steyn in this vitally important defense of freedom of speech.
Concerning the question about using Paypal because of a problem with personal account, I recommend taking cash to Walmart and purchasing a Visa gift card to use as a debit card. You can put up to $500 on the card, no monthly charges, and and they are good for 7 years after activation. Something that can get you through while waiting for an account to become available or for online purchases without making your other account details public.
Seldom does anyone win anything of value in a Libel case, other than the attorneys. “Two lawyers will do well in a town where one would surely starve”. Sorry, it is not my quote and I do not know to who to attribute it.
Dr. Mann, if a fraud and it is my belief he is, will be defeated by his science or lack thereof. An excellent disclosure of Mann’s questionable science occurs here and I hope it will continue. No matter the outcome of Mann’s law suit, it will only be a legal decision on the issue of libel, not of itself a refutation of his “science”.
“A man’s gotta know his limitations” comes from Clint Eastwood as Josie Wales, but otherwise you are spot-on.
Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry in “Magnum Force”, 1973.
The “Mann Cards” should come in a set of just 26 — Because he’s playing with half a deck!
Or maybe the other half is Jokers!
Mark Steyn operates in the realm of satire. A huffing and puffing “authority” cannot beat this adversary, especially when he calls himself a “scientist” who creates a graph by data snooping, eliminating real data that “doesn’t work” for his presentation, does sophisticated statistical procedures without asking any statistician to collaborate–Hey I don’t need a statistician on this statistical project.
People should look into Mann’s background. Extremely talented students at Berkeley enter at 16-17, and graduate at 19-20. They get into the top graduate programs in fields of their interests, and earn PhDs at age 23-24.
These students are rare. Less-gifted students graduate at age 21-22 and earn PhDs at age 25-27.
Mann graduated at age 23, and earned his PhD at age 32–attending school full-time.
This is despite having ample opportunity to take AP classes, and college classes in Amherst, MA, to get into college at age 16-17, and if he was brilliant, into Harvard, MIT (home-state schools for him), or Stanford, Caltech, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, or Chicago.Or Berkeley, but he didn’t get in at age 16-17.
Then, entering Berkeley at age 18, he took 5 years, not 3, not 4 to graduate. He only earned “Honors”, one step above undistinguished, not “High Honors”, “Highest Honors” not “Highest Honors, nominated for the University Medal”, not “Highest Honors, University Medal Finalist,” not “Highest Honors, University Medal Winner.”
Michael Mann graduated-after 5 years, not 4-as one level above no honors.Did MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Cambridge or one-step-down Cornell, Chicago or two-steps down UCSB, or UCSD take him? No. But Yale did. Yale had ZERO Nobel Physics winners. It only had FOUR NAS-Physics Section members (currently 2). Yale had a third rate physics department.
Berkeley, whose faculty could place every one of their top students into the top-ranked programs, did not identify Michael Mann as a top or even “not our best, but still really good” student.
Yale, a not-top-school in physics or geophysics, also found Mann to be deficient. How do we know this? Postdoc at UMass, as opposed to MIT, Harvard or Stanford.. Also 9 years to get his PhD (not taking time off to do other work).
So at Berkeley and Yale, professors who judged him, judged him to not be altogether that bright.
If Mann disagrees, let him authorize Berkeley to release his grades and evaluations.
I resent Michael Mann’s referring himself as a Berkeley grad. I worked hard to graduate high honors, with another year it would have been highest honors. I graduated hs from a crappy-academics farm town in Cali. How did a dips hit from MA even get into Berkeley?
My spouse from a high-academic hs graduated University Medal Finalist.
As far as I can determine, Michael Mann got a lot of B’s. He can sue me, but that’s what “Honors” means. That’s also what a Berkeley Physics degree without going to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Caltech, Berkeley for your PhD means.
Fascinating. I remember seeing an Ed.D candidate get denied permission to continue in the program because he was taking more than 7 years to complete it.
How in the hell did he go from writing this to being a warmist troll in 8 years?
June 27, 2008
Climate Wars
The National Interest
Summer 1990
A War Against Fire
By Russell Seitz
The most savage controversies are those as to which there is no good evidence either way. -Bertrand Russell
AT THE TURN of the century, a Swedish Nobel Laureate, Svante Arrhenius, laid the cornerstone of what is popularly called “the greenhouse effect”-that one of the principal gaseous products of fire, carbon dioxide, can absorb radiant warmth and trap it in the earth’s atmosphere. In the hothouse environment of the popular media, this observation has blossomed into the most fiercely debated, and perhaps most widely feared, scientific phenomenon of the day.
As Science magazine observed in a March 30, 1990, editorial: “Virtually everyone, children included, is concerned about global climate change and especially about the greenhouse effect. They have learned of increases in carbon dioxide. They have been told repeatedly that temperatures will increase 9’F. Political pressure is mounting to take action regardless of cost, and to take action now.”
This much is familiar to any observer within reach of the popular media. But what follows is not : “But how good is the evidence, and how likely is substantial global warming? When might it happen? Applying the customary standards of scientific inquiry, one must conclude that there has been more hype than solid facts … Modeling of global climate is largely concentrated on examining effects of doubling the atmospheric content of greenhouse gases. As might he expected, the answers they get are functions of the models they employ. The spread is from 1. 5′ to 5’C; that is, there is great uncertainty. If one examines the subject, one finds virtually unanimous agreement that the models are deficient….What have been the warming effects, if any, of anthropogenic gases? The typical answer is 0.5’C.
