Dilbert creator, Scott Adams wrote a post on his blog yesterday that is well worth reading in entirety: The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science
Adams notes:
It seems to me that a majority of experts could be wrong whenever you have a pattern that looks like this:
1. A theory has been “adjusted” in the past to maintain the conclusion even though the data has changed. For example, “Global warming” evolved to “climate change” because the models didn’t show universal warming.
2. Prediction models are complicated. When things are complicated you have more room for error. Climate science models are complicated.
3. The models require human judgement to decide how variables should be treated. This allows humans to “tune” the output to a desired end. This is the case with climate science models.
4. There is a severe social or economic penalty for having the “wrong” opinion in the field. As I already said, I agree with the consensus of climate scientists because saying otherwise in public would be social and career suicide for me even as a cartoonist. Imagine how much worse the pressure would be if science was my career.
5. There are so many variables that can be measured – and so many that can be ignored – that you can produce any result you want by choosing what to measure and what to ignore. Our measurement sensors do not cover all locations on earth, from the upper atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, so we have the option to use the measurements that fit our predictions while discounting the rest.
6. The argument from the other side looks disturbingly credible.
One of the things that always fascinated me about jury trials is that attorneys from both sides can sound so convincing even though the evidence points in only one direction. A defendant is either guilty or innocent, but good lawyers can make you see it either way. Climate science is similar. I’ve seen airtight arguments that say climate science is solid and true, and I’ve seen equally credible-looking arguments that say it is bunk. From my non-scientist perspective, I can’t tell the difference. Both sides look convincing to me.
Again, read the entire essay: The Non-Expert Problem and Climate Change Science
Steve McIntyre writes in comments:
I write the Climate Audit blog. I first began serious study of paleoclimate when I asked Michael Mann for the FTP location data of his data (for the Hockey Stick) and he said that he had “forgotten” the location, but that one of his associates would find it for me. The associate said that the data was not in any one location, but volunteered to find it for me. I was astonished that a result could have been so widely disseminated without any sort of formal audit – not realizing at the time that “peer review” for a journal was a limited form of due diligence.
Scot [sic] writes: “You probably are not a scientist, and that means you can’t independently evaluate any of the climate science claims.” I had mathematical knowledge and skill and decided that it would be an interesting task to actually try to verify Mann’s results. It turned out that he had made a grotesque error in his attempt to calculate principal components, had withheld adverse verification statistics and had weighted his reconstruction on stripbark tree rings that were inappropriate.
When I examined other attempts to estimate temperature in the past 1000 years, I encountered problems with every one of them, incurring, in the process, severe antagonism on the part of university academics.
However, after being involved in the controversy for many years, I think that far too little attention (none) is paid to a very fundamental difference between “skeptics” and warmists on their respective perceptions on whether human emissions of CO2 thus far have caused “serious negative damage” to the world or not. Skeptics universally think not. Many do not dispute the idea that we are carrying on an “uncontrolled experiment”, but have nonetheless concluded that, through good luck rather than good management, the consequences have been inconsequential or even beneficial. On the other hand, warmists are thoroughly convinced we have already incurred “serious negative damage” though what they view as “serious negative damage” may well be viewed by a skeptic as relatively trivial, or, at worst, an ordinary cost and outweighed by other benefits. When I challenge warmists to enumerate the most serious of the damages experienced so far, I do not get answers.
Of the potential damages, sea level rise seems one of the most serious to me, but even there, some, if not much, of the potential problem arises from very long-term (Holocene scale) events that are not materially impacted by CO2 emissions.
While I have made numerous technical criticisms of work by climate scientists, I have mostly avoided commenting on policy, other than urging far better data archiving practices – a policy which many of my adversaries opposed. Needless to say, this has not prevented demonization from climate activists – a practice that obviously does not enable them to “persuade” their opponents and critics. Quite the opposite. In my experience, more “skeptics” are born from poor conduct by climate scientists than from the eloquence of earlier skeptics.
Scott Adams wrote a pots on his blog yesterday
As long as he wasn’t writing on pot.
Fixed, thanks.
It improves imagination. But that is only half. You then have to do verification. To confirm the dots you have connected are actually connected.
I would say it changes imagination. Whether that change is an improvement or not probably depends on the individual. Certainly THEY think it’s an improvement, but the people staring at them probably don’t.
I too keep asking what harm has been done to date by an increase in CO2 from 285 ppm to 400 ppm in 166 years, if indeed those figures are accurate. I get sea level rise, which hasn’t accelerated, melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which hasn’t accelerated, retreat of glaciers, which is hit or miss and not necessarily bad, and extreme weather, which isn’t happening.
Nor can any catastrophic consequences follow from reasonable expectations of a warmer future, ie at “worst” 1.5 to 2.0 degrees warming above AD 1850, as opposed to the 1.5 to 4.5 imagined in IPCC, which is science fiction in its upper half, at least.
OTOH, the benefits of higher CO2 are many. More plant food in the air has greened the planet, which is good for vegetation and other living things.
“… which is science fiction in its upper half, at least.”
No, it’s NOT SciFi – it’s Fantasy!
I stand corrected. Fantastic fiction, then. And not in a good way.
CO2 is plant food and if it goes to low plants die then plants die then animals then everyone
So does this make Warmists the Fiction Faction?
Not fantasy — fanatasy. Involving fanatwas against infidels.
I get the sea level argument but nobody has done a global costed outline plan to mitigate it over the next 200 years by moving populations if things start to get near to dangerous. Similarly nobody is significantly stopping building in coastal flood plains or building flood proof properties.
Much of the Netherlands used to be below sea level. So did a lot of Britain.
Sea level has risen since WWII at about the same rate it did in the early 20th and 19th centuries, after the end of the LIA. Due to the hurricanes of the 1930s to ’50s, Providence, RI, built a surge barrier. Had NYC done the same, Sandy wouldn’t have caused so much damage, the cost of which exceeded the expense of such a barrier. But NY objected to the possible environmental effects of the project.
Most coastal cities can deal with MSL rise continuing as it has done. Should for any reason its rate accelerate, then there will be time to adjust. Maybe NYC will become a giant Venice, with the bottom floors of its skyscrapers under water. Or like Dutch cities, surrounded by dams, dykes, gates and flood walls.
New Orleans however might have to return to its original, limited location on the highest ground along that stretch of the Mississippi, the French Quarter or Vieux Carré.
I, for one, do not accept the sea level argument at all.
2000 years ago the Biblical city of Ephesus used to be a seaport, now its ruins reside at least two miles inland. Apparently, over the years, a nearby river filled its harbor with silt and rendered it useless as such. Can it be said that the sea level has been rising for the Ephesians?
Likewise, Thermopylae (recently featured in the movie 300) was a narrow path between the ocean and some mountains where an epic battle was fought between the Greeks and the Persians. Today, the location is a considerable distance inland, once again being filled in by the silt of a nearby river. The whole point of the battle between the Greeks and the Persians was that this narrow path was the only way into Greece – if the battle were to take place today the Persians could simply drop down to lower ground and circumvent Leonidas and his Spartans. Has the sea level been rising for Thermopylae?
Recently, I heard that the continent of Australia has been “moving” over 2.7 inches a year. Here is an article from none other than National Geographic:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/australia-moves-gps-coordinates-adjusted-continental-drift/
How can anyone seriously say with all the rivers, volcanoes (creating islands, and thus displacement of water), and continental drift, that miniscule changes in sea level are due to an increase in CO2? Remember, the Atlantic and the Pacific don’t even match up in Panama. The sea levels are different on each side of the isthmus.
2000 years ago was the time of the Roman Climate Optimum and was warmer than now so there was obviously more Greenland Meltwater and Antarctic Meltwater in the oceans with the potential for sea levels being multiple meters higher. This could also account for the apparent coastal zone increast today as more water is still locked up in ice than was then. Including an additional 6 or 7 meters of water in the oceans would definitely move the coast line much closer to it’s historic positions.
Bryan and Freedom,
Sirs, you don’t even need to go back that far. Medieval castles by the sea are now inland, as well.
Even in Wales, which is sinking along with the rest of southern Britain, thanks to Scotland rebounding from being freed of its weight of ice, Harlech Castle no longer can be accessed from the sea. The Medieval Warm Period was seriously cozy.
Its seaside position was one reason why during the Wars of the Roses, Lancastrian stronghold Harlech withstood the longest known siege, immortalized in song, as is typical for events among the great choral Welsh (standard lyrics changed for the movie “Zulu”):
I’d have linked the Charlotte Church’s version in Welsh, recorded when she was a girl, but now that as a woman she imagines climate changed caused the war in Syria, I’d rather not. However, it is even more stirring in Welsh than in the invaders’ heathen gibberish.
Heck, maybe both Boer Wars and the Zulu War were caused by climate change, too, as the world warmed up coming out of the LIA.
Good to hear Men of Harlech, It’s been a long time since I sang it with the choir at the Eisteddfodau!
The version we sang (in English) was:
Men of Harlech!
In the Hollow,
Do ye hear like rushing billow
Wave on wave that surging follow
Battle’s distant sound?
Tis the tramp of Saxon foemen,
Saxon spearmen, Saxon bowmen,
Be they knights or hinds or yeomen,
They shall bite the ground!
Loose the folds asunder,
Flag we conquer under!
The placid sky now bright on high,
Shall launch its bolts in thunder!
Onward! ’tis the country needs us,
He is bravest, he who leads us
Honor’s self now proudly heads us,
Freedom, God and Right!
Of course it sounds much better in Welsh as you say, even a nursery rhyme sounds intimidating to the English when sung by the crowd at the Arms Park.
No surprise that Wales crushed England after this:
Phil,
Indeed intimidating.
One wonders how the Anglo-Saxons and Normans managed to take most of south Britain away from the Welsh. Maybe they got soft under the Romans.
But the Welsh were often later allied with the English, as against the invading Norse. Pity there were no Welsh yew wood bowmen with Harold at Hastings, or Saxon and Welshman both might have been spared the Norman Conquest.
The English there had the best heavy infantry in Europe, but lacked light infantry and any cavalry at all. They used ponies as transport to hasten their trip to Sussex (or Kent) from Yorkshire after their victory at Stamford Bridge against the Norwegians, but horses weren’t a Saxon battlefield arm.
Against them was arrayed the most advanced, combined arms force in the world, consisting of heavy cavalry for shock action on the battlefield, light horse for scouting, screening, skirmishing and pursuit of a broken enemy and light infantry archers, but not much in the way of old-fashioned, shield-wall heavy infantry, which is all the English had, great though it was. Especially the royal house carls, armed with the fearsome Dane axe.
Welsh archers to provide the light infantry element could have swung the battle. Despite William’s heavy horse, the day was decided by one of his archers, whose arrow penetrated Harold Godwinson’s eye.
PS: I find Men of Harlech more intimidating to opponents and morale boosting for the Welsh side than the national anthem, but maybe that’s just I, not the songs.
Looks as though it’s Scotland’s fault.
Chimp, why did you sing it in English? Oh, I see, you can’t speak Welsh. I find national pride…interesting.
On the subject of Men of Harlech, I confess I get more enjoyment from this parody version which gives us yet another reason for believing the climate was considerably warmer in the past.
THE WOAD ODE or SONG OF THE ANCIENT BRITONS
What’s the use of wearing braces?
Vests and pants and boots with laces?
Spats and hats you buy in places
Down the Brompton Road?
What’s the use of shirts of cotton?
Studs that always get forgotten?
These affairs are simply rotten,
Better far is woad.
Woad’s the stuff to show men.
Woad to scare your foemen.
Boil it to a brilliant hue
And rub it on your back and your abdomen.
Ancient Briton ne’er did hit on
Anything as good as woad to fit on
Neck or knees or where you sit on.
Tailors you be blowed!
Romans came across the channel
All dressed up in tin and flannel.
Half a pint of woad per man’ll
Dress us more than these.
Saxons you can waste your stitches
Building beds for bugs in britches
We have woad to clothe us which is
Not a nest for fleas.
Romans keep your armours,
Saxons your pyjamas!
Hairy coats were made for goats,
Gorillas, yaks, retriever dogs and llamas
Tramp up Snowdon with your woad on,
Never mind if you get rained or snowed on
Never want a button sewed on.
Go it Ancient B’s!
@ Bryan A December 6, 2016 at 2:26 pm
Yet in more recent times there are many places along the South coast of UK where castles and buildings once on the beach are now miles from the sea. Nothing is static about ‘solid ground’ which itself moves with the tides and the sea is not a flat ‘sea level’. The claims of sea level measurement – globally – accurate to millimeters is like ‘global average temperature’ – meaningless. In the same way that the average phone number is mathematically correct and could be with a precision to many decimal places – but is totally meaningless.
I recall reading about a Roman port in England that is now inland, a few miles away from the coast. I cannot remember its name, though. any help (besides eating raisins)?
bazzer1959 December 7, 2016 at 12:50 am
Chimp, why did you sing it in English? Oh, I see, you can’t speak Welsh. I find national pride…interesting.
I don’t think Chimp said he sang it, that was me. We sang it in either language, depending on the event. When I was growing up in Wales many schools did not teach welsh and government forms were not available in welsh, you couldn’t get your birth certificate in welsh for example. This was part of an english campaign to extirpate the welsh language starting about a century before, my grandparents’ and parents’ generations were punished for speaking welsh in class for example, look up the ‘welsh not’. In the 60’s there was a large protest campaign led by Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Party) to reverse this and reintroduce welsh in government business, signage etc. which was successful.
Cymru am byth!
