I was stunned by Dr. James Hansen’s response in this article in the Virgina Informer
Excerpt:
“For this fall,” the organizer wrote in his e-mail to Mr. Hansen, “we are hoping to host a debate on global climate change and its implications. Patrick Michaels has agreed to come, and my organization would like you to come and debate Dr. Michaels in Williamsburg. The date is very flexible, and we can tailor the day of the debate completely to your schedule. We will be able to pay for your travel expenses and offer you an honorarium for your time. Please let me know if you would be interested.”
Mr. Hansen’s response was, simply, “not interested.”
His reply — devoid of any salutation, punctuation, capitalization or signature — came an hour after Mr. Katz sent his original e-mail.
I suppose for Dr. Hansen, debating and defending your work is “futile“?
In my opinion, demonstrating arrogance in correspondence and ignoring reasonable debate doesn’t do much to bolster confidence in the man’s work.
PA: That has to be some of the most tortured logic that I have ever seen. The accepted scientific facts are these: Before the industrial revolution, for the previous ~10,000 years, there was a balance between sources and sinks of CO2 and the CO2 level was pretty constant within about 10 or 20ppm of 280ppm. Within the last 750,000 years, the CO2 levels have stayed within the range of ~180ppm to ~300ppm. By rapidly liberating CO2 that has been locked away from the atmosphere for tens of millions of years, we have raised the levels to ones probably not seen for something on the order of 10 million years. No amount of sophistry can get us around these basic facts.
Mike Bryant: If you go back to around 2003-2005, you can find plenty of statements from”skeptics” who claim that there was important new data that was not included in the IPCC Third Assessment Report and, if we only knew what we knew now, the conclusions would be different. However, as it turns out, the conclusions of the AR4 were different only in that the evidence for AGW was found to be even stronger. I predict that most “skeptics” will forever claim that new evidence is pointing to AGW being wrong as the scientific community continues to conclude that the evidence is growing stronger and stronger.
[…] to the point of this post. As pointed out on Watt’s Up With That, the many champions of man-made global warming continue to refuse debate. Dr. James Hansen, one […]
“I predict that… ” Joel Shore
That’s the problem, you want to base my future on your predictions and computer models.
To: Mike Bryant
You know that I know that we know that the AGW crowd knows that we know that the AGW politicians and AGW Scientists are up to no good.
Misleading Power Hungry Politicians want to mislead the people but they do not want to just out right lie. So they invent tricky realities to mislead people. It is the old, it depends on what “is” is.
Well the AGW Scientists have been taking lessons from the Misleading Power Hungry Politicians.
That is why Tricky Jimmy Hansen does not want to debate. It is hard to defend these tricky realities from others who are very knowledgeable about climate systems.
You see the CO2 absorbing formula and how the AGW crowds uses it to blame only man for the extra CO2 even though we produce so very, very little.
See how that works. Misleading but not lying. Those tricky AGW Scientist have learned a lot from those Misleading Power Hungry Politicians.
This is why the AGW crowd does not want to talk about the documented observation of temperature increase first then co2 increase centuries later.
It proves that nature does not always absorb all the emitted CO2 that nature puts out.
Well, if CO2 increases when man was not around then maybe it is increasing today for the same reasons it increased hundreds of times before.
This is fun unraveling the tricky realities of the tricky AGW crowd trained by the Misleading Power Hungry Politicians.
XoXXoXoX
Serenity now…………
PA: There seems to be an “ONLY man is causing the increased CO2 in the atmosphere” theme amongst the AGW crowd.”
I’d say woman is also responsible. In fact, round my way most SUV drivers seem to be women. Perhaps it’s the attraction of that big, throbbing, CO2-emitting engine.
Jeez: “Adaptation would be less work than dealing with a single naturally occurring drought.”
I’m not sure how one could quantify that, but of course one of the IPCC planks is adaptation.
“Or to put it differently–how have the poor souls dealt with the emergence from the LIA? Did all agriculture in low income regions collapse and everyone starve?”
Presumably not. But, however one defines the LIA, AGW is forecast to be greater than the warming occurring after the LIA, and the resulting effects greater, although I doubt that everyone will starve.
MarkW: “Every crop currently grown by man grows in a large number of climate regions.”
Yes, but as you point out, they are “grown by man”. As I pointed out, modern food production is an industry supported by a large infrastructure. Even if the percentage cost of transition were very low, the aggregate cost spread across the industry could be large.
