Spencer: AGW has most of the characteristics of an "urban legend"

Ole! Touche! Bravo! Thanks for speaking up and out loud!

Well written and oh so true!

Only when they finally realize what a new treaty will cost them in loss of freedoms and standard of living will those who oppose our continuing use of carbon-based energy begin to lose their religion.
I’m not as confident as you are Mr. Spencer.

If you compare the left/right columns on http://www.climatedebatedaily.com you see that the AGW side is all about calls to authority and the skeptic side is a bunch of nerds fact checking various peer reviewed studies. But the thing that stands out most is how the non-academic AGW crowd really and truly believes that all skeptics are talk radio personality clones, meaning awful characters akin to tobacco hazard deniers or holocaust or AIDs or even moon-landing deniers. They really believe this. And if you are truly non-scientifically-literate, then that would make sense. They only have people’s *motive* as a guide and one side claims much better motives than the other. It sucks. Even junk debunking of skepticism of junk science satisfies them, utterly. They emotionally rely on debunking of debunkers. They are like children. They are spectators in a sort of sport. So the question arises as to how one would reach into the very psyche of such followers of AGW as opposes to the instigators of it. It comes down to the idea that some humans are bad. To change their minds cannot involves climatological facts, but a sea change in their outlook on which group of people are the evil ones. I think nuclear power is the best bet, the only way to undermine the AGW’s side of the equation.

Apropos of the ‘350’ thread before, Thursday in the car I was subjected to an NPR talk show where one Bill McKinnon (I think that was the name) was interviewed about the forthcoming ‘350’ ‘demonstrations and protests’. As I recall, he said that ‘350’ was the CO2 ppm level that James Hansen said was the maximum the climate could tolerate and still maintain the “stability that has enabled human civilization to develop” (that’s a paraphrase, but pretty close). What struck me was the term ‘stability’, as if the Earth’s climate has ever been ‘stable’. But, you see, it’s ‘climate change’ that is the villain, now.
The degree of passionate naiveté expressed to the sympathetic host in about ten minutes was breathtaking. It was as if the future of the world and the human race hung on this mysterious number ‘350’, and that the mass asseverations of the simultaneous displays of the magic number would bring about the new Eden.
Meanwhile, the serious socialist apparatchiks of the UN and the EU are determinedly drafting elaborate treaty language that will ensnare the free peoples of the West in webs of constraints and taxes, stifling progress for the indefinite future, and building hierarchies for themselves, while these ‘useful idiots’ like McKinnon prate on and on about ‘saving the planet’ under the mantra of ‘350’.
This is much more serious than a mere ‘urban myth’; it is collective madness.
/Mr Lynn

A wise man once said
“You cannot reason people out of something that they have not been reasoned into.”
This is the root of the problem as I see it.

The BBC World Service has just broadcast a short radio talk by Clive James on the importance of scepticism. He culminates by stressing the necessity of remaining sceptical in the face of AGW claims. Another little crack in the wall?
Listen again (might only work in the UK):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002wv05

What we are witnessing, folks, is NOT the scientific method (even though we have entrusted this in them).
What we are witnessing is a case study of mass-delusion and group-think, where, like a super-organism, this global “consensus” based upon “garbage-in”…takes on a life of its own.
Even the smartest among them are deceived.
This is a psychological and anthropological study in herd/school/flock behavior of our species that transpires over a much longer period of time.
It has happened many times before.
Mobs act differently than individuals.
Global groups of people believing (or WANTING to believe) in some cause are no different.
We think we are evolved with all our technology and such….but we have a long way to go.
Mass deception….delusion….on a global scale….has happened many times before in human history.
The best recent example perhaps, would be the Germans, who, regardless of an inordinate talent for science and engineering, fell under that dangerous group-think spell one time in recent past.
They aren’t alone….as you can look at many other human people group and find similar characteristics.
The problem of AGW is not a scientific dilemma [Science is not on their side].
It is a psychological one.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

savethesharks (20:31:12) :
Why yes, the same sort of mentality and group-think preceded the coming Ice Age scare. The local level at that time was the struggle against the Establishment, which was perceived as reactionary. Fuel for hysteria.
The Ice Age withered under the Modern Warm Period.
No problem, let’s just rip out that Ice Age Cometh and plug in the Global Warming theory.
What began as a fish-tale that got away, really did get loose and snowballed. With the help of some counter-culture think now embedded in politics, you have your recipe for an agenda, and that’s what came down.
It’s now the Attack of the 50-foot FreeWorld-Eating Dragon.
Peel off the Scales and what do you have?
A fish tale.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose concentration in the atmosphere is increasing, and since greenhouse gases warm the lower atmosphere, more CO2 can be expected, at least theoretically, to result in some level of warming.

No, CO2 emissions would increase temperatures only if one assumes that water vapour content in the upper atmosphere can change only due to a temperature change. Climate models assume that water vapour relative humidity remains approximately constant while CO2 increases. This is a nonsense assumption. This assumption is due to observations that during short time periods relative humidity stays approximately constant while temperatures change. It is invalid to extrapolate this observation to long time periods when CO2 concentrations increase significantly.
Water vapour content will change as a direct result of increasing CO2 content, independent of temperature.
This graph shows that the actual water vapour content in the upper troposphere has declined by 17% from 1948 to 2008 at the 400 mb pressure level (about 8 km altitude). Water vapour data is from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/SH400mb.jpg
Every climate model shows water vapour specific humidity going up with increasing CO2, that is, increasing with temperature. But it is going down, the opposite of the projections.
Why is this important? Three reasons:
1. The radiation balance is determined at the top of the troposphere. The line-by-line code HARTCODE was used to determine the effect of changes of water vapour at the upper atmosphere versus near the surface. This graph shows that changing the water vapour content at the 300 – 400 mb level has 41 times the effect on out-going radiation as the same change near the surface. So only water vapour changes in the upper atmosphere matter.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/H2O_OLR.jpg
2. A 3% increase in water vapour has the same effect as a 100% increase in CO2.
3. The IPCC estimate that doubling CO2 would increase temperatures by 1.06 C if there were no feedbacks, meaning holding water vapour and everything else constant. (This number is much too large, but that is another story.) They multiply this by the effects of feedbacks giving a final climate sensitivity of 3.28 C for doubling CO2. Water vapour and lapse rate together is by far the largest feedback, about half of all feedbacks, representing 1.04 C. So the models assume water vapour coupled with lapse rate doubles the warming effect of CO2. This feedback is entirely due to the belief the water vapour is increasing in the 300 to 400 mb altitude, but as the graph above shows, it is not increasing. It is decreasing. A temperature change can not cause this. It is a direct result of increasing CO2 content.
The result is that there has been no increase in the total effective amount of greenhouse gases, as characterized by optical depth (transparency to long-wave radiation), in sixty years, as demonstrated by the green line on this graph, according to the radiosonde data.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Optical%20Depth2008.jpg
The data is telling us the CO2 is displacing water vapour as a greenhouse gas, and that the laws of physics place a limit on the total effective amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

” You can fool some of the people all of the time.” they really want to believe in B.S. the stranger the better. As Woopy Goldburg said ” I don’t believe with my head, I believe with my gut.”
” You can fool all of the people some of the time.” With loud, official sounding scary pronouncements you can stampede most people for a short time.
“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” After a while the sceptics stop and say,
“this is all B.S.”

“Which laws of physics would that be?”
The laws of physics that govern the atmosphere, or specifically, the laws that control the greenhouse effect. But obviously, not the laws of physics that are programmed into climate models. When the data contradicts your theory, you need to change your theory.

So why not claim that ALL climate change is now the result of human activity?
As some claimed in the past that eclipses of the sun were caused by man.

The mass bureaucrat migration to Copenhagen may be a “once in
a life time” event. I once saw a circular Sea Hare mating chain, of
over 10 individuals. That was something, I’m here to tell you.
http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=seahmat
I expect the mass bureaucrat migration to be just as exciting.

OT, but given it’s Roy Spencer, I thought I would talk about climate sensitivity… As Dr. Spencer says, precipitation exactly matches evaporation and the atmosphere is not saturated with water vapor. Everything follows from that.
I’m strongly attracted to Roy’s ‘strong forces’ model where the ‘forces’ of warming and cooling push strongly against each other to keep temperature in a tight band (see the chart on page 53 in his [highly recommended] book Climate Confusion). The simplest case is that the hydrological cycle has strong negative feedback at the equator but weakly positive feedback at the poles and in cold, dry places like Siberia in winter at night. Surely, positive feedback can only true at the limit case where the atmosphere is saturated with water vapor. Which it isn’t. There is a strong hysteresis built into cloud formation, precipitation and dissipation which sends temperatures and humidity running back below where it started.

hotrod wrote (19:59:23):
“You need to find some way to make them face a fundamental contradiction in their belief system that causes their old belief system to collapse. It is not about facts or science to them it is about belief pure and simple.”
hotrod, you are spot on.
Even a whole series of facts and evidence can fail to persuade them. There is too much invested, and depending on the issue and circumstances, their whole identity is wrapped up in it. Self-justification is strong in Human Nature and the attitude, “I couldn’t have been wrong”, easily befalls many, one might say, it befalls those will specialized training, in even higher numbers because they only listen to their peer group, and will even be hostile to outsiders.
That is why in science, it is imperative to follow protocol: The highest is the scientific method, employing reasonable scepticism and an open-mind to engage in empirical collection of observations & measurement.
When people claim there is no need for observation & measurement, that is when you know their belief system is based on faith not on empirical science.

