The 4th International Conference on Climate Change – Chicago, Il., USA
Consensus? What consensus?
by Roger Helmer MEP
I’m writing this in the Marriott Hotel in Chicago, where I’m attending the Heartland Institute Climate Conference (and I’ve just done an interview with BBC Environment Correspondent Roger Harrabin).
Ahead of the interview, I thought I’d just check out the Conference Speaker’s list. There are 80 scheduled speakers, including distinguished scientists (like Richard Lindzen of MIT), policy wonks (like my good friend Chris Horner of CEI), enthusiasts and campaigners (like Anthony Watts of the wattsupwiththat.com web-site), and journalists (including our own inimitable James Delingpole).
Of the 80 speakers, I noticed that fully forty-five were qualified scientists from relevant disciplines, and from respected universities around the world — from the USA, Canada, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, Norway, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
All of them have reservations about climate alarmism, ranging from concerns that we are making vastly expensive public policy decisions based on science that is, to say the least, open to question, through to outright rejection of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) model.
Several of these scientists are members or former members of the IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But how do 45 sceptical scientists stack up, you may well ask, against the 2500 on the official IPCC panels? But of course there aren’t 2500 relevant scientists on the IPCC panel. Many of them are not strictly scientists at all. Some are merely civil servants or environmental zealots. Some are economists — important to the debate but not experts on the science. Others are scientists in unrelated disciplines. The Chairman of the IPCC Dr. Ravendra Pachuari, is a Railway Engineer.
And of the remaining minority who are indeed scientists in relevant subjects, some (like my good friend Prof Fred Singer) have explicitly rejected the IPCC’s AGW theory. Whittle it down, and you end up with fifty or so true believers, most of whom are part of the “Hockey Team” behind the infamous Hockey Stick graph, perhaps the most discredited artefact in the history of science. This is a small and incestuous group of scientists (including those at the CRU at the University of East Anglia). They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.
And there are scarcely more of them than are sceptical scientists at this Heartland Conference in Chicago, where I am blogging today. Never mind the dozens of other scientists here in Chicago, or the thousands who have signed petitions and written to governments opposing climate hysteria. Science is not decided by numbers, but if it were, there is the case to be made that the consensus is now on the sceptical side.
Roger Helmer MEP Follow me on Twitter: rogerhelmerMEP
The AGW believers can be summed up by the words of Leo Tolstoy “‘I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.’
That is the genuine believers. Some are merely deceivers.
You, dear sir, are opposing the monopoly of (state-fed) ABBCNNBCBS propaganda.
Shame, shame.
Yes, I was impressed too with the quality of the speakers in the list. I’m hoping that eventually all or most all of the presentations will be available to us who weren’t able to attend. I’d be nice if the people in charge could put together a book with transcripts of most of the scientifically oriented speeches. I’d buy it for sure.
This business with Pachuari being a “Railway Engineer” Was an Engineer who designed or did engineering for railways, or a locomotive driver? It matters.
In the first case, he came from a career of trying to get it straight. In the second it would have been to keep it on the tracks.
Either experience should have served him well.\ in his more recent endeavors and in any case should not be made fun of.
Exactly, I’ve seen the expression “thousands of scientists”…blah, blah, blah…………..I can name maybe a dozen. That’s the overwhelming consensus. I believe it is time to start naming names and start burying each individual chicken little science scam artist.
Best of luck with Chris Huhne, the LibDims(sic) and the equally hypnotised Tories.
Surely, there must be one politician with some common sense.
Keep lobbying for science.
Yes, the old consensus myth. As far as I can tell it seems to have bootstrapped itself from the original 50. With each pass of the consensus myth, more and more people hear that there’s a consensus. As these people include scientists in unrelated disciplines, when they add their voices too, the consensus gains momentum. Soon you have the boards of every learned society known to man telling you there is an overwhelming consensus that includes – every known learned society. Newspaper reporters and some bloggers can recite the names of dozens of bodies who all “agree” that “man is warming the planet and it will be a catastrophe.”
Groupthink? It’s more like a whirlwind of self-reinforcing delusion feeding on itself – like feedback in a sound system. Sometimes one needs to step back and take a look at just what the heck is going on here.
No booths showing the famous tree rings?
You will at least admit that among climate scientists the “skeptics” are in the minority.
Whittle it down, and you end up with fifty or so true believers
Wow. A purer example of pulling-numbers-out-of-one’s-posterior you will not find.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_from_Climate_Change_2007:_The_Physical_Science_Basis
That’s six hundred nineteen scientists. Real scientists, not economists or railway engineers… or weathermen. Working scientists in relevant disciplines.
Isn’t it embarrassing to have to just flat make something up to make a point?
Mike,
Money and a comfortable lifestyle drives your zealots…
Skeptics care about facts, not their career…
Wherever easy money and prestige are to be had, you will find dogmatic practitioners of pal-reviewed consensus style group thought science.
Dave Hardinger
I’d buy it too.
Mike May 18, 2010 at 2:39 pm:
“You will at least admit that among climate scientists the ‘skeptics’ are in the minority.”
Subtract the ones who are receiving grants or are otherwise employed to “study global warming,” and the best you’ll get are agnostics.
And how many “climate” scientists are there? Have you checked out the degrees they hold? Geography, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc.
So going by that criteria, the 31,000 professionals with a degree in the hard sciences far outnumber the comparative handful who are cashing in on the bogus conjecture that CO2 drives the climate.
Almost all of those 31,000 science professionals downloaded, printed out, signed and mailed in their copy of the OISM Petition [no emails accepted; hard copies only], which states:
Generally if someone’s continued employment is dependent on showing that CO2 causes global warming, then they will show that CO2 causes global warming — no matter how many times that conjecture is debunked.
There was once a consensus that peptic ulcers were mostly caused by food, stress and / or drink. Now it is known that the vast majority are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori
Consensus in science can be a life threatening condition!
I heard Roger Harrabin on the radio this morning talking about the conference. The slant was that the conference was mainly right wing sceptics/scientists, although he did interview a left wing sceptic scientist (shock, horror). All very brief and not exactly coming out on the sceptic side. I would be interested to hear what he interviewed you about and how you thought it went. Did he ask you about being funded by the oil industry – that was another of his slants. Bah!
Mike says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:39 pm
You will at least admit that among climate scientists the “skeptics” are in the minority.
~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Prove it.
2. So what? It just takes one skeptic to destroy a theory. Science is not a consensus-driven discipline.
I was at a wedding breakfast in Edmonton on the weekend and I found myself across the table from another guest, a friend of the bride, while I was a relative by marriage of the groom. He was from Leeds, England. My wife asked him what he did and he said he was a PhD candidate in Atmospheric Science. “Oh good” she exclaimed, “my husband knows all about climate science, he reads about it two hours a day on the Internet.” (If she only knew.) So I asked him what he was doing his thesis about and he said he was a “cloud” guy and something about sulfur. I asked if he meant geoengineering and he seemed a little embarrassed and sort of mumbled some sort of denial. ( I had used the term idiocy to as a descriptor, I think). So I pressed my advantage, hoping to flatter him a bit about his specialty, and said that I thought clouds were really where it was “at” and that all the fuss over CO2 was misplaced. He bristled and said I was completely wrong. “The water budget never changes,” he said. “It’s all about the increase in CO2. The amount of water is fixed. Fixed. Fixed and so it can’t effect any change in the climate. Only CO2 is changing.” I could see that his mind was fixed, so I went back to my breakfast. There are more koolaid drinkers out there than Charles even imagines. And the universities are producing more every day, it would appear.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:45 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_from_Climate_Change_2007:_The_Physical_Science_Basis
**That’s six hundred nineteen scientists. Real scientists, not economists or railway engineers… or weathermen. Working scientists in relevant disciplines.**
These are authors of papers that were reviewed. They are not all climate scientists and they do not all preach AGW.
@ Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:45 pm
“Wow. A purer example of pulling-numbers-out-of-one’s-posterior you will not find.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_from_Climate_Change_2007:_The_Physical_Science_Basis
That’s six hundred nineteen scientists. Real scientists, not economists or railway engineers… or weathermen. Working scientists in relevant disciplines.
Isn’t it embarrassing to have to just flat make something up to make a point?”
Wow Paul, I guess you probably aren’t understanding what you’re reading. Seeing how you’ve used Wikipedia as ultimate arbiter of truth, go here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming
Now, if you will, scroll down the list you provided and the list of names here. While I didn’t have time to do a comprehensive search, one name sticks out on both lists, John Christy. I only point that out because it shows that your list isn’t a list of the “true believers” the writer was talking about. Obviously, one can contribute to the IPCC’s report without swallowing the conclusions. But then, you knew that, right? I’ll put it another way so there may be better odds at you coming to an understanding. Just because wiki and the IPCC have a name on a list, it doesn’t mean that person is a CAGW alarmist. Further, if you do check your little list out, it does indeed include, meteorologists or weathermen, if you will.
Now, was that an attempt to troll? You’re not very good at it. Keep practicing!!!
Are we really talking about consensus again? Anyone who says that there is a consensus in science reveals that he is not a scientist. Permit me to explain. Take the C.E.R.N. project. Is there practical agreement among physicists that the project should have been undertaken? Probably. Is it a consensus? No. But here is the important point? Will there be an agreement, a consensus, among theorists as to the theoretical implications of the results and the next experimental step to take? Of course not.
Will you admit that the majority of climate scientists care about the next funding tranch? If the AGW hypothesis is shown to be wrong they are out of a job or wil have to quickly shift to another field. Many will have a big problem paying their mortgages. :o(
Charles, how would one compare the 619 scientists Paul cites in the wiki with your guesstimate? How would one verify which ones are “indeed scientists in relevant subjects”, not included in “explicitly rejected the IPCC’s AGW theory” and are considered “true believers”? If my math is ok, 50 of the population would be only 8%. If you can support your figure that would be quite sensational, I think.
To back up my “next funding tranch” statement look at the climate bandits at CRU.
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=171&filename=962818260.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=156&filename=947541692.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=332&filename=1056478635.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=270&filename=1019513684.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=1041&filename=1254832684.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=204&filename=973374325.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=185&filename=968691929.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=159&filename=951431850.txt
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=362&filename=1065125462.txt
Also look at the bottom of the following page and see how well they did with Shell oil and BP.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
Follow the money Mike and find out why there is a consensus.
I understand that 52 were the number of “real authors” of the Nbr 4 report: with 1 actually sneaking back in to the conference room after hours to re-re-edit the “Summary for Policymakers” – which is the only part actually read/publicized/propagandized – to make it even more inflamatory.
Correctomundo, Jimbo. The history of Science is filled with examples showing that the consensus was wrong, just as the [claimed] consensus that CO2 causes any measurable global warming is wrong.
In the 1840’s the majority of doctors believed that washing their hands before assisting with childbirth was an unnecessary fad practiced by midwives. Even after being proven wrong, they still continued to insist that hand washing was unnecessary.
When he noticed that a friend got a fever after puncturing himself with a scalpel, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis thought there might be a connection between cleanliness and disease. He also noticed that almost 20% of mothers in his ward died of “childbed fever” following childbirth. After he required hand washing with chlorinated water by physicians, the mortality immediately dropped to 1.3%
It is interesting that even after Dr Semmelweis died in 1865, the medical community’s ‘consensus’ still continued to reject his conclusions. Sound familiar?
Paul Daniel Ash:
It is chapter 9 that concerns people, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change.”
How many scientists contributed to that chapter? Less than 60.
The rest of the scientists are irrelevant because most people believe GW is happening.
Real scientist here as well, AWG is a load of crap, built on crap, and it is shameful it passes as science.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Isn’t it embarrassing to have to just flat make something up to make a point?
Chapters 3 through to 11 are observations of global warming and evaluation of models. They do not address cause.
Chapter 2: Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing.
Has 55 authors, not six hundred and nineteen.
Right wing sceptics!!!
I am not a right winger and here are some left-wing skeptics – [click].
Smokey says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Smokey, where do you think the funding comes from for ALL science, including medical science which I’m sure you rely on. Perhaps you don’t understand how science works. When it comes to climate scientists, skeptics are by far the minority. And in fact in my 20 years of science, I have never met one and this is coming from degrees in physics, mathematics, geology, geography, oceanography, atmospheric science, engineering, even paleoclimatology. And what you also fail to understand is that most climate scientists are conservative. They don’t advocate alarmist behavior, or believe that we are on the edge of disaster. They understand the uncertainties in future predictions and work hard to understand the processes at work in our climate system so that we can improve our understanding of future climate change. I for one would rather put my trust in scientists who are not funded by the oil and gas industry or the mineral industry, which means they are likely funded by NASA, NSF, NOAA or DoD grants. The idea that there are only 50 scientists who believe that human activities are influencing our climate is a joke. I can name at least 50 off the top of my head and NONE of them are part of the hockey stick graph. At the annual AGU meeting in San Francisco there are more than 10,000 scientists presenting each year and the majority of them believe in anthropogenic climate change. Time to get your facts straight. If you want to talk about alarmists, then perhaps you have less than 50.
But you should know, just because most of us are not alarmists does not mean we don’t believe in human-induced climate change. At least at our conferences, folks like Roy Spencer and William Gray also speak, whereas at your conference, no other voice is heard. Perhaps the conference organizers should send out emails to climate listservs so that all climate scientists can be invited to present?
Jimbo says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Mike says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:39 pm
You will at least admit that among climate scientists the “skeptics” are in the minority.
Will you admit that the majority of climate scientists care about the next funding tranch? If the AGW hypothesis is shown to be wrong they are out of a job or wil have to quickly shift to another field. Many will have a big problem paying their mortgages. :o(
Not even close. Jimbo, look at the calls that NSF and NASA distribute. Do you see AGW mentioned anywhere? No, government funded science does not call on scientists to find a link between CO2 and other observations. What it does is call for new data analysis, or development of new observing platforms, or process studies, or model development, or hypothesis testing with observational data, etc. etc.
The idea that scientists have invented AGW to stay funded is a joke. I was funded long before many scientists started to believe in AGW, and having more evidence of GHG-induced warming has not changed my funding one bit. BTW–I make a LOT more $ when I consult for the oil and gas industry than I ever could from government funding. If scientists want to get rich, they would work for big business rather than government. Instead scientists work for little $ trying to understand this beautiful planet. (remember a post-doc who has been in college for 9 years only makes 40K).
barefootgirl says she is one of the ones that “believe in human-induced climate change.”
“Believe” is the correct word, since so far there is no measurable, testable evidence showing that human activity controls the climate. If humans have an effect, it is too small to measure.
But maybe Tinkerbell was right, and all that is necessary is to believe. Don’t forget to clap your hands.☺
yeah Smokey, I do believe because I actually work with the observational data whereas you spend your days blogging.
I’m retired.☺
Anyway, show us the “observational data” that quantifies the amount of temperature increase per teragram of CO2. I’d like to see how that was observed…
…since you’re ‘blogging’ about it.
barefootgirl:
Here I am, a skeptical scientist. Call me a heretic.
If you are a climate scientist, clean up your field.
Stop with the crappy models.
Stop with adjusting temperature databases always up.
Stop ignoring that UHI actually exists.
Stop dropping weather stations around the world.
Stop interpolating from a single weather stations to others hundreds of miles away.
Stop using tree rings as a proxy, and defending the hockey stick.
Stop saying that there is a consensus, because science isn’t about consensus and is rarely advanced by consensus.
Start actually looking at other possibilities for GW.