But the answer depends on what time interval is chosen. There was substantial increase in temperature from 1880 to 1940. However, from 1940 until the 1960s, temperatures dropped so much as to lead to predictions of a coming ice age. New, precise satellite data raise further questions about warming. From 1979 to 1988 large temperature variability was recorded, but no obvious temperature trend was noted during the 10-year period.’ …A fashionable estimate of the time when doubling of atmospheric CO, will occur is the middle of the next century. But past predictions of energy usage have been notoriously inaccurate.. What should he the national response to the above uncertainties? … Whatever we do should he based on well-thought-out long-range goals. It should not result from a half-baked political response. ‘
–R.W. Spencer and J. R. Christy, “Precise Monitoring of Global Temperature Trends from Satellites , “Science 247 (March 30, 1990): 1558
Almost everything about this statement sits oddly with representations of the greenhouse effect in the popular media. Where Science speaks of conflicting studies and ambiguous results, the popularizers of the greenhouse effect deliver dire warnings with the utmost certitude. Where the one counsels a cautious political response, the other urges instant, even draconian intervention. In the name of the greenhouse effect, some environmentalists are demanding a 30 percent rollback in C02 emissions by the year 2000. They seem oblivious to the enormity of what they are demanding: a war on that most elemental of human discoveries-fire itself.
Why this enormous gap between what is known and what is urged? Why do most scientists lack conviction, where many laymen are full of passionate intensity? To answer, we might begin by way of reviewing a most important aspect of the greenhouse effect-the extent of our ignorance.
Why It’s Not So Simple
THE ATMOSPHERE is among the earth’s most complex dynamic systems: subtle in its chemistry, chaotic in its flow. It interacts with everything from the solar wind to the deep oceans. It is subject to insults great and small, brief and enduring, from men and meteorites, volcanoes and termites, wildfires and algal blooms-a list without end.
The scale of all this dynamism is more daunting still. Despite the burgeoning population of the earth, there’s still a million tons of air per capita. That’s a lot of inertia to work against, at least down here in the lower tier of the atmosphere, the troposphere (where it gets colder as you go up). But further upstairs, far above Everest, in the tenuous reaches of the stratosphere (where higher is hotter), lies only a thousandth part of that atmosphere’s mass. Our individual “share” of the stratosphere weighs about as much as a ten-yard cube of water and is laced with just a bathtub full of ozone. Hence the dichotomy between concern for an ozone layer that, liquefied, would he no thicker than the ink that you’re reading, and the authentic scientific confusion about our capacity rapidly to derange a lower ocean of air that’s comparatively as massive as a stack of bibles, the Apocrypha included.
The atmospheric sciences presently lie in limbo between the Newtonian rigor of classical physics and the realm of the un decidible. It is an uncomfortable time. The range of sincere expert opinion broadens with the complexity of the subject at issue. And at the interdisciplinary extreme–global climate expertise itself dissolves in that most universal of solvents, the theory of complexity.
Just as mathematicians found Kurt Gödel’s rigorous proof of the undecidibility of some formal propositions dismaying, there is presently no joy for atmospheric scientists in having to testify that the answers policy-makers seek are beyond the scope of the available data or the present limits of computational power. Nor is there consolation in the grim realization that their computerized global circulation models have but an ephemeral capacity to predict the future.
They can jump forward to model the climate of the distant future on a “what if” basis, but they can at best conjure up a coarsely realistic picture of global weather that lasts for a few weeks before beginning to disintegrate into gibberish. Even modeling the evolution of a single thunderhead’s birth and death is an absolute tour de force of today’s computer modeling.
By contrast, in reckoning what the whole ensemble of greenhouse gases is up to, we need to know about their transport and interaction with the atmosphere, sunlight, and each other over a range of time scales from microseconds to millennia. We need to measure reaction rates by the score and to ponder the quantitative meaning of feedbacks both positive and negative.
If there were world enough and time, individual atmospheric scientists might achieve a combination of physical and geometric intuition approaching certain knowledge of how the earth will respond in the long run to human intervention. But in practice such polymathy scarcely exists- scientists are reeling in shock at the information explosion they’ve touched off. Some causes are linked uncontroversially to eventual effects, but many phenomena, like the ozone hole, still get discovered, not predicted.
We have as well another major problem. While we have indeed driven carbon dioxide above the historical (hundred-thousand-year) range of its recorded natural fluctuation by about 20 percent (70 parts per million), we have a rather feeble understanding of the paramount greenhouse gas: water vapor. Its clouds fill a tenth of the sky. ts atmospheric concentration is so vastly greater than that of C02 as to obscure its effect. And in turn the rest of our significant effluvia-methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s), and nitrogen oxides–are dwarfed by the concentration of C02 itself.
It is one thing to understand a “straight-forward” issue like the destruction of stratospheric ozone by chlorine atoms that, being atoms, just don’t wear out. They can take decades to wander back to earth; and in the course of its prolonged residence in the stratosphere, each chlorine atom can slay a long succession of ozone molecules.
This is a scientific commonplace–given a pageful of photochemical reactions, and a few reams of hard data from the Antarctic, the conclusion that emerged was an uncontroversial one. High-flying U-2 and balloon-borne Instrumentation has already caught the culprit chlorine in flagrante reacting with some ultracold aerosols to bleach a hole in the polar sky.