How about the Skeptics Handbook by Joanne Nova, which is definitely meant for lay people:
http://joannenova.com.au/globalwarming/the_skeptics_handbook_2-3_lq.pdf
I heard Professor Lindzen on the radio a while ago and he not only mentioned it but repeated the url. He said that while he didn’t entirely agree with its contents it was a good starting point.
Joanne Nova also did a paper (which I think might have been mentioned here) about the amount of money being tossed into this bottomless pit. Big government spending their money is something most people have no difficulty grasping.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf

Above Spencer says, “If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded.”
Then later he also says,”… I once encountered a true believer who said he hoped my research into the possibility that climate change is mostly natural will eventually be proved correct.”
Does that mean that Spencer’s research is not funded?

Here’s how to twist this particular urban legend back on itself.

H/T to Richard over at EU Referendum.

What is Groupthink?
“Groupthink, a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis (1972), occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment” (p. 9). Groups affected by groupthink ignore alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that dehumanize other groups. A group is especially vulnerable to groupthink when its members are similar in background, when the group is insulated from outside opinions, and when there are no clear rules for decision making.”
http://www.psysr.org/about/pubs_resources/groupthink%20overview.htm
Symptoms of Groupthink
1. Illusion of invulnerability –Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.
2. Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.
3. Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7.Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.

I think the urban legend is also based on another kernel of truth, and this might even be the more powerful one. Although it isn’t actually a “truth” in the sense of an objective fact, rather it is a sincerely held core value. It is what some people feel to be most important, and it might be a core part of why the urban legend is so compelling.
In developmental psychology there are several models of how people develop through stages, but just look at this description of one cultural values stage from the model called Spiral Dynamics. (In Spiral Dynamics there are 8 stages, each named/labelled by colour: BEIGE, PURPLE, RED, BLUE, ORANGE, GREEN, YELLOW, TURQUOISE):
GREEN Communitarian/Egalitarian MEME – starting 150 years ago
Basic theme: Seek peace within the inner self and explore, with others, the caring dimensions of community
• The human spirit must be freed from greed, dogma, and divisiveness
• Feelings, sensitivity, and caring supersede cold rationality
• Spreads the Earth’s resources and opportunities equally among all
• Reaches decisions through reconciliation and consensus processes
• Refreshes spirituality, brings harmony, and enriches human development
The authors of this model and research estimate that about 25% of people in the West are centred mostly around this cultural values stage. It is called a “values system” because these are the things that people value most.
The research originated when a psychology professor asked his students to write an essay defining, “what is a healthy human?”, and he got back more than one kind of answer. With further research they identified 8 core values. Each one is what a person feels to be “good” or “heathy”. Notice the GREEN ‘answer’ above makes no mention of being able to compete or being able to be strong. Competition is considered unhealthy by GREEEN.
Because a values system is core—it is what a person values most—then if you want to really see eye to eye with someone, you need to frame what you’re talking about in terms that resonate with their core values.
Consider, why do most AGW supporters dismiss technical fixes? There are just a few years left—there is desperately little time—and yet technical fixes, ie. things which we could implement quickly, are often flatly rejected. Instead, AGW supporters are most vocal about changing people’s behaviour—a notoriously slow process, by the way, just look at how long it has taken for women’s rights, at least 100 years and still going, or how long South Africa continued with Apartheid when the world had sanctions against them—but nevertheless, AGW supporters want to change people’s behaviour even whilst China and India and Africa are pressing ahead with construction.
What is AGW supporter’s answer to this? I picked up a little book, “What about China?”—I thought I’d be open minded and see what they proposed to do about China—the book said, “set the example, and they’ll follow”. Really? In 6 years? A billion plus Chinese will decide to “follow” our sterling example?
No, it is patently obvious that AGW is not about AGW. If AGW was really the core issue for AGW supporters, they’d opt for technical fixes. The boat has sprung a leak, so do you get to work with buckets to remove the water? or do you sit and preach the benefits of going on a diet to lose weight? The buckets are the technical fix. But they don’t want that. They want people to lose weight. (They want people to be less greedy).
What they want is to change people’s behaviour. Look again at that description of the GREEN vmeme, a description published decades ago based on research going back more decades.
“freedom from greed… sensitivity… feelings supersede cold rationality… decisions by consensus… harmony… spirituality…”
If you’ve met people who are actively GREEEN, they are quite lovely people. Remember, this is what those people feel is the most healthy way to be. They feel that the technological world went amok with greed and competitiveness, and it continues to cause damage everywhere. So their feeling is that it is healthier for everyone to embrace a spiritual freedom beyond greed, a harmony that comes from cooperation. Instead of war and conflict, they want consensus and equality.
About 25% or maybe even 30% of people in the West resonate with GREEEN.
There’s an important feature of most of the vmemes in the Spiral Dynamics model; each vmeme believes that it is the best vmeme. GREEEN thinks people at ORANGE are greedy. ORANGE thinks people at GREEEN are ineffective and naive. BLUE thinks all the other memes should submit to the authority of the One True Way, be it the One True God, or the One Nation.
The West has a lot of ORANGE and GREEN. But travel to the parts of the world where they still do things the really old way, and you find people who’s way of life is structured around kinship, clans, and blood loyalties. This is the old tribal world of PURPLE values. The West comes in and tries to install an ORANGE democracy, but the people don’t value ORANGE, they value PURPLE, which has been their way of life for thousands of years. Chaos ensues.
We may be one planet, but we are not all on the same page. Groups of people are very different, and each vmeme will come up with its own answers to problems, based on their own core value system.
I don’t know if Spiral Dynamics is the best model or the most accurate, but I find that without it, a lot less makes sense.
What most AGW supporters want, judging by their proposed solutions, is for everyone to become GREEN, just like them. Remember, each vmeme believes itself to be the most healthy.
ORANGE looks at AGW and sees it as a cost-benefit analysis, perhaps requiring some technical fixes here and there, or perhaps simply wait and see; let the energy marked do its thing.
GREEN looks at AGW, and sees that human consensus can lead to reduction in greed, which can reduce our consumption, and reduce our footprint, and give us more time for care and bonding—instead of competition, we’ll have “sustainability” (ie. no competition).
I think that basically, you can guess where people are coming from based on which solutions they prefer/value. AGW has from the beginning been framed as a problem about reducing materialistic consumption (greed) and it has resonated with anyone who is strongly active in GREEN values. Most of these people are in the West, as the West has the high standard of living that makes it possible for people to develop to the GREEEN values-stage.
This is where I disagree most with GREEN answers to AGW. The prosperity that made GREEN values possible, was built by ORANGE technical competitive achievement. If we downscale our industry and energy, we risk reducing our standards of living, and we risk throwing ourselves back culturally. In Spiral Dynamics, no one values stage is better than any other, but they each are adaptions to particular life conditions. If life is hard, people shift to earlier values structures. If life is very hard, you end up back down in PURPLE, which as it happens, is very fond of slavery and tribal war.
The kernel of truth in AGW is that its proponents have framed it in ways that appeal to GREEEN values. GREEN was never that bothered about the cold rationality of science. They prefer feelings and intuitions. (I used to be very GREEN in my 20s, and have since shifted as the demands of life have changed, so I don’t mean to be mean to GREEN).
OK, so far I’ve tried to give a brief discussion on SD as I understand it—I’m no expert so I may have got things wrong here. I’m trying to write this in good faith.
So what about possibilities? If this is the game, how do we play it? First, I think that GREEEN will gradually realise that AGW’s call “we have to do something” is not working, and people are not shifting to GREEN en-masse in response. That’s really like expecting people in Iraq to all shift to ORANGE just because we wrecked their infrastructure, invaded, occupied, killed innocent family members, and shoved ballot boxes down their throats. Well, they didn’t shift. And the rest of the world isn’t going to shift just because it might get a little warmer, and somebody somewhere might get hit by an extra hurricane. If anything, most people in the world are probably trying to figure out whether they can use AGW to help destroy their enemies—most of the world’s population is not GREEN, but is rather part of some more ruthless vmeme.
However, 25% of the West is GREEN, and that number will hopefully continue to grow—as I say, they are really nice people! So what GREEN needs is something that’s more GREEN than AGW. AGW is only a cold bit of science at the end of the day. What really resonates with GREEN is feelings, intuition, care, bonding. This is why “sceptics” are characterised as holocaust “deniers”—it’s not because you’re technically wrong, it is because you look like you don’t care.
Maybe GREEN needs a cultural movement in the arts that’s about spreading spiritual health to the masses. Meanwhile, technical matters like nuclear power can simply be redressed in ways that support spiritual development—make the installations smaller, make them less “corporate” looking, make them more about freedom from dogma and freedom from greed. Nuclear is nature’s way of making light. Nuclear is about small things that leave the countryside alone. After all, GREEN is always going to need the hot water to make the coffee at those community centre meetings.
Wind power is often filmed from a great distance, where they look like a child’s paper windmill, blowing in a gentle breeze. Instead, they should show a turbine being built, they should show men labouring to pour the concrete. The blades’ steel should be shown being smelted in a steel furnace. Men should stand next to the turbine gears, filmed up close, to show the scale of the machinery, and corporate logos should be visible everywhere, and the noise of the turbine should be heard. Slow motion images of a bird in graceful flight being hit by a blade should be shown, and the number of kills should be compared to the numbers of animals kept in cages for medical experiments.
I have a fair amount of GREEN in me, and I just don’t find wind turbines very GREEEN.