Add to the list of inland harbors the Cinque Ports on the SE coast of medieval England.
bazzer1959
December 7, 2016 at 12:50 am
I’m not Welsh. But I admire bravery and yearning for liberty and independence among any group.
While mainly of English, Scottish, German and Swiss ancestry, I have little more love for the Normans than do the Welsh, until finally under the usurper Henry IV, the late Plantagenets became more English and less French. Of course his son, the infamous war criminal but native Welshman Henry V nevertheless ruthlessly put down Glendower’s revolt.
Ian H
December 7, 2016 at 1:12 am
Funny!
But I have to wonder just how often the ancient Britons went around dressed only in blue paint, even given the Roman Warm Period.
urederra
December 7, 2016 at 3:42 am
Possibly this famous site:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richborough_Castle
See also Richie’s comment.
From the Wiki entry, citing two sources:
“Excavations carried out in late 2008 of a 90 m (300 ft) section of Roman wall uncovered the original Roman Coastline along with the remains of a Medieval Dock. The discovery and excavation of the beach itself has pinpointed its geographical relationship to the site’s earthworks, proving that the earthworks were a beachhead defence, protecting around 700 m (2,300 ft) of coast. The site is now two and half miles inland from the current coastline.”
Again, all the more remarkable given that south Britain is sinking as Scotland rebounds from losing its ice load.
Speaking of singing in Welsh, the first time I heard “Men of Harlech” wasn’t in “Zulu”, but over the credits for my mom’s fav flick, “How Green Was My Valley”, in which Irish-American director John Ford moved across the Irish Sea but still within the Celtic Fringe:
Building a curb in 100 years is probably doable.
Except, Chimp, the rate of sea level rise is expected to increase..
UK extreme weather now sees annual flood events at the level considered ‘1 in 100 years’ pre-2000 and that’s accompanied by storms and storm surge.
UK coasts are already suffering from climate change.
Freedom Monger wrote, “2000 years ago the Biblical city of Ephesus used to be a seaport, now its ruins reside at least two miles inland. Apparently, over the years, a nearby river filled its harbor with silt and rendered it useless as such. Can it be said that the sea level has been rising for the Ephesians?”
Yes, F.M., I’ve been to Ephesus. In fact, I’ve listened to a sermon in their famous Theater while sitting on a stone block, presumably cut by the Romans, which was probably previously warmed by the butts of people listening to sermons, delivered in the same place, by one Paul of Tarsus. Cool, eh?
We were told what you were told, F.M.: that the city, a former harbor town, was abandoned, and the residents relocated closer to the shore, due to silting in of the harbor. The new town, the successor to Ephesus, is called Selçuk. The Ephesus of 2000 years ago is now several miles(!) inland.
Bryan A replied, “2000 years ago was the time of the Roman Climate Optimum and was warmer than now so there was obviously more Greenland Meltwater and Antarctic Meltwater in the oceans with the potential for sea levels being multiple meters higher.”
I don’t think so, Bryan. There’s no evidence that, globally, sea-level was dramatically higher 19 to 20 centuries ago than it is now. The RWP might have been a bit warmer than the current climate optimum (nobody knows for sure), but probably not by much, and the RWP had been going on for only about 300 years when Paul was in Ephesus. If sea-level rose during the RWP at the current globally averaged rate of 1.5 mm/yr, then in 300 years that would come to only about 18 inches of sea level rise.
Of the subsequent almost 2000 years, approximately half of the time has been during warm periods: ~400 additional years of the RWP, plus about 400 years of Medieval Climate Optimum, and about 150 years of the current modern climate optimum. It is hard to imagine how that record of half warm years and half cold years could have caused an enormous drop in sea-level.
Griff wrote, “…the rate of sea level rise is expected to increase..”
Such expectations are the product of superstition, not science.
There’s only one reason proposed to support the prediction hat the rate of sea-level rise might accelerate: because of the hypothesis that increased GHG levels (mainly CO2 and CH4) cause increased rates of sea-level rise. But that hypothesis has been tested and disproved.
We’ve done the experiment, and we’ve seen the results. We’ve already measured the effect on sea-level rise of a >30% increase in atmospheric CO2, accompanied by a doubling of CH4.
Those increases had no detectable effect on SLR. None at all. Sea level is rising no faster now with CO2 above 400 ppmv, than it was 85 years ago with CO2 under 310 ppmv.
Here’s a graph of sea-level juxtaposed with CO2 level, from a very high quality measurement record elsewhere in the Pacific:
http://bit.ly/2gvOb40
As you can see, the anthropogenic increase in CO2 has caused no increase in the rate of sea-level rise.
Not a scientist, but just wondering if “greening” is a negative feedback from high atmospheric levels of CO2. As the earth’s vegetation increases, as it apparently has because of higher CO2 levels, doesn’t that mean more CO2 gets absorbed by these growing plants. In addition, don’t these plants also absorb water, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In addition, land with vegetation also absorbs and holds water far better than land without vegetation, especially as some vegetation dies off creating humus, which, as every gardener knows, helps soil to retain water.
I think that’s a reasonable way to describe it. CO2 was drawn down to dangerously low levels (180 ppm) by plant life itself and marine species sequestering it in their shells – life was nearly extinguished by life itself!
As to water, a plant loses about 100 molecules of H2O by transpiration in “capturing” one molecule of CO2. Higher CO2 means that plants operate more efficiently in drier conditions. So I think the water cycle is a bit more complex in this context, than a simple “negative feedback”. You may be interested in Patrick Moore’s take on this
Transcript – http://www.thegwpf.org/patrick-moore-should-we-celebrate-carbon-dioxide/
Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0Z5FdwWw_c
Ronald, Your observations point to a plan or design, an Intelligent Designer perhaps!
Exactly, Mr. Abate. “Negative feedback” is an inherent response from a stable system when one of its external conditions changes. The system responds in such a way as to counter the changed condition. This phenomenon is formalized in Le Chatelier’s Principle, which says just that – systems respond to external changes so as to reduce the external change.
In the case of the biosphere, it’s responded to increased CO2 by growing more, bigger and faster.
On the other hand, positive feedback is a characteristic of unstable systems. The alarmist argument is that the small amount of atmospheric warming that should result from increased CO2 will cause more evaporation of water from the earth’s surface, hence more water vapour will be in the atmosphere, which (water vapour being another GHG), will cause more warming, which will cause more evaporation, and so on and so on, blah blah blaah until the oceans boil, the land burns, we all die and life on earth goes back to a handful of single-cell organisms. The sceptic stance is to say, the atmosphere doesn’t appear to be an unstable system – it’s been around for a few billion years and hasn’t gone off in a runaway feedback loop yet, so it must be a stable system.
Assuming that the atmosphere is a stable system, its response to increased evaporation caused by the modest warming to be expected from increased CO2 is likely to be – more condensation of the increased water vapour, leading to more clouds, higher albedo, more infra-red from the sun being reflected into space, hence cooling to offset the initial warming. Also, evaporation cools the surface and condensation warms the upper atmosphere which then can radiate more heat out to space. All this is standard sceptic argument, nothing original here. It’s so logical that only someone out of touch with reality, blinded by propaganda – and with no knowledge of earth history – can fail to appreciate it.
I knew about the impact that more water vapor could have on cloud formation. In addition, it appears that the sunspot activity of the sun may also impact cloud formation through the sun’s ability to either increase or decrease cosmic galactic rays from reaching the earth and seeding clouds. This is being studied at CERN. I don’t expect definitive results for a while. It will continue to be studied until the funding dries up.
It seems to me that the greening “negative feedback” should have been known to the climate modelers, but as far as I can tell was not. On the other hand, knowing about it but not including it in the climate models would be consistent with only using feedbacks that make the case for alarmism. Science is definitely broken, corrupted by both money and ideology. It’s not only climate science that has been corrupted. Many other fields of study have also been corrupted. A very interesting book “The Rightful Place of Science: Science on the Verge” documents the problems. John Ioannides has written about the problems of shoddy and biased research as it pertains to medical and biomedical research.
Thanks for your comment.
http://redirect.jango.com/ad=pid_azlyrics_aid_jangoplayer/www.jango.com/music/BLUE%20OYSTER%20CULT/O.D.’d%20On%20Life%20Itself
OD’d on life, life itself
OD’d on life, life itself
OD’d on life, life itself
OD’d on life, life itself
Mods, the url got munged, if you can fix it, if you get a chance.
Yes, Ronald, “greening” is, indeed, an important negative (stabilizing) feedback mechanism: The higher CO2 levels climb in the atmosphere, the faster plants consume it:
http://www.sealevel.info/feedbacks.html#greening
micro6500, I think this is what you intended:
http://www.jango.com/music/Blue+Oyster+Cult/O+D+d+On+Life+Itself/
On the news yesterday in Australia, record grain harvests across the board. Normally great news but now just good news because record harvests have been happening in the northern hemisphere also, so we have a bit of a glut happening. Climate catastrophe?
Actually – overplanting.
@NW sage – Actually crop ‘yields’ have more to do with production sizes than the amount of sowing. For sowing to have increased significantly there would have to be more land area dedicated to cropping. We know this is not the case because we would have heard of massive land clearing (or re-assignment). Farmers (at least in Aus.) for the most part understand the dynamics of what the land can take and when to give it a rest. OK, so how do production sizes increase? Mostly due to a number of factors, most of which has to do with the timing of sowing to rainfall, then the balance of sunshine to rain throughout the season. Over-sowing would simply create competition between individual plants and hence have an adverse affect on the yield. So ergo, I would be a little sceptical of the idea that increased yield had more to do with over-sowing rather than simply good land and farming management tossed together with seasonal fortune.
The increase in CO2 levels has also helped to increase crop yields.
More info here:
http://www.sealevel.info/resources.html#plants2
Neche, North Dakota, high temperature forecast one week hence is negative 8 F. But, I ain’t arguing the subject because here in the High Desert the actual temps are above normal. Most of the time (270 days this year +-) I live in an off road trailer, somewhere off road and the heat I get I make. Mountain High has problems with snow making but, Mt. Baldy doesn’t. Mt Baldy adapted.
Mitch Schliebs
Here in Saskatchewan where Nov was cited as the warmest ever (I doubt it but let’s pretend), in practical terms it meant my furnace was not running full bore burning natural gas. Isn’t that a good thing!
Also the higher CO2 level reduces the use of water by the plants.
“In my experience, more “skeptics” are born from poor conduct by climate scientists than from the eloquence of earlier skeptics.”
Best summary of the current situation I have seen for a long time!
If Steyn v. Mann and Mann v. Steyn ever go to trial, the publicity will be priceless. And Steyn intends that they do.
We all owe Steyn our thanks and there’s nothing I’d like better than to see him prevail in court. I bought a couple of his books to support the cause.
That’s what I should have done, instead of donating to his and the National Review’s case. Now I get emails from NR.
It’s Christmas. Might be time to do some shopping on Steyn’s ( http://www.steynonline.com/ )”Steyn Store”?
Gunga,
Excellent suggestion.
Spread the holiday cheer via a genuinely funny, highly intelligent and wonderfully brave writer.
I bet Steyn & Trump would hit it off. Hmm. ..
Roger,
I’m betting that Ivanka won’t want to arrange that meeting.
Spot on
Al Gore has been the top skeptic progenitor from the elitist politico category.
This is what Al Gore is up to:
From Climate Reality Project, India
“One month after the Paris Agreement enters into force, former US Vice President Al Gore will host 24 Hours of Reality: The Road Forward and will bring together millions of people to spend 24 hours focusing on the most important issue of our time.
This year, we’ll visit the top 24 CO2-emitting nations around the world and look at how climate change is impacting each nation, their commitments under the Paris Agreement, and the potential for change and solutions in each country.
Join us on December 5-6 with special focus on India on December 6th from 3:30 to 4:30 PM. Don’t miss India broadcast focused on making solutions to the climate crisis a reality.”
This broadcast was telecast by WION ( recently launched TV channel in India )
Millions of people? That would be several orders of magnitude more than he managed last time.
This is true. I became skeptical after sitting through 3 hours of Climate Change training at work.
I discovered I was a skeptic when “An Inconvenient Truth” showed up at our local theatre. It was obviously propaganda. How did I know? It begged the question without even waiting for people to enter and sit down. The marquee said, in essence: “This is true. You have to believe it.” I never went to see it.
When that pack of lies came out, I took every opportunity to tell people that it was not “science”, as so many erroneously imagined.
For me it was watching in horror as the MWP and the LIA vanished via Mikey Mann’s devious manipulations. As a geologist studying the Holocene and Quaternary, I KNEW his hockey stick was bogus. I wrote a column about the poor science of AGW and a reader generously sent me a brand new copy of An Inconvenient Truth, advising that I read it. To this day it remains pristine and unread, a testament to the general stupidity and credulousness of the general public. Someday I may have it bronzed for use as a door stop….
PMK
Historians also knew the Hockey Stick was a horse puck.
I was already a sceptic about everything, having gone through enough “experts” telling us about overpopulation, diet, acid rain, cancer cures, extinctions, the hole in the ozone and so on.
But for climate change, its my simple rule for all science – if you won’t release all the data and all the workings, you are probably a fraud.
For me, it was at three-step process:
Step 1. By happenstance or serendipity I stumbled across a NOAA web page listing 159 tide stations around the world, with each site’s linear sea-level trends and confidence intervals, in a nice grid. I was surprised that the trends appeared to be all over the place, and quite a few of them were negative. I wondered what the average was, so I scrolled to the end and was surprised a second time: no average was shown.
“Well, that’s strange,” I thought. “Someone went to the great trouble to do regression analysis on 159 different sea-level measurement datasets, yet they didn’t bother to calculate the average! I wonder why not?”
