IOP issued a no holds barred statement on Climategate to the UK Parliamentary Committee.
Some criticism ensued. Now IOP fires back:
Concerns raised over Institute of Physics climate submission
A statement submitted by the Institute of Physics (IOP) to a parliamentary inquiry on climate change continues to draw criticism, with one senior physicist saying that it is “not worthy” of the organization. Others have complained that the statement appears to play into the hands of climate “sceptics”, as it criticizes scientists for withholding climate data when requested using the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. The IOP, which owns the company that publishes physicsworld.com, has responded by making it clear that it believes in man-made climate change and that its submission was criticizing instead the practices of the climate scientists at the centre of the inquiry.
The IOP’s submission was sent last month to a House of Commons Science and Technology Committee inquiry into the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK. The inquiry is investigating the alleged hacking of CRU servers, which resulted in hundreds of private e-mails between researchers over the last 14 years being disclosed online last November. The inquiry solicited responses about what possible implications the e-mail disclosures might have for the integrity of scientific research and whether the scope of a separate independent inquiry – led by Muir Russell, a former vice-chancellor of the University of Glasgow – into the CRU’s practices is adequate.
Some of the e-mails reveal that CRU director Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from the post until the Russell review is published, withheld data from being released even after freedom-of-information requests. One particular e-mail sent by Jones on 16 November 1999 caused a media furore when it was revealed that he wrote “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
The [IOP’s] evidence is both misinformed and misguided Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam University
“Mike’s Nature trick” refers to a paper published in the journal Nature (392 779) in 1998 by Michael Mann from Pennsylvania State University, Raymond Bradley from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona. In the paper, the researchers sought to estimate how the mean temperature of the northern hemisphere has changed over the past millennium by combining various “proxy” temperature records, such as the diameter of tree rings and the presence of hydrogen and oxygen isotopes in ice cores, with thermometer temperature measurements.
[We] focused on the need to maintain the integrity, openness and unbiased nature of the scientific process IOP statement
The resulting “hockey stick” plot shows a relatively flat, but fluctuating, temperature for more than 900 years, from A D 1000 onwards (the shaft of the hockey stick) that then rises suddenly in the past 100 years (the blade). The hockey-stick graph, which is widely considered as a valid result in the climate-research community, was later included into the third assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.
The “trick”, as mentioned by Jones in one of his e-mails to Mann, Bradley and Hughes, is a statistical method that is widely accepted in the climate community and is applied to proxy measurements in the years since 1960. It deals with the problem that some tree rings in certain parts of the world have stopped getting bigger since that time, when they ought to have been increasing in size if the world is warming. According to physicist Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and a blogger for realclimate.org, Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming.
However, sceptics of man-made climate change jumped on the phrase used by Jones saying that he and the CRU were hiding temperature decreases in their data and using certain sections of the full data set that most support the conclusions they want to report.
Under fire
The IOP’s submission to the inquiry, which was sent on 10 February following approval by the Institute’s Science Board, says that the disclosed e-mails from the CRU threaten the “integrity of scientific research in this field”. The submission argues that the integrity of the scientific process should not have to depend on appeals to freedom-of-information legislation and says that refusals to comply with such requests harm “honourable scientific traditions”. It also states that the possibility that only a part of the raw data set was included in Jones’ temperature reconstructions was “evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information”.
Arnold Wolfendale, who was president of the IOP from 1994 to 1996, says that the evidence is “not worthy” of the Institute and that the submission “further muddies the waters regarding global warming”. Oceanographer and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf from Potsdam University, Germany, has gone further, calling on the IOP to retract the statement from parliament. “I was taken aback when I first read it,” he says. “The evidence is both misinformed and misguided.” Rahmstorf, who is a board member of Environmental Research Letters (ERL), an open-access journal published by the IOP, wants the Institute to withdraw the evidence or clarify who wrote and reviewed it.
In a statement, the IOP says it regrets that its submission to the inquiry has become the focus of what it calls “extraordinary media hype” and that the evidence “has been interpreted by some individuals to imply that the IOP does not support the scientific evidence that the rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is contributing to global warming”. The Institute adds that it has long had a “clear” position on global warming, namely that “there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.
The Institute says that its evidence to the House of Commons committee was “like that of other learned societies, focused on the need to maintain the integrity, openness and unbiased nature of the scientific process. The key points it makes are ones to which we are deeply committed – that science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way, however much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information.”
There have also been concerns that the IOP’s submission appears to prejudge the outcome of the inquiry. “I consider it not only inappropriate but highly irresponsible for a body like the IOP to appear to presume a judgment on what is clearly not a simple issue without having the full facts and without presumably knowing the full context,” says atmospheric physicist John Houghton, who is currently president of the educational charity The John Ray Initiative and is a former director-general of the UK Meteorological Office. Houghton has also been the lead editor of three IPCC reports.
That view is echoed by Andy Russell, a climate researcher from the University of Manchester in the UK, who has written an open letter to the Institute about the submission. “As it stands, they have written a judgment rather than an evidence statement,” he says. Russell calls on the Institute to retract its evidence and points to a statement by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) that, he says, essentially makes the same points as the IOP but in what he calls a much more diplomatic way. One statement in the RSC’s submission says, for example, that “a lack of willingness to disseminate scientific information may infer that the scientific results or methods used are not robust enough to face scrutiny, even if this conjecture is not well founded”.
Process issues
Benestad, however, does not think that the Institute should retract the evidence to the inquiry, although he wants more transparency about how it submitted the evidence. “I thought the evidence sent the wrong message. Transparency should be the same for all sciences and not just single out climate change,” says Benestad. “Regarding being more open about how the submission was written, the IOP should practise what it preaches and say how this was submitted.” He wants it to be made clear who specifically wrote the document, as well as who independently checked it before it was submitted.
In its statement, the Institute says that the evidence submitted to parliament followed “the process we always use for agreeing documents of this kind”, noting that it submits 40 to 50 evidence statements to parliamentary inquiries per year. “We asked the energy sub-group of our Science Board to prepare the evidence, based on its analysis of material that is in the public domain following the hacking of the CRU e-mails last year,” says the IOP. “The draft was circulated to the Science Board, which is a formal committee of the Institute with delegated authority from its trustees to oversee its policy work, and approved. However, we are already reviewing our consultation process for preparing policy submissions, and the comments we have received on this submission reinforce the need to make sure our procedures are as robust as possible.”
The Institute also says it “strongly rebuts” accusations of “being overly influenced by one ‘climate-change sceptic’ on the energy sub-group, and then of a lack of openness about the authorship of our evidence”. It adds that “The individual in question had no significant influence on the preparation of the evidence. Responsibility for the evidence rests with our Science Board, whose members’ names are openly available on our website.”
The parliamentary inquiry came as the UK’s Meteorological Office published a review of the latest climate-change science. The report says it is “very likely” that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the climate to change and that the changes bear the “fingerprint” of human influence. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee is expected to publish its findings in late April.
About the author
Michael Banks is news editor of Physics World
================================
Story is here, comments are open
I like this bit:
“Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming.”
Cherry picking makes Cherry Pie
The report says … that the changes bear the “fingerprint” of human influence.
And they base that statement on — what?
Does human-produced CO2 contain unique isotopes of which science has been hitherto unaware?
*blink*
Ooooooh. First?
“The IOP, which owns the company that publishes physicsworld.com, has responded by making it clear that it believes in man-made climate change..”
To believe is prerogative of religious domain, of a lack of exactness but not its substitute.
Carbon market update;
“Wall Street was supposed to become the capital of a global carbon trading market worth a trillion dollars a year but now many who thought green trading desks would be the next big thing are fearing the pink slip.
US banks had looked forward to a huge “cap-and-trade market” a system where companies would buy and sell the right to emit gases blamed for warming the planet. Many hired carbon traders, picked up assets, and trained members of energy desks to deal in emissions markets.
But prospects for a broad US carbon market have dimmed. US Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican working on a compromise climate bill, declared economy-wide cap-and-trade “dead” this month.”
US Carbon Traders Fear Pink Slips
http://www.smh.com.au/business/us-carbon-traders-fear-pink-slips-20100312-q2cr.html
Gotta love how no matter how screwed up the process is, people are still pressured into proclaiming their ‘belief’ in climate change. The back and forth on the proponent side of the agw debate is looking more and more like an argument between religious sects about what is and isn’t canon, with everyone desperate to make sure it’s not their base belief in God that’s in question lest they be labelled a heretic.
Why does it “believe in man-made climate change”?
Now IOP fires back:
[…]such as the diameter of tree rings[…]
Really? 🙂
“The [IOP’s] evidence is both misinformed and misguided Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam University”
surprise, surprise !!!!!!!!
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/members/stefan/prof.-dr.-stefan-rahmstorf
from pik website
“PIK is a member of the Leibniz Association and funded by the Federal Republic of Germany and the Federal State of Brandenburg in about equal shares. In 2009, the institute received circa 8.6 million Euro institutional funding and 1.4 million Euro from the German Federal Government’s economic stimulus packages I and II. Additional project funding from external sources amounted to 8.2 million Euro.”
Source: http://www.pik-potsdam.de/institute/organization
No s&&&t, missinformed eh ?????, missguided eh ??????.
For this kind of money I will call it BS, how about you “prof” rahmstorf ?????
The submission by the IOP made me feel proud to be physicist!
“The IOP, which owns the company that publishes physicsworld.com, has responded by making it clear that it believes in man-made climate change and that its submission was criticizing instead the practices of the climate scientists at the centre of the inquiry”
So the scientists have done rubbish ‘science’ that cannot be replicated but the IOP ‘believes’ in their results. Why? Are we talking burning bushes here or something involving clasping hands around a table in a darkened room?
“The resulting “hockey stick” plot shows a relatively flat, but fluctuating, temperature for more than 900 years, from A D 1000 onwards (the shaft of the hockey stick) that then rises suddenly in the past 100 years (the blade). The hockey-stick graph, which is widely considered as a valid result in the climate-research community, was later included into the third assessment report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001.”