So out of a growing scientific consensus, the 1987 Montreal Convention on the Reduction of Chemical Emissions was convened, and from it came an international protocol on reducing the release of chemicals that can loft long-lived chlorine into the sky. Ameliorating the problem of CFCs was relatively easy-the bill will come to only a few tens of billions of dollars, and the uncertainty factor was resolved to the point of sensible political engagement by” only’ a decade of research. Had CFC emissions continued unabated into he next century, they might have grown into a global problem. The existing local one will likely last for generations. But the Greenhouse Effect is a much rougher customer.
Tracking the Invisible Man
T0 BEGIN WITH, we’re wrestling with not just a dilemma, but the Invisible Man. The temperature records of the last century and a half are by no means geographically uniform and meticulous in their accuracy. Even today’s dense grid of meteorological observations is generally biased toward the land and troubled by the self-heating nature of urban areas. Science cannot offer a firm consensus without uncontroversial data, and the half-degree rise of the last century is neither continuous in its course nor a subject of unquestioned belief.
In recent years, three separate and significantly different scientific accounts of the same century-long record of “average” global temperatures, each peer-reviewed and each with its own set of statistical arguments in justification, have been published. They point up, down, and sideways. This is not the dismissal of a century of data, but rather a caution-the warming trend can only he proved by the data, not by a show of hands. The C02 is there, but has the atmosphere begun to notice?
Some say they are 99 percent sure they can perceive it in the data; some say those who say that are completely out of scientific bounds. Others say they see nothing, and many more that they just can’t tell-both nature’s static-ridden transmission and science’s still-crude receivers make the message far from plain. “What bothers a lot of us is, ” one modeler remarked, “telling Congress things we are reluctant to say ourselves.” Wittgenstein put it better: “Whereof we do not know, thereof we cannot speak.”
As a window for laymen to peer through, Global Change and Our Common Future, published in 1989 by National Academy Press, affords a startling contrast. At one end of the spectrum lies the rhetoric of uncertainty that dominates the hard sciences in the study of global change.
It is exemplified by the admission that it will take decades for a clear greenhouse signal to emerge from the noise of climatic variation-witness the dust-bowl drought of the 1930s and the abnormally high Great Lakes water levels of the 1980s-and by the confession that it will take 500 times more computer power to realistically model the course of the quarter-century to come. As one participant in the forum, which produced Global Change, J.D. Mahlman, noted, “Until such decadal-scale fluctuations are understood or are predictable, it will remain difficult to diagnose the specific signals of permanent climate change as they evolve. ”
At the other end of the spectrum lies the rhetoric of extinction- life scientists confidently predicting the climate-driven disappearance of species over the next fifty years. But the objects of their acute concern are the Norwegian mugwort, the Tibetan dung beetle (Aphodius hoderi), and other struggling refugees from the last Ice Age.
By the volume’s end, it is clear on which side Senator Albert Gore has enlisted: “My purpose is to sound an alarm, loudly and clearly, of imminent and grave danger, and to describe a strategy for confronting this crisis … the horrendous prospect of an ecological collapse. ” He delivered himself of this fine sermon on May Day 1989-the day before the forum started. So much for uncertainty.
No one doubts the existence of a dual trend-CO2 is surely rising. And so must its effect on the trapping and transfer of solar warmth between earth and sky. But global surface temperatures have not risen in lock-step with that rise. Given the ubiquity of water vapor, deciding this issue is rather like asking a panel of tasters to savor the difference between two big urns full of cafe au lait. One urn contains five lumps of sugar, the other six-not an easy matter, except to a diabetic.
Neither sugar’s sweetness nor its palpable metabolic effect is at issue. But it’s not an easy call. So too, scientific perceptions of both where the world is, and the timing of its rendezvous with climatic change, are still in part very much a matter of taste . As is the question of whether scientists from disciplines unrelated to the atmosphere should lend their authority to the promotion of policies that might not prevail on the objective strength-or empirical weakness–of the available evidence. It is a prerogative of the manifesto-writing classes to dragoon as many members as they can of the National Academy of Sciences into signing them (a task too often easier than getting them read).
But the resulting embarras de richesses can he a problem when the signatories outnumber the real experts in the field. The Union of Concerned Scientists got a majority of the membership to sign a declaration calling for a substantial reduction in global C02 emissions by the year 2000. Some members (notably MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen) were appalled and said so, but they failed to make it onto prime-time television.
Vexation and Videotape
THE MOST important arbiters of the environmental policy debate have accordingly become the public television producers whose products bear the Academy’s imprimatur when the credits roll. They have tools at their disposal to amplify and mute at will the discordant voices within the Academy. In a fair fight, a satellite or a supercomputer doesn’t stand a chance against the editing and special effects studios of New York and Hollywood.
So in terms of political clout, the real centers of power have moved from the locales of computer climate modeling, to the public television stations of Pittsburgh and Boston. We are being shown the planet’s future by design, in color and in stereo. Yet the production designers seldom condescend to listen to scientists arguing, calculating, and changing their minds. Intelligibility, not content, is the criterion the producers value most. Their goal is to fossilize a script on videotape, not to question the agenda it may compel, when it is reiterated like a commercial on good gray public television.