“And of the remaining minority who are indeed scientists in relevant subjects, some (like my good friend Prof Fred Singer) have explicitly rejected the IPCC’s AGW theory. Whittle it down, and you end up with fifty or so true believers, most of whom are part of the “Hockey Team” behind the infamous Hockey Stick graph, perhaps the most discredited artefact in the history of science. This is a small and incestuous group of scientists (including those at the CRU at the University of East Anglia). They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.”
====
No scientific society of standing disputes AGW. That’s a lot of incest.
But how do 45 sceptical scientists stack up, you may well ask, against the 2500 on the official IPCC panels? But of course there aren’t 2500 relevant scientists on the IPCC panel. Many of them are not strictly scientists at all. Some are merely civil servants or environmental zealots. Some are economists — important to the debate but not experts on the science. Others are scientists in unrelated disciplines. The Chairman of the IPCC Dr. Ravendra Pachuari, is a Railway Engineer.
I’m always intrigued by the ‘Railway Engineer’ statement, he’s no more a Railway Engineer than I am a bus conductor (a job I did to help pay my way through college).
He actually holds a masters in Industrial Engineering and a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Economics.
You have just made Smokey’s point about funding worries. :o) The fact that you have “NEVER MET ONE” is alarming indeed. Science is an adversarial system in which scepticism is applied to any new claims which aim to overturn what is accepted. Do you accept what I have just said?
Please note how alarmist scientist can be click.
barefootgirl, please tell me do you receive funding for climate related research and if yes then let me know if you have doubts about AGW would you come out in the open and say so? Think about your mortgage!!!!
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:02 pm
—-
REPLY:
Read these.
Dr Roy Spencer, former NASA scientist
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”
Source: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/04/the-great-global-warming-blunder-how-mother-nature-fooled-the-world%e2%80%99s-top-climate-scientists/
—–
Pachauri had ‘no’ conflict of interest?
In 2005, Pachauri helped set up set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.
“He is an internationally recognized figure in energy and sustainable development, having served on numerous boards and committees including Director of the Oil and Natural Gas Company of India; Director of the Indian Oil Corporation Limited;…
Source: http://www.glorioil.com/advisors.htm
“Our chemical lab in Houston is state of the art, custom built for purpose with one goal in mind – to supply the US oil industry with world class biotechnology to increase oil recovery from mature fields.”
Source: http://www.glorioil.com/technology.htm
“Our research facility in India focuses primarily on long term R&D projects such as heavy oil degradation, methane biogeneration from coal beds, and other initiatives.”
Source: http://www.glorioil.com/company.htm
——-
And here’s the big money:
Exxon: “(how about $100 million for Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, and $600 million for Biofuels research).”
“The US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989 – to be sure, this funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it’s 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics.”
“The $79 billion figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, and is not adjusted for inflation.”
“According to the World Bank, turnover of carbon trading reached $126 billion in 2008. PointCarbon estimates trading in 2009 was about $130 billion.”
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2835581.htm
I could go on barefootgirl but what I suggest is that you get your skates on [pun intended] and get up to speed by smelling the coffee and thinking more sceptically. I thought that is what scientists are supposted to do barefoot.
well first off, even your beloved Roy Spencer believes that CO2 in the atmosphere has increased during the last 100 years. And even Roy believes that w/o the natural Greenhouse gas affect, the Earth would be much colder than we are. So the question becomes one of climate sensitivity. Roy argues the climate has little sensitivity while many other studies have reached a sensitivity between 2-4C supported by numerous diverse climate studies (I can give you some references if you like). I don’t do those studies myself but I have read many of the peer-reviewed papers, including ones by Spencer. What interests me more are the temperature trends, not only in the atmosphere, but also at the surface and in the oceans. These all indicate the Earth is storing heat. There are also recent studies showing less outgoing LW emitted back to space (another indication of heat storage).
But like I said before, I’m not an alarmist since I understand the complexities of the climate system and feedbacks may emerge that will offset warming trends. Climate models don’t show this, but then again, they have their limitations. But the more scientists understand about the processes at work and add more complexity to climate models, the better future predictions will be.
“”” Coalsoffire says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:18 pm
I was at a wedding breakfast in Edmonton on the weekend and I found myself across the table from another guest, a friend of the bride, while I was a relative by marriage of the groom. He was from Leeds, England. My wife asked him what he did and he said he was a PhD candidate in Atmospheric Science. “Oh good” she exclaimed, “my husband knows all about climate science, he reads about it two hours a day on the Internet.” (If she only knew.) So I asked him what he was doing his thesis about and he said he was a “cloud” guy and something about sulfur. I asked if he meant geoengineering and he seemed a little embarrassed and sort of mumbled some sort of denial. ( I had used the term idiocy to as a descriptor, I think). So I pressed my advantage, hoping to flatter him a bit about his specialty, and said that I thought clouds were really where it was “at” and that all the fuss over CO2 was misplaced. He bristled and said I was completely wrong. “The water budget never changes,” he said. “It’s all about the increase in CO2. The amount of water is fixed. Fixed. Fixed and so it can’t effect any change in the climate. Only CO2 is changing.” I could see that his mind was fixed, so I went back to my breakfast. There are more koolaid drinkers out there than Charles even imagines. And the universities are producing more every day, it would appear. “””
So check SCIENCE July 7, 2007; Frank Wentz (RSS) et al, “How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring ?”
Actual Satellite observational data: a one deg C (1) increase in mean global surface Temperature results in a 7% increase in total global evaporation; a 7% increase in total atmospheric water content; and a 7% increase in total global precipitation. So what was that about the water being fixed ?
In contrast; the GCMs agree with the 7% increase in total atmospheric water content (for a 1 deg C Temp rise) but they claim the total evap/precip (which must be equal) is only 1-3%; ie as much as a 7X error from real observations.
What Wentz et al did not say but which may be conjectured from their result is that their 1 deg C change likely also causes something like a 7% increase in the total global precipitable cloud cover; since it is fashionabler in all the best climatology circles to have clouds with your precipitation. The conjectured 7% (*-/ 3x) could be a combination of increased cloud area, increased cloud water content (andoptical density), and increased cloud persistence time. Wanna bet that cloud increase doesn’t anihilate that 1 deg C Temperature rise ?
So yes clouds is where it is at; and water is far from constant; other than it is a permanent component of the atmosphere in all three phases of ordinary materials. So nuts to your new buddy.
Hmm, alarmists dismiss a list of 31,000 and tout a laughable list of 620? Even when the 620 list has names of people that are skeptical of the alarmism. Perfect example of their logic.
@barefoot girl….that’s a beautiful picture of scientists that you just painted. The poor laborious scientist. Unaffected by the gale winds of politics. Simply trying to understand our world without an ounce of advocacy or self aggrandizement or desire for the fortunes the private sector offers. They’re only in it for the quest of knowledge and to pass the knowledge on in the halls of academia.
Then, I see the likes of Jim Hansen and Mike Mann. It is then I realize,…….you’re not very grounded in reality. I don’t say that to be mean, I say that because you seem sincere. I wish all the world would view their labors in the same manner. Where integrity and focus were the true motivations of all of our souls. It isn’t. Many may disagree, but I believe it is because we forgot the words of a great thinker, Ben Franklin……….”Ultimately, man will be ruled either by God or tyrants.” The world has chosen tyrants.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Me thinks you stumbled on this blog and have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I could be wrong so please hit me! [with the science of AGW] and its proven predictions with evidence [the ultimate integrity of any theory].
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:02 pm
“Not even close. Jimbo, look at the calls that NSF and NASA distribute.”
REPLY: Where does NASA get its funds from? If it doesn’t tow the line then what? Are you a naive teenager or what?
Vincent says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Yes, the old consensus myth. As far as I can tell it seems to have bootstrapped itself from the original 50. ….
Groupthink? It’s more like a whirlwind of self-reinforcing delusion feeding on itself – like feedback in a sound system. Sometimes one needs to step back and take a look at just what the heck is going on here.”
_______________________________________________________________________
It’s more like a whirlwind of greed feeding out of the public trough – – Oink Oink
Dang, another heretic to add to the list.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/18/epa-carbon-dioxide-threat-human-welfare/
Jimbo says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:51 pm
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:02 pm
—-
REPLY:
Read these.
Dr Roy Spencer, former NASA scientist
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”
====
Maybe I don’t understand the cloud theory, but unless there is a cloud trend, how can the global temperature trend be effected?
Mike says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:39 pm
You will at least admit that among climate scientists the “skeptics” are in the minority.
_______________________________________________________________________
Mikey, Here is your list of 700 “skeptics” papers on climate science. I can not be bothered making a list of all the names from each paper and sorting out the duplicates. If you are so concerned about “psuedoscience by majority think” you do it.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
barefootgirl
“What interests me more are the temperature trends, not only in the atmosphere, but also at the surface and in the oceans. These all indicate the Earth is storing heat. ”
—–
How far back do the trends start? Have you looked at it from 1998? If so then what is the trend? Remember, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. You can see all you want with trends, it all depends on how far back you go and you should know that.
barefootgirl, you must understand that people on this blog demand evidence of AGW along with its predictions. Please provide it. Einstein’s theory of relativity made predictions which were later observed. Go on barefootgirl make some predictions so we can observe.
Jimbo says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:10 pm
There was once a consensus that peptic ulcers were mostly caused by food, stress and / or drink. Now it is known that the vast majority are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori
Consensus in science can be a life threatening condition!
=======
But modern science is usually right, and the AGW skeptics don’t have a Helicobacter pylori.
Perhaps someday science will find that a diet heavy in salt actually is beneficial to people who have heart disease. In the mean time, they probably should avoid it.
So, of all the scientists on the IPCC thing, only 45 were actually for it.
Reminds me of that statistical trick. 4 out of 5 Doctors recommend x brand ABC for patients who need ABC.
1 really did prefer x brand, 1 preferred y brand, and 3 would use either brand x or brand y.
Hey, we didn’t lie, we just didn’t bother with explaining the gorey details.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:54 pm
well first off, even your beloved Roy Spencer believes that CO2 in the atmosphere has increased during the last 100 years. And even Roy believes that w/o the natural Greenhouse gas affect, the Earth would be much colder than we are.
—
REPLY: You are a naive teenager. I don’t deny any of this. AGW says that the late 20th century warming was MOSTLY caused by the extra Co2 produced by man. This is the issue for you to prove!!!!!!!!!! You can’t prove it!!!!!! If so show us here right now. We are waiting.
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:49 pm
But modern science is usually right, and the AGW skeptics don’t have a Helicobacter pylori.
———-
Usually right does not make one right today. If you are right then prove it!!!! Provide evidence and make predictions which we can observe about future runaway warming [the ultimate test of any theory].
#
James Sexton says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:02 pm
@barefoot girl….that’s a beautiful picture of scientists that you just painted. The poor laborious scientist. Unaffected by the gale winds of politics. Simply trying to understand our world without an ounce of advocacy or self aggrandizement or desire for the fortunes the private sector offers. They’re only in it for the quest of knowledge and to pass the knowledge on in the halls of academia.
Then, I see the likes of Jim Hansen and Mike Mann. It is then I realize,…….you’re not very grounded in reality…..
__________________________________________________________________________
BOY, do you have that correct. I had originally assumed barefoot girl, was newly graduated because of her naïveté. Given the dishonesty, lying, data manipulation, theft of research and other less than admirable activities I have encountered while working as a chemist and a lab manager, I can only envy her luck . But then again she maybe a “Team Player” so never “sees” the real world.
Oh and barefoot girl, the AGW scientists WERE invited to the conference so why weren’t YOU there giving a paper????? If you ASKED I am sure they would have been happy to have you.
Off to the conference
“…A number of people with opposing views, including Gavin Schmidt, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Phil Jones and William Schlesinger, were invited to the ICCC4 conference. They all declined.” http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/15/off-to-the-conference/
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:49 pm
But modern science is usually right, and the AGW skeptics don’t have a Helicobacter pylori.
—–
You may have a point but as you look at a helicopter in the sky you sometimes see the …..???
@ Wren
“Perhaps someday science will find that a diet heavy in salt actually is beneficial to people who have heart disease. In the mean time, they probably should avoid it.”
Which science concluded by observation, not computer generated hysteria. Your assertion that science is generally right today but not yesterday is typical warmist think. Remember when eggs were bad for you? Is that current enough? Or last years flu was going to kill us all and we didn’t have enough vaccine? Oh, wait, that hysteria was generated by………you guessed it!!! Scientific computer modeling. Science gets it wrong more often than not, it has from the beginning and continues through today and on to tomorrow. Yet through the two step forward and one back routine, we continue to know more. Remember when we knew it all? I think I was about 25 or 26 when I realized I lacked all knowledge.
Science isn’t right or wrong, it is the understanding that we lack adequate knowledge in most occasions and we engage in learning more, but at no point will we or rather should we state we have complete understanding of all things or anything. We can never get there from here.
Gerald Machnee says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:19 pm
They are not all climate scientists and they do not all preach AGW.
I did not make either assertion, so this is an irrelevant objection. I was responding to Anthony’s claim that
As you all are fond of saying, strong claims require strong evidence. For the statement to be anything other than hand-waving, someone is going to need to show that five hundred sixty-nine of those names are either non-scientists or “explicitly rejected” the conclusions on the IPCC. Put up or shut up, folks.
Karl B. says:
It is chapter 9 that concerns people, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change.”
You all are fine with “Chapter 2: Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing,” ”Chapter 3: Observations: Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change,” “Chapter 4: Observations: Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground,” “Chapter 5: Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level,” “Chapter 6: Palaeoclimate,” “Chapter 8: Climate Models and their Evaluation,” “Chapter 10: Global Climate Projections” and “Chapter 11: Regional Climate Projections?” Really? Wow.
MartinGAtkins says:
Chapters 3 through to 11 are observations of global warming and evaluation of models. They do not address cause.
“Chapter 9: Understanding and Attributing Climate Change” does not address cause? Really?
James Sexton says:
Hmm, alarmists dismiss a list of 31,000 and tout a laughable list of 620?
Well, it was Anthony who’s playing the numbers game. I know millions of people who think the Lakers are better than the Celtics, that doesn’t make it so. However, the number Anthony posits is “fifty or so,” not six hundred nineteen.
Even when the 620 list has names of people that are skeptical of the alarmism.
Anthony asserts that they have explicitly rejected the conclusions of the report. That’s a bold statement, and should be subject to as much skepticism as any claim.
Jimbo says:
Where does NASA get its funds from?
Um… up until 2009, from George W. Bush. Don’t tell me… he’s in on it too?
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:26 pm
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
“……How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”
============================
Maybe I don’t understand the cloud theory, but unless there is a cloud trend, how can the global temperature trend be effected?”
______________________________________________________________________
Here are some articles on the subject:
Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/07/spencer-strong-negative-feedback-found-in-radiation-budget/
Spencer: Clouds Dominate CO2 as a Climate Driver Since 2000
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/13/spencer-clouds-dominate-co2-as-a-climate-driver-since-2000/
This is a bit easier to read and understand:
The Thermostat Hypothesis
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
This one is also interesting:
Pielke Sr. on Revkin’s question
Update To Andy Revkin’s Question In 2005: “Is Most Of The Observed Warming Over The Last 50 Years Likely To Have Been Due To The Increase In Greenhouse Gas Concentrations”?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/06/pielke-sr-on-revkins-question/
Barefootgirl, thanks for your input but I think you oversimplify things tremendously. Changes in global climate may be occurring, in fact it would be astonishing if things were not trending in one direction or another. Absolute stability is not a hallmark of natural systems. Just because the current trend appears to be warming (or at least it was for a while) doesn’t mean the trend will continue. Attributing all the observed change, which to date has been rather small, to human activity is not well supported. Changes of greater magnitude, in both directions, have happened repeatedly in the past at times when human-generated CO2 could not possibly have been a contributing factor. So the real question is not, as you try to make it, “what is the climate sensitivity?” but “is there anything at all about the current situation that’s outside the known variability of the system and therefore requires an explanation that might include factors that weren’t operative in the past?”