I never thought I would be the one to point out the glaring flaw in Dr. Spencer’s article.
Roy, your data is wrong, your theory lies is in tatters!
“Independence Day” was in fact, made in 1996 not 2006 as claimed in this report.

Vincent (04:11:50) :
Yeah, but the best part of the movie was when Will Smith said “don’t you be shootin’ that Green stuff at me !! “

O/T…but a good read.
global biofuels program INCREASES C02…perfect.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-10/mbl-ns102009.php#
JimB

M White (03:13:08)

The characteristics of ‘groupthink’ are distressingly similar to the insidious nature of movements that generate ‘true believers’—cf. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.
/Mr Lynn

Unfortunately the green brigade will never admit that AGW is a myth, and even if millions died from a repeat of the LIA episode they would continue to cling to the idea that mankind is destroying our planet.
Luckily these die-hard’s are only a tiny proportion of the total populating and not only does the average man-in-the-street not believe the AGW climate mantra, most do not rate it as even one of their top concerns.
The people who run the world have been selling us a big lie and once AGW has been demonstrated to be wrong I feel sorry for what will happen to the scientists and politicians who tried to use it for their own benefit.

Yesterday evening I heard the Climate Change minister in the UK, Ed Miliband, say in an interview with skeptic, James Whale, on LBC 97.3, that he’s only acting on what the scientists are telling him….well if you’ve funded them to tell you what you want to hear, with innocence, you can’t claim that the research result is nothing to do with you!

Yeah, it lends a whole new meaning to the term “It’s a crock”

kim (18:51:45) :
Bring back the EcoInquirer.
That was a funny website.

The “Average” guy has no idea whether the earth is actually getting warmer, or not. When it becomes obvious that it’s not, And when some of those he trusts (the local weatherman, for instance) starts pooh-poohing the idea) he will go from apathetic to hostile (if any of his money is taken for “taxes,” that is.)
The “perfect storm,” right now, would be for this to end up being a weak-to-moderate El Nino, followed by a pretty strong La Nina that would push Dr. Spencer’s 13 month smoothed average Below 0.0 (that would be a bit cooler than the ’99, 2000 La Nina.
That would give the trusted authority figure (the local weatherman) cover to say, “Well, uh, you know, it has been *Cooling* since 1998. This *theory* might need a little bit of work.”
That will be the Death Knell.

The sun has a good size spot today.
But isn’t it a bit close to the equator? I thought at this stage in the cycle the spots ought to be located at higher latitudes.

Roy Spencer says:

It is a peculiar development that scientific truth is now decided through voting.

No. Scientific truth is decided by the scientific process, as it always has been. And, who better to evaluate the current state of the science than the scientists themselves, which is why we have the expert assessments by the IPCC…and the endorsement of their findings by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the academies of all the other G8+5 nations, AAAS, and the councils of many major scientific societies such as AMS, AGU, and APS?
We only get into talking about poll results when people complain that all of these societies’ councils have been somehow been co-opted and thus that their views don’t reflect the rank-and-file members.

A relatively recent survey of climate scientists who do climate research found that 97.4% agreed that humans have a “significant” effect on climate. But the way the survey question was phrased borders on meaninglessness. To a scientist, “significant” often means non-zero.

Fine, how about asking the question a different way, namely whether they perceive climate change as being dangerous? Such a survey of people who are in American Men and Women of Science and list themselves as members of either the AMS and AGU found that 85% believe that climate change in the next 50-100 years will pose either a very great danger or a moderate danger (split about evenly between these two answers) whereas only 13% believe it will pose relatively little danger ( http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html ). [Also note that the criteria for determining who was surveyed was somewhat broader than just climate scientists and probably thus included some scientists, like forecast meteorologists or geologists, who are probably more skeptical of AGW on average than scientists working in climate science itself.]
I also have a general question for Dr. Spencer: Given that your own latest research ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/04/spencer-on-finding-a-new-climate-sensitivity-marker/ ), as I understand it, suggests a climate sensitivity of 1.6 to 2.0 C, how high do you think that CO2 can rise before we will have problems? What if you are wrong in your estimate of the climate sensitivity and the real value is between 2.0 and 4.5 C as the IPCC sees the likely range as being?

I can’t believe that you don’t believe most global warming is Mann-made.

While there is a lot of useful info here which has certainly demonstrated to me that climate change has a huge amount of uncertainty, it slightly bugs me that supporters of the staus quo are reffered to commonly as “socialists” As a commited and life long European socialist can I assure posters that there are climate change dissedents across the political spectrum, and that ones political affiliation does not automatically correlate with climate beliefs.

P Gosselin (07:16:40) :
The sun has a good size spot today.
But isn’t it a bit close to the equator?
Yes, really. It seems that solar cycle 24 is ending!. Anyway those NASA forecasts, based on that dynamo of theirs, didn´t see the future. Ask the GISS´Hansen to improve them, or better, and more beautiful hire some real fashion models.

Geoff Sherrington:
“Anyone into psychology enough to coment professionally on motivation? Is it more than the girl school mass panic attack effect that is documented?”
It is an unresolved wish to return to a utopia. I say ‘return’ because each of us has an experience in very early life of utopia – the baby experiences the world (and especially the mother) as a part of itself and ‘needing’ does not exist because everything (food, warmth, love etc) ‘magically’ appears as it is wished for.
As infancy progresses, the child learns – by increments – that the world is in fact a separate entity and frustration has to be tolerated when wishes and demands are no longer instantly met – that is, when the child’s felt urgency of a need has to be survived through a waiting period.
If this separation all goes well (if the child accepts the new reality if finds itself in), it can begin to make use of the resources in the outside world and it learns the value of ‘language’ as a tool of negotiation for its needs to be met (and for it to meet the needs of others). If the child rejects separation – that is, if it insists on remaining in ‘utopia’ and demands all external ‘otherness’ continues responding in such a way that confirms the utopian fantasy to itself – the child will grow into adulthood with this failure of development unresolved (although largely unconscious) and this will influence and determine pretty much all of its uses and abuses of a surrounding environment and its objects – including other people.
The adult will be left preoccupied with a hankering after some indeterminate ‘past’ which it feels was somehow ‘perfect’ for its existence. The adult will identify all ‘other’ – except those who collude in its demands – as being the obstacle to it achieving a return to this ‘past’.
Of course, as time passes, the objects the adult chooses to use for its project will change – it would be a bit of a give-away for a grown adult to demand the return of its mother to a lost pre-infant relationship to it, hence the need to disguise the motive (from itself as well as from others) in an elaborate ‘cover-story’ using contemporary objects – such as, as we can see, the ‘climate’ (other recent objects have included population, an angry god, swine flu, millennium bug etc).
The cover-story, and its corresponding demand, remains the same throughout: the real environment – the world the adult has to become a part of, negotiate with, exchange resources in, and survive through – cannot possibly be sustained… it is unwanted and should be abandoned and returned towards the adult’s vague fantasy of a pre-infant ‘pure’ version. It’s worth noting here that from a psychological point of view, ‘being sustained’ and ‘being held’ are interchangeable demands with the same meaning – but only a baby (if it had the words) would insist, rightly, upon this uninterrupted need – or feel it really to be the end of the world if this holding environment failed.
For this adult, negotiation with the ‘obstacle’ to its demand has no value because the pre-infant world contains no negotiation… only a (very familiar) rage as a response to an unmet demand.
The adult who is magnetised by the Global Warming story (who can’t let go) is a person with his obstacles muddled up. It becomes the other person who is the obstacle to the self’s demand – rather than the self’s demand being the obstacle to his growing up.
If psychology is indeed a science, it may be a far more interesting and resourceful one than climatology to use in discovering more about ourselves and our relationship (or refusal of relationship) to the outside world and the objects we find in it. It’s nature, just human nature.