These people are either stupid or they really haven’t been paying attention. Same for anybody who tries to defend the trick without understanding what it was really all about. Even primary school children in Patagonia know more than these oafs.
“The [IOP’s] evidence is both misinformed and misguided (Stefan Rahmstorf, Potsdam University)” … which speaks for the IOP paper.
“there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.
Action is being taken now: behold the existence of WattsUpWithThat, co2science.org, icecap.us, etc.
Relax, action is being taken.
It seems that there is a division among the scientists:
Those that want to seperate the bad acts from the science, and those that want to maintain the idea that there were no bad acts (or the acts don’t matter).
They have a problem: The bad acts can’t be seperated from the science — they contaminate the science, but to deny there were bad acts doesn’t pass the smell test.
Each division understands the bad acts are serious, the difference is their “take” on how to deal with the bad acts.
One group thinks the best way to more forward is to acknowledge the bad acts and move on. Which at one level is the best way to go, on the other hand, since the work is seminal for the discipline’s conclusions, and, the bad acts are part and parcel to the legitimacy of the conclusions, it means starting over from scratch.
The other group wants to stonewall because they can’t envision going back to scratch and they don’t want to admit the “Team” was corrupt — these were their “stars”, after all.
But it’s really an ostrich with its head in the sand.
To stonewall is to tacitly approve of the conduct: Those folks are doubling down into what I think is a losing hand.
Things are too far along to get away with stonewalling.
…..the UK’s Meteorological Office published a review of the latest climate-change science. The report says it is “very likely” that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the climate to change and that the changes bear the “fingerprint” of human influence.
How often has the Met been wrong? Just wondering…..
realclimate and in particular rahmstorf are not qualified to comment on the ‘hide the decline’ issue, as they are not trained statisticians and though they heavily apply statistical methods, still refuse to interact with the statistical community, particularly Steve McIntyre’s.
In a statement, the IOP says … “there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.
Meanwhile in an unrelated news item from a few days after the IOP submission, and just before their first ‘clarification’:
“The UK government is promising to put in place measures to protect the future funding of physics and astronomy.”
BBC News – Jonathan Amos – Mar 4, 2010
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8549627.stm
They got paid trillions by Exxon – the new world religion’s version of Satan who rules their version of Hell or global warming as they call it
guardian’s ‘belief’ concerns! massaging the data, using the generic ‘climate change’ and relief the young are still believers:
12 March: Guardian: Damian Carrington: Slide in climate change belief is a temporary glitch
It has taken a perfect storm of snow, scientific doubt and political failure to dent public acceptance of the reality of global warming – but these factors will pass
(Pic Caption) A long, hard winter has turned some people against believing in climate change.
Look at that the other way round and the Ipsos-Mori poll showed 91% of people accepted climate change was happening, and the Populus poll 75%. The difference is probably due to the former poll not including people over 65, who are significantly more sceptical, while the latter was conducted at the peak of negative news coverage about climate science..
So it seems it took a perfect storm of snow, scientific doubt and political failure to dent public acceptance of the reality of global warming by about 10%.
For greens that could be encouraging, as all those factors will fade. For sceptics, it’s more likely to be worrying, as they have never had it so good in recent years…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/12/climate-change-belief-polls
I’ll repeat here a question I just asked at Lucia’s.
It is known that tree rings have not responded to temperature in the last 50 years as it was thought they should. This is the source of ‘hide the decline’ where the tree ring proxies have continued to be used as ‘proving’ AGW.
My question was, if they don’t understand what is happening to tree rings at the moment how can they claim any certainty about what tree rings represent hundreds of years ago?
Hell even if the IOP was skeptical about AGW they couldn’t say it.
Even now they are being attacked for not being 100% behind the climate crooks.
So the IOP doesn’t believe what CRU did was actually science but they support the conclusions that result from what CRU did that they said isn’t science.
They are Believers, their support for the conclusions of a process they denigrate is faith based.
I’m not a religious person myself but I respect the IOP’s right to believe in the modern AGW religion.
Be sure to read the comments to the original article.
Transparency should be the same for all sciences and not just single out climate change,” says Benestad. “Regarding being more open about how the submission was written, the IOP should practise what it preaches and say how this was submitted.” >>
Who is he kidding? What their submission said is that the CRU wasn’t following the procedures that all sciences should follow. This is just a diversion. If he wants to question their procedures what is he saying? That the CRU should be exempt? Or that what they are doing meets the standard? He’s engaged in a smear compaign instead of dealing with the issues.
“Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming.”
The implication seems to be that there is nothing wrong with this practice!
How can climate “scientists” have sunk so low as to defend this kind of deception?
[post links, not whole articles. ~ ctm]
How do they rationalize “hiding the decline” and such to produce hockey-stick graphs “to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming”? What is the evidence except for their own bastardized and irrationally “adjusted” temperature data?
They create the evidence by methods that may be “accepted” in climate science circles, but they are not accepted, ethical, or even legal in real science. There are accepted methods for robbing banks, but we do not use them in real, normal, legal life.
Oh, I get it. They are saying outright that climate science is not really science, but junk science.
Firing back? It looks suspiciously like they are backing off, and I wonder why.
Every one of the numbered thirteen points in their “Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)” is valid. There is no need for them to publicly apologise or, cap in hand, to stress stuff like “it has long had a “clear” position on global warming, namely that “there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.
For goodness sake, the IOP merely made submissions about disclosure of climate data, the implications for the integrity of scientific research, and appropriate terms of reference for the UEA independnt review. Valid submissions. So why is it subjected to attacks unsuprted by any specific rebuttals of any of its points of submission?
John Houghton: “I consider it not only inappropriate but highly irresponsible for a body like the IOP to appear to presume a judgment on what is clearly not a simple issue without having the full facts and without presumably knowing the full context,”
Stefan Rahmstorf: “I was taken aback when I first read it,” he says. “The evidence is both misinformed and misguided.”
Arnold Wolfendale: ‘the evidence is “not worthy” of the Institute and ‘the submission “further muddies the waters regarding global warming”.’
Faced with those generalised and emotive attacks, for some reason the IOP does not call on the critics to be specific about their problems with the submission. Instead, it rolls over, apologises and and quietly surrenders.
That is sad, indeed. The forces supporting AGW are mighty indeed if a body like the Institute of Physiscs is compelled to recant like Galilleo. Are we returning to the dark ages?
http://www.herkinderkin.com/2010/01/anthropogenic-global-warming-as-organised-religion/
No amount of grand semantics disguise the FACT that the whole “CRU Climate Science” process was not, is not free from corruption fraud and dishonesty.
Gordon will have to give the physicists some more dough til they shut up.
Sounds like a longer, and more detailed version of Al Gore’s “the science is settled”.
One wonder why they even bother to keep studying climate… sounds like their minds are made up:
“there is no doubt that climate change is happening, that it is linked to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, and that we should be taking action to address it now”.
Frankly it’s slightly sad that they have to add that the IOP “believes in man-made climate change” in order to avoid being ostracized from their warmer friends.
Anything you have to “believe in” is probably not that much of a scientific theory at all. Does anyone actually say they “believe in” gravity? Thermodynamics? Either the theory is valid or it is not. Does it explain what is observed, or not? Whether one “believes” in it is immaterial.
And don’t get me started on how ludicrous the statement is that the Hockey Stick is “widely considered as a valid result in the climate-research community”! Please. Phlogiston was “widely considered valid” in the combustion-research community, too. That didn’t make it correct.
My apologies for off topic: But the Tips thread crashes my computer (I think memory).
Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704131404575117314262655160.html
“Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen”
“The notion of objective truth has been abandoned and the peer review process gives scholars ample opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies.” By PETER BERKOWITZ
What’s really insane about this is that their “excuse” for “hiding the decline” was that tree rings inexplicably “stopped responding” to temperature change after 1960 or so. They have no explanation for this. None. Not even a decent theory. So, having clear evidence that tree rings DO NOT respond to temperature for a 50 year period which is about 1/3 of the actual temperature record they are supposed to calibrate against, they just substituted actual temperature data instead.
so 1/3 of the data points they have don’t calibrate to the temperature record, but they want it accepted that the previous 1000 years is just fine.
“…Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and a blogger for realclimate.org…”
“Regarding being more open about how the submission was written, the IOP should practise what it preaches and say how this was submitted.” He wants it to be made clear who specifically wrote the document, as well as who independently checked it before it was submitted.”
Ahhh yes, the warmists lament, when caught with their pants down
around their ankles. Who knew what and when did they know it?
The 70’s are over! You got the whole hero / villain thing backwards.
The submission by the IOP made me feel proud to be physicist!
Kinda in the same vein as ‘plot’ out of that portion of Mel Brooks production (History of the World), The Spanish, -er- Climate Change Inquisition as ‘they’ (Mann, Hansen et al) have played it out for some time now … no one want to ‘hack off’ the king or grant-money givers …
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5McSEU48Y8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
.
.
Their members have obviously turned the cash taps off…
Dave Andrews says:
March 13, 2010 at 1:11 pm
…..”My question was, if they don’t understand what is happening to tree rings at the moment how can they claim any certainty about what tree rings represent hundreds of years ago?”
Let me try to answer. They can’t!!!!!
I’ve been following this issue for several days now. It seems a few partisan AGW advocates are frothing at the mouth because IoP didn’ t circle the wagons.
According to physicist Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and a blogger for realclimate.org, Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming.
Bishop Hill’s comment says it better than I can:
Deleting proxy data and splicing in instrumental data is not “widely accepted” in the climate community. In fact Michael Mann himself has said that “No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction”.
What was done in the Nature trick was to hide the evidence that the proxy records were not tracking the instrumental records in the twentieth century and were therefore not capable of reliably reconstructing earlier temperatures.
Benestad’s statement is amazing. Is he really saying it is acceptable to remove evidence that doesn’t agree with the global warming hypothesis? Really?
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41965
DirkH (13:41:34) :
“Gordon will have to give the physicists some more dough til they shut up.”