I have never seen a remotely convincing argument that the answer to the second question is “yes”.
@ Jimbo
Maybe there should be a web site stating what the typical skeptic believes. The alarmists here seem confused.
@ ALL ALARMISTS
While I can’t speak for anybody but myself, most skeptics, especially here, don’t have a problem with the assertion there is more CO2 in the air(although there is at least one conflicting study). Further, every skeptic I’ve ever interacted with knows(apparently before the alarmsts figured it out) that our climate changes. It always has, it always will. What some here may state, that warmer is preferable to colder. Some may also state that most of the “observed warming” can be attributed to the natural variances to the climate.(look back at the always changes thingy) Some may also state, given the “adjustments” to the temp data, there is no one that can state unequivocally that we are getting warmer to any significant degree. Some also have a difficulty with the arbitrary assigning of the optimum temp time frame. Knowing the temp and climate always changes, who decided we should compare today’s climate to a climate between 1940’s to 1970’s? Why don’t we compare it to 1200 AD or 100 AD? Further, more may say climate change is worth studying, but to scrap our entire socio-economic structure today would be tantamount to the “cure being worse than the disease”. Which, the alarmists hype is why it is being proposed. Others simply see the fraudulent “science” for what it is. Fraud. If an alarmist wants the world convinced of the threat of CAGW, they have to rid themselves of the Hansens, Schmidts, Manns, Gores, ect. from their advocacy group. There’s much more, but, it’s SUPPER TIME!!!
PEACE
This is a small and incestuous group of scientists (including those at the CRU at the University of East Anglia). They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.
Do I hear Dueling Banjos from Deliverance?
Paul Daniel Ash:
Allow me to accept the challenge and “put up,” even though it will never change the closed minds of those afflicted with Cognitive Dissonance koff*paulash*koff
As stated upthread, over 31,000 scientists and professionals with degrees in the hard sciences signed the following statement, which explicitly rejects the IPCC’s conclusions:
That is well over fifty times more than the 569 alarmists Mr Ash was able to find.
So, will he concede the point?
My bet is no. Cognitive dissonance is stronger than the need for credibility.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:53 pm
The folks at the ICCC conference sent out emails to dozens and dozens of climate scientists who are AGW supporters, offering them the opportunity to present and discuss their views. Of all of the invitations, only two scientists accepted. They were warmly and publicly thanked for their participation. Please check your facts before posting, it is affecting your credibility.
barefootgirl,
You intrigue me. You seem to have a barefoot in both camps, and sincerely so. Please judge my understanding of the claim that there is no science of Earth’s climate at this time. What I mean by science is best seen in the progression from Ptolemy, through Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo to Newton. Kepler was the first to do away with a whirligig model of planetary movement and replace it with a set of empirical hypotheses that enabled prediction not only of planetary motions but relative speed and distance from the sun. As with all empirical hypotheses, they were formulated as univeral generalizations. For example, Kepler’s Second Law states that a planet’s speed in its orbit is directly proportional to the area swept by a line from the Sun to the planet. Newton benefitted directly from Kepler’s work and deduced Kepler’s Third Law, about the size of orbits, from his Theory of Gravitation. Bringing together Kepler and Galileo, Newton explained that the same laws governed projectile motion on Earth and the regular motion of the planets. He explained that given a tall enough mountain and a powerful enough cannon, he could launch a satelite into orbit around the Earth. The point of this story about the history of astronomy is that, at some point, empirical science emerges from whirligig models and qualitative hypotheses grow over the decades into quantitative hypotheses that synthesize earlier results into higher level hypotheses. I do not see that climate science has gone beyond the whirligig stage. Of course, there are generalizations about the CO2 molecule, but everyone agrees that a random distribution of CO2 molecues in the atmosphere cannot produce more than one degree of warming. The fearsome warming has to come from the forcings. But the forcings can be known only if there are empirical hypotheses about them. I have used every opportunity to ask climate scientists for these desired hypotheses, as I am now asking you, and I have received worse than silence as a response. Are there empirical hyptheses about forcings? If so, what are they? If not, then why do climate scientists deny that they are in a pre-empirical, whirligig stage of climate science? Climate scientists have hunches about the melting of glaciers, the melting of arctic sea ice, the role of cloud cover in temperature, but none of these hunches can be relevant to the others so long as there is not a set of empirical hypotheses that ties them together, as Newton tied together Kepler and Galileo. So, please barefootgirl, tell me, are there empirical hypotheses that can be stated as universal generalizations and used to explain forcings and predict their behavior?
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:18 pm
“As you all are fond of saying, strong claims require strong evidence. For the statement to be anything other than hand-waving, someone is going to need to show that five hundred sixty-nine of those names are either non-scientists or “explicitly rejected” the conclusions on the IPCC. Put up or shut up, folks.”
It would seem you have your logic somewhat reversed. Since most of the names on the list had only limited input to the IPCC AR-4 [as contributing authors, reviewers, technical support, etc.], the burden of proof would seem to be yours to show that all or a majority of them have made subsequent public utterances in which they totally embraced its conclusions.
Gail Combs says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:20 pm
You’re laboring under the illusion that Wren cares about the science.
Smokey says:
As stated upthread, over 31,000 scientists and professionals with degrees in the hard sciences signed the following statement, which explicitly rejects the IPCC’s conclusions
Smokey, it’s always best to read before posting. For your benefit, I’ll again reference the claim that Anthony made without a shred of evidence:
As you’ll note if you read the actual WUWT post to which you’re commenting, Anthony was referring to “scientists on the IPCC panel.”
That was awesome, though, being all condescending to me when you clearly had no idea what either I or Anthony had written. Do that more, I love it.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Good. That’s all we are after, too. It is a shame the media have an entirely different perspective, and that perspective is fuelled by many.
They were asked. They declined (or did not respond). Go figure.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
Jimbo says:
Where does NASA get its funds from?
Um… up until 2009, from George W. Bush. Don’t tell me… he’s in on it too?
Sorry, but Presidents, not even evil ones like GWB, cannot raise funds or determine where they are spent, that is the Constitutional function of Congress.
Even though I’m personally skeptical of AGW theory, I have to side with Paul Daniel Ash.
A statement was made about there only being about fifty true believers of AGW in the climate science field. Bold statements like that from the AGW camp are (rightly) harshly criticised here at WUWT. It is only fair and just that that statement be defended and some evidence provided to justify the number.
I think a reasonable place to start would be to try to estimate the number of appropriate climate scientists who meet the required categorisation of being relevant to the discussion. I don’t know the field well enough to even try to do so, but it’s definitely relevant to the discussion. If the total number of scientists who qualify is only about fifty, then the statement that only about fifty support AGW is misleading in that that would mean it’s the vast majority. If the total number of scientists who qualify is a five hundred, then we’re talking only ten percent and the original statement takes a lot stronger meaning (assuming that it can be demonstrated that the other ninety percent don’t support AGW).
Dave Wendt says:
the burden of proof would seem to be yours
Really? So Anthony can make any statement he likes, and it’s merely accepted? Anything that doesn’t confirm your preconceptions, however, is rejected out of hand.
This is skepticism?
PDA,
You said:
“…someone is going to need to show that five hundred sixty-nine of those names are either non-scientists or ‘explicitly rejected’ the conclusions of the IPCC.”
I decided to respond to your “explicitly rejected” comment.
James Sexton says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:17 pm
I do remember all the fad warnings:
C02 forcing is geometric, no wait, C02 forcing is logarithmic.
Now it’s C02 is a toxic pollutant, no wait, C02 is plant food.
Sure am glad to see an ICCC to counter the IPCC.
barefootgirl says: May 18, 2010 at 4:26 pm
yeah Smokey, I do believe [in man-made climate change] because I actually work with the observational data whereas you spend your days blogging.
Smokey you have let us down! If only you didn’t spend your days blogging and observed the temperature outside your house everyday you would also believe in man made Global Warming like barefootgirl. She observes the temperature and by jove its going up! We are responsible!
But wait there’s more – what does barefootgirl say now? – “I’m not an alarmist since I understand the complexities of the climate system and feedbacks may emerge that will offset warming trends.”
barefootgirl, then what are you creating all this fuss about? I thought I would have to give up eating meat and driving a car. Please go back to your thermometers and dont try and dabble in subjects beyond your ken and quit griping about your paycheck. If I were you I would try and re-train in something more constructive. The doom and gloom, crying wolf, industry won’t last forever.
Smokey says:
I decided to respond to your “explicitly rejected” comment.
Those were Anthony’s words. That’s what the two little inverted commas are doing on either side of them.
@Paul Daniel Ash
As I’ve stated before, I can only name about a dozen or so “true believers”, so I can’t get to the 50 or so stated. I don’t know, I can only suppose the writer is more intimately knowledgeable about the warmistas than I am. And apparently you, too. Else, you would have produced a list of scientific CAGW alarmists to refute his claim. If I state there are only 100 stars in the sky, you wish for me to name them so you can then refute me? What a ridiculous line of thinking. As shown several times above in this thread, there are literally thousands of scientists rejecting the IPCC’s conclusions. But as a token of my good will, I’ll start your list for you, let’s see…….there’s Mann, Hansen, Jones….no wait, he’s on record as stating there hasn’t been any warming for the last decade or so…..uhmm, Schmidt, Tamino…..hmm a pseudonym? Well, there’s Pachy…..dang no he does trains……well there’s always Gore….nope he’s a ….??? …profiteer. Well, there’s been too many beers for me and I’ve way past putting the CRU crew on the irrelevant list…..you’ll have to finish the list yourself.
Paul Daniel Ash says, May 18, 2010 at 7:19 pm:
“Dave Wendt says: the burden of proof would seem to be yours
Really? So Anthony can make any statement he likes, and it’s merely accepted? Anything that doesn’t confirm your preconceptions, however, is rejected out of hand. This is skepticism?”
You were the one suggesting that those on the list were supporters of the “consensus” view. From what I’ve seen participation in the IPCC process is not any proof of support of the conclusions offered.
BTW, before berating others for not reading the lead post, you might want to note that ctm is its author, not Anthony
@Paul Daniel Ash
BTW, I neither refute nor reject the claim, I realize that’s his opinion. Also, I don’t see where the post is attributed to Anthony. Whomever the writer, you realize, as I realize, there is no way of knowing all the hearts of all the climate scientists in the world. I think the point of the statement was, as I’ve pointed out several times in the past, there are only a handful of alarmist scientists that are submitting papers and putting out statements. The rest, I presume and hope are real scientists that condemn group think and remain skeptical as a true scientist should. Personally, I’d be very interested in seeing a list of more than 50 certified scientists engaged in CAGW alarmism and advocacy.
This post is by Roger Helmer MEP, noted at bottom, I think I’ll fix that.
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:55 pm
Gail Combs says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:20 pm
You’re laboring under the illusion that Wren cares about the science.
_______________________________________________________________________
Amino, I tutor the neighborhood kids and others (for free) so I am in the habit of answering questions, when asked. It is up to the other person whether they “listen” or not. Also I learned in the Quality field that for every letter of complaint there are another hundred who did not bother to write, so my answers are for those other 100 too.
(There is always the hope that enough pounding will finally get through a thick skull.)
I wouldn’t argue with anyone scared enough to sign their posts with the nom de plume of “barefootgirl”. Sign your name or sign off little girl.
I’ve done research and published it. I know the funding and publishing game personally, and it stinks. I also understand the difference between raw data, homogenized data, and statistics, and have done an ANOVA with nothing but a Safeway calculator. I think that gives me enough credentials to talk about climate statistics under my real name (and not “strawberry shortcake”, or “graydancer”). How about you?
About climate, I’ve studied climate (I prefer the term “weather pattern variation”) as a hobby. Doesn’t make me any kind of an expert but I think I have something to say on the subject. Doesn’t matter. I believe that if you have the braincells to swim with the sharks, you should use your name. And I think the subject is important enough to sign my name to my posts. So if “barefootgirl” can’t do that, she needs to go back to the sandbox with all the other toddlers.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Dave Wendt says:
the burden of proof would seem to be yours
Really? So Anthony can make any statement he likes, and it’s merely accepted? Anything that doesn’t confirm your preconceptions, however, is rejected out of hand.
This is skepticism?
_______________________________________________________________________
ARGGHHhhhh, You are arguing over a statement made by a politician??????? Please get real guys.
not at the top it says “by Roger Helmer MEP”
see: http://rogerhelmer.com/
Smokey,
Given your glowing review of the Oregon (OISM) petition, you might want to read an actual scientist’s view from 2003 of how it was handled ( http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN03/wn080803.html ):
This is from Robert Park, a notable physicist in the area of superconductivity, the founder of the American Physical Society’s Office of Public Affairs, the author of the book “Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud” and someone who, unlike you, is willing to take on the abuse of science without regard to ideology. (He has been just as harsh on liberal Senator Tom Harkin when he supported the creation of an Office on Alternative Medicine within NIH.)
So, basically, what you had was a Soviet-style election: Bombard scientists with deceptive propaganda and only record the “Yes” votes. And, now we have Smokey defending it. I guess that old saying is true: Politics makes strange bedfellows!
@ Jimbo said: (May 18, 2010 at 3:23 pm): “Will you admit that the majority of climate scientists care about the next funding tranch? If the AGW hypothesis is shown to be wrong they are out of a job or wil have to quickly shift to another field. Many will have a big problem paying their mortgages. :o(“
Yes, most scientists need to secure grants to do serious research. No, they won’t lose their jobs if AGW is shown to be wrong. Most have tenure: Linzden still has his job. Understanding weather and climate will still be important areas of research.
Since the basis for AGW arose gradually and is based on many lines of research, if it is shown to be wrong this will likely be a gradual process as well. Individual papers do in fact point in different directions. No one has been fired for showing that Antarctica is cooling or that black carbon (soot) may be a major factor in Artic warming. But most of the evidence points toward GHG as a major factor in current warming and is projected to be of increasing import.
Since you are concerned, rightly, that money can buy influence, aren’t you at least a little concerned that corporate interests may be trying to do just that?
Dave Wendt says:
You were the one suggesting that those on the list were supporters of the “consensus” view
No.The assertion was
I’m not claiming to have disproved his assertion that the names on that list are most – if not all – either “not real scientists” or people who have explicitly rejected the conclusions of the report.
I’m saying it’s a strong claim that requires strong evidence.
That seems to me a shockingly uncontroversial premise.
Joel Shore, as usual, [snip ~ ctm]
His silly implication that educated people are totally ignorant of what they are downloading, printing, signing and mailing in doesn’t pass muster. And his comment about “Soviet style” elections is right out of the psychological projection manual for useful fools.
“Bombard scientists with deceptive propaganda and only record the ‘Yes’ votes”?? Please.
That is simply more alarmist projection. If it weren’t for projection, Joel wouldn’t have anything to say.
James Sexton says:
If I state there are only 100 stars in the sky, you wish for me to name them so you can then refute me? What a ridiculous line of thinking
If you stated that, of all the lights in the sky, only a hundred are stars and the rest are planets or asteroids or fireflies… then, yes, I – and anyone claiming to be a skeptic – would ask for some support of that claim.
None of you – well, none except Graeme W – is uncomfortable with just taking this guy’s word on faith?
charles the moderator says:
This post is by Roger Helmer MEP, noted at bottom
I read “I’m writing this in the Marriott Hotel in Chicago” at the top and assumed that Anthony had written the post. That was a careless assumption.