Gareth Phillips (08:14:27) :
..it slightly bugs me that supporters of the staus quo are reffered to commonly as “socialists” .
Gareth, the problem is that -as a group- Socialists tend to take advantage of mob hysteria better than any other group and the loudest group that seems to be taking advantage of all the Global Warming hysteria and pushing a “better” world vision for all to swallow are socialist politicians, and PhD’s, and College Profs, etc.

artwest (20:18:39) :
Thanks for the link to the Clive James piece – I will repeat the link and encourage anyone to listen:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002wv05
Clive makes a wonderful observation that scepticism gave rise to modern medicine, moving it on from belief in magic as a cure. I wonder how many sceptical “heretics” died as a consequence of not agreeing with their witch doctors and the accepted orthodoxy of the day.
Watch the modern witch doctors incanting spells using mystical numbers, such as 350, and threatening the naysayers with storms and pestilence unless they sacrifice their way of life for an austere future.

The BBC has finally acknowledged the importance of skepticism… Too bad they don’t practice what they preach.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8322513.stm

“..it slightly bugs me that supporters of the staus quo are reffered to commonly as “socialists” .”
A word on socialists – For those of you in the USA who see Europe as being more socialist and as a result more accepting of the man made climate change theory may like to see this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8321967.stm
“A group of rich Germans has launched a petition calling for the government to make wealthy people pay higher taxes.”
A whole different mindset

OK – we all agree. We are right. Opinion research shows that public scepticism is increasing. But how the hell do we stop the juggernaut.

question. if we were able to reduce the global temp what would be the end result? i guess we would have to burn more fossil fuels to keep from freezing thereby increasing co2 again. agw. what a bunch of hooey.

It seems likely to me that the good old beeb is beginning to lay on a few stories so that in the future when this collective insanity comes to an end which it surely must, they will be able to point out that they had a balanced position. At most other times though they yada yada on-message for AGW.
Meanwhile, I just popped over to the Met Office to discover what the winter has in store for us in the Uk:-
[i]Preliminary indications continue to suggest that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK. Winter 2009/10 is likely to be milder than last year for the UK, but there is still a 1 in 7 chance of a cold winter[i/].
Well, we shall see. I guess sooner or later, the law of averages will ensure they get it right. N.B must make a note of it, in case they amend it.

Fred H. Haynie (09:13:38) :
Your PowerPoint has some interesting ideas that are worthy of further research. Unfortunately, there is a significant likelihood that further research along those lines would provide evidence that could refute the IPCC “findings”.
As a fellow government employed scientist it is my experience that funding for such studies would necessarily be placed at the back of the line. Current policy dictates that funding must be prioritized to those studies that assume that the GCM models are complete and settled science.
Any other studies must delayed until decisions by policy makers to save the planet are are in effect. At that time all funding will necessarily be required to mitigate the financial and societal impacts of those policy decisions.

Fred H. Haynie (09:13:38) :
I also just finished reading the contents of you presentation:
http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf
It is a very interesting compilation! It will take some time for the implications of your summary to set in ( need to re-read it in detail now) but my first impression is that your work deserves to be widely read and given some serious consideration.
Thanks for all the effort involved in putting that together!
Larry

As Dr. Spencer points out there are many persuasive studies that question the conclusions of the IPCC – a political and NOT scientific body. The general tone in this thread appears to be for a trumpeter to spread the word to the general public. It appears this is beginning to happen with the BBC (print and radio) publishing two recent articles in support of the skeptical view. Wary of public backlash may be motivating their change of heart.
Since much of this battle is fought on the fields of public perception, those controlling PR channels have won more mind share. But the advent of “citizen news” via internet blogs and web sites is having a powerful effect. The main stream media is closely monitoring our web content and, as they are creatures of public acceptance, painfully aware of the mass growth of the skeptic view. This is their lifeblood. The real tipping point in climate perception is at what moment and who in the main stream first adopts the skeptic view? And thereby wins new mind share.
The let down at Copenhagen is the likely point. Obama will not appear, there is no G8 agreement, and the spinners are hard at work packaging disagreement to look like success. All needed at this stage is for one focused message – probably administered by a top Madison Ave firm – that asks: “Where is our $30 billion in climate research?”
That is a question of economics. $30 billion in US taxpayer funds has yielded no hard evidence of manmade CO2 caused warming, no current warming trend, and worse, no bloody treaty in Copenhagen! Three strikes and yer…
A brief review of Fred Haynie’s paper is interesting. He concludes:
“The observed rise in background levels of carbon dioxide is globally uniform and is primarily the result of rising temperatures of the arctic ocean sink and not from increases in anthropogenic emissions.”
Thank you for your significant efforts Fred.

Joseph said:

It is widely recognized that the atmosphere is opaque to IR. Except for those wavelengths within the atmospheric window that escape directly to space, all of the upwelling IR is fully absorbed to extinction in the troposphere today.
This is the reason why adding more GHG’s to the atmosphere cannot make the atmosphere warmer; because it is not possible to absorb more than 100% of the available energy. If more GHG’s are added to the atmosphere, the absorption-extinction altitude simply declines a little to a lower altitude, that’s all. No additional warming.

Your conclusion is based on a misunderstanding of how the greenhouse effect works, admittedly abetted by many explanations of it that are too simplistic. Here is a good discussion of the simplistic explanation vs the correct explanation: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.htm#L_0623
In a nutshell, what is important is not whether or not a photon get absorbed once or zero times but actually the distribution of levels from which the photons are emitted that successfully escape to space. The higher this distribution of levels is in the troposphere, the colder the temperature and hence (by the Stefan-Boltzmann Eq.) the less radiation that gets emitted. As you add more CO2, you increase the average level from which this emission occurs…and hence you get less emission back out into space.
You would be in good scientific company if you raised your objection 60 years ago; today, not so much.
Stefan says:

Joel, can I ask, what emphasis do you put on the Precautionary Principle?

I think the principle is too simplistic. In the real world, one has to weigh the possible dangers against the costs of avoiding the dangers. However, I think in the case of climate change, some serious dangers are not just quite possible but rather likely especially for some level of CO2 that we would likely obtain if we used our fossil fuel resources to their fullest potential (and didn’t sequester the CO2). We don’t yet really know exactly what level of CO2 is necessary to avoid the worst effects…but we do have enough of an idea that we need to start changing course now…with possible adjustments to either more or less stringent emissions controls in the future.
And, in considering the costs, one has to consider that fossil fuels are a finite resource anyway so it is not like we can continue having that cheap energy source forever. Better to create the market forces to develop the technologies to replace them (by which I mean both new energy sources and increased energy efficiency) sooner rather than later…so that we wean ourselves from fossil fuels before rather than after we have likely done irreversible harm.

Joel, I agree withn “weigh the possible dangers against the costs of avoiding the dangers”.
Now I don’t know if this is right, but I assume you’re not a scientist in the field of climate. On what then, have you based your conviction that,
“we do have enough of an idea that we need to start changing course now”
where by “we” we’re really talking about “them” the scientists?
Just to take a guess, is it that you think that the scientific method produces reliable information, and seeing as numerous official science bodies have declared AGW very likely, then it is indeed very likely true?
If this is so, what is your take on critiques of the cultural aspects of science, like the article “Cargo Cult Science” ?

Fred H. Haynie (09:13:38)
Whilst the statistics used are way over my head, there is a logical progression through the document which makes a great deal of sense to this layman.
Not only have you performed a detailed analysis of available data, you have also offered some predictions against which your conclusions can be tested within a modest period of time. I await the outcome with a degree of confidence that you will be proved correct.
My thanks for what must have been a massive amount of work, and I hope it has the effect that I think it deserves, to place the anthropgenic global warming scandal in the dustbin of history.

“hope the spaces come out right”
Thought it might not. Oh, well.

Better to create the market forces to develop the technologies to replace them [fossil fuels] (by which I mean both new energy sources and increased energy efficiency) sooner rather than later…
Had this been the foundation of the AGW campaign – it would have probably succeeded. The fatal error was to pin the entire campaign on an erroneous finding: CO2 is a “pollutant.”
Now we have an enormous mess with institutional science to clean up.

