Bubkes II – RC's "rush hour"

Squidly (17:17:16):
From your link:
Evolution favors the development of large sheep, which can more easily survive harsh winters, Coulson explained. So the researchers became curious about the overall decline in size of the animals on Hirta.
They are saying lies. Nobody on this world knows the evolving patterns of any species. We can guess as much that bacteria or viruses could develop resistance to a given drug, but the way is blocked by excessive uncertainties. That’s because evolution is a non Markov process. From our standpoint (as humans that we are) evolution of species is stochastic, i.e. we know that each clade or individual has a memory of the past states which have given origin to the current organism, but we do not know what those states worked neither which extrinsic or intrinsic factors triggered the changes to new states. Markov processes have fixed states which can produce fixed states for each one of the original states or one new state for all the original states; nevertheless, we absolutely ignore the future states that the current states of a clade or an individual will derive. What is more, the current evolution patterns seem to produce reduced in size species, more than gigantic individuals. On the other hand, any species has its own prototypes of activation or deactivation of evolving units which are unknown for us until now.
Something that is quite fascinating is that if humans knew which species will displace them from Earth’s face… well, humans would already have destroyed that “usurper” species. Surely, that species is still wandering out there, waiting for proper physicochemical conditions to emerge as a new species, something like the planet of the apes, without fiction, of course.

Jeremy (14:33:32) :
Besides which, regardless of what they are saying, those people aren’t dumb, they’re just misguided. They’ve let their conclusions drive them more than they should, that’s all
You jump all over Leif for a sentence that made perfect sense and then come out with this? Besides which.. lolz. I frankly am tired of discussions that end up in discussions of what the author really meant. Unless the author is dead, then he knows what he meant. When in doubt ask. The definition of is IS is. Sites which don’t allow open discussion from both sides of an argument must be boiled down to opinion sites, not science sites. I’m with Leif, why are we not just ignoring them?
Paul K (18:23:10) :
The data are clearly showing global warming is proceeding faster and stronger than the conservative IPCC reports.
Please be so kind as to cite the data you are saying clearly shows stronger, faster global warming. Just to be kind, try and find something that is dated past the year 2000 and includes both the little ice age and the midevil warming period.

The pro-RC folks just accept the spoon-fed manipulated charts and distorted Science journal studies without double-checking.

This is normal Human Psychology. You tend to seek out confirmation of opinions you already hold. This is why you read Watts; it’s certainly how I found Watts (I had a “this can’t be right” feeling) and it’s why those who agree with AGW follow RC.

From my layman’s perspective (an astrophysicist by qualification and an IT geek by trade, wait up… maybe I could grow up to be a climate scientist one day?) I find the most frustrating aspects of Gavin et al on RC are the following:
1. Complete refusal to acknowledge that MSM/Political doomsday warnings, based primarily upon their work, are both over the top and potentially misleading.
2. The ivory-tower mentality that then dismisses, out of hand, the view that the general public’s (and I include myself here) take on any such messages will, by necessity, not focus on the probabalistic element of any message content and will, by dint of human nature and the style of journalism, home in on the eye catching headline and overall tone.
3. When such MSM/Political scaremongering fails to come true, or at least be held off for at least a decade, the cop-out fallback to semantics regarding the original messages. (i.e. focusing on the “may”, “could” and “if” parts.)
Points [1-3] above are not science, not the way to do science and a barrier to progress.
As a side note, I find it interesting that both sides of the debate sees the other side as ‘in the grip of religious fervour’. Whenever this occurs, regardless of the subject, it is hard to have rational discourse.
From my perspective, being in the sceptical camp with regard to CAGW, I have to say that it seems that the RC crowd are shriller, quicker to anger, closed in rank and more prone to hostile ad-homs than people here. (This site has it’s ad-homs but they, as a general rule, seem to be light hearted and certainly don’t advocate people going and trying a Sarin experiment on themselves.)
Of course the irony is that the RC literati probably see the world in exactly the same way, only 180 deg about.
It always amuses me how the RC mindset often associates the sceptic with views such as young-earth, religous right-wing zealotry and so on. It’d be an interesting poll (anonymous if needs be) to do on this site with regard to such matters. I for one have no qualms in admitting that I am an atheist and a Darwinian.
Cheers
Mark

“PeterW
As such, it is always and unavoidably grammatically singular. No one would ask `how many wheat do you have?’ or say that `the ore are in the train’ if one wished to be thought a competent speaker of English; in the same way, and to the same extent, we may not ask `how many data do you have?’ or say `the data are in the file’ without committing a grammatical error”
But one does say: “England have lost again” when they play for the ashes.