But life is busy, and I went on with my day. As Churchill wrote, apparently about me, though before I was born, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry on as if nothing happened.” (paraphrased)
Step 2. Climategate! I was shocked and outraged by the emails exchanged between top climate scientists, about hiding and manipulating data & inconvenient results, to promote a political agenda, at the expense of scientific integrity.
Step 3. By happenstance or serendipity, almost exactly seven years ago, on the night of Dec. 9, 2009, though I rarely watched television, I turned on the set and channel-surfed across David Letterman on the Late Show, introducing James Hansen, who was hawking his then-new book. That sounded interesting, so I paused there.
I listened to Hansen repeat the often-heard claim that the oceans were rising at 1.8 mm/year for the past century or so, but that the rate of rise had recently almost doubled. I thought to myself, “I wonder if they fudged that, too?”
I remembered that NOAA web page of Mean Sea Level (MSL) changes for 159 locations around the globe. I cynically wondered if the reason there was no averaged rate of sea-level rise at the bottom of that page was that the average was inconvenient?
So I went to noaa.gov, found the page again, and downloaded it. I expected to spend an hour or so hacking the HTML into a .csv file, which I could load into Excel. But it turned out that wasn’t necessary, because the web page was actually an exported Excel spreadsheet, which loaded directly into Excel 2003.
The amount of sea level change varied drastically, from one location to another. The greatest change was a 3 foot decline in MSL (over 124 years) for Vaasa, Finland. The greatest increase in MSL was a 2.1 foot rise in MSL (over 99 years) for Galveston, TX.
I used Excel to calculate the average and median of the rates of sea-level rise. Guess what? Neither was anywhere near the claimed 1.8 mm/year.
The median was just 1.1 mm/year, or 39% lower than the claimed 1.8 mm/year.
The average was even lower, around 0.6 mm/year, or only about 1/3 of the claimed 1.8 mm/year.
No wonder there was no average shown on NOAA’s web page!
And that is how I embarked on my journey of discovery.
.
P.S. – Just now I searched for the Dec. 9, 2009 interview of Dr. James Hansen by David Letterman, and I found it on YouTube. But it appears to be incomplete, because there’s no mention of the supposed 1.8 mm/yr rate of sea level rise, which I very distinctly remember.
Google “SOKBOFLhgqM” if you want to hear the abbreviated version which I found. One interesting bit is at 7:25, when you can hear Hansen confidently predict that melting ice sheets will keep northern latitude oceans cool, while the tropics warm, with the result that the “increasing temperature gradient is going to drive stronger storms.”
Of course, these days “everybody knows” the opposite: that “Polar Amplification” is expected to cause temperatures to rise faster at higher latitudes. Some people also know that non-linear negative feedbacks limit warming in the tropics. But have you ever heard Hansen, or any other leading climate alarmist, speculate that the reduced temperature gradient might reduce extreme weather?
That’s how I became skeptical as distinct from just curious. I watched a nationally televised opening address at a formal event at a ‘sandstone’ (Australian = ‘brownstone’) university presentation where a professor of microbiology (a Nobel laureate), deliberately and calculatingly smeared a professor of geology as a ‘denier’ (by invoking the Holocaust of a powerpoint slide) while a professor of climate science (an IPCC co author of Jewish background no less) sat behind him with a smug look on his face.
I had a WTF moment as this perfect composition of what was really going on played out and I bought the professor of geology’s next book. The utter lack of ethical and moral character of the ‘smearers’ was crystal clear. The technical arguments one way or the other are immaterial when the credibility of witnesses is brought to the fore. Mann’s ‘hockey stick’, ‘hide the decline’ and ‘Nature trick’ come to mind and the flow on lack of credibility to the pack rat, rent boys at University of East Anglia puts a very large hole in that whole line about ‘unprecedented warming’. Game over about there for mine. Hansen and co are just whipped up cream on that cake, Al Gore being the cherry.
Being from a branch of physical engineering ( i.e. as distinct from electrickery engineering) the rest of the journey has been pretty straightforward. A fraud revealed is worth a thousand technical arguments. Its a bit like finding some you thought could be trusted taking $5 from your wallet. The knowledge that your erstwhile ‘friend’ is a thief is well worth the $5 or even a lot more.
Line by line I read through the entire “harry_read_me” file in total amazement.
The way harry handled the temperature data and code I now think he might be related to Peter Gleick.
The straw for me was that The Team didn’t care.
They didn’t care how they treated people either.
That’s why an effective lecture or video against warmism should focus on such “stretchers.” (e.g., the redefinition of sea level as oceanic volume.) The audience will have the same reaction.
The second focus on such lectures aimed at the public should be on failed or exaggerated predictions.
The third focus should be on bad behavior, like shutting out a skeptical polar bear scientist from a meeting of such, or the AGU’s refusal to print a minority report as its constitution mandated.
Leave the technical stuff out. Those three focuses could fill a two-hour talk.
Electrickery engineering at the hardware level is as solid as mechanical engineering. There are laws. Violation is impossible.
The speed of light is fundamental. You can’t get past 1 ns per foot. And a lot of times things are a bit slower.
Two more foci:
4. The poor performance—below what was promised—and higher direct and indirect costs of renewables than what was promised in the countries that have gone furthest with them.
5. Warmists’ refusal to debate.
“In my experience, more “skeptics” are born from poor conduct by climate scientists than from the eloquence of earlier skeptics.”
That is exactly my take as well. I first started reading the late lamented John Daly’s blog, then found the other great resources on WUWT’s blogroll (with a special affinity for fellow Torontonian Mr. McIntyre.)
Most skeptics certainly seem nicer than most warmists, particularly the professional ones. Way more patient at least.
I have a background in statistics (healthcare), so I’m not totally asea on many of these discussions. But I don’t think you need to be an expert to understand how little true knowledge we have of past climate.
BTW, I actually ran a government office Freedom of Information unit for a while. I can tell you that if I ever had a hint that anyone in my organization was saying what some climate scientists said in the Climategate emails, I would have dropped a dime on them. Soonest.
“Needless to say, this has not prevented demonization from climate activists – a practice that obviously does not enable them to “persuade” their opponents and critics.”
This is a very true observation of the main difference between climate alarmists (and leftist activists in general) and their opponents: The latter may ridicule green zealots like Hansen or Mann as stupid or ideology-driven “Chicken little” but will never demonize them as evil people (apart from some rather seldom exceptions).
But left-leaning activists are very quick to condemn their adversaries to be very bad humans or at least to be corrupt thugs or insane conspiracy dimwits. In fact, these sorts of “ad hominem” attacks are their main weapons in the AGW debate.
What does this difference tell us about the psychology of both sides?
“What does this difference tell us about the psychology of both sides?”
It tells me the right is ruled by reason, and the left is ruled by emotion.
A claim which would invoke a very emotional reaction on the part of most leftists.
TA,
I’ve found that to be generally true.
Agreed! Makes one wonder how good their argument is when we catch them lying, covering up, withholding data and attacking the careers of good people who disagree. Regularly!
This all has a distinct anti-scientific undertone.
Remember, folks, science is defined as “the belief in the knowledge of experts.”
Sorry, that’s not a valid definition of science – more likely the defintion of Cargo Cult. But maybe I’m too old fashioned. I was trained to follow the scientific methode – “Beliving” belongs to the religious domain and is (was?) considered the ultimate sin for any scientist back in the bad old days.
Dr Bongers,
Science has moved on from the “bad old days.” As anathematous as you may find it, Professor Rice of Edinburgh University—a guy who’s paid a heckload of money to teach science—agrees with that definition. It’s a theme echoed by Naomi Oreskes, Professor of Majority Opinion In The Earth Sciences at a little institution you may have heard of (Harvard University ring a bell?), whose discussion of scientific epistemology states that ‘what counts as knowledge [in science] is the ideas accepted by the fellowship of experts.’
Please list your published peer-reviewed articles on the scientific method, published alt-history novels, and longest continuous period of employment by Harvard as a teacher of how science works. Have you ever been refused an interview by Harvard University, and in what circumstances? Have you ever been refused a loan, and in what circumstances?
Dear Mr. Keyes,
One does not need to have published any papers at all to refute your flimsy argument. The logical fallacy (a question, by the way, settled long ago by finer minds than yours or mine), argumentum ad verecundiam, has no meaningful substance outside religion. Even in religion, it is not used as a substitute for rational thought. Authority is appealed to there only in matters which cannot be, ultimately, proven. Religious belief based on the goodness (including veracity), opportunity to know, and proven wisdom of an authority figure is not irrational, but, non-rational.
Your use of appeal to authority in the field of scienter, or knowledge, is irrational.
You have cited no rational basis for your conclusions about AGW at all.
Your “evidence:”
1) That a certain man employed to teach science at a fine university makes a good deal of money at it.
2) That a certain author worked for Harvard University.
3) That the above two people said AGW was so.
Your argument, by the way, is not with me or with Mr. Bongers. It is with all genuine scientists. It is with Robert Carter and Harold Lewis and Richard Feynman, et al..
Scientific Method in a Nutshell — Richard Feynman
It doesn’t make any difference ….. who made the guess, or what his name is….
Sincerely,
Janice Moore
Janice,
Brad’s style is to be sarcastic and stay in character in all subsequent comments.
It’s his way of puncturing the preposterous positions of the CACA faithful. It’s fun to play along.
Okay, Chimp. If you say so. (heh)
Thank you for the caveat. Lest the attempts at humor of Mr. Keyes deceive the unwary, however, I will continue to refute his nonsense.
Brad Keys,
Nor is anyone required to have a degree in the subject to be a scientist. We are all scientists, every babe in arms is a scientist and learns by asking questions. A qualification is merely evidence that one has studied a particular scientific subject.
Scientific Faux pas:
“…splitting the atom by bombardment is something akin to shooting birds in the dark in a place where there are only a few birds…There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.”
ALBERT EINSTEIN, PHYSICIST
1934
“My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men find that in one instant whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.”
ALFRED NOBEL, CHEMIST
c. 1868
“How a continent composed of rock some 35 kilometers thick could contrive to move is something that has never been explained, and until some plausible reason is offered in its support we need scarcely take the notion of ‘drifting continents’ at all seriously.”
FRED HOYLE, ASTROPHYSICIST
1955
Learned men? Or dogmatic “experts” so full of their own pomposity they condemn the efforts of other to further the cause of science. Thankfully, Michael Mann will never join them in notoriety because the only scientific ‘discovery’ he made was a criminally distorted piece of junk he should be jailed for.
Thankfully, no one listened to the 3 examples I gave, but at least they had success before making their silly observations, unlike Mann.
Your definition of science would have the human race stopped in its tracks were we to listen to ‘experts’.
Janice Moore
December 6, 2016 at 1:34 pm
He’s probably happy to have you do it.
But his rewording of Feynman’s famous quotation is a dead giveaway.
Typically one should not take half of what one generally thinks Brad is saying seriously and the other half is unreliable.
“Sorry, that’s not a valid definition of science – more likely the defintion of Cargo Cult….”
…says the people who apparently get their science from the blog of a cartoonist. ROFL.
Poor climate gullibilists. You have no credibility filter* at all, do you?
Last but not least, I ask everyone to kindly stop accusing me of pulling off some sort of brilliant parodic hoax the likes of which even Andy Kaufman would have admired in awe, had he been capable of getting his intellect around its various layers of irony and indirection. That’s the kind of tactic worthy of my Doppelgänger, but not me.
*The useful concept of a credibility filter was suggested to me by the skeptical scientist John Cook at his website.
Exactly, Chimp.
I’m both amused and at the same time a little dismayed that his style is missed . . or perhaps dismissed.
The terror and hilarity is only increased by his insistence on remaining in character.
I recall his starting up CLIMATE NUREMBERG a few years ago.
Someone may correct me but I recall it was in response to John Cook dressing up in that SS uniform.
People were invited to post but the expectation was that posts be supportive of the “cause”.
Anyone that deviated from the “correct” narrative was m0derated in-line to correct their obviously flawed thinking.
As I say . . hilarious.
Dear Mr. Keyes,
sorry for taking so long to grok your kind of humor. It’s great once you get used to it. And you are perfectly right about my “credibility filter” – i would even belief the village idiot in case he would support my preconceived opinion that Bielefeld is not real.
PS: “… Naomi Oreskes, Professor of Majority Opinion In The Earth Sciences …”
I love that one!
Brad is yanking your chain Henning.
We live in an age where I am not the only who really needs people who are being sarcastic to enclose their comments in sarcasm tags.
Numberwatch currator John Brignell argues that I should be able to distinguish sarcasm from reality. He is right. I should. I just haven’t managed to fully engage it all the time everywhere. It is one thing to grasp the sarcasm in “a modest proposal”. In a comment thread full of names going back and forth from serious, to data driven, to discontent, to ironic, to malcontent, to arrogant ass who just wants to mess with the crowd, I stumble.
“This all has a distinct anti-scientific undertone .. Remember folks science is defined as … ”
Seems to be an example with Swiftesque ring to it.
Brad Keyes sent me to a link to the real Brad Keyes which was even more strongly Swift than he comments here.
To unravel the mess requires effort.
No, it is not. Quite the opposite.
You’re asking us to believe that Prof Ken rice, a.k.a. There’s Physics, not only doesn’t know the first thing about what science is, but believes it’s the opposite of what it actually is.
That he literally conflates science with anti-science.
A Professor.
At Edinburgh University.
Who’s paid to teach science.
In a school of science.
Call me a skeptic, but that pushes the envelope of plausibility a bit too far.