I have yet to see a computer climate model whose screen is framed by a proscenium, with a data display set to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and an explanatory voice-over worthy of a network anchor. Yet in watching some of the most bizarre examples of video hype on climate change (e.g., “The Atmosphere in Crisis” episode of PBS’ The Infinite Voyage), even as my mind is repelled by what is being said, the hair on my head rises together with the rest of the audience’s when the clouds part and the music blares. This is semantic aggression run riot-sucking the audience into an hallucinatory Charybdis of swirling images of Gaia profaned.
Mere facts cannot prevail over the raw semiotic power of so excellent a medium, even when its masters may be leading us into a future that may be beyond economic repair-a future in which facts don’t count and perceptions of scientific authority can take precedence over mere evidence. I often find myself exhorting atmospheric scientists to concern themselves with this phenomenal mastery, horn of nature television of National Geographic caliber mated with prose worthy of Jonathan Schell. But they just smile ruefully-once was enough-they’ve seen the genre. In it, computer animated conceptions of Venus’s infernal surface vie with stark visions of all-but-airless Mars as alien stand-ins for earthly greenhouse warming and ozone depiction.
Television has little room for doubting scientists. They accordingly know the score. Who, for the sake of skepticism or the honor of the scientific profession, wants to go down in flames like Ceaucescu-locked in the sights of a hostile videocam? The TV crew has got the Maxim gun, and we do not.
So, riding on a wave of videotape, the usage “global warming” is entering the vernacular in the present tense as a mock synonym for “climate change.” If only the public read and knew more, and heard and saw less; if only more scientists (and fewer organizations purporting to represent them) endeavored to inform the electorate’s considerable curiosity-then we might face better odds in protecting objectivity from the heat of the greenhouse debate.
A DISTURBING reality confronts us: A the deliberate creation of a double standard, with one set of facts for internal scientific discourse and another for public consumption. Many who have contributed to it justify their actions by referring to their past diffidence which may have delayed action on ozone depiction. And agonized by the possibility of history repeating itself On C02, some have cast objectivity aside and openly made common cause with the eco-politicians. But this pathology of the sociology of science is not without a remedy. For the power of television to project unchallengeable images of environmental quality, real or imagined, is utterly undone when the public achieves even a minimal level of quantitative understanding; numeracy and skepticism go hand in hand.
In the absence of numbers candidly conveyed, it is all too easy to transmute supposedly quantitative scientific “facts” about the present into a qualitative legal fiction about the future. Popular coverage of the atmospheric sciences tends to neglect the enormous range of concentration (or dilution) of the various gases involved. That concentration ranges from almost 1 percent by volume in the case of water vapor, to hundreds of parts per million carbon dioxide, to 1 part per million methane, to parts per billion-total chlorine. And, finally, down to hundreds of parts per trillion-the individual CFCs.
This eight-order-of-magnitude range lends itself to rhetorical abuse on both sides of the debate. So beware equally of headlines proclaiming a fourfold increase in stratospheric chlorine (it has-from 1 part per billion in 1960 to nearly 4 parts per billion in 1990) or dismissing carbon dioxide with a blasé “Greenhouse a Humbug-C02 up by less than 1/100th of 1 percent!”
This, like “Stratosphere in Crisis–Chlorine Quadruples,” may respectively amuse energy lobbyists and substitute refrigerant salesmen, but it profoundly misrepresents the central problem posed by the interaction of climate and technical civilization.
That problem is deep time–deep not on a geological scale, but relative to the time-scale of politics. It has taken humanity ten generations to push C02 up by a bare 70 parts per million. The previous million years of using fire failed to budge it from its ambient range of fluctuation. The fossil record speaks plainly; as deep as we can drill into ancient ice, there is a clear (but how causal?) linkage of C02 and global climate. What wildfires failed to accomplish in the eons before human evolution, the Industrial Revolution has delivered-the acceleration of the history of our interaction with the very air-a bona fide change in the second most important greenhouse gas. And equally disturbing, it has delivered that fearsome engine of change, the chainsaw.
The drying effect of not-so-rapid deforestation on the climate of islands was noted by Columbus half a millennium ago. So there is nothing subtle or uncertain about regional climate change in Brazil-strip the land of a rainforest that literally makes rain, and suffer sunstroke in the dust .I wish C02-induced climate change were as simple. Clearly, a sharp-toothed carnivore is on the prowl. But we’ve yet to see a full-grown specimen. Are we dealing with Snoopy or Cerberus?
It’s hard to tell- it’s only just a foundling pup, and the question of its diet remains to he wrestled with-it might grow into either. But grow it will-slowly, and for a long while undetectably. One of these centuries, we’re going to have a real dog in our front yard. But what kind? And when? An interdisciplinary consensus on the magnitude of the “greenhouse effect” and its impact on sea levels in the next century won’t come cheap-or soon.
Nobody knows if the synergy of all the ill-defined feedbacks will coincide with high-side outcomes of the many inputs that global systems models require. So some will invoke the presumed prudence of assuming the worst. For others, there is Murphy’s Second Law: if everything must go wrong, don’t bet on it.
Changing the weather on a local scale is categorically a different matter than transforming the climate of the globe. The vast reservoir of CO, locked up in limestone dwarfs the atmosphere’s burden by many, many thousandfold. The geological unleashing of a fraction of it in the days of the dinosaurs created an atmosphere far richer in C02 (and some 5 C warmer) than that of today. The tricky question-how much fossil fuel must be burned to do likewise–has a brief answer: all of it.