Stefan,
Yeah…I am a physicist, not a climate scientist. So, I am to a certain extent trusting the judgment of those in the field. Although, I have also spent a considerable amount of time reading papers and textbooks in climate science, so I don’t feel that I am relying only on the judgment of scientists in the field; however, there are certainly issues that I feel less “up on” than others.
And, yeah, I am sort of using the royal “we” there.
As for the cultural aspects of science, I recognize that science isn’t perfect and that there are fads and paradigms. However, I think that we don’t have any viable substitute for basing policy decisions on the best understanding of the current scientific view in the peer-reviewed literature; to do otherwise is to open things up to hopeless politicization.
Thus, I think that it is incumbent on scientists who are “skeptics” on AGW to prevail on their fellow scientists to change their views by presenting their evidence in a scientific forum…and I actually applaud Dr. Spencer for working to publish his papers in reputable scientific journals. Unfortunately, the “skeptic movement” as a whole seems to expend most of their energy taking their case directly to the policymakers and the public and publishing in less serious journals…or journals well outside the climate science area of expertise, using arguments that have most often been thoroughly debunked in the scientific realm, rather than trying to prevail on their scientific colleagues…And this alone is, to me, a bad sign. (There is nothing wrong with discussing science directly with the public and policymakers but that should not be your primary approach.)

“And it is also a good bet that 100% of those scientists surveyed were funded by the government only after they submitted research proposals which implicitly or explicitly stated they believed in anthropogenic global warming to begin with. If you submit a research proposal to look for alternative explanations for global warming (say, natural climate cycles), it is virtually guaranteed you will not get funded.”
Now how’s that for an urban legend! 100%, you reckon? On the basis of exactly what evidence? Until you can provide a source for that claim, I’m going to presume that you simply made it up.

Fred H Haynie: thank you for your fine presentation. As an engineer, I do like the idea of having starting equations applied to the data. I will look in more detail at your presentation, but at first reading I see no alarm bells.
I will be going through this with a coarse tooth comb and will get back to you if I have any questions.
In summary: fantastic work!

“the “skeptic movement” as a whole seems to expend most of their energy taking their case directly to the policymakers and the public and publishing in less serious journals”
Because the journals that you regard as serious won’t publish papers that question their pre-conceptions but rather accept self peer reviewed work that is frankly shoddy.
As a ‘physicist’ you should understand that the keystone of alarmist logic is that since we understand all the processes of the climate and all the influences on it from the sun and the oceans, we may assign any unexplained warming to Man.
The presumption that we understand the climate is flawed and only a fool would argue with that.
You may consider yourself a ‘physicist’ but your inability to understand the logic of your position shows you don’t think like one.

Joel,
It seems to me you are sincere in your beliefs, so I would like to ask, in your opinion, what are the “arguments that have most often been thoroughly debunked in the scientific realm.”
I want to cross reference the skeptical arguments with those that have been “debunked” and then examine the “debunking” arguments.

Shirley,
“P.S. The consensus position is very clear, consisting of the following points: (1) the climate is getting warmer; (2) CO2 is the cause for this warming; (3) in particular, the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels; (4) this will turn into a problem if we don’t do something about it. Obviously y’all know this, since you are reading and posting comments on a blog created to deny exactly those four points, multiple times per day. Or is that just a coincidence?”
Let’s take each point.
1) Climate is getting warmer. Yes, everyone agrees on that but as to the amount of warming, even the scientific institutions can’t agree.
2) CO2 is the cause for this warming. Nobody, not even the IPCC makes such a ridiculous claim. The IPCC position is that greenhouse gases (not just CO2) accounts for the majority of the warming, not all of it. Then you have very credible scientific opionion that humans are altering the climate but CO2 is only a minor part of this (Roger Pielke et al). There is also very robust evidence that most of the warming is natural with CO2 playing a minor role and further evidence that warming has stopped since 1998.
3) See point 2.
4) This will turn into a problem. Not much consensus on this and with good reason. Most scientists understand the limitations of computer models.

Joel Shore
Yes, in a perfect world I’m sure what you suggest would be the way to tackle this debate. But this particular field has become very politicised.
I am not a scientist and have never been one, although my education was scientific (electronics and physics). I have followed the debate for about a year now and a lot of the practical science seems to depend on funding, and what I have picked up on (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that obtaining funding for climate research often depends on meeting political criteria ( the fads and paradigms you mention). Anecdotally, it would seem a lot easier to obtain funding for research that is likely to align with pro AGW orthodoxy.
This would seem to make it a lot more difficult for those scientists with a sceptical outlook to actually produce the work that their better funded peers would actually take note of. You need to do the research and offer your paper for publishing before you can obtain peer review.
As for the rest of the”sceptical movement”, I can only speak for myself, but I suspect many are like me, in that we ask questions when we see or hear of things which don’t add up or don’t accord with our personal experience. When we don’t get answers, are called deniers or are told “the science is settled” yet see more and more complex mechanisms and models proposed to account for climate predictions which don’t accord with observation, then we doubt that th scientists have it right.
I am reminded of the increasing complex models (based on spheres, deferents and epicycles) proposed by Ptolemy to account for observed planetary and stellar motion when the orthodox view was of a geocentric universe.

Re: Joel Shore (11:59:26)
Heh, thanks for that link Joel, I hadn’t seen that before. Weart’s description of a “radiative ping-pong ball greenhouse effect” is very funny. It conjured up a hilarious mental image that really had me laughing. It is also entirely incorrect and so wrong-headed that I hardly know where to begin.
Let’s take your statement:
“In a nutshell, what is important is not whether or not a photon get absorbed once or zero times but actually the distribution of levels from which the photons are emitted that successfully escape to space. The higher this distribution of levels is in the troposphere, the colder the temperature and hence (by the Stefan-Boltzmann Eq.) the less radiation that gets emitted.”
This is entirely incorrect. The IR radiation that originates in the troposphere is the result of the release (radiation) of latent energies by water vapor as it changes phase at altitude in the troposphere. This radiation is the strongest in the upper-most levels of the troposphere precisely because it is so cold there.
As water vapor rises through the atmosphere, if it fails to encounter a nucleation seed (speck of mineral dust, airborne bacteria, etc.) by the time it reaches ~700 mbar (where the temperature is 0C), it can continue to rise as supercooled water vapor. Upon reaching an altitude of ~300 mbar, where the temperature is -42C, that temperature causes the supercooled water vapor to spontaneously crystallize, due to crystal homogeneous nucleation, without the need for an external nucleation seed.
When this irreversible freezing process occurs, the latent heat of sublimation is released (radiated) and it is quite large. Recent investigation indicates a lower bound for this energy to be ~50% greater than the simple sum of the latent energies of condensation and fusion, due to a change in entropy. Here is a link to that paper:
http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~kostinsk/jas_entropic.pdf
This is supported by the atmospheric cooling rates calculated with the LINEPAK line-by-line code using the Intercomparison of Radiation Codes in Climate Models (ICRCCM). Take a look at figure 1 in this paper:
http://esto.nasa.gov/conferences/estc-2002/Papers/B4P2%28Mlynczak%29.pdf
As can be seen, the atmospheric cooling (due to radiation) is calculated to be the strongest at ~300 mbar, where the irreversible freezing of supercooled water vapor releases the latent energy of sublimation. The Stefan-Boltzmann Eq. is of no concern here.
At the link you provided, Weart said:
What happens to infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface? As it moves up layer by layer through the atmosphere, some is stopped in each layer. (To be specific: a molecule of carbon dioxide, water vapor or some other greenhouse gas absorbs a bit of energy from the radiation. The molecule may radiate the energy back out again in a random direction.
This is also incorrect, as no tropospheric gas re-emits any absorbed upwelling IR (UIR) due to radiative decay, and that can be easily demonstrated with simple observation. Take a look at this radiance plot of surface measurements during a cloud-free night and day.
http://www.srrb.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/surf_check?site=desr&mos=June&day=2&year=2008&p1=dpsp&p5=dpir&p6=upir&ptype=gif
As can be seen, even though during daylight hours the UIR increases by 200 W/m^2 (50%!) the downwelling IR (DIR) fails to respond. These energies (photons) travel at the speed of light. If it were true that tropospheric gases re-emitted (due to radiative decay) any of the upwelling IR they absorbed , there would HAVE to be an increase in the DIR in response to the tremendous increase in UIR, but there is not.
The only tropospheric gas that emits IR is water vapor, due to it changing phase and releasing latent energies.
Joel, I think you need to seriously reconsider your position, as it is unsupported by the information at hand.

The red herring by the AGW true believer, Joel Shore, that skeptics should keep to their place and only discuss the failures of AGW in forums he approves is rather transparent and condescending.
AGW promoters have not had any problem dominating every aspect of the public square for over 20 years.
At this point, real tax dollars, in very large sums, and real treaties, that directly impacts each of us are at stake. We on the skeptic side are, it seems to some of our AGW friends, too uppity in pointing out the failures and falseness of their theory. That is clearly an effort of distractoin on their part.
All reasonable people should never forget the ad homs, the threats against professional standing, and the calls for criminalization of cilmate dissent, by the AGW community.
Now, with the public opinion joining the facts, and not supporting AGW, the true believers are suddenly calling for the debate to be limited to peer review processes (controlled by AGW promoters)?
No. Way. Ever.