Gordon did that already, just 4 1/2 days after the original submittion…
Andrew30 (13:00:39) :
IPCC’s Pearl Harbour;
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/jstor_climate_report_translation/
How can an Institute “believe in man-made climate change” ?
This itself is preposterous.
Ooops, hit “go” too soon:
The IOP is not a heretical organization and its members should continue receiving government funds.
I happen to know that the ‘sceptic’ who has been implicated as unduly influencing the IOP, though consulted on the draft submission – was very surprised to find he had little to add – it was already a well-informed and strongly worded submission as would befit an Institution that cared about scientific integrity. However, shortly after the submission, he was phoned by a Guardian reporter, who had obtained his number, despite the fact he had no lead role in the submission – which he explained clearly. However, the Guardian ran a major story on how the IOP’s submission had been hi-jacked by a non-believer.
Clearly the IOP has been put under a great deal of pressure by the publicity – and scandalously so by Houghton, Ramsdorf and Wolfendale – all of whom have reputations at stake if the global warming story continues to unravel. These are sad days for science – when so many indulge in political witch-hunts, and sad days for what was a highly-regarded newspaper (admittedly, some time ago).
The whole episode lays bare the uncomfortable truth that ‘belief’, reputation and authority are powerful players in this saga.
Any scientist who reads those emails ought to be disturbed and to respond as has the IOP. And IOP needs to examine itself – it can see that the emails display a disregard for the most essential safeguards of science, and that this is very serious – and IOP deserves congratulations for having the courage to say so – but it then must examine the consequences for the science. Global data sets emanating from both NCAR and CRU cannot now be relied upon – they are not sufficiently free from manipulation. The World Meteorological Organisation implicitly recognises this by undertaking a new and open compilation of global temperatures. That will take three years.
The ‘hide the decline’ issue has a significance that is generally missed – the period of recent tree ring data also corresponds to a period of expanded instrumental coverage – and the overlap has to be used to calibrate the longer term tree-ring record back to 1000AD so that a graph of ‘global temperature’ back that far really compares like with like. It is easily forgotten that proxy data does not give an ‘absolute’ temperature – even for the region in which the trees are sampled.
The lack of correspondence between the two data sets in a significant period of the overlap, as found by Jones, is very important – and it is this fact which is ‘hidden’, not just the decline in the tree rings themselves. Mann’s methodology was already flawed – and the ‘trick’ of replacing the tree ring data was just another flaw – so Jones’s defence that this was a common ‘trick’ to pull is no defence at all.
If these experts were being interrogated under an adversarial system in a court of law, they would be torn to pieces. The parliamentary system is no where near as fierce a test – but it is the best we have outside of the courts – let’s see whether it has some teeth.
Mann overboard. Read all about the “giant denier machine.”
Mann ‘s “premature elation” is a howler.
“In retrospect, Mann says the movie contributed to a “premature elation” among some scientists that they had won the battle for public opinion on global warming. He also says his colleagues and policymakers were too eager to present certain scientific conclusions as “settled” — particularly with regard to possible consequences from climate change, which he says need further study.”
Here’s the money from Wirth :
“It’s not a fair fight,” Wirth says. “The IPCC is just a tiny secretariat next to this giant denier machine.”
…-
“Questions about research slow climate change efforts”
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2010-03-10-warming_N.htm
Regarding being more open about how the submission was written, the IOP should practise what it preaches and say how this was submitted.” He wants it to be made clear who specifically wrote the document, as well as who independently checked it before it was submitted.”
As I pointed out to Ramesdorf.. Who wrote what was the EXACT problem Holland was trying to figure out with his FOIA. briffa shared ar4 ch06 with Wahl. Against policy. He knew he was breaking the rules. He specifically asks whal if his plagarism will be noticed. It was. hence the FOIA of briffa mail. Hence Jones request that Wahl delete his mail. Hence the effort to thwart FOIA. hence the ICO opinion that CRU violated the wall.
Log on to the comments and ask Ramesdorf that question. How did ch06 get written?
A “star scientist” has fallen.
The terminology: scientist, researcher, engineer, ban, barred, plagiarism, feted, etc.
The lovingness: “whose career has been nurtured”.
…-
“Scientist’s spending has run afoul of Canada’s research council
Canada’s largest research-funding organization has slapped an extraordinary ban on a star scientist who is accused of plagiarism and of spending up to $150,000 in government grant money on custom car parts, televisions, home-entertainment systems and other equipment “inconsistent” with his research proposals.
Officials at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) say they have barred the scientist from funding indefinitely. They will not name him.
But Canwest News Service has learned the researcher is Daniel Kwok, by all accounts a brilliant engineer at the University of Calgary, whose career has been nurtured by the research council for years. He has collected almost $2-million in federal grants and fellowships.
Prof. Kwok, a nanotechnology whiz whose work has been feted on Parliament Hill and in the pages of The New York Times, now also has the dubious distinction of being one of a very few researchers ever banned from receiving NSERC grants, the lifeblood of science careers in the Canadian academic world.”
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2677927
The Institute says that its evidence to the House of Commons committee was “like that of other learned societies, focused on the need to maintain the integrity, openness and unbiased nature of the scientific process. The key points it makes are ones to which we are deeply committed – that science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way, however much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information.”
==========
They are all for open and unbiased science, but requests for information are considered “hostile”??
Explain please.
A corrupt process cannot yield but corrupt product.
This parsing and dancing around by the AGW community is only prolonging this debacle.
This is just tulip dealers in Holland arguing that the price of tulips should go back up since they still bloom.
oh yeah-
The whole idea that global warming is now called ‘climate change’ is such an oxymoronic effort by those in the AGW community.
How many rebrandings do these clowns need before the fact that there is no crisis occurring?
So tree stopped growing in response to temperatures, inexplicably, in 1960. Except for those trees that started growing FASTER, as has been reported at WUWT: Forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/02/forests-in-the-eastern-united-states-are-growing-faster-than-they-have-in-the-past-225-years/
But no matter. The tricky tricksters jimmied the graph to hide the growth decline in their trees. They used different data from somewhere else that had nothing to do with trees to manufacture a hockey stick.
Then they got caught. And the leaked emails revealed that the tricky tricksters knew all along that they were committing scientific fraud. It was not casual or accidental negligence. It was premeditated fraud.
So the IOP called them on it with a high-falutin’ pontification about the foundations of “science”.
But when some puffheads complained, the IOP immediately backed down and swore on their Atheist Bible that they still believe! “Oh Lordy, Lordy, we believe!!!!” (not in the Lord per se but in CAGW).
Gag me. Is there anything so pathetic as a heretic recanting his heresy when shown the thumb screws? Science, as we once knew it, is dead. It has been supplanted by Medieval superstition and the wailings of the high priests embroiled in theological controversy.
I am still convinced that the IOP is complicit in the ongoing whitewash. It’s called bait and switch. All an effort to make skeptics look confused. It is not a coincidence that they will only go as far as to say that they “believe” rather than state that they can “show” or “demonstrate”.
Having cake and eating it too. Bloody cowards. They are afraid of the orthodoxy. As I have said many times before, we are in a very dark age…
Well thats the end of IOP.
I think any reputable member will resign.
The Institute says that the evidence submitted to parliament followed “the process we always use for agreeing documents of this kind”, “We asked the energy sub-group of our Science Board to prepare the evidence, based on its analysis of material that is in the public domain following the hacking of the CRU e-mails last year,” says the IOP. “However, we are already reviewing our consultation process for preparing policy submissions, and the comments we have received on this submission reinforce the need to make sure our procedures are as robust as possible.”
The Institute also says it “strongly rebuts” accusations of “being overly influenced by one ‘climate-change sceptic’ the individual in question had no significant influence on the preparation of the evidence.
The Institute does not seem to be resiling from its position –
merely saying that it will make sure that its procedures are as good as they ought to be.
There is the expected strong attack from known ‘warmsters’ who cannot bear even the slightest criticism of their ilk and their behaviour. The above statement makes it clear to me that the IOP will not be influenced by the tantrums of the like of Stefan Rahmstorf, Arnold Wolfendale, and Andy Russell.
Doug
I wonder if the Institute of Physics “believes” in AGW in the same way it, well “believes” in Ohm’s Law, the laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics etc.
Would they place as much trust in the existence of AGW as the crew of Apollo 13 placed in Delta Vee when trying get back to Earth without either just skidding off the atmosphere or coming in a too steep an angle, becoming a real Fireball XL5?
Let’s see who’s whining the loudest. “John Houghton, who is currently president of the educational charity The John Ray Initiative and is a former director-general of the UK Meteorological Office. Houghton has also been the lead editor of three IPCC reports.”
Andy Revkin (NY Times) recently wrote about a Yale study indicating that skeptics were likely to be white, “born again, or evangelical” Christians.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/the-classroom-as-science-hot-zone/
The implication is that skeptics are Creationists dismissive of “real” science. But from Yale’s “Forum on Religion and Ecology” is this list of John Ray Initiative partners:
Agricultural Christian Fellowship
A Rocha
Arthur Rank Center
Au Sable Institute
Christian Ecology Link
Christians in Science
Church of Scotland Society Religion and Technology Project
Church Mission Society
Christian Rural Concern
EcoCongregation
Institute for Contemporary Christianity
Has the Hartford bulldog been sniffing the lysergic acid??
“2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. “ Point #2 of 13, IOP Statement to Parliament
Unequivocal. Forthright. And true. Nothing to retract, nothing to qualify. Note the IOP backs its statement up with confirmation from the findings of the UK Information Commissioner.
After Climategate and the memorandum by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39) I have wondered how to reduce corruption and group think in,
1. peer review,
2. funding, and
3. journalism?
In other words – how do we encourage integrity? One option would be to increase transparancy. Another would be to ensure that people are replaced regularly so that democtratic principles would prevail. I am not sure if this would help in practice.
Any ideas?