The immensity of the world’s reservoirs of coal (like limestone) teaches the disparity of scale between what humanity can do in a single generation and what goes on in the course of geological time. We are but builders of pyramids and hewers of wood, not architects of mountains or choreographers of continental drift. For all the leverage our technology affords us, we are a species that fits into a single cubic kilometer,
with room to spare. In light of the minimalism its editors advocate, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalogue-
“We are as gods, so we’d better get good at it!”-
is stunningly hubristic. But what of the lamentations of those who decry what mischief we can and do see?
Turning Up the Heat
THEREIN LIES the political paradox: what we can perceive, we can endeavor to put right. That scar on the Soviet landscape, the vanishing Aral Sea, bears witness to the deranged power of central planning like the mark of Cain. Yet, the diverted rivers that caused it can he swiftly returned to their courses. But the action of the invisible hand of energy economics upon the world is imperceptibly slow.
Bear in mind the beaver. Without benefit of godhood, its mindless industry acting over eons has transformed the Canadian landscape into a wilderness of lakes. Likewise ,creating a brave new world with an atmosphere transformed by the total depiction of fossil fuel is a labor of generations yet unborn.
We cannot govern the actions of posterity, but we can teach by our example. We can plant trees and stay the hand of mindless deforestation. We can value the richness of biological diversity and recognize the intellectual poverty of sullen indifference to the majesty of nature. But any pretension to oracular foreknowledge of how, over the next quarter century, the earth will respond to our presence lies in the realm not of science but of intuition.
And just as surely, any denial that unrestrained C02 injection can transform the world within five generations lies beyond the pale of both-especially if China’s vast coal reserves are exploited at a per capita rate approaching that of the U. S. today.
Politically, I counsel constant vigilance. The salvation of the world affords an enchanting pretext for those predisposed to societal intervention . They have already raised the abolitionist banner, pointing to the prospect of Bangladesh awash and water skiing down the Mall to the Capitol-a prospect no more likely in my lifetime than nothing happening.
My personal expectation-and I reserve the right to change my mind if the evidence does-runs more to centimeter-per-year rises in sea level and a lot more climatic variability than actual temperature rise in that lifetime.
There is a precedent of sorts, at the periphery of human history, of a temperature change fully as large (5 to 6’C) as even the most pessimistic estimates for the century to come. It happened an eon ago, and its onset was so sudden as to raise the contemporary question of climate responding in an abruptly nonlinear way to humanity’s growth. Yet mankind muddled through the last Ice Age’s death throes and has done rather well since, despite a 100-meter rise in sea levels!
But unlike the regression of the glaciers, a reversal of the course of the Industrial Revolution is not to be meekly borne. An examination of the history of energy policy over the last two decades reveals some unexpected and paradoxical trends in the relationship between environmental awareness and actual emissions of the greenhouse gases.
In the aftermath of the Arab oil shock of the early 1970s, computer models not of climate, but of resource depiction and energy costs, played a major role in determining energy policies. The most egregious projections, immortalized in textbooks by neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich, had the United States running out of natural gas in 1989. Yet they inspired the National Academy of Sciences to commission a massive study with conclusions (promote energy efficiencies and develop coal and oil shale resources) reflecting a belief in continuous energy cost inflation.
At the turn of the century, a coal-fired electrical station that was 8 percent efficient was a state-of-the-art wonder. A solid half-century of progress followed, at a rate of better than a half-percent a year. By the 1960s, such facilities had achieved new-plant efficiencies of over 40 percent. Back then, coal was literally dirt-cheap. But with the coming of the 1974 oil shock, it was assumed that as energy costs soared into the 1980s, market forces would compel heroic efforts to raise the thermodynamic efficiency of such plants to the limits of high technology-a process fuel cost savings would amply justify.
But the cost projections were wrong, and we got the Oil Glut instead. And, courtesy of Earth Day and its aftermath, a draconian regime of sulfur emission control. The enforcement of that regime did two things quite unrelated to acid rain. Installing the control systems reduced the efficiency of existing plants by five whole percentage points, and defunded the development of the next generation of more efficient combustion technology and power-generation systems.
So we are entering the 1990s about 15 % worse off in terms of C02 emission per kilowatt-hour than we were a generation ago. This is pretty close to a worst-case scenario whatever one’s view on the near-term effect of greenhouse emissions: the largest single term in America’s fuel equation-coal-fired electricity-has been running retrograde to progress in materials science and combustion technology for twenty years. Yet both here and in Japan, science has lately begun to deliver the Right Stuff for raising its efficiency-materials able to withstand higher temperatures and stresses for longer times. But they are being applied more to aircraft engines than to power stations.
Together with the realization that energy costs do show a shallow but steady inflationary trend, this suggests that we need not he idle while awaiting newer and more elegant generations of climate models and nuclear technology-or that Holy Grail of applied physics, hot fusion that truly emulates the power of the sun.
So there may indeed be a solution to the profound uncertainty that engenders reluctance when we are offered insurance against C02 bracket creep-at a trillion-dollar premium. Consider a double Scots Verdict: even if the verdict on global warming is not proven, we could still save a bundle of hard cash if a canny enough energy policy can be found.