I previously said (21:30:51):
“The actual water vapour content in the upper troposphere has declined by 17% from 1948 to 2008 at the 400 mb pressure level (about 8 km altitude).
The result is that there has been no increase in the total effective amount of greenhouse gases, as characterized by optical depth (transparency to long-wave radiation), in sixty years, as demonstrated by the green line on this graph, according to the radiosonde data.”
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Optical%20Depth2008.jpg
tallbloke (04:09:49) said:
“The pyrheliometry data on optical depth seems to say something different. Hoyt found no change to 1968 but Philipona et al who continued the work using the Hoyt time series as a baseline find various changes in optical depth since.”
http://acp.web.psi.ch/acp_publ/documents/proceedings/2002_9_20_Atmos.Res.JFJ_Davos.pdf#page=23
The article shows the measurement of short-wave transmission, which is highly affected by volcanic and human caused aerosols. The article states “Only in 1985 the atmosphere seemed to partly recover from the volcanic aerosol burden reaching again a transparency level of 2 to 3 % below the (1909-1968) long-term reference.”
My comment and graph refers to long-wave optical depth, not short-wave.
Part 3 of the article discusses 4 years of long-wave radiation measurements. It does not discuss any time trend, and considering the large variation of water vapour content, 4 years of data can not determine a time trend.

Shurley Knot (11:04:33) :
(2) CO2 is the cause for this warming;
Data shows that what you say is not true.

Spencer = creationist = nut
OK that’s it, you are banned- you are nothing but troll bombing each thread with your comments – get out- Anthony

sagi, Rereke Whakaaro, hello and thanks, it is nice not to be a lone voice on a forum 🙂
Do you think there might be any aspects of the AGW issue that when focussed on, could be the conditions or demands that begin to shift anyone who’s already at exiting-Green to Second Tier, at least cognitively?
What do you think about Green in science? How do we talk to, say, scientists who on the one hand would maintain that the only real forum for truth is their own peer reviewed journals, whilst at the same time, some of these scientists might also be members of an ethical movement, perhaps a Green organisation, like the Union of Concerned Scientists?

RR Kampen,
Of course a true believer is uninterested in discussing the fact that AGW theory is failed, and that the promotion of it is fundamentally corrupt.
Rather than wonder about a system of thought that embraces anything said in its favor, and rejects everything said that is critical, true believers see that as the proper order of things. So your boredom is understandable: to be engaged at all means questioning your faith. And AGW cannot withstand that for even a moment.
You should be more interested, if you had any critical thinking skills, to consider that that the climate does not care what the AGW community says, either.

@Chris-savethesharks
An excellent expansion on what I remember reading in my youth, ex a work by C.G. Yung: (if I remember correctly) “The morality of a crowd is in inverse proportion to its size” I have seen this at work umpteen times! So much for the claimed scientific consensus. The larger the “in” group, the more the individual accountability and standards are compromised in favour of the group-think.

Re: GabrielVanDenBergh (05:48:44) :
An excellent expansion on what I remember reading in my youth, ex a work by C.G. Yung: (if I remember correctly) “The morality of a crowd is in inverse proportion to its size” I have seen this at work umpteen times! So much for the claimed scientific consensus. The larger the “in” group, the more the individual accountability and standards are compromised in favour of the group-think.

This is especially true in mathematics, where advocates of free speech who purport that Pi is a rational number actually get kicked out of their job!

Re: evanmjones (06:10:15) :
In the late 1980s the PDO hadn’t even been discovered yet.
No, its effect is small by comparison. It belongs to the ‘noise’ on which a marked upward trend is superposed.

RR Kampen,
And I seriously doubt if you are telling anything close to what you were actually waiting on in the 1980’s.

hunter, we are into the fastest climate change in thousands of years.
I wouldn’t break into a panick for that, but I wouldn’t close my eyes to this reality either.
As for the eighties, the literature is still there. Do a count and discover the huge AGW-consensus that was there already then.
I know it because I believed until 2004 it had to be the sun. And I felt just like you then 😉

Juraj V., Junkscience? Please!!
Anyway, even this graph shows something typical for many parts of the world: a slightly decreasing variance (due to the weakening winter season!) and a distinct, consistent upturn in the last decennia (known as the ‘hockey stick’).
What suprises me is the that years 2006 and 2007 don’t stick up more in this graph. They were the warmest.

Talking about AGW related urban myths, unfortunately, average person after decades of media massage got all that myths deep into brain. Ask anyone and he says, yes we (will) see more droughts, more floods, more extremes, more hurricanes.
But then you look at the hard data and you see that there is no visible trend in hurricane frequency nor intensity. You learn that the deadliest hurricane hit Galveston in 1900, the strongest hurricane hit US in 1935. Katrina did sucked, but the biggest havoc was caused by failing sea protection walls.
You learn that highest recorded temperatures ever were all seen in 19th century or first half of 20th century (except Antarctica where observations started after WWII).
Strongest wind ever recorded blew in 1934.
The most extreme drought hit US in 30ties, Central Europe in 1947.
You learn that droughts killed millions in India in 18th and 19th centuries.
Then you look at CET temperature record and see, that inter annual temperature variations during the LIA were often wild and warming or cooling trends were by far more intense than in 1950-2000.
As LIA started, increased temperature contrast between tropics and polar regions caused powerfull storms, sea floodings in Northern Europe and strong coastal erosion, something unheard today.
I recommend in such discussion to ask the opponents few basic questions: when were highest temperature records observed, strongest and deadliest hurricanes, deadly floods, droughts; they will have no clue, since they can only babbling about fastest climate change™ without any hard facts. Beat them with facts, and sane people will recognize it.

This storm killed 1852 people in Holland and a couple hundred in Britain and Belgium:
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/1953/Rrea00119530201.gif
This system drowned 343 people in and around Hamburg: http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/1962/Rrea00119620217.gif
This system (‘Vivian’, Stockholm 938 hPa) produced comparable tides on Dutch coasts that did nothing, because de dykes have been improved considerably: http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/archive/ra/1990/Rrea00119900228.gif
Systems from the LIA have not been known to be more severe than low pressure areas like those mentioned above. The impact of such was much more severe, of course, like the impact of even a moderate cyclone in Bangadesh will remain devastating until there’s something of a sea defense in place there. For now already many lives have been saved there because they put mounds and hills everywhere so people can run up them during a storm surge.

O, Juray, the post about storm surges was a reply to yours. And, as an aside, climate and climate change is about averages, not incidents. But a barchart of daily min, max, average temperature records per decennium for de Bilt, Holland, looks like this:
http://benlanka.tweakdsl.nl/climate/datumrecords.png

To me as a scientist, the word “significant” implies that we could see the signal above the noise level (natural variation, in this case). But, we still don’t even know what the noise level is and probably never will.

Re RR Kampen (09:30:22)
Bilt.. isnt it the station which was found to be biased upwards?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/ooops-dutch-meteorological-institute-caught-in-weather-station-siting-failure-moved-station-and-told-nobody/
Try harder next time.

Sandy says:

Because the journals that you regard as serious won’t publish papers that question their pre-conceptions but rather accept self peer reviewed work that is frankly shoddy.

Not true at all. In fact, skeptical paper have been published in peer-reviewed journals, even quite bad papers. For example, there is the Douglass et al. paper (see discussion here ) that was published despite a fairly elementary error that should have been caught in the refereeing process. And, the paper by Stephen Schwartz in Journal of Geophysical Research arguing for a low climate sensitivity was published; the problems with it were admittedly a little more subtle but it prompted several comments and in his reply to the comments, Schwartz admitted there were problems and upped his estimate of the climate sensitivity from 1.1 +/- 0.5 C to 1.9 +/- 1.0 C ( http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-80226-2008-JA.pdf ) although my guess is that some of the commenters would argue that his revised estimate is still too low given the identified problems.
Finally, there is the paper by Gerlich and Tscheuschner (see http://www.realclimate.org/wiki/index.php?title=G._Gerlich_and_R._D._Tscheuschner ), which admittedly falls into the category of a paper that was published in a journal pretty far outside the climate science field (in a statistical physics journal). Still, I think the fact that it was published at all is quite embarrassing considering that it is extremely polemical and has various wrong statements not only about climate science but even many about physics.
Vincent says:

It seems to me you are sincere in your beliefs, so I would like to ask, in your opinion, what are the “arguments that have most often been thoroughly debunked in the scientific realm.”
I want to cross reference the skeptical arguments with those that have been “debunked” and then examine the “debunking” arguments.

There are a few sites that discuss the most common arguments. This is one of the best: http://www.skepticalscience.com/ This is another: http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

Joseph says:

As can be seen, the atmospheric cooling (due to radiation) is calculated to be the strongest at ~300 mbar, where the irreversible freezing of supercooled water vapor releases the latent energy of sublimation. The Stefan-Boltzmann Eq. is of no concern here.