Reply: I am partially responsible. I put this one up at Anthony’s request and did not add the obvious attribution at the top with I have since corrected. I have now also captioned the picture. ~ ctm
The author is An MEP from the UK who was attending the conference! He was stating an opinion. I was introduced to the numbers game for Catastrophic Climate Change by the Alarmist Camp. At that time years ago I had to be picked up off the floor as I was suffering from uncontrollable fits of laughter. That was about my same reaction when I walked by a booth at a convention and read the company name ACCUWEATHER. I realize it is not nice to say derogatory things “Now” but at that time in my life the word “OXYMORON” came to mind and I said it out loud! I was reminded of that when I found a web site called “Realclimate” and finally realized what the word meant because RC really defines the term OXYMORON!
So Paul daniel and Barefootgirl the numbers game has no value in scientific research and proves SQUAT about what is observed.
The IPCC left the world of reality when they failed to follow their own procedures and continued to claim following after the evidence showed the opposite. Before that they were providing What if scenarios rather than science, rather like guessing games.
#
#
Pamela Gray says:
May 18, 2010 at 7:49 pm
I wouldn’t argue with anyone scared enough to sign their posts with the nom de plume of “barefootgirl”. Sign your name or sign off little girl.
I’ve done research and published it. I know the funding and publishing game personally, and it stinks….
__________________________________________________________________________
You are correct Pamela, if the “science climate” barefoot girl was working in was all sweetness and light, she would not be as cautious about using her own name. She is worried about the retaliation she faces for visiting the site of an “an arrogant, ignorant blowhard” as one of tamino’s commenters, Derecho64 put it .
Just visiting that site is enough to convince anyone “Climate Scientists” can be a vindictive bunch. Thank goodness Anthony runs a much more polite site. (Thank you moderators)
My apologies. I missed that it was something written by a politician. I had originally thought it was written by Charles (I’d checked the name at the top of the post and had missed the attribution at the bottom). Now that Charles has fixed the post so it’s clear who wrote it, I can safely ignore the whole thing.
I don’t take anything a politician (or former politician) says as being ‘truth’.
Wow, lots of responses, what fun. Yes, I am a climate scientist, raised in engineering (BS and MS) and a PhD in physics. So at least that should meet with many of your “hard” science requirements. Coming from engineering, I like to be accurate, because in that field you have to be. I work with satellite data, trying my best to convert the raw satellite data into geophysical variables that are useful for studying earth system processes. I have met Roy Spencer on a number of occasions when I was on the AMSR-E science team.
Since none of you who have written responses are actual scientists, it is clear you don’t understand even the least bit as to how it works. Remember, Roy Spencer was a NASA scientist, so he too got your hard-earned tax dollars for his work. But working for NASA instead of a University also meant he earned at least 120K, while University scientists earn way below that, unless they earn tenure and even then it’s on the low side compared to NASA scientists.
I have been a scientist for well over 20 years and I will tell you that all of your conjectures about scientists, how the funding works, who believes in AGW and who doesn’t is so far off base it is rather laughable to me. Also, what climate scientists actually believe and what you THINK they believe is also way off base. Yes there are a few “alarmist” scientists out there. I have sat on panels with Jim Hansen, given talks with Michael Mann, I know where they are coming come. And while I don’t agree with alarmism, I also see the value of folks like them pushing the issue, just like I see value in skeptics questioning the issues. It all works to help us further our research and understanding of the climate system.
I think it would be great to see skeptics address the real issues, rather than rely on inflamatory statements or cherry picking of data, or outright false statement to raise skeptism. It’s true that the media does a great dis-service to climate science. And while you can rip on media coverage (which most climate scientists also do), how many of you actually bother to read the scientific articles? Smokey, since you are retired to you bother? Or do you simply take whatever Roy Spencer says as “truth” while ignoring all the other studies? Do you critique his science methods the same way as you do others? Seems doubtful from what I’ve read on this web site the last month or so.
BTW…climate science is not just about CO2, it is about understanding the Earth system, including the land surface, the oceans and the atmosphere. If you do a search on climate science papers, you will find that most titles of papers do not mention CO2 in their titles. CO2-induced warming is a tiny fraction of climate science funded today.
Please…do some searches on grant announcements, journal titles, etc. and do your own assessment as to the nature of climate science being funded and summarized in peer-reviewed papers. I have no political agenda here (same with most climate scientists), but yes I am a vegetarian to answer another bloggers question.
Consensus in group opinions and decisions is a concept that has started dominating since democracy became a consensus 🙂 choice of decision making, of any sort.
Before that, it all dependent on who was top cat in any discipline, from politics to church.
Consensus is what is necessary in committees, otherwise no decisions would be taken. People get fed up with dithering, which is what happens if one delegates a decision to a committee, and consensus was invented, where dissenting people mumble grumble under their breaths but shrug and wait to get their own on another subject, so that some progress can be made. It is another lesson of democracy: some progress is better than no progress.
When there is no democracy in decision making bodies, take the formal church for example, gross violations can occur. In science one gets Lysenkoism, in recent times.
In science one uses the famous Piltdown man example , where the scientific community was led up the garden path. In the beginning of the century it was not consensus that was responsible so much, as the “schools” dominated by grand professors and working more or less in a feudal manner.
Another not so well known example is the “Folsom man” discovery that showed the early presence of man in the Americas. The discoverer is honored now,
http://www.folsomvillage.com/folsommuseum/georgemcjunkin.html . There were stone age tools found among fossils of 10000 year antiquity,
but the dominating figure in anthropology at the time, whose strong thesis was that the Americas did not have stone age populations, imposed his opinion until 1925, though the discovery happened in 1908.
I discovered this little known delusional story in science through a collection of Tony Hillerman, in The Great Taos Bank Robbery: And Other True Stories of the Southwest .
Unfortunately the book is at the vacation cottage and the name of the professor is hard to recall a, H*r**ik something, who was dominating the field strongly. The anthropological community must be sort of ashamed of the story, since very few links to it come up and I could not find the fellow. It is what will happen to the AGW crowd in a few decades.
In my discipline, particle physics, where research moves fast and where groups of people are necessary to be able to experiment, both have manifested in my lifetime: consensus and schools of thought. If you are building a cathedral or a Parthenon, consensus is necessary for any work to be done in a coherent way by the great number of people that are involved. A top direction is also needed to conceive the plan.
The balance is what is necessary, and is what has been lost in the climate community due to its being high jacked and seduced by political interests.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:47 pm
Willis, I am a member of MANY climate listservs that send out announcements of conferences. And I can tell you there was not one mention of ICCC on any of those. Is it sent out to AGU, AAG, GSA, IGARSS members? Nope. What about ARCUS, CLIMLIST? Nope. So how do you think it will reach climate scientists? Why not include those on the meeting next year. That should be interesting…
Jimbo says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:51 pm
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 4:54 pm
well first off, even your beloved Roy Spencer believes that CO2 in the atmosphere has increased during the last 100 years. And even Roy believes that w/o the natural Greenhouse gas affect, the Earth would be much colder than we are.
—
REPLY: You are a naive teenager. I don’t deny any of this. AGW says that the late 20th century warming was MOSTLY caused by the extra Co2 produced by man. This is the issue for you to prove!!!!!!!!!! You can’t prove it!!!!!! If so show us here right now. We are waiting.
REPLY: Jimbo….where do you get that? Sorry but point me to journal papers that state that all of the late 20th century warming was do to CO2 (or mostly). That is simply not true…climate scientists do not believe that. We know that BOTH natural and anthropogenic factors are influencing climate. And realistically there are not enough climate model simulations available to filter out natural climate variability. Nor can you in observational data isolate one factor from the other (only in climate models can you begin to attempt to do this, but like I said there are not enough simulations to statistically do this).
sigh, as I stated earlier, I neither accept nor reject his statement. But, I’ll play your game.
You state “If you stated that, of all the lights in the sky, only a hundred are stars and the rest are planets or asteroids or fireflies… then, yes, I – and anyone claiming to be a skeptic – would ask for some support of that claim.”…..perhaps, yet, were I an astrologer, even an amateur, I’d probably be able to list 101 known stars from the top of my head and refute the claim with out the necessity of support. Oddly, that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Again, I can only name about a dozen or so that I know to fully embrace the CAGW fantasy, so I can’t outright refute his assertion. Also, I doubt that he’s reading this thread, so it would be of little use to ask him for his list of 50 or so. Further, for me, there’s a “care factor” involved. I don’t care about the issue enough to be worked up about it. You, on the other hand seem to be perturbed by his assertion, yet also seem unable to refute it. While I agree, his choice of words probably aren’t the best for this group, as pointed out earlier, he’s a politician. I doubt he’s actually conducted a poll, or did a study of any kind. In some circles, the precision of words carry less meaning and the bombastic nature of words are more useful.
It does kinda suck though, doesn’t it? When one asks for support only to be denied access to the information. I can see where that might cause a bit of ire. Thank goodness Mr. Helmer didn’t use public money and do years of calculating to come up with that premise and then pass laws based on his assertion else you’d really have cause for anger for being denied access to his methods and numbers. It probably also sucks for you to realize, in spite of Mr. Helmer’s lack of strong evidence, that the consensus which many try so hard to believe has been consistently over stated and not at all relevant to the CAGW discussion. I don’t care how many cling onto the notion. It could be 50, or it could be the 620 number, or even as much as the Oregon petition and be 31,000 or even 300,000 it doesn’t make the CAGW notion correct, or incorrect for that matter. It is incorrect for many different reasons on many different levels, but a show of hands………next, we’ll vote if 3+2 is really 5.
Graeme W says:
May 18, 2010 at 8:55 pm
“…..I don’t take anything a politician (or former politician) says as being ‘truth’.”
__________________________________________________________________________
I think that is one statement most people would agree to, no matter what their philosophies. The older I get the more I dislike politicians.
Coalsoffire says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:18 pm
He bristled and said I was completely wrong. “The water budget never changes,” he said. “It’s all about the increase in CO2. The amount of water is fixed. Fixed. Fixed and so it can’t effect any change in the climate. Only CO2 is changing.”K>>
Whoa. So you had a PhD candidate from Leeds doing climate research who said that water is fixed and can’t effect any change in the climate? So there’s no water vapour feedback after all? Please tell me you got his name and he can be quoted. Please, please please….
Pamela Gray says:
May 18, 2010 at 7:49 pm
What hostility Pamela. Why not demand the same from Smokey? The reality is that there are some “crazy” folks out there and since I have two children I’m raising, I don’t need to encourage any more death threats from “crazy skeptics”. Yes, I have received some and I’m finding a lot of other climate scientists have as well. Don’t know why it has to turn hostile, but for some folks out there, there is a lot of anger even though the majority of climate scientists have absolutely no political agenda. We were funded before the media jumped on the AGW bandwagon and we will still be funded afterwards. Good work is always valued. But given your hostility, you are one of the folks that I would prefer to not have my name revealed to. I like to steer clear of fanatics.
@ Paul
“sigh, as I stated earlier, I neither accept nor reject his statement.”……should read “as I had meant to state earlier.” Apparently, my head got ahead of my fingers and in my earlier post, it came out “refute nor reject”…..which, of course, carries an entirely different meaning.
*ahem* For those who post Wikipedia citations onto WUWT, please note the following:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/05/14/exclusive-shake-wikipedia-porn-pressure/
Porn on Wikipedia? Someone should tell Dr. Pachauri, maybe he can peddle e-book versions of his classic work on climate science, “Return to Almora”!
Graeme W
“I don’t take anything a politician (or former politician) says as being ‘truth”
Me
“I don’t take anything a climate scientist says as being ‘truth”
Can a climate scientist be telling the truth?
Smokey says: May 18, 2010 at 4:24 pm
But maybe Tinkerbell was right, and all that is necessary is to believe. Don’t forget to clap your hands.☺
Too rich! I had just read the same reference to ‘belief’ by climate scientists, went for a glass of milk, thinking of making a reference to getting stuck on reviving Tinkerbell. No need, you’re on the ball as usual Smokey. Are you also in Colorado? I am retired too, I’ll buy you a beer some time.
barefootgirl;
Since none of you who have written responses are actual scientists, it is clear you don’t understand even the least bit as to how it works>>
Wow. You see barefoot, I’m not a scientist. I don’t even have a degree. Nothing. Nada. If you assume for one second that this means I “don’t know how it works” you are being very very very foolish. I know more about research funding than most of the scientists I’ve sold technology to over the years. (GASP! Not only does he not have a degree, he’s one of those awful SALESMEN!) I’ve helped a few write their grant applications. (I need them to get their grants funded so I can sell them stuff) I’ve been involved in high performance computing in the research sector going all the way back to pdp11’s. Despite having no degree, I know what logarithmic means. With no degree, I can still explain Stefan’s Law and show people how to do the calculations. I can read AR4 and when I get to the section where it says that there is a linear relationship between forcing and temperature I can scratch my head and go… no, not how it works. When I get to the section where it says that CO2 forcing “increases logarithmically” I start laughing. Oh, and being one of those gawdawfull salesmen, I know a snowjob when I see one. AR4 is a blizzard.
So if you really have all those degrees that you claim you have, good on you. If you are doing honest science, then good on you. But don’t for one second believe that just because I’m not a scientist I don’t know how things work, or that I don’t know what logarithmic means.
And BTW, I have kids too. And a mortgage. And I will lose business because of my views on AGW. Despite which, my name is on my comments, I don’t hide.
@ barefoot
“Since none of you who have written responses are actual scientists”.
Given your earlier stated desire to be “accurate”, you care to share how your were blessed with this obvious stroke of inherent knowledge? Your whine about being painted with the wrong brush, is well laughable. If you believe the Manns and Hansens of the world are of any value whatsoever, then your very misguided. Mann outright misrepresented his graphs to the world. Nice science. Under Hansens leadership, historical temps are simply adjusted to fit his premise. Another piece of work. These two statements I gave are not situations that are subject to interpretation. These things have been shown. Of course, I could go on, but I’m sure you’re familiar with the fraudulent behavior and fraudulent acts of other notable “scientists”. Another part of your whine tickled me when you referenced how the media misrepresents scientific work. I don’t ever recall seeing a correction made by an alarmist over what the news reported. You and your entire field of study has been deafening silent when they get it wrong, so please forgive the assumptions, but many of us believed scientists had a sense of responsibility to get it right. My bad.
More on the sense of responsibility…….perhaps you live in a vacuum and don’t realize all those laws and regulations being imposed on the populace in the world in response to the alarmism? Here is a cause and effect that isn’t as difficult as climate. Economies are being ruined by this science. Livelihoods are being wrecked by the laws. And the worst most egregious effect, people are literally starving. The starving occurs for many reasons, but the knee jerk response to the alarmism is one of them and has caused much pain and suffering in various parts of the world. You sense hostility? I’ve no doubt. Were I you, I’d separate myself as far away from the Hansens and Manns of the world. Even an inaction has an effect.
Gail Combs says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:26 pm
“The most obvious way for warming to be caused naturally is for small, natural fluctuations in the circulation patterns of the atmosphere and ocean to result in a 1% or 2% decrease in global cloud cover. Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming — or global cooling.
“……How could the experts have missed such a simple explanation? Because they have convinced themselves that only a temperature change can cause a cloud cover change, and not the other way around. The issue is one of causation. They have not accounted for cloud changes causing temperature changes.”
============================
Maybe I don’t understand the cloud theory, but unless there is a cloud trend, how can the global temperature trend be effected?”