The IOP submission at its heart is concerned only with scientific processes, or lack thereof, and FOI compliance, or lack thereof. They made no submissions on AGW theory. They raise reasonable doubts about the way proxy data was used. The fact that scientists seem to find this submission and the issues raised “not worthy” (Arnold Wolfendale – IOP past president), “misguided” (climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf from Potsdam University) and “highly irresponsible” (John Houghton, president of the The John Ray Initiative and former director-general of the UK Meteorological Office) is of concern. One can only presume that the scientific methods and methodology used therefore is the gold standard of science today. That being the case taxpayers should withdraw public support for science in general on the basis that the entire field in general supports poor methodology and has no will or mechanism for correction or self criticism and evaluation.
If the “methods” used by the CRU are now the standard then science is of little worth. I submit public funding be withdrawn and a bonus declared to taxpayers who have been duped into believing that science follows strict rules of integrity and sound practices. Of course it is still possible that science be funded privately or by scientists themselves and I would encourage that to continue. I admire people who put their own money where their mouth is. Until now I thought the rot was limited to a small section of the soft science community – some or most of the climate scientists and the environmental scientists. It dismays me that this seems not to be the case. I would welcome public pronouncements from reputable scientific bodies in support of the IOP submission that would prove this wrong. No wonder the US has withdrawn from publicly funded manned space exploration. I doubt it has the scientific and industrial base to pursue such lofty aims. Maybe the Chinese civilization can succeed where the western civilization has failed. We can pursue excellence in plotting hockey sticks, running models and demonizing non-believers and others can pursue the solar system and beyond.
The idiocy is well illustrated by Gilbert (14:08:41) quoting Bishop Hill from comments on the link below:
“Bishop Hill’s comment says it better than I can:
Deleting proxy data and splicing in instrumental data is not “widely accepted” in the climate community. In fact Michael Mann himself has said that “No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction”.
What was done in the Nature trick was to hide the evidence that the proxy records were not tracking the instrumental records in the twentieth century and were therefore not capable of reliably reconstructing earlier temperatures.
Benestad’s statement is amazing. Is he really saying it is acceptable to remove evidence that doesn’t agree with the global warming hypothesis? Really?”
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41965
What a disgraceful joke science has become.
I find it hard to believe (but i do believe) that these people have not read all the e-mails. If they had, they would not have the front to say what they are saying. Read the E-Mails Its a slam dunk.
There was(is) a conspiracy and all the evidence is available. All you have to do is READ it.
Apparently speaking the truth “sends the wrong message” these days. I continue to be completely disgusted by the Orwellian dishonesty of those in both politics and climate science these days (though the two are unpleasantly close to being the same thing).
I’d still like to know how the physical properties of the trees in question, specifically how they respond to temperature, have changed in the last 50 years. Without proof that this has occurred, accepting the hockey stick as valid is a laughable proposition.
“That view is echoed by Andy Russell, a climate researcher from the University of Manchester in the UK, who has written an open letter to the Institute about the submission. “As it stands, they have written a judgment rather than an evidence statement,” he says. ”
Pot calling the Kettle black I would posit. Isn’t that the whole game of AGW?????
regards
Dave Andrews (13:11:31) :
Quote: “”My question was, if they don’t understand what is happening to tree rings at the moment how can they claim any certainty about what tree rings represent hundreds of years ago?””
Because Dave they looked and looked until they found only one.
Unfortunately, that one had been hit by lightning, had termites, and severe root damage……
……but hey, it was a good one!
Dave, just one.
So….Big Carbon has finally put the hammer down on the IOP! That took much longer than I thought it would! Their souls are nearly gone.
The IOP missed the increase in STD’s in Uganda being caused by AGW. Come on, get current.
” The IOP, which owns the company that publishes physicsworld.com, has responded by making it clear that it believes in man-made climate change and that its submission was criticizing instead the practices of the climate scientists at the centre of the inquiry.”
believes? I that is a verb for religion, not for science.
Did it ever occur to them that starting over pays the same initially as sticking to bad theory and looking really stupid? Because when the grantors get tired of supporting them, it’s going to hurt.
When ever someone says to me “Climate Change” I ask, “Are you referring to CO2 induced global warming?”
I am not sure at which point alarmists will accept they are wrong. I suspect it will be when an ice sheet covers most of the northern hemisphere!
The general public may become skeptical very quickly once they realise how much they will be paying to ‘fight’ AGW. They will want some really heavy and convincing justification. At the moment I suspect they just think this is just some academic debate which will not affect their lives.
Peter Taylor (14:35:57) :
‘…………I happen to know that the ’sceptic’ who has been implicated as unduly influencing the IOP, though consulted on the draft submission – was very surprised to find he had little to add – it was already a well-informed and strongly worded submission as would befit an Institution that cared about scientific integrity. However, shortly after the submission…..’
————————————-
Truly sad! Tell him he has the support of all of us as well as little folk with no voice, no money, no power…and no computer. He needs to come on line here and post his experience where his story can be safeguarded for researchers in the far off future.
Revisionnism at best. These characters have had too much time to adjust their “official versions”. Benestadt was Inquisitor who wanted to deny funding to Svensmark…
I think it’s very significant, and very sad, that the IOP should need to defend their submission in this way and be forced to reitterate and grovel about their belief in AGW. Their submission to the enquiry was not about the science of warming as such but about the research process, specifically East Anglia’s data secrecy, which they quite rightly said was non-scientific and against scientific process. That should not need a defence in either direction because no real scientist should disagree with it.
Quote “According to physicist Rasmus Benestad from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and a blogger for realclimate.org, Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming.”
Unquote
I realise that somebody has already commented on this.
But Really!
Is Rasmus REALLY stupid or does the think that WE are REALLY STUPID?
Is this man a real live physist, or just a climatologist, or is he just speaking with his Real-Speak-Climate hat on?
Those who condemn the position of IOP did not read it carefully. They had their minds made up that the “science is settled”. The IOP did not condemn the proposals for AGW, they pointed out that several scientists tried to manipulate the porcess of evaluating the evidence for AGW. The IOP points were valid even if the manipulation was performed by a “skeptic” To keep the money rolling in they faked the results at CRU and at IPCC. As it turns out the work at IPCC was even more devistating to the AGW proponents case. They were sloppy.
I probably meant physicist, when I typed physist, but then I should have said [self snipped] enough.
Peter Wilson (13:13:54) :
QUOTE
“Jones’ reference to “hiding the decline” could have involved removing some tree-ring proxy data from the analysis after 1960 to produce a curve that agrees better with the evidence for global warming.”
The implication seems to be that there is nothing wrong with this practice!
How can climate “scientists” have sunk so low as to defend this kind of deception?
UNQUOTE
Answer – it’s very easy to fall.
It’s much harder to rise above the muck when you’re already stuck fast in it.
This link previously posted but definitely worth a read :
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/25/jstor_climate_report_translation/
Basically a Japanese critique of the IPCC’s claims, quite powerful and almost offensive [Comparing climate modelling to astrology!]. Unfortunately AGW is all about politics so this report may be ignored by the Japanese government. Even so, an enlightened piece.
Not surprised that the alarmist ranters are bringing out the torches and pitchforks, demanding to know who wrote the submission. The Alinsky techniques of personal destruction/character assasination remain alive and well in our scientific community among the climate jihadists.
It is the duty of a scientist to be a skeptic. His/her role in the pursuit of knowledge is to knock holes in current theories and discover new things and effects. Every time we knock a hole in a theory by showing where a hypothesis does not explain an observation, we learn something. That, in the long run, is what it is all about.
PS. If left in the Japanese form it could probably be sneaked in to Wikipedia!
Sadly impossible in English – any non-AGW comments will be removed rapidly – in as little as 60 seconds! Read about one man’s attempts here :
http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/Wikipedia_on_Climate_Change
old construction worker (16:24:28) :
“When ever someone says to me ‘Climate Change’ I ask, ‘Are you referring to CO2 induced global warming?'”
Exactly right. The climate always changes, naturally. CO2 is such an insignificant player that its effect can’t even be measured.
It is sometimes thought that there is only one definition of “belief,” namely “the acceptance of an idea without a provable basis in reality”: That’s only one of the dictionary definitions of belief. There are others, below, found at http://www.dictionary.net/belief :
I see far too much of phrases like this…
Yes, widely accepted in the climate community but nowhere else!
WTF makes them so special?
DaveE.
On being noteworthy:
The prestigious British Institute of Physics (IOP) issued a
single-paged Memorandum to the British
Parliment’s House of Commons Select Committee on
Science and Technology concerning
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm
The Instutute of Physics expressed concerns that the lack
of transparency, verifiability, replicability, and openness
of raw data and coding used to interpret that
data as expessed in the CRU emails and data release were
not such that would inspire confidence in good scientific
processes in general and in climate science in particular.
The Instutute was especially adamant that FOIA requests
were not, are not, and should not be a part of the scientific process. They imply that the necessity of using an FOI
request to obtain data or code, especially when made by
a reseacher, represent a profound failure of the scientific
process in that instance.
The IOP never expressed doubts about the validity of the
science or raw data involved, only the interpretative
processes and practices employed after basic data
collection, and only because those processes are obscured
by procedural clouds of the researchers own creation. They
don’t second guess the motives of reseachers in their initial
sample selections.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
We now see a variation of the complex CRU/IPCC peer
review publicity steamroller trying to shame an objective
view into conformity with the nebulous “consensus”
on the state of the art of climate science.
The supporters of this “consensus” treat any public
message conerning climate science as if it needed
their collective permission to have any
validity in claiming space on the printed page or
in the annals of climate science history.
To the “consensus” followers, the IOP memorandum
appears to be a dissonent note in the tune the popular
piper has been calling as the proper melody for climate
science these past few years.
Sadly, dissonent notes are destined to be treated as
dissident challenges.
Readers of this blog are all too familiar with the “shoot
the messenger” tactic employed against any action not
comporting with the concensus view of reality. The
more objective and authoritative the message, the more
guns called in to do the shooting.
The IOP was generally bland in their no-nonsense
memorandum to Parliment. Given the forces at work,
this has become either a very bold or a very naive
statement of principles.
It is noteworthy.
Let the witch-hunt begin…
While trying to figure the influence of “Greenhouse gasses” on Climate I pulled up some climate data on 3 cities across the U.S.