He’s a professor, and you’re not! Therefore, consensus!
Skeptical heretic witch-burnings to commence forthwith. To help forestall the coming cold.
Dear Mr. Keyes,
I do not know where your quoted material (the part you put in italics in your comment just above) came from, but, if “Prof Ken rice” asserts that human CO2 is known, i.e., that there is evidence of causation, to in any way cause climate shifts on earth, then he is wrong.
Whether he is:
1) incompetent
2) insane
3) lying
is for you to decide.
The evidence (CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED. for one piece), i.e., data, proves him to be wrong.
Sincerely,
Janice Moore
P.S. I think, I may be wrong, but, I think I detect the tiniest chink in your ad verecundium armor through which you might, in a receptive mood, consider listening to an eloquent and highly knowledgeable scientist about why Mr. Rice is mistaken. In case I’m right, here you go:
“Believing in Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, and Climate Models” — Dr. Christopher Essex
(youtube)
Best wishes to you in your genuine pursuit of science facts.
Too bad there are no warmist experts, as experts are able to make predictions that are valid and provide arguments that cannot be dismissed. Scientific Expertness is determined by ability to provide theories that can explain phenomena upon which everyone can agree. The only agreement amongst all climatologists is that CO2 CAN (not necessarily WILL) cause an increase in Earth temperatures. How much is the what the debate SHOULD be all about, not stupid strawman arguments that falsely claim that skeptics believe that mankind has had zero effect on climate.
Global warmists who claim skeptics believe zero warming are complete and dispicable liars,
who should be sued for slander or libel.
We’ve had decades of time that can test warmist theories and we see that they have failed almost 100%. Looking at a graph of computer model predictions over the years demonstrates that their predictions are all over the place – not even remotely close to a consensus, as ridiculously claimed by warmists. Climatology as practiced by the warmists is basically junk science, incapable of explaining much of anything. It has become a politcal, not a scientific enterprise, as one can see by the plethora of ad hominems tossed about.
“Looking at a graph of computer model predictions over the years demonstrates that their predictions are all over the place – not even remotely close to a consensus, as ridiculously claimed by warmists. Climatology as practiced by the warmists is basically junk science …”
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THg6vGGRpvA –
No Certain Doom: On the Accuracy of Projected Global Average Surface Air Temperatures –
to see exactly WHY these computer models can be appropriately described as pure junk.
Brad is being sarcastic. He knows full well that Feynman famously said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”.
And what would Feynman know, Chimp?
You’re oh, so right, especially compared to that little giant, Nobel Laureate Mickey Mann!
Was Feynman really an expert, Chimp?
Yes, he was, but only in quantum physics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum computing, particle physics and nanotechnology, so why pay any attention to him? Plus of course his lectures, which form the basis of modern physics education.
But according English grad Mosher and historian Orestes, Feynman has the scientific method all wrong!
This is Brad Keyes at his teasing best. He loooves pulling people’s legs! His first quote on “Science is…” was a deliberate misquote. WUWT ought to dedicate a corner to him, but then his sneakiness would be too obvious.
Rich.
What I want to know: Is violation of Poe’s Law a misdemeanor, or a felony?
Actually feynman didn’t follow his own rules in all cases.
See the history of neutrinos.
Science. .understanding our experience..
has many methods. Feynman described one of the methods.
Look at science scientifically. It’s not a platonic ideal.
Go look. Observe.
Steven,
How about you go and explain instead of being characteristically cryptic, so as to avoid being shown incorrect?
Just how do you propose that science should be conducted, if not by stating hypotheses, then based thereupon making predictions capable of being experimentally tested and shown false?
Post-modern, government-funded, financially and ideologically-driven fake consensus “science” doesn’t count. Consensus exist for the sole purpose of being shown false.
Consensus in 1543 was that the sun goes around an immobile earth. In 1772, it was that phlogiston is responsible for combustion. Before 1867, it was that miasmas and humors caused infectious diseases. Before about 1958, it was that continents were immobile. I could multiply examples many times over.
The allegedly consensus hypothesis that most warming since whenever (pick a date) is primarily due to human activity, if it ever really were a consensus, was born falsified and is an obvious crock junk science fiction, based upon all relevant evidence. This hoax has cost untold human lives and trillions in treasure. You should be ashamed of your part in perpetrating it.
Well done, sir. I love doing this sort of thing, and I missed it.
The link you quote for this defintion contains the following statement:
“Judith, however, says that his work will probably stand the test of time better than will the AR5 assessment of equilibrium and transient climate sensitivity. Really? Firstly, the IPCC’s assessment is based on a large number of published works. Is she suggesting that his paper is really so much better than any of the others? Also, as far as I’m aware, his paper was a new statistical analysis of existing data. He didn’t – I don’t think – generate new data from which he could then estimate the climate sensitivity. He simply used existing data and determined a much lower value than that determined by others. I don’t know whether his analysis is good or not, but this is a rather surprising result.”
This comment (about a paper written by Nicholas Lewis), could easily have been made in 1906 by the best physicists of the day, who were all in agreement on the subject of Newtonian physics, about the work of that upstart patent clerk from Berne. He didn’t generate any new data, but took the data from other experiments and conducted a thought-experiment which came to a conclusion that was very much at odds with Newtownian physics. The clerk even came up with a number of individual experiments and measurements that could prove his theory wrong. People are STILL trying to falisify this theory, to this very day, by performing real, reproduceable experiments and .making real reproduceable measurments.
Subsequently, some other experimentalists discovered other phenomena (quantum physics) which are not consistent with relativity, and the physics community has been working like mad, generating data and theories to try to make the two theories work together. Maybe some day they will succeed.
The actual quote from Feynman (“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts”) still holds true for real physicists, and the people who have to use their finding to make useful stuff (e.g., engineers). It is only recently, with the upsurge in the soft “sciences” that don’t produce anything that is reproduceable or falsifiable, except useless PhDs and lots of student debt, that this quote has been turned on its head.
Yeah, that Einstein guy! He should have gone with the consensus ad he might have made something of himself!
John, I agree completely. Einstein, by all accounts, had a brilliant mind—it’s one of history’s great tragedies that he wasted it fighting against established science, not for it.
Brad,
I am glad you corrected me on your mode of posting last week. If I didn’t now read all your posts as sarcasm I would have tried to argue with you.
Though I would add that what you listed is the definition of Climate Science™
Brad your reference is to your own quote in another blog – repeating does not make it true. Don’t put scientists on a pedestal, making them the new priests of our age. My experience in research has found many base needs from tenure to grants to fame that produced questionable data and even more questionable interpretations. 1. Look for independently sourced data that points in the same direction ie RSS, UAH and radiosonde. 2. Listen to experts interpret the data and do the summary with your own logic and an understanding of basic principles.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts.
Richard P. Feynman
Ken who?
Brad: You have the gall – or the audacious wit – to use the fallacious ATTP blog to support a distortion of a quote from Feynman – a great scientist, the hem of whose garments Ken Rice is not fit to touch – to support a scientific consensus (which, by definition is anti-science). Then again, Ken does tend to exemplify the ignorance of experts. Then again, Rice could never master the eloquence of McIntyre (which probably explains why he never post here).
Harry: I don’t believe gall and audacious wit are mutually exclusive.
“science is defined as “the belief in the knowledge of experts.”
in which case, science cannot advance beyond banging two rocks together, because at some point that’s the only expertise man had.
Silly definition.
“Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.” http://sciencecouncil.org/about-us/our-definition-of-science/
That’s one definition of science, from, as far as I can gather, a reasonably credible source.
Feynman was being facetious.
Brad, on trusting the experts, Freeman Dyson said this:
“The people who are supposed to be experts and who claim to understand the science are precisely the people who are blind to the evidence. Those of my scientific colleagues who believe the prevailing dogma about carbon dioxide will not find Goklany’s evidence convincing. . .That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/three-wise-men-talking-climate/
Freeman Dyson: “That is to me the central mystery of climate science. It is not a scientific mystery but a human mystery. How does it happen that a whole generation of scientific experts is blind to obvious facts?”
Definitely a human mystery. Human psychology.
It is not new.
Phlogiston.
Re phlogiston,
You so not have to go back nearly that far.
By the turn of the 20th century, there was a mountain of solid evidence that the continents of the earth were not fixed in place and that, for example, Africa had once been joined to South America.
But even as recently as the 1950s, any geologist who wrote a paper that hinted of drifting continents was committing career suicide.
Going back several more decades, consider the reluctance of the “experts” to accept the germ theory of disease.
In fact, the entire history of science is a compendium of such paradigm shifts.
The difference with CAGW is that it is actual fraud, not just people being hard-headedly wrong.
Because its not unusual. For quite some years, the number of human chromosomes was stated wrongly by just about everyone because a learned expert had failed to count properly. Most scientists are researchers into the existing orthodoxy, only a few challenge it.
While it was a mystery to Freeman Dyson, Richard Lindzen was an eyewitness to the corruption of climate science. He tells all in an article, if you haven’t yet read it:
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/climate-science-was-broken/
How true Ron. Good to bump into you again—I never thanked you for your kind words last time.
You’re welcome. Of course your fortune-telling was in the pre-Trumpian era. What will you forecast now? The media is in a frenzy trying to keep up with him, and predict what he will do. I am reminded of the Scarlet Pimpernel: “They seek him here, they seek him there. Those greenies seek him everywhere.”
Ron, what do you think of me: that when the facts change, I change my predictions?
Pah! Forecasting the Facts requires integrity. The integrity not to switch horses halfway through the race.
No, my friend, everything is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen, except WORSE. (I’m like a climate scientist that way.)
Brad, I think you write in the tradition of a great Harvard mathematician.
Tom Lehrer on his friend Hen3ry (the 3 is silent):
“Like so many contemporary philosophers he especially enjoyed giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was. One particular bit of advice which I recall is something he said once before they took him away to the Massachusetts state home for the bewildered.
He said: “life is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.”
It’s always seems to me that this is precisely sort of dynamic, positive thinking that we so desperately need in these trying times of crisis and universal brouhaha.”
Ron
Ah, thank you for reminding me of Hen3ry’s immortal Identity:
If anyone still needs to understand the subtle humor of Brad Keyes, i would remind you that the actual quote is that:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts”
– Richard Feynman
Not according to Richard Feynman, no slouch himself.
Ach. Missed comment by Menicholas. I stand corrected.
Are you illustrating how “cherry-picking” works? 😉
People seem to construe your statement wrongly, almost to the point of seeming and overly intentionally reactionary. If I might be so bold, might I suggest that you start off with A Modest Proposal that all people’s who are anti-science and skeptical of the 97% of their betters have their fingers amputated and mouths sewn shut so they won’t be capable of interfering with the important work that must be done to save the planet.
My message was intended for Mr. Keyes, writing from my phone tends to be overly terse and error prone. My apologies.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” – Dr. Richard Feynman
A Nobel Laureate? That’s the most knowledgeable person you can quote? I don’t believe in the ignorance of cleverpants poindexters like Feynman, but you should, shouldn’t you?
This was exactly true of me. I could not believe what Phil Jones said to Warwick Hughes. I thought: is this a real scientist? Then I read about the trouble McIntyre had getting data from Mann. Something was wrong here. This is not how science works. ———–>>>>>>> Skeptic…
Personal journey related at CE. I was 1.5 years into 3 years researching what became ebook Gaia’s Limits. Working on food calories in 2011. Came across a deliberately (for Congress) NRDC mislabeled crop yield chart from NSF. Itself incorporating a glaringly false econometric analysis that would have flunked out an undergrad back in my day. My first post ever at Climate Etc covered the details. I was oblivious to Climategate at the time. But became a quick study. The warmunist propaganda in ‘peer review’ is worse than ever imagined. Lots of very specific irrefutable examples in the climate essays of Blowing Smoke.
It’s slowed down now, but I used to love sending people to RealClimate. It creates more skeptics than it destroys.
Ditto for me.
I started reading about global warming in 2009.
I posted a couple of what I thought were innocent questions on realclimate and was ridiculed and censored.
After I read more, and in particular Climate Audit and The Blackboard I became a Skeptic/lukewarmer.
What an eloquent summary by Adams, which sums up beautifully why so many of us have serious doubts about man-made global warming. It reveals how somebody whom — I presume — has little scientific training (maybe I’m wrong), but a great deal of intellect and intelligence, can get to the heart of the matter with clarity that is all too often clouded by too much detail and theory.
I’ve always felt that the key question about man-made global warming is actually remarkably simple: it is not whether man is responsible for some global warming, which is almost certainly true, but how much? In other words, if the theory is correct why have global temperatures failed to correlate with increasing concentrations of CO2?
A genuine scientist would look at the evidence and conclude that the theory is weak and should be re-examined. What the vast majority of climate scientists do, of course, is claim that their theory MUST be right regardless of the evidence.
Moderators. I never said that.
There are two MarkW’s on this thread each with different emails and locations. It happens.
My guess is that the MarkW who posted December 6, 2016 at 1:43pm is the real deal. The other guy needs to GET HIMSELF ANOTHER PEN NAME — since he is clearly the fence-riding newbie (having read many “MarkW” comments).
Is there no way to identify by e mail address the original MarkW, the solidly anti-AGW, prolific regular commenter whom we all enjoy reading?
@ the original MarkW — your writing style and well-informed-in-science, insights will distinguish you, but, you might need to alter your name (if WUWT can’t figure out which is which using e mails).
@ the neo-MarkW — PLEASE USE A CLEARLY DISTINCT PEN NAME.
I feel your pain, MarkW.