______________________________________________________________________
Here are some articles on the subject:
Spencer: strong negative feedback found in radiation budget
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/07/spencer-strong-negative-feedback-found-in-radiation-budget/
Spencer: Clouds Dominate CO2 as a Climate Driver Since 2000
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/13/spencer-clouds-dominate-co2-as-a-climate-driver-since-2000/
This is a bit easier to read and understand:
The Thermostat Hypothesis
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
This one is also interesting:
Pielke Sr. on Revkin’s question
Update To Andy Revkin’s Question In 2005: “Is Most Of The Observed Warming Over The Last 50 Years Likely To Have Been Due To The Increase In Greenhouse Gas Concentrations”?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/06/pielke-sr-on-revkins-question/
======
I couldn’t find anything in these articles that address the question I raised.
I don’t understand how the long-term warming trend of the past century can be attributed to clouds unless there is a trend in clouds. Has there been a trend to fewer clouds. more clouds, different kinds of clouds? And if there has been a cloud trend, what’s driving it?
Paul Ash: We aren’t taking words on faith. We’ve been at this for a while, and have seen the alleged IPCC consensus debunked over and over, while the CAGW believers keep repeating the same mantras, ignoring the evidence in favor of computer models. We are familiar with many of the “experts” associated with the IPCC reports. A less representative sampling of real world political demographics scarcely exists.
Joel Shore: With regard to the Oregon Petition supposedly being fraudulent, please note that after CAGW scaremongers initially spread this rumor, the entire project was repeated, and still managed to get over thirty thousand signatories in North America alone: nearly ten times and total number attached, however vaguely, to the IPCC reports. And most of them are hard scientists, not philosophers, psychologists, economists, behaviorists, or political scientists, who feature heavily in the IPCC list. If the petition were taken worldwide, the number would easily double or triple.
Most of the “scientists” connected to the IPCC reports were mere reviewers, and a great many of them have complained that their negative reviews were ignored. Many others have demonstrated how meaningless their own positive reviews were, since not ONE bothered to check quotations, summations, and footnoted references to see if the literature drawn upon for the IPCC claims actually said what the IPCC authors claimed it said, or if it even existed in the first place. This is peer review? These experts couldn’t be bothered to look up a quotation or cross-check a reference? Clearly, a great many of them just wanted their names on the reports to boost their own careers and status, and didn’t give a flip what the reports or summaries said or didn’t say.
As more and more of the fakery and dishonesty of the summary writers becomes well-known, and as the weather continues to defy CAGW, I believe there won’t be even fifty IPCC scientists willing to leave their names on its Sibylline Prophecies.
To j ferguson et al: Pachauri’s stellar academic credentials must look great on the jacket of his new semi-autobiographical porno novel. The fact that he proudly poses with this book says a great deal. Of course, we have to accept his claim that he actually wrote it, instead of paying a ghost writer or using a computer bodice-ripper writing program to churn it out. Several such programs exist, and if Pachauri knows anything, he knows how to use trashy computer programs to achieve a desired result.
davidmhoffer says:
May 18, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Coalsoffire says:
May 18, 2010 at 3:18 pm
He bristled and said I was completely wrong. “The water budget never changes,” he said. “It’s all about the increase in CO2. The amount of water is fixed. Fixed. Fixed and so it can’t effect any change in the climate. Only CO2 is changing.”K>>
Whoa. So you had a PhD candidate from Leeds doing climate research who said that water is fixed and can’t effect any change in the climate? So there’s no water vapour feedback after all? Please tell me you got his name and he can be quoted. Please, please please…
———
The world’s water supply is fixed at 332.6 million cubic miles, according to the source below. I’m sure that’s an estimate that could be off a little, but it seems likely the supply of water is fixed :
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercyclesummary.html
Of course water affects climate, but the question is how can a fixed supply of water cause long-term warming?
Wren,
Uh….that has got to be the biggest troll strawman tossed around in a long time.
Uh, Uh, Uh…maybe uh by changing the relative proportion of each phase in which it exists, and perhaps uh, inducing albedo changes? Hmmm…
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 9:21 pm
“I think it would be great to see skeptics address the real issues, rather than rely on inflammatory statements or cherry picking of data,”
Wine all over my keyboard AGAIN! I seem to recall the “Cherry Picking” is an art form of the AGW camp!
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 10:41 pm
I don’t understand how the long-term warming trend of the past century can be attributed to clouds unless there is a trend in clouds. Has there been a trend to fewer clouds. more clouds, different kinds of clouds? And if there has been a cloud trend, what’s driving it?
Have a look at measured global cloud cover:
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2006_EOS.pdf
Well, whatever is driving it, it must not be CO2, since it was falling until 2000 and is going up now. CO2 has been merrily rising the nonce.
See also more current albedo measures: http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2008_JGR.pdf
Fig 2.
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 5:49 pm
“But modern science is usually right, and the AGW skeptics don’t have a Helicobacter pylori.”
What’s more to the point is that alarmists can’t demonstrate the ulcer.
As to modern science usually being right, when it becomes non-modern science at some time in the future, let’s look back and see how much of it is still right then.
If science were ever “right”, there’d be no point doing any further research, would there? Pray tell me one scientific theory that has ever been irrefutably right, incapable of revision or reinterpretation.
You see, this is the fundamental error of the CAGW people. They think that they are RIGHT and that RIGHTNESS becomes fixed at a certain point in time. This is why it isn’t science, but religion. In science, there is no RIGHT; at best, there’s only what the strongest evidence supports. As to consensus, it’s tiresome to point out again and again that consensus, as a rule rather than an exception, changes with time, but that truth, whatever it is, remains the truth.
Are you RIGHT to think AGW is occurring, and is anyone RIGHT that even if it is, it is a bad thing? I don’t know. You don’t know. Nobody knows. If we all remembered that, climate science might actually make some progress and proselytists like you might actually start to engage with the notion of doubt.
I repeat: where is the ulcer? Where is the actual thing you can point to that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that AGW is occurring, and that it is harmful? Show me that, and I won’t need to show you my H.Pylori.
Mind you, since it is you who is claiming the ulcer exists, the responsibility is for you to first show it me, and to produce the cure. Don’t simply claim there is an ulcer and prescribe a draconian solution (e.g. stomach excision) that might well kill the patient. Expect the patient to say: “Bugger that for a bag of chips”, I want a second opinion”.
What barefoot girl does not seem to understand is that ALL humans are political and economic animals, including the ones who happen to work in science. A naked ape with a PhD is still a naked ape.
And given the current education system, a PhD just ain’t what it used to be.
No consensus in Germany, that’s for sure:
http://pgosselin.wordpress.com/
Wren;
Of course water affects climate, but the question is how can a fixed supply of water cause long-term warming?>>
Sad thing is I think the question is serious. OK Wren, when the IPCC says that positive feedback from water vapour will triple the warming effects of CO2, what is it that you think the water vapour is made of? You asked a question back there about trends in clouds and how that might be connected to warming. I doubt that we have enough data on clouds for anywhere close to long enough to trend anything about them, but that aside, what is it that you think clouds are made of? When there’s a discussion about shrinking ice caps and albedo changes, what do you suppose the ice is made of?
Frankly, I am inclined to support your position. Water is a fixed supply and so can’t cause warming. Water vapour feedback? Hoax. Cloud feedback? Hoax. Albedo feedback? Hoax. Speaking of hoaxes, have you heard of global warming?
Barefootgirl:
If what you say is true, it appears you are one of the good guys in climate science. Good for you.
But if so, why aren’t you and all the others who aren’t alarmists up in arms against those who are and are pushing the politics? Why aren’t you posting at RC to complain that they are giving your science a bad name? Why are you here taking pot shots at people who fervently hope that there are many good apples in the barrel, but that if there are, are mystified why they aren’t vociferously and publicly disowning the alarmist rhetoric?
Why are you making claims that AGW-supporting scientists weren’t invited to the conference? It can only be that you didn’t check your facts on that. And why not? My guess is that you have an entrenched notion that sceptics are inherently unreasonable. But look here: check out the blog roll at WUWT and other sceptic sites I could mention, and you will find links to AGW sites. Then go and check the warmists sites, particularly the most prominent one, RC, and see how many of those return the compliment.
As to death threats, lunatics on both sides engage in such objectionable behaviour. I don’t see that kind of behavior here at WUWT, and Anthony or the moderators would soon boot anyone out who stooped to that.
If you are an honest, non-alarmist climate scientist, then you are very welcome here. Just behave like one and don’t assume that we are all ignoramuses. The things about climate science that arouse the most scepticism can be understood perfectly well by any reasonably intelligent person.
The fact that they seemingly can’t be understood by some of the most vociferous AGW proponents who have PhDs and university research positions simply goes to show that a PhD etc. is no guarantee of having commonsense. It wouldn’t matter if those people didn’t have much sway, but they do and, as much as anything, that is because those who disapprove of them are seemingly standing by and letting them get on with it.
Pete Hayes says:
May 19, 2010 at 12:15 am
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 9:21 pm
“I think it would be great to see skeptics address the real issues, rather than rely on inflammatory statements or cherry picking of data,”
Wine all over my keyboard AGAIN! I seem to recall the “Cherry Picking” is an art form of the AGW camp!>>
Yeah, that one cracked me up too, big time. Then I realised she was serious. Cracked me up all over again. Then I read her comment about being an engineer and having a PhD in physics, and how other people not being scientists like her, we can’t possibly understant “how things work” followed by whining about hostility and not understanding where that comes from. Cracked me up all over again. Then I realised she was serious.
Stick around barefoot, you’re a hoot!
it all boils down to common sense and there’s not much of it around these days half of the new uni graduates have never heard of the word, thay look no further than their nose. So thay have a uphill battle to understand anything. it’s very sad to say this.
—-
Since you are concerned, rightly, that money can buy influence, aren’t you at least a little concerned that corporate interests may be trying to do just that?
Yes I am concerned Mike and please take a look at the “corporate interests” and advocacy group at the bottom of CRU history. These organisations and corportations fund the CRU. Among them are Shell, BP, WWF and Greenpeace.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history/
and you’ll find more problems with influence being placed on climate researchers below:
How Climate Researchers Plotted with Interest Groups
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,694484-3,00.html
Funding for climate research
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2835581.htm
Pachauri’s double standard from a company he set up called Glorioil
http://www.glorioil.com/advisors.htm
http://www.glorioil.com/technology.htm
http://www.glorioil.com/company.htm
—
So yes Mike I am concerned about money buying influence. :o)
My bad, I should have said man made greenhouse gases which includes Methane, etc., My point remains essentially the same, show how man’s fingerprint was dominant in the warming of the late 20th century. As for my claim see below.
MartinGAtkins says:
Chapters 3 through to 11 are observations of global warming and evaluation of models. They do not address cause.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Ok, I’m feeling generous. Chapters 2 and 9 still only gives you about 98 individual authors. “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change” is none the less ambiguous and would require reading of each author’s input.
That’s a lot less than your six hundred and nineteen scientists.
Steve Keohane May 18, 2010 at 9:56 pm,
Thanks for the offer, Steve. I’ll take you up on it if I should get to Colorado. I’m in Northern California now.
Let’s assume that Roger Helmer is right “fully forty-five were qualified
scientists from relevant disciplines” at Heartland conference. But, always
the same old faces, and the same stories. Where is the Sceptic side recruitment? –
there is none. Meanwhile young scientists emerge and publish all the time in
scientific journals, because they are interested in the facts not in a politically
motivated movement, which is intellectually not getting anywhere.
mikael pihlström has no clue about how the real world operates, particularly regarding academia and what it takes to get tenured.
davidmhoffer says:
May 18, 2010 at 9:39 pm
had a PhD candidate from Leeds doing climate research who said that water is fixed and can’t effect any change in the climate? So there’s no water vapour feedback after all? Please tell me you got his name and he can be quoted. Please, please please….
—-
Sorry, I didn’t get his name. Remember I was a relative by marriage to the groom and he was a chum of the bride. Worlds apart. In fact the bride was sitting right beside him during this exchange and she was visibly upset with me because her friend was upset with my questions. I felt badly about that because one doesn’t want to ever upset bridezilla on her day. I did tell the guy that I knew a bit about Phil Jones and Michael Mann and invited him to comment on their situations. He would not. Or at least did not. I don’t know what I expected but maybe he’s been button holed on the issued enough to be wary of the subject. Nevertheless it is his chosen specialty and I was disappointed that he wouldn’t share any insight about the current poster boys of climate science.
I appreciate the comment someone made here about the whole AGW theory being built on water vapour forcings as a consequence of CO2 initial warming. It does seem strange that the fixed water budget can be held responsible for the catastrophic warming of the planet, but only as a response to increased C02, and yet in any other context it’s judged incapable of affecting the trend because overall water is fixed in amount. Is the distribution of water, as a liquid, solid, or aerosol fixed and immutable? I suppose that the different forms of water have decidedly different effects on climate and that during ice ages, for example, the distribution has a profound effect. And I have the impression that cloud cover makes a big difference and that it’s not constant or fixed in any real way and might, just might, be influenced or changed by things other than C02???? I was willing to learn something from this guy, and I guess I did. And I assume his position is the one accepted and taught in academia today. “Nothing to learn here from water, it’s fixed, (settled) move along (to C02), and how about cooling the whole place off with a little sulfur”. It’s scary.
Joel: “But most of the evidence points toward GHG as a major factor in current warming and is projected to be of increasing import.”
I hear this all the time, but cannot find a shred of real evidence pointing towards GHG as a major factor, so could you point me to where your statement that “most of the evidence points toward GHG” came from?
Tx
@barefootgirl: You come over to me as someone who has a preconceived view, no doubt acquired through the media, that sceptics are a bunch of swivel-eyed, foam-flecked bunch of scientifically illiterate, right wing loonies. Some are, of course, but as you’ve found today a lot are not. In fact at the top level the CAGW scare is pretty easy for anyone with high school science to challenge, and it boils down to this:
The IPCC, states that only 50% of the warming over the last century can be attributed to natural forcings, therefore it is likely/very likely that the other 50% is caused by CO2 and othe GHGs released into the atmosphere by humans.
Good, now let’s set to and find empirical evidence of this assertion, where is the theory that will prove this hypothesis by observations?
Secondly we all know agree that a doubling of CO2 should, all other things being equal, cause a rise in temperature of 1C, but the IPCC tells us this will be amplified by positive feedback caused by water vapor. Good, now develop a theory that will enable us to prove this hypothesis with empirical evidence.
In logical terms this “scientific” position is the equivalent of saying, “If we had some bacon, we could have some bacon and eggs, if we had some eggs. (H.B Morton, aka Beachcomber).
Science progresses through, hypothesis, to theory, to observations, to acceptance. We ahve hypothesis, and what is really strange is the number of scientists (and I don’t believe it’s only 52, there are a lot more) who are prepared to go from hypothesis to acceptance without the intermediate stages in the scientific process.
I’m an engineer by the way but I worked in research for a number of years, and indeed, was a sponsor of research at a pre-eminent university in the UK, during my time mixing with some admirable professors in many of our universities it became apparent to me that their major job was the pursuit of money for their departments, and the customer, was always king.
Barefootgirl, you seem to be saying to us that the clerk (you know the guy, whatshisname), who thought the consensus regarding some kind of scientific theory was wrong (what was it about, relatives or some such thing, yuck, yuck), should be thought of today if he were here, as a skeptic and should be ridiculed because he was not of the same caliber as your degreed, credentialed, published, presented and climate connected self? If I remember, he wasn’t a member of the in crowd and hadn’t published in the field which he was about to shake up. Given your superior attitude, I dare say you would have looked down your nose at him as well.