What do you mean that the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation is of no concern? The only way that heat energy can be communicated away from the earth-atmosphere system is via radiation according to the S-B Equation. Yes, some of the heat that gets to the upper atmosphere gets there due to process of evaporation and subsequent condensation. (See here for a diagram of the earth’s energy budget: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/bna/educate/earth_rad_budget_kiehl_trenberth_big.gif ) However, that energy (or a portion thereof) is then radiated out into space.
The evaporation and condensation only ends up changing the energy budget for the earth system as a whole to the extent that it affects the temperature structure of the atmosphere. (And indirectly to the extent that it forms clouds, which can reflect sunlight and absorb and subsequently emit IR radiation and transports water vapor up into the upper troposphere where it acts as a greenhouse gas.)
For the tropics, that temperature structure is expected to be determined essentially by the moist adiabatic lapse rate, which means that (due to the condensation of water vapor) the temperature in the upper troposphere in the tropics warms more than at the surface does. This is indeed a negative feedback for the surface temperature rise since it means that the surface temperature does not have to rise as much as the temperature in the upper troposphere must rise in order to restore radiative balance. It is included in all of the climate models where it “takes back” part of the temperature rise due to the water vapor feedback. [In fact, since much the same convective physics controls both the (positive) water vapor feedback and the (negative) lapse rate feedback, the models with a higher magnitude for one feedback tend to have a higher magnitude for the other, so that the sum of the two feedbacks varies less from model-to-model than each of the feedbacks individually.]

This is also incorrect, as no tropospheric gas re-emits any absorbed upwelling IR (UIR) due to radiative decay, and that can be easily demonstrated with simple observation.
…
The only tropospheric gas that emits IR is water vapor, due to it changing phase and releasing latent energies.

This makes no sense at all. Substances emit electromagnetic radiation simply by virtue of being at a non-zero temperature. We often talk of there being absorption and re-emission but the “re-emission event” is completely unrelated to the absorption event, with the only relation being that it is the absorption events that are of course playing a role in determining the temperature. The radiative emission occurs simply due to the temperature. See the discussion here by an emeritus professor of meteorology who is sort of stickler when it comes to using terminology correctly: http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadGreenhouse.html I had thought he was a little too militant but now that I see the sort of confusions that you are making, I am beginning to understand his militancy on being precise about this stuff.

Mr. Shore,
You have still failed to explain why the IPCC is credible, when it is not a scientific organization.
You have still not reconciled your demand that skeptics only publish in scientific journals, while AGW promoters are free to do as they please in the public square.
An additional point you may want to address is why you would persist in sending people to AGW propaganda sites that demean skeptics?

“In fact I remember ‘we’ (scientists) were by the end of the nineteeneighties just waiting until global warming would rise to significant levels. It duly did.”
A coin was flipped the other day. I predicted it would come up heads. It duly did.

Ken Gregory says:

Climate models assume that water vapour relative humidity remains approximately constant while CO2 increases. This is a nonsense assumption. This assumption is due to observations that during short time periods relative humidity stays approximately constant while temperatures change. It is invalid to extrapolate this observation to long time periods when CO2 concentrations increase significantly.
Water vapour content will change as a direct result of increasing CO2 content, independent of temperature.
This graph shows that the actual water vapour content in the upper troposphere has declined by 17% from 1948 to 2008 at the 400 mb pressure level (about 8 km altitude). Water vapour data is from the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/SH400mb.jpg

I believe that the long-term trends in this humidity data from radiosondes are believed to be unreliable due to changing instrumentation and other issues. And, they are in stark contrast to the data from satellites, which shows the specific humidity and the temperature to be positively-correlated (such that relative humidity remains pretty close to constant on average) for both the shorter-term fluctuations and the longer-term trends. See here http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;310/5749/841 , or see here http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/323/5917/1020 for a review with other references.
The satellite data also seems much more reasonable as it is hard to come up with reasons why the correlation of upper tropospheric water vapor with temperature would go the opposite way on the multidecadal timescales as it goes on the annual timescales (as the radiosonde data seems to suggest) given that the convective effects controlling this are on much shorter timescales than both of these. And, as TallDave noted, it is hard to understand a mechanism for how changes in CO2 levels would drive changes in water vapor levels directly, as you seem to suggest.

A 3% increase in water vapour has the same effect as a 100% increase in CO2.

Really? So, if your radiosonde data is to be believed and is representative of the drop in water vapor at the atmospheric levels important for the greenhouse effect, that would imply that we have had changes in water vapor between 1948 and 2008 that would be the equivalent of something like 5 or 6 halvings of the CO2 levels (e.g., dropping the CO2 levels by something like a factor of 50). Wouldn’t you expect that to result in one heck of a cooling, in contrast to what we have seen…or do you think that the temperature is somehow so insensitive to either that it doesn’t matter?
Frankly, I think the problem is that BOTH the data that you show is wrong and that your claim that a 3% change in water vapor has the same radiative effect as a 100% change in CO2 levels is wrong.

Joel Shore “Unfortunately, the “skeptic movement” as a whole seems to expend most of their energy taking their case directly to the policymakers and the public and publishing in less serious journals…or journals well outside the climate science area of expertise, using arguments that have most often been thoroughly debunked in the scientific realm, rather than trying to prevail on their scientific colleagues…And this alone is, to me, a bad sign. (There is nothing wrong with discussing science directly with the public and policymakers but that should not be your primary approach.)”
Hmmm…the same could be said about your side, Joel.
Again…the burden of proof is on you. Show forth the evidence that a trace gas in the atmosphere is causing runaway warming.
Show it. Prove it. Where is it??
This is not a hard proposition. Either you can prove your theory with OBSERVED evidence….or not.
Second question, though, if the “Skeptic” movement is so unimportant to you (and you certainly have Copenhagen, the UKMet, and Obama on your side so YOU are a majority)….then why are you expending so much time and energy here???
Get back to work and research and stop spending so much time on this blog.
You are obviously bright, and the world needs you, but not to spend hours arguing that which you can not (and still not have been able to) prove.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Joel Shore (16:52:43) : I’ll prepare a comprehensive reply after work tomorrow. Check in 24 hours.

sagi,

She calls Green “Affiliative Consciousness”, and points out that differences and conflict are seen as threatening at this level, that being needed and harmonious relationships with others are a core motivation, and that the correct option for action for a Green is the consensus of one’s peer group.
So that is the barrier … and the challenge … for Green scientists.

Aha, thanks for the reference.
Plus when Green becomes threatened or trapped (the “gamma” step in SD):
“When Green confronts the barriers, it will descend into a rigid, holier-than-thou, politically correct stance, arrogantly questioning everybody else’s motives.”
I feel like I’ve seen quite a lot of this out there. When someone is called a “denier” it is because Green is actually feeling threatened?
I was glancing at George Monbiot’s website yesterday. It seems he started out working on African issues, investigating the suffering of African victims, and his more recent work seems (to me at least), to be about how the poor in Africa suffer due to the Western multinationals’ contribution to climate change. It reminds me of the film, ‘The Constant Gardener”.
What I’m wondering is how Monbiot has taken issue with other environmentalists, particularly those who are focussing on population as the main problem: The Optimum Population Trust, David Attenborough, Jonathon Porritt, Paul Ehrlich. Monbiot at one point seems to have accused the founder of the Ecologist magazine of being some sort of extreme right fascist.
Yellow starts to look at the whole system and from a Green perspective this can look elitist and even fascist. And yet, if we’re actually to tackle environmental problems, it does warrant stepping back and looking at systems of systems (at least to begin with, but as Ken Wilber observed, systems theorists are mostly focussed on the external Web of Life, the material planetary systems, but generally ignore all the internal stuff about psychology and culture, so their “system theory” is not really holistic, for it leaves out half the picture, it leaves out the fact that most of the world’s cultures don’t care about global environmental issues).
Let’s say from a Yellow perspective, the world’s problem, given current levels of technology, is mainly population—and what we need are fewer people, preferably fewer big families, which tends to be the poor. Meanwhile from a Green perspective, the poor are the biggest victims, and what we need to do is to protect them, help them to rise out of poverty, but without adding additional resource depletion. That means the rich need to send their wealth to the poor. In this scenario, the African poor win, but in the other, they lose even more. Where’s the consensus on that?
But I’m not sure really that from a Yellow perspective, population is the core problem—I’m not sure where the Optimum Population Trust is coming from, do you have a sense about this? I’m finding it hard to distinguish between Nature’s order (Yellow?) and a One True Order (Blue?). Maybe OPT is a sort of authoritarian answer to environmental problems, or maybe it is simply Yellow’s best assessment at the present time…? It confuses me when they all have upper class British accents. When the Duke of Edinburgh says he’d like to reincarnate as a virus to wipe out human overpopulation, that conservation is a “hard headed” business, what meme is that?
I guess what I’m wondering is what will happen to Green consensus as more people get involved with proposing actual solutions. Green can spot and reject any Orange solution as “just more selfish multinationals protecting their interests”. But what is Green going to make of Blue solutions and early Yellow solutions?
It will be hard to maintain consensus when people like Monbiot are calling other environmentalists “fascists”.