I got an unusual block from wordpress saying fhe following is duplicate commment ? I dont think so!
The blog statistics speak for themselves it wasnt too long ago wuwt was level pegging with real climate with 7 million hits today wtwt approaching 16 million hits and real climate languishes with 7.9 million hits in other words WTWT is out blogging Real climate 10 to 1 now, and that pattern of hits is happening across the web and it must must be creating a real feeling of desperation in the pro AGW sites.
a detailed analysis of web activity would prove enlightening. People are voting with their mouse to great effect !!

The fact that RC is claiming “warming increasing faster than expected” in 2009 is interesting. If they had posted this view in 2003 it would have carried far more weight since it was only after this point of time that the warming noticably levelled off. So why run the story now ?
Is this the beginning of a desperate last stand !
Perhaps Gavin should rename his site to “Real Modelled Climate” ?.

Nit: “July 30, 2009”? What’s the temperature? Never mind that, what’s the Dow? Uh… Red Sox?
Best,
Frank

Sea level is actually not rising faster on a geological timescale. A paper titled “Holocene evolution of a drowned melt-water valley in the Danish Wadden Sea” gives a pretty good history of sea level rise. Figure 6 to be exact. Sea levels rise at a rapid pace from about 8500 ya to about 6000 ya. Then there is a drop followed by a return of sea level rise at a slightly lower rate leveling off about 4500ya. Then there is a very steep drop followed by a rapid rise until about 1500 ya. That is followed by a drop until about 1000 ya followed till today by the slowest sea level rate of rise in the entire Holocene.
Those numbers are from me eyeballing the graph in fig. 6 and the abstract says “The sea level has been rising from − 12 m below the present level at c. 8400 cal yr BP, interrupted by two minor drops of < 0.5 m at c. 5500 cal yr BP and 1200 cal yr BP, and one major drop of not, vert, similar 1.5 m at c. 3300 cal yr BP:
But the rate of rise as not been consistent and the current rate of rise is the lowest of the Holocene. So any "increase" in rate of sea level rise would simply put us back to where we were say 2000 years ago when sea levels were rising much faster than they are today.

Deadwood: “University of Colorado’s satellite data show no trend in sea level rise since 2006. Sea level “rise” has been flat for the past 3 years.”
But the university’s graph also shows that sea-levels have been rising since the beginning of 2007. Or 2008. Take your cherry-pick.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_ns_global.pdf
Anyone can play the short-term, cherry-pick game. The Copenhagen report deals with longer-term projections against observations, because climate is a long-run phenomenon.

If I recall, RC said the old IPCC prediction for sea level rise was 1.9 mm/yr. Now since the University of Colorado record of sea level rise shows a very steady rate of 3.2 mm/yr since 1994, the IPCC would seem to have leeway to raise their prediction by simply projecting the current ACTUAL sea level rise. But, this is expressed as “worse than imagined”.

Yes, the sea level is rising and… What? It’s quite normal and cyclical. I have said until dropping tears that we are starting a completely natural warmhouse since the last icehouse which ended ~11500 years ago. During warmhouses the sea level goes off the rails; during icehouses sea level retreats. I don’t know why you fire my graphs and articles. At least blink once at this graph:
http://www.biocab.org/Geological_TS_SL_and_CO2.jpg
In that graph the higher sea levels generally correspond with periods of warming while lower sea levels tie the knot generally with periods of cooling. The lower sea levels are explained by a reduction of sea liquid water as the oceans ice up at the poles. We notice also that the sea level response is sometimes negative with respect to warming or cooling of the atmosphere. For example, at the end of the Silurian Period the warming remained stable while the continental flooded area (CFA) diminished.
Please, notice how the sea level was ~50% higher during the Ordovician than at present, so six centimeters in 100 years is nothing. The sea level will never arise to higher levels than during the Eocene, when the flooded of continental area was ~20%.
The remainder AGW scaring arguments are plain lies.