The Doppelgãnger problem: Climate Change’s
evil cousinugly friendidentical sister.Anthony: It shouldn’t happen.
Bloke down the pub , he obviously meant “spot” !
Just got a email from RV magazine and they have a recipe for “surf and turd” , now that puts the typo into perspective .
‘they have a recipe for “surf and turd”’
Ah, maybe another was of reducing California’s methane issue?
At least it’s not as irrational as “surd and turd.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OL6-x0modwY&w=560&h=315%5D
Say’s it all
[snip -off topic]
:”One of the things that always fascinated me about jury trials is that attorneys from both sides can sound so convincing even though the evidence points in only one direction. A defendant is either guilty or innocent, but good lawyers can make you see it either way. Climate science is similar. I’ve seen airtight arguments that say climate science is solid and true, and I’ve seen equally credible-looking arguments that say it is bunk. From my non-scientist perspective, I can’t tell the difference. Both sides look convincing to me.”
—————-
Yes it is hard for many to cut through such a given situation and circumstances……
But for as much as it could be worth, there is a “famous” call used in courts of law by lawyers:
“objection, your honor, leading the witness”
Meaning that the evidence and the witnessing is of no any validity when the witness and the evidence is lead towards a desired conclusion.,
From my point of view in science that is even more important.
If the evidence and data are lead towards a desired and wishful premeditated outcome or conclusion, than that is not valid as far as the scientific method concerned….
But that is me, and my point of view….
In principle this does not prevent any one from trying, but it also means that the one who is tempted at such as, must be prepared for and accept the consequences involved, regardless……
cheers
Before finally coming out for Trump, Adams similarly said he was for Clinton because he was afraid she would kill him, going full Vince Foster on his posterior.
Adams’ writing over the last year has been brilliant – he didn’t just predict that Trump would win, he predicted exactly how he would win and why he would win. He also has predicted quite a few things as to how he will govern, and the appointments he’s making seem to be right in line with what he has said.
In a year where almost everyone has been wrong about everything, I can’t think of anyone who has been more consistently correct about very hard predictions than Scott Adams.
I agree.
I was not sure what the heck was going on until I followed a link to Adams’ blog, and read of his prediction and reasoning.
It took me a short time to understand and believe what he was saying, but it was quickly evident he correct.
And his methodology has let me understand the insanity of the Trump haters as well.
I share his blog with all of my friends and people I meet, and can tell who has their head screwed on right by who sees Adams’ genius.
for those who haven’t been following, reading Scott Adams (and Dilbert) is a treat –
http://blog.dilbert.com/
I agree.
I’ve always enjoyed his sly, telling wit, but now he has shown himself brave as well as funny and trenchant.
Thanks for that VERY GOOD reminder, Bubba. Scott Adams has been a one-man army for truth for years (and for humor and sanity, too) via “Dilbert.”
So!
A mini-tribute to Scott Adams (and Dilbert the long-suffering engineer):
*********************************
For all things Scott Adams (and Dilbert) go to: http://dilbert.com/
Books and stuff here: https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Adams/e/B000AP9MO0
I just have to add one to Janice’s collection:
http://imgur.com/a/379Me
I’ve been following his blog for about six months and find your assessment to be dead on the money. He is very insightful.
My attitude at this point in time is that Trump is appointing people to get them out of the way. As Obama did with Hillary.
Probably my all time favourite Dilbert cartoon as it pertains to Climate Science™.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NQf68JLQuYg/Vo6lHdmzEgI/AAAAAAAAAGo/g-U_4cpyT5Q/s640/Dilbert_ExcelErrors_20160107.gif
I only have my own life to look at (which is too short for any sort of climate statement) and I can tell you that I had several very hot summers in the ’50s that have never been repeated. I can also tell you that I had two winters with some snow in the area that has never been repeated. So, based on 68 years of clweather, I can say that where I have lived, the “climate” is milder than it was in the ’50s and ’60s.
It is like looking at the sky and seeing how much cleaner it is and looking at some rivers and how much cleaner they are and then listening to some fool tell my how horrible the current ecology is and how we are all going to be dead within 10 years and there will be no human beings any more, and I just shake my head.
Finally, any time I hear that data has been “adjusted,” I drop all interest in the study. Any adjustments would require a longer paper than the study that states that data has been adjusted.
Then, for climate change, I have read of at least three major temperature adjustments that have been made in the last twenty years and all were made to LOWER the temperatures in the past—what a coincidence. That, my friend, is NOT science.
When will the majority learn that ecology and climatology are driven by one force: MONEY. This leads to the need to scare everyone and to demand that more be done and that more funding be supplied. This, also, feeds into those whose life is so empty that they grasp any hair-brained idea that will let them feel that they are “saving” others.
I suspect the MONEY force is also why NASA keeps finding signs of life everywhere they look in the universe–currently, I hear that they have found life on Mars (or, at least, that life once existed on Mars), and that Venus and virtually every moon in our solar system could support life—if only we could get funding for more exploration to find this life. And they keep finding Earth-like planets, where the most they can claim would be an estimate of the mass/distance for the planet from their star (I don’t know if EITHER can be independently determined). I just have doubts that, whereas 10 years ago, the ability to find a planet based on the dimming of a star or the wobble of a star was considered extremely difficult except for massive planets extremely close to a star, once MONEY was introduced, suddenly we are finding new earth-like planets on an almost daily basis.
Finally, modeling is not reality. I was taught that Science could only model the universe. We could take the model and make predictions and see if they come true, but we could not ever confuse our model with reality. Now, “scientists” talk about their models as BEING reality.
Very good comment.
Regarding the determination of both mass and distance of an “earth-like” planet: Just trying to exercise my high school physics here. You have both the amplitude and the frequency of the wobble. The frequency gives you the duration of the planet’s year, and the amplitude tells you about the ratio of the masses of the planet and the central star.
I suppose you then need an estimate of the actual mass of the central star. If you examine its light, you can form an idea of what its temperature and elemental composition is, so I guess that could lead to such an estimate. That, and the aforementioned ratio, give you the mass of the planet. The star’s mass would also allow you to calculate at which distance gravity and centrifugal force would become equal. But the accuracy of all this is probably somewhat limited.
This was similar the train of logic I was using before Climategate broke – something to the effect of ‘if it quacks like a duck…”
Now keep in mind, this would have been on the tales of the Bush administration and every conspiracy theory imaginable, being presented to me as if I’d done it myself. Yet, when I showed them what should have been a very obvious ‘quacking duck’, I was met with total denial – as in not even entertaining the thought. Then Climategate blew up and, having been dismissed on the logic front, I thought that verifiable proof of jury-rigging would be more convincing.
This was how I learned that some people simply can’t be convinced.
In this regard, adherents of the CACA faith are just as impervious to reality as creationists.
Chimp, people are weird in stereotypic ways, but different content, as noted by Eric Hoffer in “The True Believer” Global warming fills much the same role in its adhernents lives as religion does to a zealot, and leads to acting in similar ways.
Too bad that the proportion of fundamentalists is so much higher among the CACA faithful than among Christians and Jews.
The Enlightenment was a cultural speciation event, in the true Darwinian sense. The denizens of the new cultural species organize themselves as individuals and their association into external groups is facultative. The denizens of the original population organize themselves as collectivists, and their association into external groups is obligate.
The contest is now between a culture of individualists — who recognize individual status, rights, and freedoms, and a culture of collectivists — who recognize adherence to group normative morals.
Much of the 20th century contest between democratic and communist societies becomes understandable in that light.
Obligate collectivists will necessarily join the most strongly moralizing and culturally fashionable group of the day. It used to be religion. These days it’s politics. Hence your distribution, Chimp, that “the proportion of fundamentalists is so much higher among the CACA faithful than among Christians and Jews.”
Christianity and Judaism have gone through the Enlightenment, and most manifestations of these religions by and large recognize the status of the individual. Only the fundy versions impose collectivist morality; the same versions that, significantly, adhere to their pre-Enlightenment structures.
Although there are people with collectivist outlooks among the so-called conservatives, it seems to me that the group-level demonology of the Progressive left is clear evidence that the much greater bulk of the obligate collectivists have organized themselves there.
Pat,
Well said. The CACA confession is definitely in need of at least a Renaissance and Reformation, but an Enlightenment would be even better. They and ISIS.
After the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War, most Christians have learned to tolerate opposing views. Even the most devout fundamentalists, most of them, anyway, don’t argue for theocracy and the burning of heretics.
But CACA believers do imagine blowing up the heads of skeptical infidels.
I hope that something like the Reformation will happen. The Papacy needed to fund its wars in Italy, so stepped up indulgence peddling in the rich German states. This ticked off Luther, and the rest is history. Now the CACA orthodoxy wants to tax us evil carbon emitters in order to fund its war against industry and humanity. The taxed are now revolting. Let’s pray that a new Thirty Years’ War doesn’t ensue, figuratively or literally.
The world wars of the last century were more than enough, thanks.
In humans endocannabinoid production declines after about age 25. By age 30 a person’s world view is set. And it is set because of body chemistry. This was expressed in:
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” – Max Planck
The silver on the screen must be corroding, Simon, ‘cuz I’m playing all the old reels but seeing different movies each time.
==================
Pat Frank
December 6, 2016 at 3:56 pm
The Enlightenment was a cultural speciation event, in the true Darwinian sense.
“Ahh what a relief it is!” I’ve been trying to suggest that point of view for a few years on Twitter. Of all places? No, because it’s in response to “Progressives”, who for example like to repeat memes such as, “History is on the side of Socialism.” So I tell them, “But Evolution isn’t” and hashtag them as “Pre-Enlightenment Throw Backs” or “Persistents”, or “Perfect Totalitarian Fodder”, etc.. They “Believe in Evolution” but have no idea what I’m talking about. At least it seems to shut them up for a while…until they feel the irrepressible urge to repeat another #DumbAssMeme.
JPeden, good luck with your attempt to spread the thought. Maybe telling Progressives that we are a culturally obligate species (the only one), will help.
Perhaps remind them that every single humane value they suppose as their own derived from the Enlightenment and the societies of facultative individualists.
That can only mean their collectivist ideas about morality make them self-contradictory, in that no humane values have ever emerged from obligately collectivist societies (which tend to murder ethical innovators).
And, as people who wish to return to collectivist morality and all its evils, they are exactly on the wrong side of history.
“I agree with the consensus of climate scientists because saying otherwise in public would be social and career suicide for me even as a cartoonist.”
This must be true for the majority of the general public. How else could you explain that AGW is at the bottom of every policy priority list.
http://climatechangedispatch.com/gallup-americans-still-rank-climate-change-as-low-priority-concern/
Thank you, great article. Roger Pielke Jr wrote a similar piece in the WSJ yesterday about his experience being vilified for concluding that natural disasters are not related to global climate change. I think the problems we are experiencing in the climate debate are part of a larger problem of how does one find the truth?
Steve McIntyre wrote
Of the potential damages, sea level rise seems one of the most serious …
Bingo!
Data manipulation was not discussed above (did I miss it?). Anyway, it should have been, and sea level as measured by satellites has been manipulated over the years:
http://oi67.tinypic.com/2s7yxxz.jpg
or a simpler representation:
http://oi59.tinypic.com/24e8482.jpg
Since 1993 the rate of sea level rise according to satellites has been adjusted upwards
by about 0.9 mm/yr.
It’s a matter of opinion as to why they’ve been adjusted but a matter of fact that they have been.
Fascinating to read his blog from about Aug 2015 regarding Trump. He explains Trump’s victory as it happens.
Now, using the same thinking to this post, let me explain what Adams is doing(in my opinion not well, but he’s the expert). Skeptics are latching on to his arguments, but not noticing his method. He starts by saying he accepts the scientific consensus, that when scientists say it, he accepts this. What he is doing is pacing, then leading. It is targeted not at skeptics, but warmists. They first give him credibility based on his to them obvious statements about accepting the science(that the warmists like because of policy but I digress). Then he starts casting doubt on the position, but he is operating from a position of strength where they will continue to listen to him.
Adams identifies Trump doing the same technique. He went from a deportation force and getting rid of anchor babies, to ‘getting out the bad ones, and letting the good ones back in’. Muslim ban became ‘extreme vetting’. Cheers for gays from Republican audiences.
Scott Adams says; “I accept the consensus of climate science experts when they say that climate science is real and accurate. But I do that to protect my reputation and my income. I have no way to evaluate the work of scientists.”
Well, I guess he’s being honest. Sort of. He “accepts the consensus” because it is safer to, and he fears there could be negative consequences for not doing so. He could be right. But then he uses a red herring to wriggle out of his dilemma (of not knowing which side is correct) that he has “no way to evaluate the work of scientists”.
Most of us skeptics/climate realists were faced with the same dilemma. It turns out we do have a way, and it’s our very own built-in BS detector. It may take a while, but you begin to see who the liars are by how they act.
.
Bruce,
No unlike Pascal’s Wager.
In the story above, Scott Adams said:
Indeed. His punishment has been measured in the millions of dollars.
The SJWs won’t think twice about ruining someone for thought crime.
Last year the Australian National University had posters all over town that said in BIG letters:
“Join the thought leaders”
I always read it as thought police. Which is what I think they meant when they wrote it.
When detailed logically consistent mathematical arguments can be made in favor of CO2 harmful warming and detailed logically consistent mathematical arguments can (simultaneously) be made AGAINST CO2 harmful warming, … THAT, in itself, seems to be indicating something critically wrong with very, very basic assumptions.
I continue to struggle with the lapse-rate math in favor of and against harmful CO2 warming. Does anybody really know anything? … “Settled” ?!, yeah, right.