Maybe you need a lesson in humility from Judith (since you know everybody, you know her too). She’s on your side yet no longer trusts the GISS’d and CRU’d temperature records and has been eloquent in her statements regarding the abuse of scientific license to drive policy before the hypothesis of AGW has yet to take its first step towards theory.
I’m not angry at you. I’m pointing out your long nose in clear language. Stop telling us how dumb we are and start engaging in debate. Let us see just how smart you are. I should warn you that your assessment of me being a fanatic would not be your surest bet on that.
Smokey says:
May 19, 2010 at 5:49 am
mikael pihlström has no clue about how the real world operates, particularly regarding academia and what it takes to get tenured.
LOL. Surely, he must have meant that meanwhile young PNS-trained pseudo-scientists emerge and publish all the time in scientific journals, not because they are interested in the facts but in a politically motivated, career-driven movement which is intellectually not getting anywhere, and which will be defunct within a decade.
davidmhoffer says:
May 19, 2010 at 1:00 am
Wren;
Of course water affects climate, but the question is how can a fixed supply of water cause long-term warming?>>
Sad thing is I think the question is serious. OK Wren, when the IPCC says that positive feedback from water vapour will triple the warming effects of CO2, what is it that you think the water vapour is made of? You asked a question back there about trends in clouds and how that might be connected to warming. I doubt that we have enough data on clouds for anywhere close to long enough to trend anything about them, but that aside, what is it that you think clouds are made of? When there’s a discussion about shrinking ice caps and albedo changes, what do you suppose the ice is made of?
Frankly, I am inclined to support your position. Water is a fixed supply and so can’t cause warming. Water vapour feedback? Hoax. Cloud feedback? Hoax. Albedo feedback? Hoax. Speaking of hoaxes, have you heard of global warming?
=====
Yes, since the world’s water supply is fixed, changes in the amount of water vapor can’t result from a change in the supply of water. The amount of atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels, however, is not fixed. It is increasing as more fossil fuels are burned, releasing the CO2 that’s trapped in the fuel.
Unlike water vapor, a green house gas that recycles quickly, the CO2 from fossil fuels is a green house gas that stays in the atmosphere for a long time as evidenced by the long-term increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. So you have an upward trend in the CO2 and a supply of water vapor for feedback.
Ref – Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:45 pm
“Wow. A purer example of pulling-numbers-out-of-one’s-posterior you will not find.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_from_Climate_Change_2007:_The_Physical_Science_Basis
“That’s six hundred nineteen scientists. Real scientists, not economists or railway engineers… or weathermen. Working scientists in relevant disciplines. Isn’t it embarrassing to have to just flat make something up to make a point?”
_______________________
You’re half right. It used to be. It isn’t anymore. And one person’s ‘scientist’ is another person’s ‘psyentist’. By the rules of AGW or CC (‘Climate Change’) all is fair, it’s a war, the truth is irrelivent –in fact ‘truth’ is actually non-existant in this argument if you’re one of The Choosen, one of The Saved, one of The Elect, one of Fat Albert’s Faithful. I fear we have been poisoned by some microbe in the water, all 6.8 billion of us. What is truth? What is real? Is this all a bad trip? A mad dream? Isn’t there a guru on a mountain we can all go to and findout what we should believe? Isn’t there something we can snort, sniff, shoot, sip, pop, or whatever, that can help us see the light and know the way and feel good and groovy?
You know? Life’s a real bummer when there’s no one to take you by the hand and spoon feed you and give you whatever you need, whenever you need it.
Smokey says:
May 19, 2010 at 5:49 am
mikael pihlström has no clue about how the real world operates, particularly regarding academia and what it takes to get tenured.
The fact that young scientists don’t turn up at your conferences
has something to do with my clues about anything?
Consensus? …Oh, that!, that is, of course among a few BANKS.
Jimbo says:
May 19, 2010 at 2:57 am
Dear Jumbo:
CO2 follows temperature, not the other way. Open a coke and you´ll see it: The more you have it in your warm hand the more gas will go out when you open it.
CO2 is the transparent gas we all exhale (and Not SUV: That dark is SOOT=Carbon dust) and plants breath with delight, to give us back what they exhale instead= Oxygen we breath in.
CO2 is a TRACE GAS in the atmosphere, it is the 0.038% of it.
There is no such a thing as “greenhouse effect”, “greenhouse gases are gases IN a greenhouse”, where heated gases are trapped and relatively isolated not to lose its heat so rapidly. If greenhouse effect were to be true, as Svante Arrhenius figured it out: CO2 “like the window panes in a greenhouse”, but…the trouble is that those panes would be only 3.8 panes out of 10000, there would be 9996.2 HOLES.
See:
http://www.scribd.com/documents/28018819/Greenhouse-Niels-Bohr
CO2 is a gas essential to life. All carbohydrates are made of it. The sugar you eat, the bread you have eaten in your breakfast this morning, even the jeans you wear (these are made from 100% cotton, a polymer of glucose, made of CO2…you didn´t know it, did you?)
You and I, we are made of CARBON and WATER.
CO2 is heavier than Air, so it can not go up, up and away to cover the earth.
The atmosphere, the air can not hold heat, its volumetric heat capacity, per cubic cemtimeter is 0.00192 joules, while water is 4.186, i.e., 3227 times.
This is the reason why people used hot water bottles to warm their feet and not hot air bottles.
Global Warmers models (a la Hansen) expected a kind of heated CO2 piggy bank to form in the tropical atmosphere, it never happened simply because it can not.
If global warmers were to succeed in achieving their SUPPOSED goal of lowering CO2 level to nothing, life would disappear from the face of the earth.
They KNOW IT, they are not that fool. Their objective is another: To make us the slave workers of a world governed by a few of them, like in Aldous Huxley novel “Brave New World”, so we are destined to be the “Gammas” servants and they the “Alphas” masters.
CRAZY as it is, it is their purpose
Pascvaks says:
May 19, 2010 at 6:35 am
Ref – Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:45 pm
PS: Ref your link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_from_Climate_Change_2007:_The_Physical_Science_Basis
There is no Chapter regarding “Observations: Oceanic Climate Change and Sea Level” in the reference you cite. That would seem to be a fairly large chunk of the globe that is missing and an area of great significance to the subject at hand.
Is the water on the earth really a fixed amount?
It seems to be elementary chemistry, that combustion of fossil fuels causes oxygen from the atmosphere to be reacted into the deadly CO2 and wonderful benign H2O.
;-}
How many gigatons?
-Jay
anna v says:
May 19, 2010 at 12:26 am
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 10:41 pm
I don’t understand how the long-term warming trend of the past century can be attributed to clouds unless there is a trend in clouds. Has there been a trend to fewer clouds. more clouds, different kinds of clouds? And if there has been a cloud trend, what’s driving it?
Have a look at measured global cloud cover:
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2006_EOS.pdf
Well, whatever is driving it, it must not be CO2, since it was falling until 2000 and is going up now. CO2 has been merrily rising the nonce.
See also more current albedo measures: http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_etal_2008_JGR.pdf
Fig 2.
————–
Thanks for the references. I don’t see evidence of a long-term trend in global cloud cover in the 2006 article’s chart for 1985-2005. The total cloud amount rises for a few years after 1985, falls from the late 1980’s to the late 1990’s, and then rises to 2005. Both low clouds ( a cooling effect) and high clouds(a warming effect) declined from the late 1980’s to the late 1990’s. High clouds, however, account for an increasing proportion of the total cloud amount, and all of the increase after 2000. Perhaps that’s the link with the rise in CO2.
Wren;
Yes, since the world’s water supply is fixed, changes in the amount of water vapor can’t result from a change in the supply of water. The amount of atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels, however, is not fixed. It is increasing as more fossil fuels are burned, releasing the CO2 that’s trapped in the fuel.>>
Wow, a cogent argument from Wren. You’ve been improving of late, I’ll have to be more carefull.
The amount of water is not fixed and there is no CO2 trapped in the fuel. The fuel is composed of chains of C (carbon) and H (hydrogen). When the fuel is burned it combines with O (oxygen) from the atmosphere. The burnt fuel then appears as CO2 and… H2O. Presto! New water! Now you can argue that the amount of water created in this fashion is insignificant compared to the amount already in existance…. and I would agree with you. Its not true that the amount of water is fixed, but the amount released from fossil fuels is insignificant by comparison to what we already have… sorta like CO2.
President Eisenhower warned us of what to fear in his farewell address on January 17, 1961:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
And what Eisenhower warned about has happed.
Who controls the purse strings controls the “consensus”. Toe the line of the ideology of those who controll the purse strings (awarding of government grants and other public funding) or look for work doing something else to make a living.
Just the facts of life. When it becomes a matter of meals or ideals, meals win out every time.
Consensus science has been wrong far more often than it has been right. Read some history of the progression of science and technology through the ages.
Wren;
Yes, since the world’s water supply is fixed, changes in the amount of water vapor can’t result from a change in the supply of water. The amount of atmospheric CO2 from burning fossil fuels, however, is not fixed. It is increasing as more fossil fuels are burned, releasing the CO2 that’s trapped in the fuel.>>
Wow, a cogent argument from Wren. You’ve been improving of late, I’ll have to be more carefull.
The amount of water is not fixed and there is no CO2 trapped in the fuel. The fuel is composed of chains of C (carbon) and H (hydrogen). When the fuel is burned it combines with O (oxygen) from the atmosphere. The burnt fuel then appears as CO2 and… H2O. Presto! New water! Now you can argue that the amount of water created in this fashion is insignificant compared to the amount already in existance…. and I would agree with you. Its not true that the amount of water is fixed, but the amount released from fossil fuels is insignificant by comparison to what we already have… sorta like CO2.
=====
Sure, its the carbon that’s trapped, and the carbon thats trapped is the source of the CO2 . Gimme a break.
First, you agree that the world’s water supply is fixed and now you have changed your mind. Your new “insignificant water” in vapor form recycles quickly like like all that old water. CO2 from burning fossil fuels doesn’t recycle quickly, which is why the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is growing.
Wren;
Sure, its the carbon that’s trapped, and the carbon thats trapped is the source of the CO2 . Gimme a break.
First, you agree that the world’s water supply is fixed and now you have changed your mind. Your new “insignificant water” in vapor form recycles quickly like like all that old water. CO2 from burning fossil fuels doesn’t recycle quickly, which is why the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is growing.>>
You missed my sarcasm and may I point out that YOU started with water is fixed and now you are arguing that it isn’t. Yes CO2 is growing. Let’s do the math per IPCC AR4 and see what happens to CO2 forcing in watts per meter squared as we increase CO2 by 100 ppm over the previous level:
“normal” CO2 = 280 ppm
280 + 100 = 380 (+1.7 w/m2)
380 + 100 = 480 (+1.2 w/m2)
480 + 100 = 580 (+1.0 w/m2)
580 + 100 = 680 (+.85 w/m2)
680 + 100 = 780 (+.63 w/m2)
Are you seeing the problem here?
LarryOldtimer says:
May 19, 2010 at 8:36 am
President Eisenhower warned us ….
To avoid that all your Official Agencies should be privatized, that could be done by gradually transferring its services to private companies, so the goal to achieve would be to get all needed services through outsourcing.
Wren says:
May 19, 2010 at 8:45 am
CO2 from burning fossil fuels doesn’t recycle quickly, which is why the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is growing.
It is patentely time for you to do some more studying, why do you think that CO2 is only increasing at 2ppm/year?
It is because it is being sucked up all over the planet by Plants (It makes them grow and they die without it) and the Oceans, many of the shelled creatures need it to survive.
Wren says:
May 19, 2010 at 8:45 am
Wren;
Yes, since the world’s water supply is fixed
Are you sure?.
During summer time above the poles and due to increased radiation, atmosphere´s oxygen is turned into Ozone (O3), which during winter time and specially when there are proton flares from the sun or increased cosmic rays, as during solar minimums (mainly composed of protons-90%-, which, btw, we must remember are Hydrogen Nucleii), and these react with ozone to produce water 2H+…O3=H2O+O2.
So as far as we receive protons (Hydrogen nucleii) we’ll keep on importing water.
Barefootgirl,
Please do not pretend to have a monopoly on climate knowledge in this forum. Some of us also have advanced degrees in Atmospheric Science (focusing on remote sensing and radiative transfer) and actually understand the limitations of climate monitoring and research…whether through arbitrarily tuned climate models, or MSU/AMSU TLT records. I also attend many conferences and participate in workshops with UAH, RSS and NCDC. I myself even question Spencer/Christy b/c I know the challenge of inter-satellite sensor calibration. I know many at NESDIS, NWS, NASA and from grad school who also are skeptical of modeled feedbacks and are annoyed by alarmism. So what if you claim many climate scientists are also annoyed by alarmism – those at the top in the field are the ones contributing recklessly to the hysteria. Hansen, Mann, Emanuel…I’ve heard Lubchenco speak many times as NOAA admin, and her distressed calls to change the tone and up the rhetoric to convince people CO2 is destroying the earth. How is dropping a piece of chalk into a cup of vinegar, and saying that this is what is happening to shell fish in the ocean, in front of Congress, not unethical or perjurous? That isn’t the media spinning climate science into alarmism, that is direct alarmism.
Pamela, what I am talking about is your preconceived notion of climate scientists. There are very few alarmists out there. So much of the blog posting on here is constantly ripping on climate scientists, but how many of you actually bother to read their papers? Media coverage, press releases are not the same as the actual papers. They are looking for headlines, shocking statements. I also notice how anything folks like Lindzen or Spencer say are blindly accepted without subjecting their analysis to the same rigor as other climate analysis.
And yes, I do know Judy and she too is a believer in anthropogenic climate change. Glad to hear that despite that fact you actually have some respect for her.
barefootgirl, May 18, 2010 at 9:42 pm:
So let me see if I can translate BFG’s comment:
1. Pamela is “hostile” [repeated 3 X]
2. Smokey by implication is hostile too
3. There are “crazy” folks out there
4. BFG has two children who must be protected
5. “Crazy skeptics” [plural] have made multiple death threats against BFG
Is that about the gist of it? OK then, I have a couple of questions:
Did you, BFG, make a police report of the “death threats” purportedly made against you by “crazy skeptics”? I request that you post a scan of the reports so we may view them here. Unless sealed by a court order, they are public information, so it should be no problem. If they are sealed, post a scan of the judge’s order. You can redact your name.
Next, who exactly were these “crazy skeptics”? To make that accusation you must have been aware of their identities, since you didn’t say something to the effect that you assumed they were skeptics. So provide specific identities, please.
Finally, having two children in your custody, you would be remiss in not promptly making a police report upon receiving death threats from crazy skeptics or anyone else. Only a bad mother would blow off a threat like that, increasing the danger to her children.
So in the interest of full disclosure, and because we put a premium on credibility here, please post those scans in this thread. Thanks in advance.
davidmhoffer says:
No…I am just seeing the reason why climate scientists talk about the radiative forcing and climate sensitivity in terms of a doubling of CO2, since it is the fractional increase in concentration that is relevant when the relationship to concentration is approximately logarithmic.
Bruce Cobb says:
May 19, 2010 at 6:32 am
Smokey says:
May 19, 2010 at 5:49 am
“mikael pihlström has no clue about how the real world operates, particularly regarding academia and what it takes to get tenured.”
“LOL. Surely, he must have meant that meanwhile young PNS-trained pseudo-scientists emerge and publish all the time in scientific journals, not because they are interested in the facts but in a politically motivated, career-driven movement which is intellectually not getting anywhere, and which will be defunct within a decade.”