Gary Gulrud: “…less histrionics…”
I don’t do histrionics.
“You do not possess, nor can you attain, the high moral ground here.”
I do, and I can. Read the script. “Climate” is the average of weather over the long term.
BTW, real climate scientists do not “giggle”. Michael Jackson giggles. Climate scientists laugh boldly and heartily, in deep, booming, man-like tones.
Not sure how that’s possible, since we haven’t yet reached the highs of the MWP and RWP as the best evidence shows us. Also, all evidence shows that wamer is better than colder, within reason. There’s no reason to believe anything will get too warm, but plenty of reason to believe cold will eventually destroy civilization (e.g. the next ice age, whenever it starts).
Joel Shore states, with apparently true belief:
Um… no, they haven’t: click [Click on the picture to bring up a larger, more readable image.]
OK, it’s my mistake for not reading Joel Shore’s post above closely before posting. I now see that he had arbitrarily picked 750 thousand years as his cutoff. Why? No such date was ever mentioned in PA’s post that Mr. Shore was commenting on.
For example, 65 million years ago the Earth was absolutely teeming with life of all kinds; the planet had a pleasant temperature and dinosaurs roamed the land… and the atmospheric CO2 concentration was in the thousands of ppmv: click
That appears to be the reason for the arbitrarily selected cutoff date of 3/4 of a million years ago, no? AKA: cherry-picking the data.
Look, there is general agreement that increased carbon dioxide has previously resulted in a very *slight* amount of warming. But even doubling the current concentration will cause very little additional warming. In fact, the planet is currently starved of CO2 compared with past atmospheric concentrations. It is simply alarmism to state that a few hundred ppmv change will cause a planetary catastrophe. The real threat is another Dalton Minimum-type global cooling. Now that is scary.
Finally, as a past officer in a large statewide organization, I understand how the organization’s public positions are taken. The rank-and-file scientists are not polled by secret ballot on their opinions; rather, the organization’s Executive Board almost always makes those decisions. If the dues-paying scientists’ views were polled, they would look like this: click
I know how these organizations play the game, because I was an insider; the elected chief financial officer of an organization with 15,000+ members. Therefore, I only accept a secret ballot vote of the rank-and-file members, or a poll such as Gallup’s as cited above. Anything else is the result of gaming the system.
Smokey.
Brendan H. knows, that I know, that he knows that I know, that he knows the reasons that Tricky Hansen won’t debate. They are the same reasons that Brendan H. struggles to debate and goes to the weakness of the GW is bad argument.
1. They have not proved that GW is even bad. In fact history has shown GW is good. If it was not for GW we would still be living in caves. GW is the reason we have advanced so far in just 10,000 years.
2. They have done a very poor job of even proving that GW is occurring. Thanks to their criminally managed temperature measuring sites combine with incompetent staffing and sneaky evolving smoothing software “algorisms” by Tricky Jimmy Hansen we can’t be sure of the alleged empirical evidence anymore. We have to use anecdotal evidence (i.e. my Grammy says it is warmer now then when she was a little girl line of thinking.)
3. They have not even proved CO2 is causing the GW. The trends, graphs and CO2 science just don’t stack up right. Their current AGW Theory is getting weaker every year (i.e. last 10 years and next 10 years).
The AGW crowd toss numbers, theories and climate model outputs around hoping to confuse. Unfortunately for them, when they represent in front of an audience and against other climate knowledgeable skeptics they get slaughtered. Just ask Jimmy Hansen’s lap dog “Gavin”.
I think it is time for a new AGW Theory by the AGW crowd.
Love and Kisses
Serenity now.
“Moreover, fluences cannot be ‘balanced’ using arithmetic.”
I do not see why arithmetic summation is not applicable to fluences. These are almost periodic systems, and if each fluence is the total annual flux representing one period, So I see nothing wrong in using algebraic addition. They are scalar quantities and continuity or mass balance relations represent the same phenomenon whether they are represented in differential forms (for any specific time) or arithmetic forms (for a appropriate period of time).
Syl: “I have no problem attributing the increase to humans.”
Evan: “shouldn’t that imply 100 % of the increase in atmospheric CO2 comes from human activities alone?
In a word, yes.
(But, as we already went through, I don’t think it has much effect other than the mildly beneficial.)