Las Vegas, Tulsa and Knoxville
Las Vegas: 36.17 N Latitude
Tulsa: 36.15 N
Knoxville: 35.98 N
These cities are close in Latitude so will receive the same amount of solar flux. I wanted to see what effect water vapor had on temperature.
Yearly Relative Humidity (A.M. and P.M.)
Las Vegas: 39% and 21%
Tulsa: 81% and 58%
Knoxville: 86% and 59%
July Temp: (High/Low/Average) F
Las Vegas: 104.1/78.2/91.15
Tulsa: 93.8/73.1/83.45
Knoxville: 86.9/68.5/77.7
July Sunshine Hours:
Las Vegas: 88%
Tulsa: 74%
Knoxville: 64%
Albedo:
Desert sand: 0.4 (Las Vegas)
Green grass: 0.25 (maybe Tulsa)
Decidious trees: (0.15 to 0.18)
Las Vegas has much less water vapor in its air than Knoxville, Water vapor is noted as the most significant greenhouse gas (numbers given from 70% and up). Las Vegas also reflects much more of the energy that hits the ground relative to Knoxville. Yet Knoxville has an average temperature much below Las Vegas. The other significant data was hours of sunshine. Las Vegas is exposed to a considerable more sunshine than Knoxville (all due to clouds as they are close in Latitude). Tulsa also has a warmer average temperature and is exposed to more sunshine (humidity levels are similar between Knoxville and Tulsa).
I can only conclude (and perhaps indirectly) that the “greenhouse effect” is a fairly small effect when compared to the effect of clouds. The higher water vapor in Knoxville cannot come close to countering the cooling effect of the cloud cover.
I know clouds are a big debate in what causes Global warming. One study links solar activity to cloud formation. Lower solar activity, more clouds via increase in cosmic rays that promote the development of clouds.
I was wondering if you could have another cycle that would take place even if the sun has a constant activity level. Since clouds seem to be far more important to global temp than any greenhouse effect. The idea I am thinking is a warming/cooling cycle based on evaporation. In a cool earth, less water evaporates from the oceans and there is less moisture in the air for cloud formation. Because of this, more solar energy will be absorbed by the oceans and they will slowly warm (high heat capacity). As they warm the air above warms and you get the global warming cycle. More moisture evaporates and you start getting more clouds. The increase in the clouds will start the cooling cycle as less radiation hits the oceans and earth (just like Knoxville vs Las Vegas). Because of the momentum of the system and large heat capacity of the oceans, these warming and cooling cycles take decades and can explain the warmth in the 1930’s (also a warm Greenland), then the cooling period following this one with the cold 1970’s and early 1980’s. Now we are in a warming cycle again and it seems to have reached a peak and the cloud cover will increase leading to a cooling cycle.
Long post, if anyone reads it let me know if it seems logical. Thanks!
That’s the question we’ve all been asking.
Oceanographer and climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf from Potsdam University, Germany, has gone further, calling on the IOP to retract the statement from parliament. “I was taken aback when I first read it,” he says. “The evidence is both misinformed and misguided.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
No mention in the article that Stefan Rahmstorf has coauthored on RealClimate with Gavin Schmidt of ClimateGate fame.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01
/climatepredictionnet-climate-challenges-and-climate-sensitivity/
also
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/the-ipcc-sea-level-numbers/
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
From looking at Stefan Rahmstorf’s home page it appears his entire career is all about global warming—no mention of this in the article:
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Natural climate variability mechanisms were understood better? Would that not help sort out the problems they have with forecasting and modeling the weather and climate by extension?
I am tired of people just talking about the weather so I did some about it.
25 years of independent self funded research has led to some good conclusions as to where to start to find the important answers to solve the problems that have created this air of not knowing so real science cannot proceed and fictitious stuff cannot be discarded.
http://research.aerology.com/aerology-analog-weather-forecasting-method/
Discusses a method of defining the patterns in the Natural climate background variability, so as to provide a stable base to go forward with the answers needed to progress with the truth in hand.
Long read but worth it, Realclimate keeps asking for a “skeptic scientific answer” to the problems rather than just more distractions from their “truth”, well here is my answer to their challenge.
Arnold Wolfendale, who was president of the IOP from 1994 to 1996, says that the evidence is “not worthy” of the Institute and that the submission “further muddies the waters regarding global warming”.
Arnold Wolfendales’ home page shows a lot of work in the area of cosmic rays. I wonder if he knows about Svensmark’s work? It could challenge his viewpoint on global warming.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/staff/profiles/?id=1822
We should all know the reason that major petrochemical organization were supporting the alarmists is that they know any carbon taxes forced upon them are simply passed on to the consumer. After the past few years inflated fuel costs, the general public in all countries have become accustomed to higher fuel costs. We would all just buck-up and pay the ever increasing costs and they would be more than happy to vaccuum up the added monies.
Mike’s Nature trick”…..The “trick”, as mentioned by Jones in one of his e-mails to Mann, Bradley and Hughes, is a statistical method that is widely accepted in the climate community….
………………………………………………………………………………………………
whitewash!
But it is true that it is accepted in some parts of the climate community, as ClimateGate has revealed.
The beatings inflicted on the IOP are standard procedure for the pro-AGW crowd. They’ve put the IOP on the defensive and rather than come out swinging against these bullying tactics the IOP is backpedalling.
Is there any wonder finding working scientists, who’d like to keep on working, who are skeptical of AGW is so bloody difficult?
This is the shame of our generation. We should be thinking ahead about ‘what next’ when Mann and Jones are exonerated and reinstated with honours. I have no faith in the integrity of anyone who breathes the same air as the pro-AGW scientists. They’ve shown themselves to be mean, vindictive and ruthless against those who stand in their way.
How many mistakes, and incidences of corrupted data and unethical practice are required to be revealed before belief in AGW and its affects are suspended?
@richard Holle (19:17:07)
So you are working on Deep Thought? 🙂
So which Carbon Extortionist yanked their chain?
I really don’t think they get it. This is their moment.
This is their history being made. Their detractors are
lost, and will be looked upon as fools. Rembemer, you
can always work in the private sector, where being
right matters.
Peter Taylor (14:35:57) :
Thanks for your comment Peter. I appreciate it!
The gods will not be happy about another point of view on GW.
David Alan Evans (18:13:08) :
I see far too much of phrases like this…
is a statistical method that is widely accepted in the climate community.
Yep and it’s said with condescension pursed lips, eyes looking down the nose and a—se clenched tightly.
Remember…Sorry.
Alvin (19:39:34) :
@richard Holle (19:17:07)
So you are working on Deep Thought? 🙂
It is a lot of work and somebody with a really boring day job had to do it.
since I resemble that remark why not?
Maybe what needs to happen is that the countries of Europe, along with Great Britain, accept AGW completely, become carbon-less societies, and watch what happens. At the same time, mass exodus from those countries cannot be allowed, as that would polute other countries with masses whose thought process would cause the destruction of even more countries.
No, let them go for it. See if they survive the collapse of countries that were once great.
Climate scientist square off against physicists?? Sorry, this song has been running through my mind all day….
If a drug company tried to get a product on the market using the kind of sloppy, poorly documented, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, retrofit and then lie about it, etc., methods that the “climate science community” has plainly used over and over again, their executives would be broke at best, and quite possibly in jail. The most disturbing part of this story is how thoroughly fundamental principles of science have been perverted in the name of this myth. Remember the Newsweek reporter commenting on the Duke rape case, in which the district attorney continued to pursue prosecution after he knew the charges were false: “The narrative was correct but the facts were wrong.”
The alarmists don’t really care about facts, they care about narrative and what it can do to increase their power. They won’t go away without a serious fight, because they don’t care about the truth and will not quit until they’re made to quit.
The IoP’s submission to Parliament was right on the money. It was a clear statement of scientific method as it applied to the work of Mann, Jones, and their fellows. The objections to the IoP’s submission have nothing to say about scientific method. All of them are political objections. They change the topic from scientific method to advocacy. In the heated, nay hysterical, climate of these times even the IoP is made to bow to the sacred cow of global warming. What rubbish. To achieve the utter silliness of AGW advocates one would have to find something like a historical record of a panic caused by fears that the Ether had caught fire and would consume the entire universe.
Theo Goodwin (21:28:16) :
” To achieve the utter silliness of AGW advocates one would have to find something like a historical record of a panic caused by fears that the Ether had caught fire and would consume the entire universe.”
Not quite! In my field (public health), we do this all the time. Remember all the panic regarding the worldwide pandemic from H5N1 avian influenza (“bird flu”)? Don’t hear squat about bird flu, do we?
When the latest H1N1 flu broke out, I had colleagues who totally freaked and thought it was the return of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. They were stockpiling anti-virals etc.
However, public health rarely has a chance to re-align the world’s economy and transfer wealth, as is the case with the AGW scenario. I’ll have to suggest that to the virologists some time….
The IOP has its’ own Fakers to protect as some of its’ foundations are built on fudged data. In the world of physics, experiments cost millions to conduct and are designed to yield the result needed to justify the cost. The setup is run many times to develop the data and then the setup is dismantled and not likely ever to be done again.
The IOP is not upset that the CRU was fudging the data, they are upset that the CRU got caught and is it being made public.
All fields have a problem with fakers but generally they are “hung” if caught, End of problem. To cover it up just makes the cleanup harder and regaining public trust more difficult.
Anticlimactic (16:26:34) : “I am not sure at which point alarmists will accept they are wrong. I suspect it will be when an ice sheet covers most of the northern hemisphere!”
Nope. They’ll be “Johnny one-notes” until we cut off their funding. Canada could be under 100 feet of ice, and alarmists would still spew their pseudoscience.
“Rahmstorf, who is a board member of Environmental Research Letters (ERL), an open-access journal published by the IOP”.