——–
That is a harsh statement on your young generation of scientists-to-be!
Given that there is always some amount of group-thinking, conformism
and calculation, a great number of these youngsters would still be
inquisitive and independent minds. After all, that’s why US science
is excelling in any global comparison. Following a tenure track does
not require any particular stand on AGW – if your topic is e.g. atmospheric
chemistry a young scientist would have a lot of freedom to write and evolve
according to his/her own opinion. So, the original reflection remains:
few young scientists in the sceptic conferences.
Wren says:
May 19, 2010 at 8:45 am
Wren;
Yes, since the world’s water supply is fixed
Are you sure?.
During summer time above the poles and due to increased radiation, atmosphere´s oxygen is turned into Ozone (O3), which during winter time and specially when there are proton flares from the sun or increased cosmic rays, as during solar minimums (mainly composed of protons-90%-, which, btw, we must remember are Hydrogen Nucleii), and these react with ozone to produce water 2H+…O3=H2O+O2.
So as far as we receive protons (Hydrogen nucleii) we’ll keep on importing water.
=====
Are you saying the world’s water supply is increasing over the long-term?
BFG, I have to say that you’re not coming across as credible, you claim to be a climate scientist but don’t put across any credible arguments for your case. (That’s not surprising to us sceptics, but I believe you believe there is a credible case, I just don’t believe you know what it is). Then you come up with the death threats canard, this goes back to my original statement that you’ve been reading the warmist propoganda and believe that scientists are being attacked, when it is quite clear to me, given the vociferous nature of the warmists that they would by now have trumpeted these attacks from the rooftops. There are plenty of AGW supporters who come on this and other sites and I’ve never seen anyone threaten them implicitly or explicitly. So tell Smokey what he wants to know.
davidmhoffer says:
May 19, 2010 at 9:35 am
Wren;
Sure, its the carbon that’s trapped, and the carbon thats trapped is the source of the CO2 . Gimme a break.
First, you agree that the world’s water supply is fixed and now you have changed your mind. Your new “insignificant water” in vapor form recycles quickly like like all that old water. CO2 from burning fossil fuels doesn’t recycle quickly, which is why the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is growing.>>
You missed my sarcasm and may I point out that YOU started with water is fixed and now you are arguing that it isn’t. Yes CO2 is growing. Let’s do the math per IPCC AR4 and see what happens to CO2 forcing in watts per meter squared as we increase CO2 by 100 ppm over the previous level:
“normal” CO2 = 280 ppm
280 + 100 = 380 (+1.7 w/m2)
380 + 100 = 480 (+1.2 w/m2)
480 + 100 = 580 (+1.0 w/m2)
580 + 100 = 680 (+.85 w/m2)
680 + 100 = 780 (+.63 w/m2)
Are you seeing the problem here?
————————————–
The logarithmic effect has been know for over one-hundred years. Why would you think it hasn’t been taken into consideration?
Now, about this supposed trend to an increased supply of water in the world. How do you know the supply is increasing? Are water levels rising?
Joel Shore, May 18, 2010 at 8:06 pm…
Joel would be advised stick to things he knows something about, which don’t include either the OISM Petition or human nature. Explaining the Petition he says:
Aside from being wrong about my politics [I have always been registered Independent/Decline To State], Joel incorrectly presumes that a voluntary petition is a “Soviet-style election.” That’s an amazing disconnect from reality.
Joel is trying to convince us that more than 31,000 professionals with degrees in the physical sciences, including 9,000 PhD’s, are so brainless that they didn’t understand the meaning of what they were downloading, printing out, signing, stamping, and mailing in.
In other words, according to Joel Shore these highly educated individuals were somehow tricked or hypnotized into signing their names to this statement:
Maybe Joel doesn’t understand what that statement says. But I think the rest of us do.
Joel Shore, Wren,
Joel Shore;
No…I am just seeing the reason why climate scientists talk about the radiative forcing and climate sensitivity in terms of a doubling of CO2, since it is the fractional increase in concentration that is relevant when the relationship to concentration is approximately logarithmic.>>
So we agree that CO2 is logarithmic. Now let’s look at earth’s radiance to space as temperature increases in that context:
“normal” CO2 = 280 ppm
280 + 100 = 380 (+1.7 w/m2)
380 + 100 = 480 (+1.2 w/m2)
480 + 100 = 580 (+1.0 w/m2)
580 + 100 = 680 (+.85 w/m2)
680 + 100 = 780 (+.63 w/m2)
Earth Radiance from 15 degrees C
15 degrees C = normal
15 + 1 = 16 (+5.53 w/m2)
16 + 1 = 17 (+5.59 w/m2)
17 +1 = 18 (+5.65 w/m2)
See any problem yet?
By the way, still waiting for Barefootgirl to answer Theo Goodwin’s question (in comment May 18, 2010 at 6:49 pm):
So, please barefootgirl, tell me, are there empirical hypotheses that can be stated as universal generalizations and used to explain forcings and predict their behavior?
davidmhoffer says:
May 19, 2010 at 11:15 am
Joel Shore, Wren,
Joel Shore;
No…I am just seeing the reason why climate scientists talk about the radiative forcing and climate sensitivity in terms of a doubling of CO2, since it is the fractional increase in concentration that is relevant when the relationship to concentration is approximately logarithmic.>>
So we agree that CO2 is logarithmic. Now let’s look at earth’s radiance to space as temperature increases in that context:
“normal” CO2 = 280 ppm
280 + 100 = 380 (+1.7 w/m2)
380 + 100 = 480 (+1.2 w/m2)
480 + 100 = 580 (+1.0 w/m2)
580 + 100 = 680 (+.85 w/m2)
680 + 100 = 780 (+.63 w/m2)
Earth Radiance from 15 degrees C
15 degrees C = normal
15 + 1 = 16 (+5.53 w/m2)
16 + 1 = 17 (+5.59 w/m2)
17 +1 = 18 (+5.65 w/m2)
See any problem yet?
—–
If you have a point to make, why not just make it rather than going through a lot of steps?
Smokey says:
May 19, 2010 at 11:01 am
Joel Shore, May 18, 2010 at 8:06 pm…
Joel would be advised stick to things he knows something about, which don’t include either the OISM Petition or human nature. Explaining the Petition he says:
So, basically, what you had was a Soviet-style election: Bombard scientists with deceptive propaganda and only record the “Yes” votes. And, now we have Smokey defending it. I guess that old saying is true: Politics makes strange bedfellows!
Aside from being wrong about my politics [I have always been registered Independent/Decline To State], Joel incorrectly presumes that a voluntary petition is a “Soviet-style election.” That’s an amazing disconnect from reality.
Joel is trying to convince us that more than 31,000 professionals with degrees in the physical sciences, including 9,000 PhD’s, are so brainless that they didn’t understand the meaning of what they were downloading, printing out, signing, stamping, and mailing in.
=====
That 31,000 isn’t as many as it may seem. It is from a huge pool of people. It includes people in more categories than just those who are employed scientist and engineers in the U.S., a group that totaled 18,927,000 according to the National Science Foundation. Even if the pool was restricted to that group, the 31,000 would represent only 1 out of every 610.
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/pdf/tabh-5.pdf
Wren;
If you have a point to make, why not just make it rather than going through a lot of steps?>>
We agreed that CO2 is logarithmic. Do we also agree that earth radiance rises as temperature rises?
Smokey says:
If you look at the credentials of the signers in detail, I think you’ll find them not that impressive. I am amongst the very best qualified ***JUST*** by virtue of the fact that I have a PhD in physics and I would argue that such a credential alone does not in fact make me qualified to judge the merits of the data and arguments in the “paper” that accompanied that petition (and the merits of the petition statements). It is only because I have probably spent well over a thousand of hours over the last decade studying climate issues as a “hobby” that I can see the deceptiveness and errors in that paper. Few scientists, even if they have as closely aligned a background as I, have that sort of time to invest….or the inclination to do so. (Also, scientists are not used to being actively deceived by their fellow scientists and thus are not very good detectors of such deception.)
So, I am not surprised that out of the millions of people in the U.S. that have the necessary credentials to sign that petition, they found 31,000 who were willing to sign. That represents only a small fraction of those qualified to sign even by their extremely diluted standards. As polling has shown, the more specifically qualified scientists are to comment on the merits of climate science, the more strongly lopsided is the agreement with the consensus view.
davidmhoffer says:
Since, I can’t read your mind, I am not yet sure where your confusion is. However, my guess is that you are just rediscovering the fact that in the absence of feedbacks (other than that implied by Steffan-Boltzmann relation), the climate sensitivity is around 1.1 C for a doubling of CO2. [Actually, your numbers won’t quite bear that out because you are mistakenly using the temperature at the surface rather than the effective temperature at which the earth system is emitting back out into space [which corresponds to a temperature higher up in the troposphere], but they would if you correctly used the ~255 K value.]
I am having a conflict of interest. I like to read scientific, peer-reviewed magazines such as Science and Nature and Geophysical Research letters. According to your view, these magazines, with their hundreds of articles are alarmist literature that require religious belief to digest. Now, I am not religious and still ‘believe’ most of the science published there to be reasonable, as I assume, it is not part of a plot by some 50 or so believers that hijacks the scientific community. I can also not really find a climate hysteria in these magazines, but I am open minded and listen if you point those out to me. If your ‘real scientists’ outnumber the ‘AGW believing scientists’, the ‘real scientists’ should take over and run the peer reviewed show. I agree with you, there is no reason for alarmism or hysteria. Why do you create them?
One last thing I would like to know. How many of the people you are referring to as ‘believers’ are actually religious, compared to how many of the delegates at the Heartland conference?
Brighton Early
friendsofginandtonic.org
I see that Wren and Joel have their talking points in order: out of millions of people qualified to sign the OISM Petition, “only” 31,000 have signed.
So let’s deconstruct that silly argument: the alarmist contingent has repeatedly tried to get the *same* group of people to sign their petitions supporting CAGW — and they have come up with only about one-tenth the number of signatures.
Which of course also refutes Joel’s last sentence above. Truth be told, the only “consensus” for CAGW is in those groups paid to find evidence of CAGW — and there is still no verifiable, testable evidence showing that human activity drives the climate.
REPLY: Just to add to that, I’m sure Joel will have a ready answer as to why the organizer of that Oregon petition won last night in Oregon:
Robinson is Republican nominee for District 4 seat in Congress, will face DeFazio in fall
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/05/us_rep_congressional_district_2.html
Science researcher Art Robinson beat small businesswoman Jaynee Germond by a wide margin to win the Republican nomination for the District 4 seat in Congress. He will face longtime incumbent Rep. Peter DeFazio in the fall general election.
Gosh, an arch skeptic in Congress? Can’t wait for November. – Anthony
It is simply not the case that all the signatories to the Oregon Petition hold a degree in the physical sciences. Most of them are actually engineers, incuding software engineers. Now engineers are skilled and useful people, but not necessarily informed about other disciplines. Of the rest a sizable proportion (>10%) are medical people, including vetinarians. Now my Doctor was magnificent with my allergies, but I am not sure I would go to her with a problem in radiative transfer physics.
There must be over 5 million people eligible to sign the petition, so 31,000 collected over a decade is a drop in the proverbial. When Scientific American contacted a sample of actual climatologistys who had signed, 10% had no memory of the petition, which should give the truly sceptical pause before relying on its conclusions.
On the other hand the report of the IPCC WG1 which deals with the Physical Sciences had over 600 contributing authors, every last one a published and practising climatologist. There’s a list here: http://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~prall/climate/AR4wg1_authors_table.html
Now I do not claim that every last one of these would applaud every sentence of the executive sumamries, and there has been a single resignation from this number, but clearly Roger Helmer’s assertion that there are just about 50 ‘true believers’ is nonsense.
What of the other half of his comparison, that there are 45 scientists from relevant disciplines and repected institutions speaking? Well, in amongst the politicians and Heartlanders starting with his ‘friend’, S Fred Singer… Singer (born 1924, retired) wrote on his website that most glaciers are in fact expanding not retreating, a statement that he must have known is false but which echoed round the internet for a long time http://www.monbiot.com/junkscience . He gave as a source ‘a paper in Science’ which turned out not to exist.
Then there’s Pat Michaels, retired State Climatologist, who in testimony to Congress erased two of Jim Hansen’s three projected climate scenarios, leaving only the highest as evidence of exaggeration. Some have described this as ‘fraud, pure and simple’.
Then there are Georges Carlin (EPA, retired), Marsh,(retired from Argonne National Laboratory) listed as ‘University of Chicago’ though if anyone knows his connection to that seat of learning, I am all ears – and Kukla (born 1930, retired). Of course we have Monckton http://www.altenergyaction.org/Monckton.html and Nils-Axel Morner (born 1928, retired) dowsing enthusiast http://www.edf.org/documents/3868_morner_exposed.pdf ,
Ian Plimer http://bit.ly/entingplimer and so on and so forth. Try as I might I couldn’t get the numbers of those actually meeting Helmer’s description into double figures …. anyone able to help?
Brighton Early says:
May 19, 2010 at 12:55 pm
I am having a conflict of interest. I like to read scientific, peer-reviewed magazines such as Science and Nature and Geophysical Research letters. According to your view, these magazines, with their hundreds of articles are alarmist literature that require religious belief to digest. Now, I am not religious and still ‘believe’ most of the science published there to be reasonable, as I assume, it is not part of a plot by some 50 or so believers that hijacks the scientific community. I can also not really find a climate hysteria in these magazines, but I am open minded and listen if you point those out to me. If your ‘real scientists’ outnumber the ‘AGW believing scientists’, the ‘real scientists’ should take over and run the peer reviewed show. I agree with you, there is no reason for alarmism or hysteria. Why do you create them?
…—…—
For example, would you consider that Mann is a alarmist? Maybe even a “AGW believing (so-called) scientist”?
Does he contribute to the hysteria about AGW beliefs? Absolutely “Yes!” == His distortions and infamous/faked/fraudulent graphs appears 7 times alone in the IPCC reports, and is the fundamental basis in Al Gore’s movie and book. HE is the “definition” of AGW hysteria.
But Mann IS also on the editorial board and IS a (anonymous!) peer-reviewing “scientist” on more than 30 different journals and trade publications. Now – How are you going to get past that bias?
Mann/Hansen etc, al are the Inquisition, with Obama and his annointed EPA and NOAA and NASA and GISS and NWS and their (now well-funded by 79 billion in AGW hyped) university heads and departments, etc, etc are the holy ones. And their minions in ABBCNNBCBS are zealously repeating the chants and charts for their masses.
I do not understand the problem some people have here of changes in cloud cover altering the global average temperature. The earth is massive and temperature variations are not synchronised throughout the globe.I see no problem with the pdo causing more clouds and reflecting more sunlight back into space locally as Roy spencer suggests, I accept it as a possibility at least until it is disproved, I am not a scientist though.
Smokey says:
Really…Can you give me an example of a mass-mailed petition on the AGW side where there was no attempt to limit the signers to people who worked pretty directly on the subject?
Anthony says:
And, this proves what exactly? If he was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, then at least you might have something that gives evidence of his standing in the scientific community (although even that would not necessarily be an endorsement on all views he has on scientific issues). Winning a Republican primary? Not so much.
Joel Shore says:May 19, 2010 at 12:40 pm
If you look at the credentials of the signers in detail, I think you’ll find them not that impressive. I am amongst the very best qualified ***JUST*** by virtue of the fact that I have a PhD in physics and I would argue that such a credential alone does not in fact make me qualified to judge the merits of the data and arguments in the “paper” that accompanied that petition (and the merits of the petition statements). It is only because I have probably spent well over a thousand of hours over the last decade studying climate issues as a “hobby” that I can see the deceptiveness and errors in that paper.