—–
Sure. I know that some AGW critics do not accept that increase in CO2 in recent times is due to human activities, which I find to be inconsistent.
Evan, Yes, we have already gone through whether CO2 is beneficial or not. I have no problems in admitting that your views are consistent.
Well, once one gets into the CO2 absorption mechanics and persistence issues, it could get a little more complex. And I have serious questions about how it’s measured. And I still have that WWII question (how could CO2 possibly have been flat during that time).
But I also see a perfectly logical mechanism whereby a 3.5% increase in CO2 output can increase the atmospheric sink by a little under half a percent per year.
Smokey: You say, “OK, it’s my mistake for not reading Joel Shore’s post above closely before posting. I now see that he had arbitrarily picked 750 thousand years as his cutoff. Why? No such date was ever mentioned in PA’s post that Mr. Shore was commenting on … That appears to be the reason for the arbitrarily selected cutoff date of 3/4 of a million years ago, no? AKA: cherry-picking the data.”
There is in fact an excellent reason to choose 750,000 years ago that has nothing to do with cherry-picking data. It is that this is how far back we have ice core measurements, which are the only measurements of CO2 levels that have the precision and time-resolution to make strong statements.
It is also sufficient for the discussion at hand, which was whether it is our emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere that is responsible for the current rise above the pre-industrial baseline level. Just on the basis of probability alone, the odds that the CO2 levels would happen to rise above ~300ppm by a natural process during the century-long period in which we have liberated all this sequestered CO2 when they haven’t in the previous 7500 century-long periods are miniscule. Of course, comparing the amount we have emitted to the amount of increase in the atmosphere and also by looking at the isotope ratios of that atoms, we can determine with certainty that we are in fact the ones responsible for the current rapid rise in CO2 levels.
As for your separate argument that we don’t need to worry about high CO2 levels because they have been higher when we look in the past on geological timescales: First of all, a particular concern is the very fast rate of rise of CO2 levels, which is much faster than what has been seen, for example, in the ice age – interglacial transitions over the past 750,000 years of ice core records. Second of all, noone is claiming that the earth…and life on it…cannot survive some dramatic changes over the long term. However, this is hardly an argument for this not being a major problem.
After all, looked at this way, no problems we are currently facing are important: Do you think the earth and most of its inhabitants can’t survive a few terrorists flying planes into buildings? Do you think the earth and most of its inhabitants can’t survive rising Medicare costs or higher taxes? The earth has gone through dramatic changes over geological time: major asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, major extinctions, etc., etc. It does not follow that we want to just sit back and not prevent such a major change caused by us simply because the earth’s inhabitants will be able to recover from it on geological timescales. Rather, the question to ask is how such changes will affect ecosystems and human societies over timescales that we are interested in, which tend to be on the order of years to a few centuries rather than millions of years.
I honestly want to understand specifically what you believe.
Yeah, you would say that, Joel. It’s all about Belief with you AGWers, not science. Science isn’t about consensus, Joel. But, you knew that, right?
John McL.
Vector quantities, not scalar. As an example I re-post my comments from a recent thread at jennifermarohasy on radiative fluences:
The black body has a characteristic curve of emission dependent only on its temperature.
Solids, particularly Kirchoff’s plane solids, are analogous but at reduced emissivities=absorptivities as the kinetic energy is continually transiting their lattice and is ‘immediately’ available for emission.
The dimensionless constants e=a are also proportional to the time required to emit or absorb, the speed of the interaction.
Their frequency/wavelength curve is of modified shape and displaced toward higher temperatures as their e=a falls.
Gases e=a are dependent on their pressure and temperature, requiring a different graph of emission against temperature for each pressure.
It is only at high pressures and temperatures, e.g., the solar surface that the black body analogy for gases becomes congruent to reality.
At 1Atm, 350ppm and 25 degrees C the e=a constant for CO2 is 9*10^-4, a very small value in comparison to green leaves at 0.94.
The fluence through any cube of air within the first few 100 m of the ground (at night) would then be a resultant vector overwhelmingly outward bound.
If Kirchoff’s law applied, and all the radiative flux into the cube were matched by that leaving the space, all of the resulting vector remains outward bound simply accounting for probability.
But we know that a vanishingly small portion remains in the cube because the temperature rises. Therefore the atmosphere is not in thermal equilibrium.