I think it is unacceptable that Mr. Rahmstorf is still a board member and possibly reviewing articles in a respected journal before allegations against him have been investigated.
see for example
http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/01/opportunism-and-the-models/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/03/the-secret-of-the-rahmstorf-non-linear-trend/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/07/08/rahmstorf-et-al-reject-ipcc-procedure/
As a much earlier poster noted, one should really read the comments following the original post from physicsworld-dot-com. It didn’t take long before the whole army of alarmists descended on their website. A plurality, if not a majority, of the posts carried links to RealClimate. Even Eli Babbet chipped in with remarks to find and expose the “skeptic” that he has assumed must have been responsible for the IoP’s initial message to Parliament. It would seem that the “Chicago Way” is gaining favor with the community of proponents, and scapegoating their opponents is one of their tools of the trade.
It also seemed apparent that most of the other mostly non-committed (re AGW) posters had no idea of the objectivity or lack thereof of the RC connection. It was also apparent that the AGW counter-attack is underway in full force. The IoP’s slavish endorsement of AGW was an exercise in overt obsequiousness that in effect tacitly declared the science itself irrelevant.
One needs to look no further for an example of the power of money to corrupt
Norman “I can only conclude (and perhaps indirectly) that the “greenhouse effect” is a fairly small effect when compared to the effect of clouds.”
Cliamate forecasters, simply don’t seem to understand clouds dramatically affect temperature. Everyone who has seen frost after a cloudless night, knows the dramatic affect of clood cover. So, it really is incredible that they keep reporting: CO2 and “water vapour” and totally ignore the effect of cloud cover. To give you an idea of the difference, I used a cheap IR thermometer, and on a cloudy night it read around 4C, but on a cloudless night/day it read around -35-?? (below lowest reading which is -40C).
” science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way, however much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information.”
======
Speaking of hostile requests, the University of East Anglia received 58 FOI requests of similar nature asking for details on confidentiality agreements with different countries, many of which were identical except for the specific countries mentioned. Apparently, this was an organized effort, but the following rather amusing request was from a participant who failed to follow instructions:
I hereby make a EIR/FOI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements)restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries: [insert 5 or so countries that are different from ones already requested1]
1. the date of any applicable confidentiality agreements; 2. the parties to such confidentiality agreement, including the full name of any organization; 3. a copy of the section of the confidentiality agreement that “prevents further transmission to non-academics”. 4. a copy of the entire confidentiality agreement.
The 58 FOI requests can be seen at —
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/25032/response/66822/attach/2/Respons
IOP blog Comment 69 contans a common half-truth put around by catastrophic AGW proponents.
John Mashey gives the “oh-so-simple physics” account of AGW and adds this challenge:
“To reject AGW, one must reject at least one, maybe two of:
a) All that is known about the absorption/emission characteristics of GHGs, i.e., that they absorb infrared.
b) First Law of Thermodynamics, i.e., Conservation of Energy
c) Second Law of Thermodynamics, energy flows hot=>cold”
John Mashey fails to acknowledge that none of this is in dispute. But in equal measure, it does not get AGW to the catastrophic end of the argument.
Claims of high climate sensitivity rely on untested arguments of amplification by positive feedback. So predictions of catastrophe are not a simple matter of applying simple physics afterall.
Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf of the University of Potsdam has personally had more than two million euros in climate related funding over the past 3 years, yes, I would also be very vocal for that amount of money.
Norman (18:39:01) :
Long post, if anyone reads it let me know if it seems logical. Thanks!
Something else that comes into play is the terrain and elevation of those cities, Norman.
The altitude of the reporting stations (according to the Citizens’ Weather Observation Program)
Las Vegas: 2,211 MSL (however, the city is spread over what’s essentially an area of foothills 2000 MSL – 3100 MSL with mountains to the west)
Tulsa: 764 MSL (slightly rolling prairie with scablands to the west and north)
Knoxville: 1086 MSL (in a valley between the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountain ranges)
Home page for the CWOP is http://www.wxqa.com/
kwik (14:16:20) :
At last some national bodies are standing up for themselves instead of “Towing the AGW line”
pat,
“So it seems it took a perfect storm of snow, scientific doubt and political failure to dent public acceptance of the reality of global warming by about 10%.
For greens that could be encouraging, as all those factors will fade. For sceptics, it’s more likely to be worrying, as they have never had it so good..”
Perhaps. Unless of course the cherry picking science, scientific retractions, suppression of the medieval warm period, poor surface stations management, biased peer review, cool-normal summers, cold-normal winters, stable hurricane seasons, Antarctic ice growth and skeptics like me, all CONTINUE. Funny thing about mixing science with politics, it eventually looks a lot like religion.
RockyRoad (20:45:17) :
Do you mind, there are about 60 Million of us in the UK alone, why should be subjected to the SCAM just to show the rest of the world it doesn’t work.
Would you voulunteer your country to do it?
“Wren (00:35:36) :
” science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way, however much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information.”
======
Speaking of hostile requests, the University of East Anglia received 58 FOI requests of similar nature asking for details on confidentiality agreements with different countries, many of which were identical except for the specific countries mentioned. Apparently, this was an organized effort, but the following rather amusing request was from a participant who failed to follow instructions:”
Wren, you have repeatedly expressed your view that FOI requests are evil because they stop the poor geniusses from devoting all their time running more computer simulations, forcing them instead to devote time to organizing their data collections, which they didn’t as Jones admitted.
Ask yourself a question: Wouldn’t it be possible to spend a little bit of the tax payer millions on some accountants who take care that the data is organized well enough so that a FOI request (whether hostile or not) can easily be answered? And isn’t that the exact purpose of the FOI act?
And if a lot of people send similar FOI requests “in an organized way”, oh perish the thought, like the organized mass e mail campaigns where GreenPeace makes their members flood MPs with protest letters, well, wouldn’t all these necessarily similar FOI requests be answerable in one go?
You really seem to have problems with the FOI act. Or with accountability of climate science in general, but then, maybe you are a climate scientist yourself – they seem to have exactly the same problem.
“Mike Haseler (23:51:10) :
[…]
knows the dramatic affect of clood cover. So, it really is incredible that they keep reporting: CO2 and “water vapour” and totally ignore the effect of cloud cover.”
Speaking of clouds, here’s McGuffie, Henderson-Sellers, 1987,
“Will clouds provide a negative feedback in a CO2-warmed world?”
http://iahs.info/redbooks/a168/iahs_168_0619.pdf
Wren (00:35:36) :
Speaking of hostile requests, the University of East Anglia received 58 FOI requests of similar nature asking for details on confidentiality agreements with different countries, many of which were identical except for the specific countries mentioned.
Did the UEA receive any “friendly” requests from Climate Scientists wanting to check the basis/validity of the “science” underlying their own profession?
“… science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way, however much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information.”
Yes, one must sympathise with anyone confronted with “hostile requests.” How utterly terrifying it must have been for them.
“… science should be communicated openly and reviewed in an unbiased way, however much we sympathise with the way in which CRU researchers have been confronted with hostile requests for information.”
Yes, one must sympathise with anyone confronted with “hostile requests.” How utterly terrifying it must have been for them.
[@ mods: sorry, posted this under bogus email previously]
Science itself is on trial …. All scientists have got to know that now. The wrong outcome will doom them all to mere political “white coat stand-ins” at press ops. As if the grant system hasn’t already done that.
It’s the hocus-pocus runaway positive feedback that make the whole laughable AGW dispute. Not to say anything about the now known falsifying of the surface temperature records. But — If the positive feed backs were true, then earth would either be a snowball, or fiery hot. Neither of which is true. Positive feed backs cause latch conditions, from which there is no recovery, barring catastrophic events, like a possible a giant meteor strike, or the earth’s surface turning to red-hot lava.
Maybe a little overly dramatic hand waving on my part, but not by much.
Bill Tuttle (02:58:18) :
Thank you for the info on elevation. I know as you go up in mountains it cools but only up a ways. I think a valley or below sea level is cooler at night (cold air is heavier). Do you know what effect the elevations you listed would have on the temperatures of the cities I selected. (I am also looking at other cities as well, I just have to find ones at roughly the same latitude so that the solar energy flux is similar).
To Jeff Alberts, Dave Andrews, et al,
I accept the tree ring data as reliable (when not cherry picked or a “bad” species is used) for the following reasons.
The “divergence problem” is the trees reporting colder temperatures than the instrument record since about the 1960’s. As shown on this site and others, they have been fudging the historical temperature record with adjustments, including strange selective ones for certain years and periods. The tree ring data cannot be selectively fudged as the same technique is used throughout a given sample and a given study.
Thus the trees used are acting as rural un-fudged thermometers, honestly reporting the temperature. There is sufficient real proven science to trust these records before the 1960’s, the only problem is they don’t agree with the major temperature databases after then. Therefore, simplest explanation, the trees are saying there is something wrong with those major temperature databases. Which has been shown many times to be true on this site and others.
So trust the trees, within appropriate error ranges. They are really agreeing with us.
@A C Osborn (06:01:31) :
“RockyRoad (20:45:17) :
Do you mind, there are about 60 Million of us in the UK alone, why should be subjected to the SCAM just to show the rest of the world it doesn’t work”
Fully agree, A C Osborn!
Isn’t it bad enough to have the EU government, the Westminster (make believe) “government”, all the Scientific Institutions, the Charities & Churches, every major Political opposition party, the heir to the Throne, the big money financiers, virtually all the media and 99% of the rent seeking and corrupt academics all spouting this AGW crap at every turn (and conspiring to bleed us all white with food and energy price hikes to pay for it all)? Not to mention clowns like “Sir John” Houghton.
I certainly don’t want to be the kind of demonstration project @Franklyn Durilla Road suggests here!
Although it is clear that, actually, we’re not far from that point already.
Perhaps, as a compromise, there is a quicker and more painless way.
If all the coal-fired power station operators got their heads together and shut down for “essential maintenance” for a few days, everyone would very soon get a foretaste of what will inevitably happen in five years time when most of them have to shut down anyway, whilst all the 2,700 bird shredders up and down the land still only provide a percent or two (at best) of the power we need.
It wouldn’t take more than a day or two for the UK population to tire of shivering in the dark.