Like “agreeing to disagree”, we should settle on the obvious fact that it is NOT settled.
A very good skeptical presentation would be a collection of unsettled points.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/28/greens-blame-donald-trump-for-crumbling-paris-climate-accord/comment-page-1/#comment-2225245
We have known since about 1985 that global warming was scientifically wrong – a false crisis.
We have known with greater certainty since about 2002 that it was a deliberate fraud.
Regards, Allan
_____________________________________
MY POST FROM 2009 re MIKE’S NATURE TRICK:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/20/mikes-nature-trick/#comment-228857
Some of us always knew it was a trick.
Now it is absolutely clear that it was much more. It was not just bad scientific methodology; it was deliberate fraud, conspiracy and corruption.
These scoundrels have taken hundreds of millions in government grants and caused the waste of hundreds of billions in public funds.
I hope they are prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
They belong in jail.
_______________________________
ONE MORE BLAST FROM THE PAST
Jul 11, 2009
The Reason You shouldn’t Believe Doomsday Predictions of 2009
Icecap Note:
In a story Gaia’s Right, Mark Steyn notes “According to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, we only have 96 months left to save the planet.” Really? Ten years ago, we had a lot of time? Funny, that’s not the way I remember it. (“Time is running out for the climate,” said Chris Rose of Greenpeace in 1997.) So what’s to blame for this eternally looming rendezvous with the iceberg of apocalypse?
The good news is that, at this week’s G8 summit, America’s allies would commit only to the fuzziest and most meaningless of environmental goals. Europe has been hit far harder by the economic downturn. When your unemployment rate is 17 percent (as in Spain), “unsustainable growth” is no longer your most pressing problem. The environmental cult is itself a product of what the prince calls the “Age of Convenience”: It’s what you worry about it when you don’t have to worry about jobs or falling house prices or collapsed retirement accounts. Today, as European prime ministers are beginning to figure out, a strategic goal of making things worse when they’re already worse is a much tougher sell.”
[End of Steyn excerpts]
This doomsday cultism is not new. Some of the same people decades ago believed time to save the world was running out.” This story captures some from Earth day 1970.
Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind. George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist
“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine. Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…” Life Magazine, January 1970
Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.
Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live.
Doomsters get off on gloomy predictions. It excites them, stirs their otherwise drab lives, gives them a sense of superiority, if not a full-blown messiah complex.
Imagine if someone had gotten up on the stage right after these clowns and said what would really happen: In 45 years, the population of the world will be more than doubled, and each person will have more food than ever in human history. There will be an epidemic of obesity spreading throughout the world. The air and water will be cleaner than at any time in the past century. Oil will be plentiful, with worldwide production increasing and prices bouncing around and at times approaching historic low values.
Etcetera, etcetera…
How would the person that spelled out exactly what would actually happen have been received?
Maybe about the same as climate skeptics are received by warmistas today?
BTW, Allan…Like you, I knew in the mid 1980s, when the scare mongering was just getting started, that the fear of CO2 caused global warming was pure malarkey, and the idea of a warming Earth would result in rapidly escalating catastrophe was preposterous.
Huh. I’ve wondered for about a decade now if Adams would ever see the Left eating its own. It appears he has.
I hate that it costs him income, but maybe it’ll open up other opportunities.
7. When all solutions converge into the socialist secular progressive Utopia (highly redundant) you know that the main “forcing” factor in the models is ideology rather than anything in the climate itself.
The quote of the day is here: http://phys.org/news/2016-12-unpredictability-theory-ice-cores.html “Imagine an isolated climate system” There are so many things wrong with it, it’s simply amazing. That’s why science has so big issues nowadays. Cargo cult science is replacing genuine science more and more…
Over last about five years, I had a few (two or three) serious discussions with “warmists” and in all these cases we generally agreed on all evidence, but just couldn’t agree on what conclusions to draw from it. They’re all scared by the future, even if they admit the current state is not all that bad.
For most people, climate change is a religion. They were told something over and over again so many times that they accepted it as truth and now work on spreading the word without having the intellectual potential to put it under scrutiny. They just believe it’s true.
Hi Kasuha
Here is adequate scientific evidence that there is nothing to worry about – that global warming is a false crisis. I have known this since 1985, since I first became aware of global warming alarmism.
Clause 1 says climate sensitivity to CO2 is very low, so low that NO dangerous global warming will result from current or probable future increases in atmospheric CO2.
Clause 2 says we don’t even know what causes what, and both sides of the fractious global warming debate have probably “got the cart before the horse”.
Furthermore, not one of the warmists’ scary scenarios has materialized – they have a perfect negative predictive track record.
That is the science, now to the politics:
When you find warmists falsifying data and models, and lying, threatening and intimidating skeptics, why would you ever believe anything they say?
The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour, and the best prediction of warmists’ future behaviour will be just like their past – 100 % false,
Best wishes for the Holidays to all, Allan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/24/water-vapour-the-big-wet-elephant-in-the-room/#comment-2056092
[excerpted]
1. In reality, climate sensitivity to CO2 (ECS) may not exist in a practical sense, or may be so close to zero as to be insignificant. Many scientists believe that significant atmospheric CO2 increases started circa 1940 when fossil fuel combustion accelerated, but since then, global temperature has gone up, down and sideways, which suggests that Earth’s climate is dominated by natural drivers and the impact of atmospheric CO2 is relatively insignificant – if ECS exists, it is probably less than 0.3C/(2xCO2).
…
2. The other “elephant in the room” is that atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales. Few academics want to discuss this subject because they “know” that CO2 drives temperature, and typically they just want to debate the magnitude of climate sensitivity to CO2 – or essentially, by how much the future can drive the past. 🙂
Post Script:
Ferdinand will probably weigh in again re Clause 2, trying again to persuade me that his “Mass Balance Argument” is relevant to what I am saying here – it is not.
That time scale argument is actually pretty thin. The construction of CO2 records from ice cores depends on assumptions as to how rapidly air bubbles get entrapped by snow compaction. I honestly don’t believe we can know this precisely; it is just modeling all the way. If you look at the official Antarctic records, the (model-dependent) time lag is pretty variable.
I agree with the rest of your points. One would think that mankind’s perfect record of failure re. doomsday predictions should give people pause, but it rarely does. This time is always different, apparently.
Hello Michael – not “thin” at all.
Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record and also by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.
Happy Holidays, Allan
Reference:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/10/31/watch-global-co2-jump-with-el-nino-over-time-then-look-at-the-whys/comment-page-1/#comment-2335540
[excerpts]
To falsify the false global warming alarmist hypothesis, one only has to show that CO2 lags and does not lead temperature, and why, which I have done.
…
My hypothesis was discussed extensively in 2008-2009, because it contradicted the popular notion that increasing atmospheric CO2 primarily caused rising temperature, which was false. Both sides of the fractious global warming debate (the warmists AND the skeptics) bitterly contested my hypothesis.
The close dCO2/dt relationship and resulting 9-month lag of CO2 after temperature is now generally accepted, even among many warmists. The best counter-argument the warmists have suggested is that the ~9-month lag “must be a feedback effect”, which is a cargo-cult argument:
“We KNOW CO2 drives warming (our paychecks depend on it), therefore it MUST BE a feedback effect.”
… Here is one depiction of the subject dCO2/dt vs T relationship, although I think it is slightly different mathematically from my own, which I suggest is technically more correct.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14
If you want to check my math, the 2008 spreadsheet is here – see Figures 1 to 4.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRaeFig5b.xls
I used UAH LT and Hadcrut3 for temperatures, and global CO2 concentrations back to 1979. The dCO2/dt vs T correlation holds.
In a separate unpublished spreadsheet I used Hadcrut3 and Mauna Loa CO2 back to 1958 and the correlation still held.
I no longer use the surface temperature data, Hadcrut or other, because I have lost confidence in its accuracy, especially due to all the recent “adjustments”.
In conclusion, I remain reasonably confident that the future cannot cause the past (in our current space-time continuum). 🙂
Regards, Allan
Post Script:
Statistician Bill Briggs also examined my hypo in 2008 using a completely different approach, and supported my conclusion (even though I did not like his methodology much. because it only examined a 12-month lag).
http://wmbriggs.com/post/122/
See also Humlum et al, January 2013, written five years after my icecap.us paper:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
Highlights
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.
– Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.
– Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.
****************
There are multiple independent lines of evidence and reasoning that should each be sufficient to prevent anyone from believing that there is much to worry about.
For anyone well educated in the relevant subjects to truly be fearful of CAGW would seem to require a mind bogglingly selective attention.
Allan, the effects responsible for the 9 months lag and the 800 years lag are surely different. On the short time scale, seasonal changes of photosynthesis and plant decay are important.
My comment referred not to the (trivial) seasonal variation but to the 800 years time lag that was inferred from ice cores. I have played numerical fitting games with the EPICA records myself and know that they do not provide solid support for this widely reported number.
Hi again Michael,
I wrote above:
“Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record and also by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.”
In my shorthand, ~ means approximately and ~~ means very approximately (or ~squared).
It is possible that the causative mechanisms for this “TemperatureLead-CO2Lag” relationship are largely similar or largely different, although I suspect that both physical processes (ocean solution/exsolution) and biological processes (photosynthesis/decay and other biological) play a greater or lesser role at different time scales.
All that really matters is that CO2 lags temperature at ALL measured times scales and does not lead it, which is what I understand the modern data records indicates on the multi-decadal time scale and the ice core data records indicate on a much longer time scale.
This does not mean that temperature is the only (or even the primary) driver of increasing atmospheric CO2. Other drivers of CO2 could include deforestation, fossil fuel combustion, etc. but that does not matter for this analysis, because the ONLY signal that is apparent signal in the data records is the LAG of CO2 after temperature.
It also does not mean that increasing atmospheric CO2 has no impact on temperature; rather it means that this impact is quite small.
I conclude that temperature, at ALL measured time scales, drives CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature.
Precedence studies are commonly employed in other fields, including science, technology and economics. The fact that this clear precedence is consistently ignored in “climate science” says something about the deeply held unscientific beliefs in this field – perhaps it should be properly be called “climate religion” or “climate dogma” – it just doesn’t look much like “science”.
Happy Holidays, Allan
If Scott Adams was a climate-scientist, I would advise him to watch out for his career. Such thinking betrays the mind of a true scientist, and that is not welcome when ‘there is a planet to be saved’.
Now, here’s a thing, would you let the ‘experts’ who build climate models determine the ideal climate for you and yours? (Second-hand car, anyone?)
Many years ago a mentor of mine who I greatly (and still do) advised me to have the experts on tap, not on top.
1.
This false equivalence assertion is either intellectual laziness or just Adams blowing hot air at us for the sake of it.
I’ve been reading about AGW quite extensively for several years. I have not yet come upon even one (sorry, Ferdinand E., not even yours) “airtight” argument that AGW is fact. Not one. All I have read are guesses — all of which have anti-correlation and anti-proof against them, now. At BEST, they could be labeled, “educated guesses;” they have not even risen to “testable hypothesis” yet. (Well, heh, at “BEST,” they would say they were “settled science,” lol).
2. Re: Adams’ and not ruining his chances of making money by affirming science facts
I get that. But, why does he not just refrain from saying anything? Why take a wishy-washy, lukewarmer, intellectually dishonest, position in public?
3. Finally:
🙂
I get what you are saying, but I think that you are wrong here. Look at Dilbert; in the cartoons, he is frequently confronted with a situation where he can do something or not, to prevent a bad outcome. He virtually never does anything and the outcome is always terrible.
I think it is the same with Scott Adams; he is seeing the point at which somebody has to do something. And we all know that the way the sceptics have been doing it, fighting propaganda with fact, doesn’t work.
Dear Hive,
1. There is no alternative, Hive. Truth (facts, data, logic) is the only effective, enduring, weapon against lies. Lying to stop lies only comes back to bite you in the end. Credibility is essential to winning the Battle for Science.
2. Your definition of “work” is too narrow. Your time frame, too short. MANY people have testified in threads on this site that WUWT’s (and other pro-science realism sites’) science giants and their arguments persuaded them that AGW was a lie or, at least, started them well on the way to ascertaining that fact.
You believe (I challenge you to prove your assertion, if it is not mere belief):
1. WUWT/Anthony Watts’ exposure of the flawed U.S. surface temperature data collection stations;
2. Stephen McIntyre’s expose of the “hockey stick” tree rings;
3. Roy Spencer’s testimony about the satellite temperature records and lack of a lower troposphere “hot spot” and more;
4. WUWT’s (and others’) publishing the “Climategate e mails” in which Phil “Cheers” Jones, et al. destroy themselves out of their own mouths;
5. Christopher Monckton’s magnificent lectures and writing exposing the non-science of AGW;
6. Dr. Bob Carter’s careful writing about the flaws in the AGW arguments;
7. Richard Lindzen’s numerous, powerful, presentations and writing;
8. Dr. Harold Lewis’ letter resigning from the APS;
9. Jo Nova’s years of incisive reporting of the facts;
10. Mark Steyn’s writing, exposing the truth about Mann, et al. and more;
11. Lawsuits by Christopher Horner and David Schnare and others in defense of science facts;
12. Bob Tisdale’s years and years of painstakingly graphing ENSO;
AND I COULD LIST SO MANY IT WOULD TAKE 5 MINUTES JUST TO SCROLL PAST IT AT BREAKNECK SPEED.
that all this did not “work?”