Rather than mandating reduced consumption of fuel and its Luddite consequences here and in the growing industrial sector of the Third World, let us consider getting more Kilowatt-hours by literally turning up the heat. A policy that promotes raising the minimum thermodynamic efficiency of hotter-running fuel-burning power stations by say 8 percent (to around 44 percent) by the year 2000 might be paid for by the very fuel it saves. Neither we nor our posterity can object to saving ourselves some cash-thrift has as few enemies as prodigality in fuel consumption has friends outside OPEC. And should the presently hung scientific jury reach a Scots Verdict in the interminable trial of Earth v. The Greenhouse Gases, little macro-economic mischief will have been done.
But should nature follow art, and oblige the environmental televangelists with an unambiguously toasty third millennium — when I have spoken of uncertainty in this essay, I have meant what I said– the retrospective imposition of such a policy regime will he a source of some satisfaction to all, save hardened libertarians. But how will stewardship be redefined in the longer term-the century or so it would take to double C02 at the present pace?
OPTIONS DO exist. Given alternatives to power derived from fossil fuels, the whole fuel cycle can he redefined, with hydrogen replacing carbon. There is another major (and revolutionary) technical fix: we can liquefy air and burn fuels in pure oxygen, and condense the resulting C02 with the frigid liquid nitrogen that is the by-product of that liquefaction. But both hydrogen fuels and systems that recaptureCO2 are (like solar and wind power) dauntingly expensive.
So even today, in the midst of climatic ambiguity, even the most chlorophyllic environmentalists are having stirrings of conscience about their adamant refusal to acknowledge an unambiguous fact of physics.
As surely as C02 can absorb the warming infrared, the strong nuclear force is millions of times stronger than the chemical bonds that are burst in unleashing heat from coal. Rather than embarking down the soft energy path that leads back beyond the Industrial Revolution’s roots into a future dark age, the Greens should pause to consider the effect on the environment of renewing and perfecting our mastery of the atom’s pale fire.
The prospect of nuclear power’s second coming presents environmental millenarians with a real source of cognitive dissonance: it is they who are the problem. It is their delaying tactics that wasted years and squandered billions at Seabrook and elsewhere. And it is their past indifference to the environmental consequences of the fossil fuel that the reactor might have saved that makes a mockery of their present rhetoric.
The sooner their paranoia about nuclear waste disposal is laid to rest alongside that waste itself-deep in the and badlands, well secured, and as soon as the criminal mischief of Chernobyl is buried under the foundations of a reactor both safe and sanely contained, the sooner will civilization cease to he obliged to make a chemical waste repository of the sky.
So let all summon the courage to be kind to our environment. For if the bulk of the arsenals of Armageddon are indeed fading into historical irrelevancy, what better fate for them than to disappear as smokeless fuel into newer and more tractable nuclear furnaces? Better they light the world for a generation than heat it for a baleful instant.
And better too that cooler heads than those that dominate the hot media prevail in informing the Congress and the electorate. For this much is certain: science needs to see the illumination of today’s hot-tempered environmental policy debates. If light is to prevail over heat, many will have to simmer down and reflect they have lately been doing or counseling.
If candor prevails, climate professionals will realize once again that laymen too can recognize cant when they hear it and cartoons when they see them. Scientists would do well to recall that insight’s inevitable corollary-the neutrality of scientific institutions must first exist if it is to he respected.
For as the thaw continues in the Eastern bloc, we see emerging from beneath the glacial recent facade of science in the Soviet Union grim evidence of what happened when science was last subordinated to the true believer’s agendas for changing the world.
Whether the trial of Galileo or the tyranny of Lysenko, at all times and in all polities, science politicized is science betrayed.
Russell Seitz, from 1985 to 1989, was a visiting scholar and associate of Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs. His writings have appeared in Science, Nature, and Technology Review as well as the Economist, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and The National Interest
FOOTNOTES
‘Professor Alan Robock, University of Maryland, quoted in Science 244 June 2, 1989): 1041-43.]
‘To add to the confusion, the CFCs are roughly 1000 times more efficient than carbon dioxide as absorbers of infrared, making them significant greenhouse gases and major agents of stratospheric cooling: some scientists fear the Invisible Man might he hiding in his Doppelganger’s shadow! While stratospheric cooling is perhaps the least controversial of the effects at issue, it is conspicuously unpublicized.
‘I am indebted for both Columbus’s observation about Caribbean deforestation and the opening quote to a speech delivered by Presidential Science Adviser D. Allan Bromley before the National Press Club in April 1990.
No, Sir. Of course, reduced consumption of fuel of any kind is beneficiary.
If the average U.S. citizen manages to save just 0.5 kwh/d that comes down to a saving of 45.625.000.000 kwh per anno.
It only requires some thinking.
Switch out the light if it is not needed.
Reduce fun-riding in a gas guzzler. Attention Detroit: build cars that deliver more miles per gallon. Have a look at Europe(the continental car manufacturers, not the so-calld “EU”). Spacious diese-fueled cars consume less than 7 liters per 100 km. That’s more than 30 miles per gallon.
Walk short distances. Or take a ride on a bike.
Better the insulation of your home. Bricks have been invented quite a while ago…
Use firewood occasionally.
Don’t throw away plastic bottles etc. There is energy in it comes from oil. And the seven seas don’t want to be converted into landfills…
Just some thoughts about savings. And even the coal will last longer if its consumption is reduced.