“All this means rethinking the very nature of the world economy It claims to be geared to ‘sustainable development’ but there is precious little that is sustainable about it, and very deep changes are required if we are to have any future on this planet.” — Edward Goldsmith
“During much of the nearly 20 years I lived in rural Cornwall I had no car (though I cheated and took taxis). I had no central heating, no freezer, and I used a composting toilet. Now, I am afraid, I am once more a city slicker. However, it was an experiment in the right direction.” — Edward Goldsmith
This has some relevance also to the other thread, “eat the dog”, where the Vales have for decades been working on “autonomous” housing that can stay off grid. I think “eat the dog” was just a way to draw attention.
When I was a student I once said to my tutor, Robert Vale, “I do believe that the environment is the only issue architects should be focussed on”.
Since then, climate change entered the mainstream consciousness, but this is something that I’ve never felt right about—if people were truly serious about climate change, about sustainability, about humanity’s survival—if climate change was really as urgent as the IPCC and scientists say it is, then we would be enacting extraordinary measures—we would re-architect civilisation—and we would not wait for the agreement of those who hadn’t got the memo.
I really don’t understand—we are all perfectly capable of living without a fridge (my grandma did her whole life)—why we continue to ponce around saving plastic bags and trying to figure out what brand of shiny new electric car to buy. You don’t need a car. You don’t need a fridge. You don’t need any of that. And you certainly don’t need two kids.
This fundamental disconnect with reality is what troubles me more about climate change, far more than any “denialist” anti-science.
Robert Vale said, when he grows old, and his children ask him, “Dad, what did you do to save the world?”, Robert said he wants to be able to answer them.

Nevermind Joel, what has Al Gore given up?

Oops, 34 years ago.

Stefan says:

Joel,
what have you given up?

I won’t claim that I am a saint but I have done various things to try to reduce my carbon footprint. I own a Prius. I live in a neighborhood where a lot of services that I need are available within walking or biking distance and I use foot or bicycle for a significant fraction of my trips; when I do use my car, I try to combine trips to places that are in the same vicinity rather than making separate trips. I own a small house and I pay a surcharge on my utility bill in order to have the utility add a certain quantity of wind energy to the electricity grid. I have installed CFLs in most fixtures and installed a low-flow shower head. I also try to keep the thermostat down during heating season (although I get a little pushback from my girlfriend on that one). Our house does have an air conditioning unit but we hardly use that at all. I try to buy at least some of our produce at a local farmer’s market (that I almost always get to by bike).

Joel Shore (10:28:13) :

I own a small house and I pay a surcharge on my utility bill in order to have the utility add a certain quantity of wind energy to the electricity grid.

How much will it cost to get the MUG tattoo removed?
If where you live is anything like the UK, no-one actually knows how much power is produced by wind because they don’t use bi-directional metering.
In case you didn’t know. When there is no wind, the turbines are often driven from the grid. I’ve seen wind turbines driven for days on end from the grid, using power, not generating!
There is no record of how much power is really generated, so how can they realistically charge anyone
DaveE.

Joel Shore (10:28:13) :
I won’t claim that I am a saint but I have done various things to try to reduce my carbon footprint. I own a Prius. I live in a neighborhood where a lot of services that I need are available within walking or biking distance and I use foot or bicycle for a significant fraction of my trips; when I do use my car, I try to combine trips to places that are in the same vicinity rather than making separate trips. I own a small house and I pay a surcharge on my utility bill in order to have the utility add a certain quantity of wind energy to the electricity grid. I have installed CFLs in most fixtures and installed a low-flow shower head. I also try to keep the thermostat down during heating season (although I get a little pushback from my girlfriend on that one). Our house does have an air conditioning unit but we hardly use that at all. I try to buy at least some of our produce at a local farmer’s market (that I almost always get to by bike).
I respect that…practicing what you preach. Thanks.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

save the sharks says:

I respect that…practicing what you preach. Thanks.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Thanks. I do try to practice what I preach.
Ken Gregory,
Thanks for your reply. You say:

The paper assumes the T12 signal is proportional to relative humidity only because this signal has not changed much since 1982, and climate models project constant relative humidity. This is circular reasoning.

The Soden paper does not use T12 alone. It also looks at T2. By looking at T12-T2 it is able to at least approximately subtract out the effect of changing temperature and just get a measure of the changing absolute humidity. Dessler and co-workers (list of papers here: http://atmo.tamu.edu/profile/sub/239 ) have also independently looked at humidity as measured by satellites; I haven’t looked in much detail at their method of doing it but it uses different satellite measurements and they get similar results to Soden.
As for the radiosonde data, as Soden et al explain: “Although an international network of weather balloons has carried water vapor sensors for more than half a century, changes in instrumentation and poor calibration make such sensors unsuitable for detecting trends in upper tropospheric water vapor (27). Similarly, global reanalysis products also suffer from spurious variability and trends related to changes in data quality and data coverage (24).” [I couldn’t find Ref. (27) but Ref. (24) is this paper: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Staff/Fasullo/refs/Trenberth2005FasulloSmith.pdf ]
You also haven’t addressed the other reasons that I mentioned for the radiosonde data not being believable including the amount of negative radiative forcing it would imply (if your estimate of the strength of water vapor relative to CO2 is correct, which I admittedly don’t believe either) and the idea that the specific humidity is well-correlated with temperature fluctuations on the annual timescales but then fails to be correlated on the longer timescales.

Is there anyone out there who can point to a rigorous treatment , in the form of a peer reviewed paper , that can justify Soden’s suposition that … ” changes in Instrumentation and poor calibration make such sensors unsuitable for detecting trends in upper tropospheric water vapor …” . Maybe it’s just me , but I’m having a bit of a difficulty admissing to the idea that a 17 percent drop in WV levels can be so lightly dismissed on account of percieved ” Calibration ” deficiencies and changes in instrumentation . Granted , analog instrumentation of the immediate post WW II era was not as accurate as the electronically based digital instruments of today , but 17 percent ? That just seems a bit over the edge. For one thing , if Mid – 20th Century instrumentation was deemed inadequate for measuring WV levels [ according to Soden ], how was this conclusion determined : i.e. was this based on some sort of compelling evidence or is this just “his ” opinion . Secondly , at what point on the part of Soden , or the scientific community in general , was it determined that instrumentation was sufficient to the task of accurately measuring WV levels ; the advent of satellite monitoring ? Do satellites measure humidity and water vapor levels directly ? If not , then what makes them so much better than tools which take direct measurements ? Thirdly , since I am given of the opinion that instrumentation technology presently is more advanced than that which existed in 1948 ; why shouldn’t I subscribe to the possibilty that the preservation in the continuity of data trends [with regards to WV levels] was observationally maintained through 60 years of continuous improvement in instrumentation technology ? Somebody help me with this .

Ken Gregory says:

The statement “A 3% increase in water vapour has the same effect (on optical depth) as a 100% increase in CO2″ was determined by HARTCODE line-by-line (LBL) code.

Okay…The new parenthetical statement you have added changes the meaning considerably. I had thought you meant that the radiative effect (radiative forcing) due to a 3% increase in water vapor is the same as that due to a 100% increase in CO2. However, as you note, “a change in optical depth is not proportional to a change in out-going long-wave radiation”, so this 3% vs 100% claim is really irrelevant to their effects on the global temperature.

Of course I know that Soden looks at the T12-T2 difference, but we don’t know if this cancels the temperature effect because we don’t know the relative contribution of water vapour and temperature to the T12 signal.

I don’t understand what you are saying here. The changes in T2 should reflect the part of the change in T12 that is due to temperature, because T2 is sensitive only to temperature and not water vapor. This is why Soden subtracts one from the other in order to remove the effect of the change in temperature. (In reality, the T2 and T12 don’t have exactly the same weighting over the various atmospheric levels but they are quite close so the cancellation of the temperature variation part of T12 should be quite good.)
And, as I noted, Dessler uses different satellite data to look at the changes in water vapor.

Nature has many ways to reduce specific humidity. In the tropics, every time the air temperature increases, thunderstorm clouds form and more SW light is reflected, the OLR increases, and rain increases, until the maximum air temperature is passed. See “the thermostat hypothesis”:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/

But it seems to me that such a hypothetical mechanism would not explain how there is a positive water vapor feedback for temperature fluctuations on, say, approximately annual timescales (where I believe that both the satellite and radiosonde data show it to be operating) but somehow does not occur on the longer multidecadal timescales.