This energy is available for random emission, for conduction or if the ‘cube’ is warmer or cooler than surrounding cubes, for convection.
The direction of the radiation as well as it’s value is essential. The same is true of strictly chemical fluences. This should be obvious in the case of CaO creation for cement. The use of the cement removes CO2 from the atmosphere and water used. To imply that this is distinct from the natural fluence, which scalar arithmetic must do, is inaccurate to say the least.
Bruce, am I to take that non-answer as saying that you are simply unwilling to explain why all of these scientific organizations endorse the conclusions of the IPCC?
As for the role of consensus in science: Well, you are technically correct in the sense that in science all knowledge is provisional, nothing can ever be proven (as it can in mathematics because science is inductive and mathematics is deductive). However, the concept of consensus is useful whenever it becomes necessary to ask what the current view is in a scientific field, as is necessary if science is ever to, for example, inform public policy decisions.
Smokey, you say “Finally, as a past officer in a large statewide organization, I understand how the organization’s public positions are taken. The rank-and-file scientists are not polled by secret ballot on their opinions; rather, the organization’s Executive Board almost always makes those decisions. If the dues-paying scientists’ views were polled, they would look like this: click”.
First of all, it seems to me that it is an unfair debating tactic to link to a chart with no context or sourcing provided that would allow me to investigate it or verify it. As near as I can tell (see the article I link to below), the chart you provided is to a poll that is now 17 years old and, again as near as I can tell, the chart is a misrepresentation of what the poll found. Here is a link to a more recent poll of the AGU and AMS memberships: http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html I think such a poll is an imperfect device, given that only a small fraction of the membership of these two organizations is probably actively working in the climate change field, but with that caveat noted, here is a summary of some of that poll’s results:
97% of these members surveyed say that the surface temperature has increased in the last century.
84% percent say they personally believe human-induced warming is occurring while only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming.
41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, 44% below it will by moderately dangerous, and only 13% see relatively little danger.
26% find “The Inconvenient truth” to be “very reliable” and 38% rate it as somewhat reliable (which is much, much higher than the analogous numbers given to the media on the subject). This is also to be compared to no more than 1% who rate Michael Crichton’s novel “State of Fear” as very reliable.
As for how an organization produces statements on climate change, I agree that the decision is probably usually made at the upper levels rather than by a poll of all of the members. That’s what representative democracy is all about. And, it has the advantage that the executive committee of these organizations are usually good at identifying the most appropriate experts for a particular issue. By contrast, when you poll the whole society, you are polling lots of people who work in a competely different field than climate science.
Now, I could conceivably imagine a situation where one or two scientific organizations had an executive committee that was quite out-of-touch with their rank and file on some issue. However, if this were the case, you would expect to see quite an outcry within the organization, and perhaps some dramatic changes in the next election cycle of that organization. Furthermore, while it seems conceivable that this could happen within one or two organizations, it seems like it requires a vast conspiracy to happen in the scientific academies of all the G8+5 nations, all the relevant professional societies, etc., etc. And, indeed, the poll that I cited above, while imperfect, seems to verify that no dramatic divergence of this sort between the executive committee and the rank-and-file appears to have happened within the AGU or the AMS.
Truth is arrived at democratically, men in groups being so reliable. Hmmm.
Here’s a complete non-statement from the survey linked to by Joel:
That would seem to say, the current trend being no warming or some cooling, that members of those two groups think the current interglacial is dangerous. Interesting. That, or they’re afraid of extreme cooling.
Gary,
I’m not sure what your point is. I don’t think the democratic method is best either. I think it is best to review the peer-reviewed science in the field. However, some of your peers here seem to think polls are better…so I gave the results of a poll of the AGU and AMS members.
Jeff,
I think that actual scientists in the field, as opposed to many of the “skeptics”, are actually capable of seeing beyond internal variability to consider trends over time periods where the trends are significant enough to yield firm conclusions. All because you and your skeptical friends have an alternative view of reality, it doesn’t mean the scientists in the field do.
“to consider trends over time periods where the trends are significant enough to yield firm conclusions.”
Your data, please. Please show which trends, over time, your are measuring that support your ‘firm conclusions.’
Perhaps skeptics don’t have the alternative view. Perhaps they have the view that fits measureable observations.
Scientific truth is not ultimately determined by “democratic” means.
However, policy is and, most emphatically, must be.
Sticky one, that.