And I predict that a “full and frank exchange of views” would ensue, between the British public and the greenies and the pusilanimous and ignorant politicians who have enthusiastically sucked up the greenie propaganda and who are driving this whole farce.
Could be really interesting.
Go, on (the generators), give it a go! Just before the election would be a good time!
I liked the IOP’s submission but this is disappointing. On one hand the IOP supports the LHC and the search for repeatable evidence of the existence of the hypothesised Higgs Boson (as do a lot of physicists, arguments aside about particle physicists getting all the grants). On the other hand they ‘believe’ in man-made climate change as in that man is having an influence on climate. And yet where is the evidence of this and the characterisation of the processes that are supposed to cause it? I thought the IOP had more backbone. It seems the pro-AGW movement has the power to influence akin to the physical power of that big super truck from Knight Rider that Garth Knight drove all over KITT.
To kadaka:
I can empathise but show me the characterised curves as to how a tree ring can represent temperature and to what accuracy and then we can discuss reconstructions. Correlations are not enough. If they are showing a divergence we can’t know why until the growth behaviour of the tree is known. Until this point it’s anyone’s guess and we shouldn’t use them. This is Science 101 (as they say in the US). It amazes me how many people jump the gun.
Martin Brumby (09:49:00) :
LOVE IT!
Bring on the Anarchy.
*********************************
DirkH (06:34:12) :
And if a lot of people send similar FOI requests “in an organized way”, oh perish the thought, like the organized mass e mail campaigns where GreenPeace makes their members flood MPs with protest letters, well, wouldn’t all these necessarily similar FOI requests be answerable in one go?
You really seem to have problems with the FOI act. Or with accountability of climate science in general, but then, maybe you are a climate scientist yourself – they seem to have exactly the same problem.
******************
I have to agree with you there. Really, this is the computer age. All it would have taken is an organized computer. How hard is it to put a file on FTP?
Jordan says:
Well, none of what he says should be in dispute (and isn’t really within the scientific community) and yet there seem to be a lot of people here and elsewhere spouting all sorts of nonsense about the greenhouse effect violating the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, the radiative effect of CO2 already being saturated, the observed rise in CO2 being natural, etc., etc.
It would be nice of the [snip] actually restricted their arguments to issues involving feedbacks and climate sensitivity, for which the evidence is generally against them but at least they have a prayer of being right, rather than arguing all of this other nonsense.
I agree with you that high climate sensitivity does not follow directly from the basic physics. However, I disagree that the arguments for positive feedbacks are “untested arguments”. For example, there has been lots of testing of the water vapor feedback using satellite measurements recently. And, there has been a lot of testing of climate sensitivity in general using paleoclimate data as well as the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo and even just the general current mean climate state. Admittedly, it remains a difficult problem to narrow down what the climate sensitivity is, but there is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that it is likely in the range of ~2.0-4.5 C and very unlikely to be below 1.5 C.
Mike Haseler says:
I honestly don’t know where you guys come up with statements like this. Climate scientists in fact know this quite well. They understand both the shortwave cooling effects and longwave warming effects of clouds. It is true that modeling clouds is very difficult and thus that clouds remain a major source of uncertainty, but to claim that climate forecasters don’t know that clouds affect temperatures is just silly. I have a book sitting on my bookshelf entitled “Clouds in the Perturbed Climate System” that is from a recent conference that was held in Frankfurt in March 2008.
tarpon says:
There are very few climate scientists talking about “runaway positive feedback” as a likely occurrence in our current climate system. They are talking about positive feedbacks that amplify the warming but do not lead to instability. There is some confusion because what many climate scientists refer to as net positive feedback (i.e., feedbacks leading to a larger increase in temperature than is predicted due to the radiative effects of the change in CO2 alone) would not be called net positive feedback in control or systems theory. The question essentially comes down to whether you include the response of the climate system described by the Stefan-Boltzmann Equation (i.e., the increase in radiative emission as the planet warms due to the T^4 dependence of emission on temperature T) as a negative feedback or whether you consider the temperature change implied by this (in response to the radiative forcing due to increases in greenhouse gases) as the zeroth-order effect and then talk about amplification or reduction of this temperature change by the other feedbacks.
It boils down to a matter of definition and, while many climate scientists have adopted terminology that can create confusion, some do follow the more traditional systems theory definition and view the increased the S-B effect as a negative feedback, in which case the net feedbacks are negative even for high climate sensitivity (only going positive if there is a real runaway effect). For someone following this convention, see for example, “Global Physical Climatology” by Dennis Hartmann, Section 9.3: http://www.amazon.com/Global-Physical-Climatology-International-Geophysics/dp/0123285305
“Do you mind, there are about 60 Million of us in the UK alone, why should be subjected to the SCAM just to show the rest of the world it doesn’t work?”
I would say because in a democracy, people get the government they deserve. The best hope for Britain would be if it is forced to stare into the abyss of utter destruction; a desolate landscape of shuttered factories, endless dole queues and a currency pegged to the Zimbabwean dollar. Only then can the British rise up in Churchillian defiance and throw off the shackles of these eco fascists with the cry “Never again!”.
@ Micky C (10:10:41) :
I have read up on the isotope dating techniques enough to reasonably trust them. However what I find interesting is not the actual numbers themselves, but what the numbers are trying to show, the shape of the data over the actual data.
For me it is the fixed point that gives it away. If for example it was shown that you couldn’t trust tree ring data less than twenty years old, possibly due to some unknown process that “fixes in place” the temperature data over that period, then you could trust data over twenty years old. The point of trust would move over time. Instead it is set at a certain time, the 1960’s, and does not change. Yet the problem has been know for over a decade. So the period of “unreliability” grows without a plausible explanation being presented for the trees.
Now if you wished to use tree ring data as proof of AGW, you should show what changed since the 1960’s to make the tree ring data unreliable from then onward. What are your answers? Temperatures and CO2 concentrations went up. Thus to say the trees are lying since the 1960’s you have to say that the trees don’t properly report higher temperatures and CO2 concentrations, thus allowing the possibility that temperatures and CO2 concentrations could have been higher in the past and the trees didn’t record such.
The trees are doing their level best to refute the alarmist claims. Mann etc have tried to manipulate the tree ring data, that work was discredited, and less-alarmist revisions have been issued. Currently with the divergence problem, using the tree ring data has become a bit of a liability. Discrediting it significantly would allow them to get rid of that albatross and more firmly root their case in “reliable” data like the adjusted temperature records. If you have solid scientific reasons to disavow the trees and feel compelled to do so “for the integrity of science” then go right ahead, we want honesty in science. But as things stand, I’m content to let the trees speak for themselves.
Nice article by Dr. Martin Hertzberg:
When a scientist becomes a fear-mongering propagandist
Please follow the IOP discussion here: http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/41965
It is clearly an advantage for us that climate “scientists” still believes, as is evident in the IOP discussion, that it it perfectly OK to use only the observations that support a certain point of view: at some point a critical mass of proffesional scientists and engineers will know about this attitude – and Climategate will explode!
Also, it is an advantage for us that Pachauri is still around and that the Climategate whitewash is conducted by Robbert Dijkgraaf, who recently broadcast on Dutch radio a complacent statement about the “consensus” on climate science.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100029630/climategate-the-ipccs-whitewash-review-is-the-agw-camps-biggest-mistake-yet/
Possibly we should focus even more on the science here at WUWT and let “the dark side of the force” organize and deliver the mistakes.
Joel Shore (10:59:40):
Prof Richard Lindzen, head of the Atmospheric Sciences department at MIT, gives a climate sensitivity of less than 1, in which case CO2 is a non-problem.
Who should we believe? You and the 100% political appointees at the IPCC? Or MIT’s chief climatologist?
“Joel Shore (10:59:40):
Admittedly, it remains a difficult problem to narrow down what the climate sensitivity is, but there is quite a bit of evidence suggesting that it is likely in the range of ~2.0-4.5 C and very unlikely to be below 1.5 C.”
“Evidence” probably means “we ran a computer simulation and it fell over completely a bit later than the others when we tuned the climate sensitivity parameter to 4.5″… only in nicer words.
Joel Shore (10:59:40) :
I guess we agree that John Mashey was wrong to suggest AGW is all a matter of basic physics. Failure to mention temperature amplification by positive feedback is a material omission.
There is a very good account of the basic issue by James Annan at climateaudit:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/02/james-annan-on-25-deg-c/
As James Annan stated, “a doubling of CO2 will result in a 1C warming at equilibrium, *if everything else in the atmosphere stays exactly the same*”. So neither of us view this part as controversial, but neither is it at the more alarming levels you mention.
Anan’s discussion then moved onto assertions of amplification by positive feedback. He simply uses a quotient to inflate the climate sensitivity, by considering possible numeric values for feedback factors.
Nothing at all convincing in that. And this type of approach leaves me wondering whether there is indeed a violation of conservation of energy in amplified climate sensitivity.
It is all very well talking about notional factors in an equation to get a particular result, but the real world has to comply with the laws of thermodynamics.
If we have a change in a physical variable, there must be a source of energy for that change to cause an amplified change in a physcial variable with the same units/dimensions.
To convincingly argue for amplification in climate sensitivity, we need a detailed account of all the physcical process involved, to state whether they merely dissipate energy (passive elements) or whether they add power to the system (active elements).
There must be at least one active element in the feedback loop for amplification. Without this, there is nothing to add power and therefore to gives us the conditions for amplification.
The mere addition of the output signal to the input does not do this. To argue that this can cause amplfication would be like suggesting that you can jump into a basket and lift yourself off the ground using the basket’s handle. Physical systems don’t work that way.
To repeat, if everything in the climate sensitivity loop is a passive physical process (purely energy dissipative), there is nothing in there to give us amplification.
I have not seen the question of feedback analysed in these terms and that’s why I tend to dimiss it as an “untested argument”. I’d be happy to receive any references which fully address this issue.
Smokey says:
You might try believing almost all of the other 99.99% of the world’s climate scientists who aren’t named Richard Lindzen…and every major scientific society who has made a statement on the issue. But, you already know that.