Effects:
(yes, okay, the laughably weak, damned-out-of-their-own-mouths arguments and obviously-fiction movies like “An Inconvenient Truth” did much to cause these effects as well):
— Climate change is the LOWEST item on the voters’ list of “concerns”
— Internal combustion engine vehicle sales are doing GREAT (check out Chevy Silverado)
— Gasoline is as popular a purchase as ever
— EPA is backing off its coal-strangling regs.
— Congress filed Kyoto (and Trump will do the same with Paris) climate extortion in the round file
— Al Gore is rarely heard from
— “Who is Bill Nye?” asks anyone under 20.
— Big money long ago abandoned wind and is currently dropping solar
Do you REMEMBER what was being said in the 1990’s and early 2000’s about climate? “The earth has a fever” — “planetary emergency.” Now? Mostly silence.
And you think that ALL of that was simply because the public saw through the propaganda on — its — own???
I see it differently. But for the science realists, we would be much worse off.
Time.
Just a matter of time till the last rat disappears, for they are fighting for a lost, utterly worthless, cause.
AGW is over.
The money is gone.
THANK YOU, SCIENCE GIANTS!!! Keep up the good fight until the world is completely rid of the climate rats!
With gratitude to them (and with amazement that anyone could fail to see the above),
Janice
P.S. And, no, it is not contradictory to say, “AGW is over” and — “fight on to the end.” Rats breed quickly. They cannot win as it now stands, IF the science realists remain vigilant, for the climate rats must be completely eradicated to prevent a resurgence of the plague of AGW.
When no one can prove that, in the real world, CO2 causes global temperature rise; but a cult basis it’s religion on CO2 causing global temperature rise, that’s what did it for me.
I’m not a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but in business I have met a lot of con men, and boy, does climate alarmism ever reek of a con game.
Nor do I think it’s deliberate, or an organised conspiracy, It’s just a passing bandwagon that’s gathering momentum until it careers out of control and crashes. Which it will, Trump or no Trump.
Janice; I take it you are NOT a follower of Scott’s blog.
Question on semantics: why the expression “serious negative damage”?
Isn’t this a double negative or at best, pointless redundancy? If not, WTF is positive damage?
Remember Dilbert is biting office humor. It carries over to Scott Adam’s blog. Serious positive damage is horrible stuff like fewer weather extremes and lower insurance premiums (bad for insurance companies), more dangerous polar bears (bad for seals), a greening Sahel (bad for the Sahara desert), a reliable dispatchable electricity grid (bad for renewable companies and their subsidies). Horrible from a certain perspective.
I know this is beating a dead horse, but it is hard to believe that some people define science as a belief that is supported by the opinion of experts. As noted, science is not a physical thing, It is not an object, and you cannot go to the supermarket and buy a pound of science. Science is a methodology, or a group of ideas sequenced to learn how the physical world works. From theoretical formulations, to experimental design, to the necessary physical validation of said theory, science has nothing to do with beliefs. Beliefs have everything to do with religion, but nothing to do with the scientific method.
Beware the use of expert opinion. Experts have spent their careers accumulating bad records. Witness financial and market experts, most of whom cannot manage a stock portfolio to equal the average return of a stock index fund (Malkiel). Witness medical experts who have managed to get over half of all medical studies wrong (Ioannidis). Witness our economic experts that missed forecasting the entire banking mortgage disaster (Taleb).
What makes anybody think that climate experts are any better? As Mann has shown, some of these experts are just legends in their own minds.
Bob, remember Brad Keyes only does very biting sarcasm. See his main blog contributions at CliSkep. No need for him to label them as such for those of us in the thick of the fray. This thread was a marvelous example of the havoc he can cause with one Feynman deliberate misquote!!!
ristvan: Ah. A teachable moment. Thanks.
Very well put by both authors. Climate science a relatively quite and arcane field has suffered immeasurably from its infection by politics. To a lay person there seems little science left and much political grandstanding and money grubbing built up. The entire field is a mess akin to the US housing market in 2007/8.
Citizens concerned that that good ethics prevail in public policy are left with little choice but to pull the corrupted edifice to the ground. In the US we may now be able to begin that process. It will not be easy.
Climate theories regardless of model basis cannot pass any of Feynman’s criteria for science never mind all of them. Skepticism show not get tangled in the validity of hindcast UHI adjustment factors being too large or too small. If it isn’t science it isn’t going to be changed by applying scientific methods.
The Australian fake news site, ABC reports on “hottest year ever” bringing Australia’s highest ever crop yield. The irony for them probably went straight over their heads! Warwick Hughes has the link here: http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=4842
Judith Curry has a lot to say about this, and about science “heresy”. Beware “crusades” against “heresy”. One of the medieval anti-heretic “crusaders” is reported to have said, when asked how to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys: kill them all, the Lord will recognize his own.
https://judithcurry.com/2016/12/05/climate-heretic-to-be-or-not-to-be/#more-22571
1. A theory has been “adjusted” in the past to maintain the conclusion even though the data has changed. For example, “Global warming” evolved to “climate change” because the models didn’t show universal warming.
Not really. The term in general use prior to 1975 was ‘climate modification’. In ’75 Broecker published a paper entitled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” The Charney report published a few years later adopted Broecker’s terminology, when referring to surface temperature change, Charney used ‘global warming’, when referring to other changes that would result from increasing carbon dioxide, Charney used ‘climate change’. Thus the two terms evolved simultaneously,this is still the usual usage.
Well while that’s great for the scientific literature, in popular parlance it definitely shifted from “global warming” to”climate change.”
Those of us in Gen X (among others) that actually watched and read the news on a regular basis over the last two decades can attest to that.
“Those of us in Gen X (among others) that actually watched and read the news on a regular basis over the last two decades can attest to that.”
That’s right. I lived through the whole era from global cooling to global warming. After the world started warming up in the 1970’s, global warming became the focus and the terms “global warming” and “climate change” were used interchangeably, but in the early days “global warming” was by far the one most used, and then it gradually transformed into “climate change” being the term most used. And I think that transition took place because of the pause.
Terms do not “evolve” via usage in a single paper, or even a dozen or more. The preponderance of usage has been “global warming” in earlier years, then “climate change” later. Broecker clearly was an outlier in using the terms interchangeably. Citation of one subsequent report is nothing more than charney picking.
This is exactly what needs to be done. There needs to be an Open Source Temperature Reconstruction, where all additions, subtractions, edits and adjustments are made in broad daylight. The concentration of power is mindboggling considering someone like Michael Mann and James Hansen can spread nonsense that costs the taxpayers trillions of dollars. We simply can’t afford to allow activists corrupt science for their own personal agendas.
I fully believe Hansen is sincere. Not so, most Warmists.
Damn those lying Warmists! Damn them I say!
Yes . . Corporations are required to submit to independent audits annually.
Just why Climate Science™ is permitted to audit their own work is a mystery.
wherever there are multiple variables and politics, you can be pretty confident that self interest is likely
“5. There are so many variables that can be measured – and so many that can be ignored – that you can produce any result you want by choosing what to measure and what to ignore.”
Well, we all know about the temperature adjustments to the land temperatures that the NCDC implements in GHCN-M. It is probably about 0.6C overall now that has been added to the trend without real justification.
But they are also doing this with the Ocean SST anomaly records now. Bob Tisdale has commented on this a lot but recently I have had a good look at it.
Do you know that they have thrown out the SSTs recorded from the satellites ($ billion of dollars spent by Nasa and the NOAA putting these dozens of satellites up there and they are supposed to be very accurate) but when the NCDC moved from ERSST V3 to ERSST V3b in 2013, they just got rid of the satellite measurements.
“However, the addition of satellite data led to residual biases. The ERSST v3b analysis is exactly as described in the ERSST v3 paper with one exception: ERSST v3b does not use satellite SST data. The ERSST v3 improvements are justified by testing with simulated data.”
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/marineocean-data/extended-reconstructed-sea-surface-temperature-ersst-v3b
AND, then they threw out all the drifters and buoys and Argo floats in ERSST V4 recently implemented in 2015. Huang 2015 Part 1 and Liu 2015 Part 2 and finally in Karl 2015.
“Buoy SSTs have been adjusted toward ship SSTs in ERSST.v4 to correct for a systematic difference of 0.12°C between ship and buoy observations. Although buoy SSTs are more homogeneous and reliable than ship observations, buoys were not widely available before around 1980.” If you are just adjusting the bouys to the Ships (and doing this continuously ever after, then you are not using the bouys.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00006.1
Well, I had a look at these.
Throw Out Satellites:
You can’t find ERSST V3 (ships, buoys and satellites) anywhere anymore (the NCDC has scraped the record out everywhere) BUT, naturally I have an old saved copy of the last version ERSST V3.5.1 only up to July 2012.
This is why they threw out the satellite data (noting that they really only got going around 1981 or so). REALLY. This tiny difference is well within any type of error margin and made no difference whatsoever.
Throw out Bouys:
And then why did they throw out the buoys (noting that they really only got going around 1980). REALLY. This tiny difference is not difference at all. Huang 2015 Part 1 and Part 2 and Karl 2015 were all based on a fake premise. There is no real difference.
Even if you go back to 1947, You can not say there is any real difference between the Ships and Bouys and just the Ships. There is no rationale to cherrypick different periods like was done in Huang 2015 and Karl 2015 to try to pretend there is some difference. They actually added 0.12C to the trend from 1947 to 2010 based on this difference. After 2010, who knows what was added to the trend.
But then, if you have now thrown out the satellites previously, and then the bouys, you are are only relying on the ships now. Since this record ends in 2010, now you have room to bump the record up.
Now if we go way back now and compare the last ship, buoy and satellite record, there isn’t much difference overall, but now one has complete control over what get reported from now on because its all random ship engine intake adjustment algorithms.
There you go. Now you know why. Everything can be calculated in a basement office at the NCDC with ZERO transparency.
And now all we can rely on is the lower troposphere satellite measurements because the GHCN land temperatures from the NCDC are just completely adjusted out of all imagination. And now even the Ocean SST is nothing but adjustment algorithms.
You can easily subtract 0.5C from the NCDC and GISS and Had Centre and BEST global temperatures because that is how much unjustified adjustment has been done.
All the data is here. (Except I don’t think there is a copy of ERSST V3 available anywhere on the net anymore). (and if you find a copy of ERSST V3 somewhere, please let me know. The NCDC seems to have been very thorough in scaping off every version of it off the internet everywhere. Like why would they do that? ).
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectfield_obs.cgi?someone@somewhere
I have a 2009 and 2013 ersst version in my archives.
A Gordian Knot to be resolved with a slice of tropospheric microwaves.
============
Forest Gardener, for 2015 and 2016 at least, I think you would have to create your own record from scratch after gathering all the raw data that was used previously and is still produced. Contacting the WMO, the bouy operators, the satellite operators and get them to send their data to you. Some of this is available in various formats across the internet but certainly not all of it. You really need to have an agency with 20 years experience putting all this together to be able to do so. There will be no way to double-check the data now starting in 2015. Ocean SST is just a number produced at the NCDC now. The independent Ocean SST indices are slowly being discontinued now. Even HadISST was decapitated by a NASA-funded study in 2016 citing errors in the satellite derived records.
Bill Illis wrote: “There you go. Now you know why. Everything can be calculated in a basement office at the NCDC with ZERO transparency.
And now all we can rely on is the lower troposphere satellite measurements because the GHCN land temperatures from the NCDC are just completely adjusted out of all imagination. And now even the Ocean SST is nothing but adjustment algorithms.”
There’s the long and the short of it: The satellite records are the only thing we can rely on. NOAA/NASA have completely botched the surface temperature records.
There are lots of people using this bogus NOAA/NASA surface temperature data in their work, which means lots of people are reaching erroneous conclusions.
I see people are still talking about ‘ppm’ when referring to CO2 levels,
but I doubt that the ‘man in the street’ comprehends this. Better I think
is to say that CO2 as a component of the atmosphere, compared to
other components, has increased from 3:9997 to 4:9996.
When possible, I use parts per 10,000 by volume. But that’s for dry air.
If you ignore all the other GHGs, which is reasonable, as they are measured in billionths in our air, and accept a whole atmospheric average of two percent for the main GHG water vapor, then here’s the situation:
We’ve gone from 203 greenhouse effect molecules per 10,203 air molecules to 204 GHE molecules per 10,204 air molecules since AD 1850. Bear in mind that each of the 200 H2O molecules is a lot more potent in retarding loss of heat to space than is each of the three or four CO2 molecules.
Ooh, scary!
A good way of putting the numbers into perspective and making them more meaningful to the non-engineers among us.
Even better we understand that ~ 93% of CO2 is in the oceans.
That adds some perspective.
Well thanks for clearing THAT up. Can I interest you in some lovely new ice-free property in Greenland?
Frank Ciccarelly
Good offer if the price is right!
Personally I recommend anybody reflecting on it to check out the current Greenland record ice mass increase and factor that into the price.
I use pennies in a ten dollar bill
Re Steve McIntyre’s comments, these days there’s a thing called “Data Management Plans”. Quoting http://otago.libguides.com/data_management “Good research data management is a series of activities that make it easier to locate, access, share, and use data. It applies to all forms of data and to all disciplines. Researchers should invest time in planning and take action throughout the research data lifecycle to ensure it is managed well.” This is a relatively new thing, but it’s increasingly the case that research funders expect you to *have* a data management plan and to carry it out and for the data to remain web-accessible for a long time. _That_ is what the current norm for research is. I do recommend reading that page to get an idea of the standard that modern climate (or any other) research should be held to.
It was all the experts who drove Tschernobyl, Fukoshima and Sellafield, Harrisburg and Tcheljabinsk. Perhaps it will be the experts to cause the fate of the earth.