I am not talking about third-world-countries but the “first” world. The “first” world has the money to make savings.
“Better the insulation of your home. Bricks have been invented quite a while ago…”
Eh?
So we should add some bricks to our homes? Burn some wood?
Plastic bottles will wind up in the ocean if thrown away?
Buy a new car, and make it a spacious diesel?
You sound like your last data point was 1990.
All cars and even SUVs get excellent mileage these days.
How about only buy a huge ride if you need one?
I need a truck five or six times a year. I do not want two vehicles…so I rent a truck when I need it, and use MY OLD CAR for getting around. Built in 1998, it gets 25 PH, and they built those Infinitis to last. Buying a new car when your old one works fine is part of the problem…it takes massive amounts of energy for every step from the mining of the metals to the assembly and transport of the vehicle itself. If you really need a new car, buy one, but do not get one just because you like to have a new car every few years.
How about these:
-Buy LED light bulbs. Bite the freakin’ bullet and shell out the cash. One tenth to one thrd the power usage…and the bulbs really do last.( The twisty kind, CFLs, do not last as long as claimed, but they can do. The will fail early if turned on while still warm…so turning off a switch every time you walk out of a room can cost you. Keep this in mind when buying and setting timers and motion sensors. LEDs are better, and way down in price.)
-Buy light switches with timers or motion sensors. Learn to install stuff yourself so it only costs the amount of the parts and a few minutes on a Saturday morning. Get dimmers at the very least. Preferably both.
-If your AC unit is more than 15 years old…buy a new energy efficient one. Especially if you live in the southern tier. Think about a heat pump, and have an analyst with good credentials do an analysis to let you know if a heat pump is a good idea for your house and area.
-If you have a pool, look at how long the pump runs…they do not need to stay on 24/7. Six hours a day is plenty. Change the filter, your pump will not work as hard.
-Buy a smart thermostat. A no brainer…it will pay for itself in a few months unless you are already constantly adjusting it. Keeping your heater or AC on at the same temp 24/7 is throwing massive amounts of money away.
– Switch whatever you can from electric to gas…heaters, water heaters included, and stoves and ovens. Cheaper to run and more efficient and cleaner burning. If there is no gas lines in your ‘hood (what up wit’ dat?), use propane in a big tank. Still better, but not as good as natty.
There are others, but these are a start.
OH, yeah…FANS!
Underused, these save on cooling and heating costs, esp. if you have high ceilings. Running a ceiling fan during heating times prevents the hot air from staying up above where everyone is sitting.
And fans when an AC is in use reduces cooling costs dramatically. Moving air keeps a person much more comfortable and the temp can be adjusted accordingly.
It is incredible to me whenever I walk into a home with no fans running. And many of not most do not.
Weird and crazy.
You are quite obviously wilfully misunderstanding what I wrote.
If you had read with just a minimum of attention, you ought to have noticed that I didn’t promote adding bricks.
Bricks plus adequate insulation, not that plaster chemistry but wood, makes a reasonable internal climate of a home and saves heating costs.
Burning wood? Of course, wherever and whenever possible. You seem to forget that wood is sustainable. Rent a truck and collect it yourself.
Yes, plastic parts of all kind end up in the oceans: http://www.nrdc.org/oceans/plastic-ocean/
I never promoted buying a new car. That’s my wording: “Reduce fun-riding in a gas guzzler.”
What is your idea of “excellent” mileage? No Idea, I presume.
Your attitude towards buying, renting or whatsoever of a truck when needed is your own affair:
“Qoud licet bovi non licet iovi”.
Interesting as well that you obviously never considered walking or riding a bike, things that are really easy(for those who can ride a bike, can you?) and cheap.
Quite interesting that you made no remark about my proposal of saving jus .5 kwh/day per capita.
Just some of these proposals make it easy to save energy and money.
@PaulS actually that quote comes from Magnum Force, the second Dirty Harry movie.
I look forward to reading my own copy of Steyn’s book.
But what’s ironic about all this “warm” bashing by the warmists is that Global Warming is good. It’s almost as if they want to push climate toward Global Cooling. And in the middle of an Ice Age, yet! Are they purposefully attempting to end the Holocene? Personally, I’m not looking forward to 90,000 years of glacial conditions and perpetual winter.
With warming, life thrives. Of course, there are limits, but Earth seems to handle those quite well. Looking at the temperature record for the last 600 Million years, temperatures seem to be capped, for the most part, at about 25-degrees C (about 15-degr.C more than today). Water may be the key. So long as we have oceans, we may have the proper balance of positive and negative feedbacks.
With the Big Oil Rockefellers supporting this “climate change” hoax, and their penchant for eugenics, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re licking their chops to trigger a sudden end to the Holocene. That’s about 7 Billion people they can eliminate with very little effort. This kind of puts the entire “Climate Change” debate on an entirely new level. “Mann the minion of evil who helped kill most of humanity.”
I know many people don’t like to talk about conspiracies, but they need to grow up and realize that conspiracies are dirt common. And some conspiracy theories are based on fact.
The hockey stick will become part of the historical document of the climate wars. The climate wars are going to come to an abrupt end. There has been an abrupt change to the solar cycle which is going to cause abrupt planetary cooling.