Deciding scientific issues by the fact that you can find one expert who will support your point of view is the sort of attitude that will lead to a new Dark Ages where we ignore science in favor of own political and ideological preconceptions.
Jordan: The fact that you think that there is “a violation of conservation of energy in amplified climate sensitivity” shows that you do not understand the concept of feedback loops outside a very narrow engineering space. In the climate system, you have an open system with huge energy input from the sun. All that is necessary is for changes to occur that retain a little bit more of this energy. Examples are increased water vapor and the resulting decrease in infrared radiation escaping back into space or reduced ice / snow and resulting albedo change that reduces the amount of incoming solar radiation reflected into space.
In fact, it is by enforcing conservation laws, and not just ignoring them, that climate scientists model the climate system.
Well, they can still get a grant from Chesterfield.*
(* “4 out of 5 Docs smoke Chesterfield.”)
Joel Shore (17:12:22),
You made the statement: “You might try believing almost all of the other 99.99% of the world’s climate scientists who aren’t named Richard Lindzen…”
I would guess that probably 100.0% of the world’s other climate scientists aren’t named Richard Lindzen.
Word games. You’re trying to imply that 99.99% of the world’s climate scientists agree with you. They don’t.
The ones employed by gov’t & universities know how to play the game, and they know what to say and when to keep their heads down.
But when they retire, suddenly lots of them speak their minds.
The Dark Ages were plagued and abetted by superstition, which has everything in common with the CO2=CAGW scare.
Woo-woo, run, it’s “carbon!” Call the IPCC Exorcist!
Joel Shore: “Deciding scientific issues by the fact that you can find one expert who will support your point of view is the sort of attitude that will lead to a new Dark Ages where we ignore science in favor of own political and ideological preconceptions.”
Ahh there is more than one expert Joel. As a matter of fact there are quite a few.
I would say that you are the pot calling the kettle black [on the Dark Ages oart especially] in trying to shut down anyone who dare calls into question the new pseudo-religion/pseudo-science of CAGW.
Welcome back. I was wondering where you were.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
correction [on the Dark Ages part especially].
Not sure what oart is….maybe like the oort cloud lol.
Joel Shore: “Deciding scientific issues by the fact that you can find one expert who will support your point of view is the sort of attitude that will lead to a new Dark Ages where we ignore science in favor of own political and ideological preconceptions.”
I now pronounce you, “Man and Wife “, Joel.
Joel Shore (17:18:26) : “The fact that you think that there is “a violation of conservation of energy in amplified climate sensitivity” shows that you do not understand the concept of feedback loops outside a very narrow engineering space.”
I asked for references Joel, and all you can come back with is a swipe at me and how much I might or might not understand feedback systems. That kind of reply isn’t going to persuade anybody – certainly not me.
I take it that you agree with me that there must be at least one active element in a feedback loop in order to give closed loop amplification. The reason I mentioned this is because you may wish to accept it as universally true, and independent of whetehr a physical system is open or closed.
You correctly observe there is supply of energy to the climate system from the sun. But this plain fact comes nowhere near demonstrating that anything in the climate acts as an active component. Until the case for an active response has been convincingly made, the default must be that the physical processes are purely passive (energy dissipative).
I have seen no demonstration that ice albedo change or water vapour produce an active response to CO2. This tend to be just loosely asserted and then leapt upon to get the required amplification by fiddling around with quotients and then surmising the values of numerical parameters in assumed mathematical models.
There is plenty of supposition and speculation in this subject, but substantive and convincing analysis is surprisingly short on the ground.
If you wish to assert amplification Joel, please provide the references to scholarly articles I requested. Argument about how you think it might work does not convincingly enforce conservation laws.
“Peter Taylor (14:35:57) :
The ‘hide the decline’ issue has a significance that is generally missed – the period of recent tree ring data also corresponds to a period of expanded instrumental coverage – and the overlap has to be used to calibrate the longer term tree-ring record back to 1000AD so that a graph of ‘global temperature’ back that far really compares like with like. It is easily forgotten that proxy data does not give an ‘absolute’ temperature – even for the region in which the trees are sampled.
The lack of correspondence between the two data sets in a significant period of the overlap, as found by Jones, is very important – and it is this fact which is ‘hidden’, not just the decline in the tree rings themselves. Mann’s methodology was already flawed – and the ‘trick’ of replacing the tree ring data was just another flaw – so Jones’s defence that this was a common ‘trick’ to pull is no defence at all.”
When I worked in the vital area of making car-parts (rather than the trivial business of deciding the future of the human race) I could predict with 100% certainty what the response would be if I had proposed to a customer that I perform vital measurements with a process that could not be calibrated to agree with my best available control data. The conversation would have been brief and would have suggested an immediate conjunction of fornication and travel.
Its a hoot reading Physics-World, the regular Physicist readers are getting a bit fed up with the religious repetitive contributions of the “consensus” advocates.
Who seem to think that if they repeat the same point endlessly to wear down the other contributors they must be correct.
Or are they trying to convince themselves!
Bryan (06:48:14) :
Its a hoot reading Physics-World, the regular Physicist readers are getting a bit fed up with the religious repetitive contributions of the “consensus” advocates.
Who seem to think that if they repeat the same point endlessly to wear down the other contributors they must be correct.
Or are they trying to convince themselves!
From another thread Smokey also noted :
R Gates simply ignores all the evidence that debunks his CAGW conjecture, and instead constructs his own mental world, like the UFO cultists in Dr Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails.
You can’t debunk the CAGW kind of Conspiracy Theory because its adherents simply won’t let it be debunked or truely scientifically falsified. It’s a mental process very similar to the infantile, “Whaaa, you can’t make me, whaaaa”, where the fact of the adherents’ right to believe whatever they want to makes the belief “true”.
But what these kind of Conspiracy Theorists also don’t seem to realize is that their “belief” is verbal nonsense because it states nothing factual, while still having the wording and grammatical form of a statement making a factual claim. It’s a “cargo cult” kind of statement – one having the form of a factual statement but without the actual substance or content which would make it a truely factual claim by allowing it to be checked it against the real world.
And it’s not like this way to confuse oneself and others by the misuse of words is new. For example, the process was well known, explained, and deconstructed in my Philosophy courses 45 years ago. Back then we were also noticing it mainly in religious speech where special, protected ways of knowing were then claimed to exist by the Religion’s adherents. People using this verbal trick were also seen [by Wittgenstein?] as essentially being “entranced” by words devoid of any factual content, and so the trick is useful in propaganda campaigns such as that of Climate Science’s CAGW.
No reference to the statement the IOP attributes to Rasmus can be found, by me , by google or by others. Unless someone comes foreward with a url, this will have to be regarded as a lie.
Please send the url to annieatbr@gmail.com
Thanks:
John
Jordan: I don’t really know what you are asking. You seem to be asking for someone to translate the climate system language into the control theory (or whatever) sort of language that you are familiar with. I think you need to find someone more familiar with the latter’s language to do so.
But from the point of view of basic physics of energy conservation, it is very simple. If you change the albedo of the earth by melting ice, for example, then more solar radiation is absorbed and the earth is then out of radiative balance (i.e., it is absorbing more radiation than it emits). The earth responds by warming until its emission of radiation increases enough that radiative balance is restored.
“Climate Scientist”
Would someone tell us please what this title means, especially today? Is it still found in the scientific literature? Is it, Post-Copenhagen, still on anyone’s lips? Is it a “Science” or a pseudo-something? Is it a derogitory term for people who claim to have a special knowledge of events that will transpire in the future? Are they a super-sorta weather fortune tellers with a PhD?
“Climatology” is listed in Wikipedia. A ‘Climate Science’ or “Climate Research” search directs one to ‘Climatology’.
The only thing the Wiki folks have on “Climate Science” is a contrived list of folks Wiki calls “Climate Scientists” (some greats, some wannabe greats, and a few you wouldn’t bring home to meet your mother-in-law); most of these had/have real degrees in real sciences and, as far a I know, not a single one had a degree in “Climate Science”.
Alas, another inexplicable mystery in climate science.
PS: wiki says “Climatology (from Greek κλίμα, klima, ‘region, zone’; and -λογία, -logia) is the study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of time,[1] and is a branch of the ‘atmospheric sciences’.”
Joel Shore (17:38:54) : I don’t really know what you are asking.
Yes, I think that’s clear Joel. And it is also clear that John Mashey (my original point, you will recall) was wrong to suggest that to dispute alarmist AGW was tanamount to disputing basic laws of physics.
You seem to be asking for someone to translate the climate system language into the control theory (or whatever) sort of language that you are familiar with. I think you need to find someone more familiar with the latter’s language to do so.
Not so. My point is that claiming amplification by using feedback analysis needs to comply with the law of conservation of energy. And this unconditionally means showing how the feedback loop contains at least one active element (an element which adds power). I notice you have been unable to provide the references I asked for. I would have expected much better.
But from the point of view of basic physics of energy conservation, it is very simple….
You have not demonstrated that your examples are anything other than “passive” (energy dissipative) processes in the climated.
In your example if ice, ice loss uncovers a darker surface and this should be a better radiator. At high lattitudes (i.e. where we generally find the ice) the angle of incident solar radiation is shallow (on an annual average basis). We therefore have all the conditions for an equilibrium, although this will be perturbed by seasons and weather conditions. So you have not made the case that there is an active climate response from ice melting processes on the Earth at current conditions.
You might have had conditions for an active response if the Earth were flat and the angle of solar radiation was always normal to the surface. But if that had been the case, the ice would have melted long ago.
I have one question regarding IOP and the physics aspects of the AGW theory :
did this honorable institution have a look on some extraordinary papers which claim that AGW based on CO2 is everything but physics :
Gerlich & Treuschchner (1989), Robitaille, etc. ?
I’m wondering whether these papers had eventually to face rebuttals in peer reviewed papers…
Ar this stage I’m not aware of any, and would just conclude that they represent the current stage of physics, which mean that next IPCC report’s science basis would be interesting to draft !