At AGU next week I expect, perhaps a good bet, to see Chrissy McEntee, Her Majesties Ship, flanked by a flotilla of Rent-a-Cops, as if CA State-Troopers, cutting a wide swath and leaving a bigger wake in their passage through the throngs of … unimportants, i.e. the ‘paying’ attendees.
I’ve started calling myself a climate change “doubter”. The response from warmists has been tepid. 😉
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
Interesting read from the Mr Dilbert (Scott Adams)…
Highlights:
“I endorse the scientific consensus on climate change to protect my career and reputation. To do otherwise would be dumb, at least in my situation.
“And as we can plainly see, the cost of disagreeing with climate science is unreasonably high if you are a scientist.
“While it is true that a scientist can become famous and make a big difference by bucking conventional wisdom and proving a new theory, anything short of total certainty would make that a suicide mission. And climate science doesn’t provide the option of total certainty.
“And if the risk of climate change isn’t real, I will say I knew it all along because climate science matches all of the criteria for a mass hallucination by experts.“
It’s getting hotter here on planet earth.
The ice sheets are melting. Greenland is thawing. You don’t have to be a climate scientist to figure it out. You could be a farmer or a fisherman or an Eskimo. Or maybe a polar bear. The weather is getting crazy too.
It’s coming at us at top speed. The Climate Change Express…
Coo coo ca choo, waiting for go do.
===========================
Quite right, the record number of polar bears proves it; they are multiplying from around 4 000 a few years ago to currently around 25 000 because they understand that otherwise they are doomed!
Even if you ignore all the complicated predictive models, there’s plenty of historical evidence for climate change. The very fact that CO2 levels are 30% higher than at any point in time in the past 10,000 years is suggestive that some change, whatever it is, will happen.
It is to be noted 10,000 years is an exceedingly long time. The relevant XKCD comic (https://xkcd.com/1732/) gives a very good sense of perspective here. We truly have never before seen a CO2 increase on this scale. That’s 500 human generations — again, it’s an extremely long fucking time, the scale of which is comprehensible only after you put in some serious intellectual effort.
To say that this increased CO2 level might effect nothing at all is a bit naive. It is obviously going to affect SOMETHING, especially considering that the cause-and-effect relationship between CO2 levels and global temperature (i.e., the greenhouse effect) has already been well-established for over a century.
While we can agree that the greenhouse effect will cause some kind of global change, the nature of this change and the degree of this change can be reasonably called into question, especially in the absence of predictive models. As some have suggested, the CO2 increase might actually result in something positive for the planet, such as an increase an greenery.
But since it’s the very fate of our planet that’s being called into question, the only prudent thing to do is to go forward and take steps by assuming the worst, especially since the actual action steps being proposed are not particularly expensive, difficult or controversial.
Anything else is just careless.
We’ll get slight and net beneficial warming from man, and great greening, feeding an extra billion bellies, if not now then before long, and certainly sooner cumulatively.
Our miserable little aliquot of man added CO2 is a boon and is to be celebrated. There is no need for fear and less cause for guilt. This is a good man is doing; a small one, an initially inadvertent one, but one to be sustained nonetheless.
================
Scott’s entire article is based around the fact that the groupthink bias that exists among scientists is suggestive that popular climate change science may not be wholly accurate.
While this is a convincing argument (I agree that the groupthink bias exists), it can be argued that laymen (like Scott himself) are even more biased. They are affected by biases like the status quo bias and the positivity bias. Obviously these biases are even stronger among major political figures and business magnates, who are also compelled by vested interests.
This is especially suggestive considering that scientists actually look at the evidence while laymen like Scott essentially pull their opinions out of thin air.
On the whole, scientific consensus is PROBABLY more accurate than the layman’s opinion, and hence action should be taken accordingly.
But an outsider’s bias is less strong. They have no desperate need not to have wasted their career.
The point about climatiologists is that they use the Precasutionary Principle to justify only looking for evidence that anthropogenic CO2 is the dominant factor in climate. If they look at the system from an unbiased viewpoint – looking for other dominant factors – they are called out as “anti-science” and banned from debates.
Climatology is the only branch of scince that refuses to debate with those who do not endorse the State approved policy line.
Taking the consensus of climatologists as evidence that anthropogenic CO2 is the dominant factor in climate is exacly like taking the consensus of vicars on the reality of God. They are pre-selected for their bias and are not required to question it.
The difference is that there’s no evidence that God does not exist either.
But there’s no Tropical Hotspot.
In philosophical terms, equating a consensus of religion to a consensus of scientists amounts to global skepticism, which in my view, is not really a healthy perspective to adopt.
In the same vein, you might reject a doctor’s opinion on your health, simply because experts cannot be trusted. In fact, you might go as far as equally trusting a shaman and a qualified doctor who provide contradicting opinions, and then find yourself in a dilemma as to who to trust. This kind of thing has actually happened before in the form of the anti-vaxxer movement.
I’ll concede that a direct comparison between doctors and climate scientists cannot be made for many reasons, although they might be similar in some ways.
If you’re not going to trust predictive models for climate change, you can at least come to the concession to trust the historical CO2 data, especially since making these measurements would obviously be much simpler than complicated predictive models, and hence much less subject to bias.
If you can come to that concession, then read my other comment to find out why the CO2 data alone should be a huge cause for alarm:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/06/quote-of-the-week-mcintyres-comment-to-dilbert-creator-scott-adams-on-climate-experts/comment-page-1/#comment-2362682
Man’s changing the atmosphere. We’re all gonna die!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I did not equate “a consensus of religion to a consensus of scientists”.
I equated “a consensus of religion to a consensus of climatologists”.
And I explained why climatologists are not scientists.
They pre-select their opinion and then look for evidence to support it.
Science is self -correcting. Climatology is not.
Having an “ology” in the title does not make you a scientist. Only Virgos are so naïve as to think otherwise.
“scientific consensus is PROBABLY more accurate than the layman’s opinion, and hence action should be taken accordingly.”
oh NO !
A layman should NEVER trust a science (which is always wrong, remember that) . Always put a middleman between these two : an engineer that succeeded in making good stuff for the layman using the science. Then you can trust it.
I don’t trust Newton, Kelvin nor Einstein, i don’t trust the “scientific consensus” (for whatever this oxymoron means) that they did good science. I do trust the stuff (car, fridge and GPS) that showed their science to work, so i accept collective action based on their science.
I would accept AGW if either you tell me it cost pretty much nothing — this is why I accepted the Freon / ozone thing — but instead they tell us billions of billions ; or engineers routinely warmed greenhouses a couple of K with very minute trace of costless CO2 — but they don’t.
The truth is, the steps required to combat climate change are really not all that dramatic. We already have the engineering know-how in place to accomplish this.
Of course, understanding this requires a greater understanding of how the energy industry works, why humans came about to adopt oil and coal as the primary energy sources, and why a transition to sustainable energy is ultimately inevitable for humanity. This is simply out of the scope of this comments section.
The only solution to climate change being proposed is to accelerate a transition that is already happening. It really is that simple.
I highly recommend this blog post to learn about all of the above:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-life.html
It’s really not that hard. All we have to do is stop using cheap readily available energy and start using expensive, rarely available when you need it energy.
Because if we don’t, we’re all gonna die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
“The truth is, the steps required to combat climate change are really not all that dramatic. We already have the engineering know-how in place to accomplish this.”
Yes they are, no we don’t. According to IPCC, at least : even utterly stopping right now dumping CO2 into atmosphere just delay CAGW by a few years, but don’t prevent the doom.
“a transition to sustainable energy is ultimately inevitable for humanity. ” Of course it is. Pretty much the same way a baby will ultimately get out of the womb of his mother, so what’s wrong with getting him out a few month earlier ? won’t kill him , will it ? oh …wait … Leave the kid alone. He will make the transition himself when ready.
Right now, humanity have, and cannot live without taking advantage of, a huge cellar full of canned energy. When (and if !) this cellar gets depleted (in a few century or even millennia), or made useless by some new tech, then will be the time to transit.
Right now, this is a move of a scared miser, that have rather act as if is cellar were empty, when it is actually full of food.
More evidence would be nice.
As an example, what would you say is the difference between a climate scientist and a medical vaccine scientist, and what would be the difference between the respective scientific communities?
I see a lot of parallels between the two.
I think if you want to look at an example of what is wrong with science, look no further than Stephen Hawking.
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/21/politics/scientists-open-letter-trump-climate-change/
Here is one of the great minds in science joining the bandwagon of AGW when I wager he has probably not even looked at data and the science in any detail at all and despite his far superior interllect I would happily debate him in public about his AGW beliefs….because that is all they are beliefs not fact. He is just joining the consensus without question.
If a great mind like Hawking can fall into this trap then there is not much hope for free thinking science and debate.
Well, if all you had to go by was the Hockeystick chart, then you too would think humans are causing the Earth’s atmosphere to heat up. Gavin has fine-tuned the temperature chart so much now he has CO2 levels and temperature moving in lock-step, and gives the appearance that temperatures are just getting hotter and hotter and hotter as each successive year goes by.
If you believe you are looking at a true representation of reality in looking at the Hockeystick chart, then I can see why someone would believe in CAGW. And why should they question the chart? After all the “experts” swear by it. LOTS of “experts”.
The only way to change that belief is to demonstrate that the surface temperature chart has been manipulated improperly and does not represent reality.
Show someone a chart beginning in the hot 1930’s (hotter than 2016), and you will show them a chart in a slight downtrend. The complete opposite of what you see in the Hockeystick chart. The Hockeystick lie needs to be demonstrated to the clueless experts who believe in CAGW.
I would say the Hockeystick lie needs to be demonstrated to the general public, but the general public seems to get it without going to that effort. Their common sense tells them nothing unusual is going on in the weather, if you go by the polls which show AGW very low on their priority list.
If you want to shake the academics out of their delusions about CAGW, then blowup the Hockeystick chart’s credibility in public.
Hawking is probably the most insulated, cloistered, closeted person around and all we KNOW is what someone reports him saying via his Mac or his “interpreter.”
Next, has he gone over the data that no one can get their hands on or is his opinion as much politics and wishfulness as everyone else’s? Until all the raw data is available to everyone, I only see fraud and “cold fusion” levels of pseudo-science.
“n my experience, more “skeptics” are born from poor conduct by climate scientists than from the eloquence of earlier skeptics.”
SO true !
“Of the potential damages, sea level rise seems one of the most serious …”
seems, indeed, or rather : seemed.
I got interested into CAGW because of a spot dear to my heart very close to shore, so I wanted to know if it would be submerged some day.
I found that the doom was hyped, and the discrepancy between the reality and the horror show was so great, I began to examine other things being told. So I turned skeptic. skeptic AND furious to have been lied to.
Sadly, ideology can overpower intellect, and Hawking’s joining the scare wagon seems to “settle” that point.
So now, I must confess, that even though my first comment (way back above) expressed ambivalence, it was more an admission of ignorance, NOT having the tools to counter pro-warming technical arguments with equal savvy, even though my gut has been telling me for years now that something is wrong. That’s how I came to write several blogs going totally against the popular claim, based on my own puny internet research. You guys are so much deeper into exposing the scam than moi.
I used to be a rider of the human-caused, CO2-warming bandwagon, by the way. You are seeing a convert here. Does this make me fundamentally a greater genius than Hawking? (^_^)
hard to vary explanations…
the AGW meme is an example of easy to vary explanations. as such it is unidentifiable with astrology.
THE reasoning voice in this is David Deutsch, Karl Popper student and one of if not the foremost
physical theorist and philosopher of the sciences..
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_deutsch_a_new_way_to_explain_explanation#t-979743
“However, after being involved in the controversy for many years, I think that far too little attention (none) is paid to a very fundamental difference between “skeptics” and warmists on their respective perceptions on whether human emissions of CO2 thus far have caused “serious negative damage” to the world or not. Skeptics universally think not.”
As a skeptic, I have to disagree with Steve on that second sentence, at least for myself. I am skeptical because I just don’t think we understand the global biosphere well enough, or have enough reliable data to know what effect mankind is having on the climate. At least not well enough to take any kind of preventive action. Sure we must be having some effect, but to what degree? So whenever someone makes definitive statements one way or the other, I’m skeptical. Just as I’m skeptical of the dark matter and dark energy theories.
“Dilbert creator, Scott Adams wrote a post on his blog yesterday…….” Mr. Adams must be a regular reader of WUWT.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
#climate science
#climatescience
@ScottAdamsSays
#WUWT
The main thing for me, the proposed actions against global warming are certain to cause more harm than the purported global warming.
There are seashells on mountains, proving that the ocean was once as high as the mountains. And ‘Chimp’ , ….you proved there is no evolution, all by your lonesome. ( “…. retreat of glaciers is …hit or miss, and extreme weather … isn’t happening…” )
Well there’s the other possibly that the mountain top use to be around sea-level, which I find much more likely.
Now the have found wave remodeling like 200 mile inland in North Carolina, but I think that was about 100 foot deeper.
“There are seashells on mountains, proving that the ocean was once as high as the mountains.”
Don’t you think it is more likely that those shell fossils originated at or below sea level and were then pushed up during mountain formation? We have marine fossils in the Blue Ridge and Appalachians on the east coast, but sea level has never been that high. During the Cretaceous, a good third of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and all of Florida lay under warm, shallow seas. This is evident in the ancient shorelines that appear as sand ridges paralleling the Atlantic. There are some excellent shoreline notches in rock that mark the highest sea level in the Carolinas. 200 miles inland from today’s coast? Very probably, but I won’t swear to that.
PMK
Scott Adams should give talks on climate change and Al Gore should write comic strips