Cycle abrupt climate change was discovered almost 20 years ago. One by one possible internal forcing mechanisms were eliminated (ocean current changes, changes to atmospheric composition, changes to planetary albedo and so on). As the planet resists forcing change –negative feedback – rather than amplifies forcing changes – positive feedback there must be a massive powerful serial forcing change to cause what has happened again and again and again and again in the paleo record, a powerful cyclic forcing change to cause cyclic abrupt climate change. The cyclic warming and cooling has a periodicity of 1500 years and every 10,000 years or so the 1500 year forcing becomes super large, a Heinrich event which is powerful enough to end an interglacial period.
1) Due to the observed 1500 years periodicity of the temperature changes in the paleo record (internal earth systems are chaotic and hence are not capable of warming and then cooling the entire planet cyclically) and as 2) it is a fact that the cyclic warming and cooling effects both hemispheres – supports the assertion that there is an external massive forcing agent (it’s the sun) that cyclically forces the climate.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/05/is-the-current-global-warming-a-natural-cycle/
Glacial/Interglacial cycle last 420,000 years from the analysis of Antarctic ice cores.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/VostokTemp0-420000%20BP.gif
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from Greenland ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper. William: The Greenland Ice data shows that there has been 9 warming and cooling periods in the last 11,000 years. There was an abrupt cooling event 11,900 years ago (Younger Dryas abrupt cooling period when the planet went from interglacial warm to glacial cold with 75% of the cooling occurring in less than a decade and there was abrupt cooling event 8200 years ago during the 8200 BP climate ‘event’).
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
The peculiar solar cycle 24 – where do we stand?
http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/440/1/012001/pdf/1742-6596_440_1_012001.pdf
Since you have omitted the last 155 years in your version of Alley’s graph it does not show the most recent warming period.
Since you have omitted the last 155 years in your version of Alley’s graph it does not show the most recent
warming periodnatural warming cycle.Fixed. You’re welcome.
Really enjoyed this, William, and would like to preserve it somewhere, though not the the whole thread. Can’t find how to collect the very useful graphics. A pity! I guess that the actual numbers came from the Vostok and GISP data, which must be accessible somewhere. Can you help?
Robin – who spends most of his time examining climate time series.
Mr. Astley,
I am certain that more than a few of the characters in this charade will be famous for a very long time…and not in a kind or good way.
I would not be surprised if at least one or two new words become part of the everyday lexicon, based on the names of people who performed particularly egregious duty to push CAGW.
Names synonymous with fraud, scientific incompetence, doubling down on a wrong idea even when it is known to be wrong, etc.
I am sure readers here can make some nominations for such new verbiage.
The error of the hockey stick that gets little mention is the long straight handle which promotes that there was no warming (or ice ages) before the 20th century. We should actually use the hockey stick and show photos of ice skaters on the Thames etc etc rather than focussing on the technical discussions of the uptick, which most lay people would not understand. After demolishing the straight handle as lies, then it is easy to say to people, “well, if that is not right, can you see that the uptick may also not be right?”
A ‘straight handle’ does not promote ‘no warming’, that requires a flat handle.
Good luck finding ‘photos’ of skaters on the Thames, the last Frost Fair was in 1814.
http://quotulatiousness.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Frost-Fair-of-1814-by-Luke-Clenell.jpg
A major reason for the freezing of the Thames was the Old London Bridge which obstructed the flow, this bridge was removed in 1831 and along with the embankment of the river changed the flow dramatically. Without that it is very likely that there would have been more Frost fairs, possibly as recently as 1962/3.
Phil dot
You may have uncovered a new climate cooling mechanism! Just build shaped bridge and we can induce freezing temperatures, crop failures, snow and frozen devastation! I would never have thought that thermodynamics could be so easily overthrown. You really ought to put the proofs of your conjecture into a journal article. The City of London could hold annual frost fairs to boost tourism.
Seriously! Tell him what is what Crispin.
So bridges and the shape of a rivers banks determine whether the water gets below freezing?
And putting a restriction or bottleneck in one spot will cause…wait, what? Cause the water to back up?
Amazing…this sounds a lot cheaper than a dam.
An optimal design/insulation is a combination of brick masonry faced/sheathed/revetted with wood. Adapt to the prevailing climate when building your home. Think. It will cost money if you don’t and buy off the shelf.
Optimal is stone walls three feet thick. So what?
few build their own homes, or have them custom built.
Where do you live and how rich are you?
Us common folk need to buy a house as is for the most part.
The house I live in is older than 100 years and of the brick-and-mortar-type with gas heating. The walls are not as thick as they ought to be, so insulation became an issue here at ~ 52° N. Wood did fine.
Burning wood? Obviously you must move toward the equator.
Warmer is better, but I dont think I should set the Congo basin ablaze…
I’ve pre-ordered the book as well, looking forward to it. But Anthony, all those name jokes, are they really necessary, among grown-ups? That’s really one of the few things that MM *can’t* help.
Okay. I just pre-ordered on Amazon. $15 was kinda high for a paperback but I’m guessing it’s larger than standard with illustrations. I’ll pay extra for Josh 😉 I’m gonna promote this on facebook too.
just placed my pre-order at Amazon. thanks. I look fwd to an entertaining read.
I just finished the book last night and attempted to put a review on Amazon.
Amazon still says “This item has not been released yet and is not eligible to be reviewed.”
There’s still the original three reviews (two for and one against) that somehow were allowed.