So, where do you draw the line? A PhD in physics, engineering, physiology, music. We’re always hearing form the CAGW contingent that it takes a degree in Climatology, Climate Science, etc.; and Meteorology is not good enough. I’ve spent as much time as you have studying the issues. Clear up this misconception for us. Maybe it’s not the degree, how about GPA. You need to be smart enough and have a degree? I got 4.0 /4.0 through 120 post graduate hours. Good enough for you. Look up the number of degreed individuals that read this blog. As I recall, better than 50% with advanced degrees. But you know better. What a pompous twit, in optical physics.
Paul Daniel Ash says:
May 18, 2010 at 7:06 pm
Erm…
I agree, it’s always best to read before posting.
DaveE.
Joel Shore says:
Since, I can’t read your mind, I am not yet sure where your confusion is.>>
That’s the tinfoil hat in action, great stuff. Keeps the aliens out too.
Joel Shore says:
However, my guess is that you are just rediscovering the fact that in the absence of feedbacks (other than that implied by Steffan-Boltzmann relation), the climate sensitivity is around 1.1 C for a doubling of CO2. [Actually, your numbers won’t quite bear that out because you are mistakenly using the temperature at the surface rather than the effective temperature at which the earth system is emitting back out into space [which corresponds to a temperature higher up in the troposphere], but they would if you correctly used the ~255 K value.]>>
Given your credentials, I accept that I should have used 255 K. Had I done so, I would have arrived at 3.84, 3.88 and 3.93 watts/m2 respectively. Let’s recap my previous comment with those values incorporated:
“normal” CO2 = 280 ppm
280 + 100 = 380 (+1.7 w/m2)
380 + 100 = 480 (+1.2 w/m2)
480 + 100 = 580 (+1.0 w/m2)
580 + 100 = 680 (+.85 w/m2)
680 + 100 = 780 (+.63 w/m2)
Earth Radiance from 255 K:
255K = normal
255 + 1 = 256 (+3.84 w/m2)
256 + 1 = 257 (+3.88 w/m2)
257+1 = 258 (+3.93 w/m2)
Analysis: Given that we are currently at just slightly over 380 ppm, and IPCC AR4 quotes the last few decades as exhibiting a 1.9 ppm/year increase in CO2, it will take about 200 years to arrive at 780 ppm. If we further total the forcing to be expected from 780 ppm we get an additional forcing of 3.68 watts/m2. While calculating sensitivity from 280 to double arrives at a 1.1 degree direct temperature increase, the combination of CO2 being logarithmic and earth radiance increasing exponentially, the sensitivity FROM WHERE WE ARE NOW is only 1 degree.
Further, both 1.1 degree (for CO2 doubling from 280) and 1.0 degrees (for CO2 doubling from 380) are theoretical values, as are the proposed feedbacks from water vapour claimed by IPCC AR4 to arrive at a positive feedback 2 to 4 times direct forcing from CO2. Observation however, suggests that the current CO2 concentration (just over 380 ppm) increased from 280 ppm during a time period when earth surface temperature increased by only 0.6 degrees. Given that the logarithmic function of CO2 should have resulted in 38% increase (380/280) which in turn yields 48% of the forcing arrived at by doubling from 280, we see that the combined sensitivity of CO2 AND water vapour, provided that we attribute 100% of the observed increase to CO2 plus feedbacks, is just over 1.2 degrees. Given that the earth warmed about the same amount in the previous century, 1.2 degrees seems very high as most of it is likely natural, but for now let’s accept that there was zero additional natural warming, and the entire 0.6 degree increase was driven by CO2 rising from 280 to 380.
If we apply Stefan Boltzman and the logarithmic nature of CO2, not to where we came from (280) but where we are now (380) and adjust for the observed sensitivity, we arrive at about 0.5 degrees, feedbacks included, for the next 200 YEARS of CO2 production at current rates.
Question: Where is the catastrophe?
Wren, hope you are still following along.
Barefootgirl, hope you are paying attention. Joel Shore responded to my questions by stating his assumptions about my math, and identifying the error that I made. When you bring that sort of approach to the discussion based on the knowledge that you claim, you will start getting respect around here rather than hostility.
Joel, looking forward to your rebuttal. Keep in mind that if I erred by a factor of THREE, that still results in only 1.5 degrees over the next 200 years, so to convince me that there is some catastrophe on the horizon from CO2 emissions, you are going to have to show me that I erred by a factor of 6 or more. Incidentaly, if you model from TOA at 255 K (as I did on your suggestion) then you are assuming that absorption of upward LW below TOA is 100%. Since we know that this is incorrect, that upward LW from earth surface does in fact escape through the atmospheric window in some proportion, I would think that the TOA number at 255 K is low.
Smokey says:
May 19, 2010 at 10:25 am
yes Smokey our institute has reported the emails to security. And because of them, our institute has implemented more security measures since before these threats started a few years ago, anyone could have walked into our offices.
It is unfortunate that some here think this has to be all political. Scientists are the most objective folks around. And we are very careful not to link our names to any political side. Whenever I do outreach work I first make sure there is no political agenda. It’s one thing to present data and analysis and try to educate folks, it’s another to be tied into someone else’s agenda. I do think there are a lot of “haters” on this site. I see it constantly in hostile, downgrading remarks made towards anyone who disagrees with a skeptics point of view. Which by the way is hard to follow, since I find so many contradicting points made here. Sometimes you believe in rising CO2 levels, sometimes not. Sometimes you believe in the temperature record, sometimes not. It all seems to depend on what point you are trying to make. You don’t subject your few chosen favorite scientists to the same rigor as other scientists. Outright lies are presented as facts. And the cherry-picking that goes on here is worse than anything I’ve ever seen in any published climate paper.
But it’s been very enlightening for me as I now have a better understanding of what type of arguments/tactics you use to try to present your case. I have to prepare for a televised climate debate and you all have helped me tremendously get ready for it. So thank you all very much for that.
Aloha!
Barefootgirl;
And the cherry-picking that goes on here is worse than anything I’ve ever seen in any published climate paper.>>
You’ve repeated this accusation several times, but not given one example. Given the fraudulent hockey stick, and the tree ring study 50% weighted to a single tree, I think you have to come up with something pretty astounding to be worse than just those two examples.
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 9:30 pm
Do you know what the strawman argument is?
Jimbo never said ALL warming was claimed to be anthropogenic
DaveE.
barefootgirl,
No credibility there. Not calling the police when multiple “crazy skeptics” make death threats against you would be completely irresponsible — if your story was true.
So report the names here. You know, the names of the “crazy skeptics” who are supposedly stalking you. Otherwise, it’s clear that you’re fabricating the whole thing. No one in their right mind, especially someone with children, would blow off actual death threats by just tipping company security; in fact security would be legally obligated to notify the police. Death threats are a crime. And most everyone you talked to about it would tell you the same thing: call the police! Now!
But it was a swell story.
Phil Clarke,
Got nothin’, I see.
There have been repeated attempts to get lots of signatures on alarmist petitions. They all fizzled. Every one. That “consensus” seems to be in your imagination, not in the real world.
But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: let’s discard 5% of the OISM signatures. That’s a lot, I’m sure there are not that many that are questionable…
…on second thought, let’s throw out 10% of them. No, 20%!
Would you be happy with 25%? 30%? How about discarding 40%?
OK then, if you insist… let’s discard half of the 31,000 signatures. That still leaves way more than all the alarmist signatures… in total.
And Joel Shore, if it weren’t for your incessant appeals to authority, you wouldn’t have much to write about, would you? I’m about as impressed with them as I am with Joe Biden. But I notice that the climate is acting normally, as always, so unlike you I don’t need the politicians running those credibility-challenged organizations to tell me what to think.
barefootgirl says on May 19, 2010 at 2:51 pm
You know they don’t have anything substantive to say when they accuse you of being “haters.” It goes along with the charge that we are “creationists” and sundry other malefactors.
So you think it is OK for a scientist to “cherry pick?”
It’s not ok for any side to be cherry picking. I would have more respect for this web site if there was no cherry picking done in the posts presented here. A justification for starting and end points should always be given with any graph that you show. So perhaps that can be a start for new posts?
I wonder when Anthony is going to mention that the Arctic ice extent is now at the 2007 level? Seems he was quick to mention when it approached the “normal” line but he’s been very quiet about what’s happening today. And it’s almost at the 2006 line (I just looked at the German site), which I would think would merit some discussion since 2006 was the previous record low winter ice extent. It would mean that the ice decline rate has been rather fast this May. Seems to fit with estimates of ice volume given by the APL site. I would think if WUTW wants to be the “science” site to go to that they would give equal coverage of what’s happening in the Arctic today.
There have been repeated attempts to get lots of signatures on alarmist petitions. They all fizzled. Every one.
Oh Really? More than 1,500 of the world’s most distinguished senior scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in science, have signed a landmark consensus declaration urging leaders worldwide to act immediately to prevent the potentially devastating consequences of human-induced global warming
Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1997/10/971002070106.htm
More recently, 1,700 UK scientists signed up to a similar petition – http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/news/latest/uk-science-statement.html
You will notice that these are practising scientists, as opposed to say, practising MDs vetinarians and Chiropracters.
Or try this: list the professional scientific bodies who have failed to endorse the mainstream position. Won’t take you long.
Or try this thought experiment : let us assume that the speakers at ICCC 2010 are the ‘cream of the crop’, the best and bravest contrarians. Here is the list: http://www.heartland.org/events/2010Chicago/speakers.html
Leaving aside the demonstrably flexible approach to the truth of some of the delegates – out of 70-plus speakers I count just three women, and not a single non-white. The average age seems about sixty and there are an awful lot of Emeritus/retired folk in there. Where are all the young, bright, black women who agree with you? Roger Helmer is past the official UK retirement age. What does the future hold for your movement, Smokey?
You wonder about the supposed “hatred” you claim is seen in the skeptic community. But it the AGW alarmists who are rioting, wanting to kill conservatives, and wanting them fired and thrown in jail. It was Matthews (an AGW extermist like all in the biased ABCNNBCBS) who wanted BP executives shot – on camera, on TV, only yesterday. You claim you “fear” skeptics – while the AGW extremists control the governments, the police, the publicity, the mass media, the science journals, the courts, the international fund, the national funding, the rioters and the “protesters” ….. Now, why would a sceptic be worried about his or her future?
Why would a skeptic be worried about a mere AGW-caused 1.3 trillion in (unneeded without the hype!) government control? Are YOU going to protest that waste of time and money?
The AGW-alarmist community (from the UN’s Inter governmental Panel through president Obama through his hand-picked heads of the EPA, NASA, GISS, NOAA, NWS, DOE, and the other funding agencies through the socialist/liberal folowers on the Supreme Court through the democrat leaders of the House and Senate through the whitewash panels “reviewing” Mann’s lies and fraudulent papers through the editors of Science, Nature, National Geographic, and Scientific America …..
Name ONE AGW proponent who has apologized for the fraudulent words, extremism and hatred (that you claim to fear from the skeptic community) that IS ACTUALLY present FROM and sponsored BY the AGW extremists.
These alarmists are the people who are using AGW to destroy the world’s economies for political, funding, and social gains. These are the ones ACTUALLY rioting and destroying people’s lives and properties and ACTUALLY causing famine, disease, and floods and deaths by their policies. These (your AGW fellows) are the ones who actually threatening millions with early, and promising nothing but continued poverty, ignorance and disease to billions.
All in the name of AGW, AGW fears, and (deliberate) AGW (mindlessly extrapolated) hyperpola by assuming a twenty year trend continues for centuries.
Yet you admit you have never heard ANY of your “peers” even QUESTION the exaggerated assumptions of 5 and 10 degree C warming caused by CO2? YOU have never protested or corrected their exaggerations – in person? In writing? In public? In the classroom or laboratory? In the lunchroom?
Name any single harm coming from two degrees warming worldwide. Name ANY harm coming from an increase of CO2 to 700 ppm.
You cannot = There is none.
Now, name the proven harm, death, and misery coming from regulating CO2 to the absurd levels demanded by the AGW extremists.
Oh – And show that limiting CO2 will actually stop the actual “natural increase” in climate – which is around 1 degree C !! – that we have seen since 1650.
—
Barefootgirl, I don’t know about anybody else here but I am in fact a scientist and understand the funding game quite well. For instance, I know that when there is a “flavor of the month” concept in favor, a grant proposal based on that concept has an improved chance of funding. I also know that, once an investigator has obtained a multiyear grant based on a particular concept, that concept is not readily abandoned no matter how much evidence accumulates against it.
You undermine your credibility when you adopt the “you peasants just don’t know as much about this as I do” tone, rather than addressing perfectly clear questions in a substantive way. I work in a field where the approaches frequently used in climate science would at best result in bankruptcy, and at worst in criminal prosecution.
Phil Clarke,
I liked your second list! It made me laugh out loud. [The first one is 13 years old, so we can’t really give that one full credit, can we?]
The Grantham Research Institute? [do a search for “Grantham foundation”] The Environment Agency? The London School of Economics?? Not exactly rocket scientists.
I’m surprised they didn’t get the Caitlin Arctic Bedwetters to sign. Big opportunity missed there.
It looks like most of the signers are busy sucking at the public teat, so of course they’re going to claim CAGW — their jobs depend on it, don’t they? And over two hundred [200+] signers from the Met Office! That’s about as hard as getting the Boy Scouts to sign the Pledge of Allegiance.
One thing you could have left out was the blatant race-baiting and groveling for the female vote: “out of 70-plus speakers I count just three women, and not a single non-white.” And what, pray tell, does that have to do with science? [However, I will say that Pamela Gorman in your Heartland link should count for extra points☺]
My sincere advice: Stop digging, Phil. You haven’t come up with even 20% of the OISM petition numbers with all your links put together. And the OISM Petition is just one. There are others I haven’t counted [and FYI, the OISM Petition accepts M.D.’s and veterinarians — provided that they possess a degree in one of the physical sciences. So sociologists are out, even if they have a medical degree].
Now you can see where the true scientific consensus is.
Robert, that’s unfortunate that your experience with funding is as you describe. Must have been hard to stay funded doing biological work if you didn’t grab onto the flavor of the month. But the reality is, scientists who do good work will continue to get funded, while those that don’t, don’t. Sure, it’s a bit of an old-boys club so it’s hard for a new scientist with a good idea to get in, but once they show their merit, they too get funded. I don’t know who you have worked with, I’m sure I can do a search of papers you’ve published and see your collaborators but if they don’t do good work, probably best to stop working with them. The climate scientists I personally know are not even close to as you describe. And they are also humble. The old-boys club that you’ve undoubtably dealt with given your age is coming to an end.
Smokey,
If it makes you feel better then do feel free to ridicule a signatory, Oceanographer Professor Ralph Ryman simply because he lists his current affiliation as the LSE
http://www.oceanologyinternational.com/page.cfm/link=49
This will not change the facts, which can be summarised:
– The percentage of scientists, whether measured by petition, survey, professional position statement or literature review who endorse the broad findings of the IPCC is in the high nineties.
– The Oregon Petition is propaganda, no more or less: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-11-12/#feature
– The brightest and best that the Heartland Institute can muster is a rump of predominantly retired, emeritus and elderley ex-scientists and a smattering of overzealous libertarian free-market idealogues. Oh, and Monckton.
I have seen the future, and in it Marc Morano is a footnote.
davidmhoffer –
Your errors in a nutshell:
(1) You can’t get a good constraint on the climate sensitivity from the 20th century temperature trend. For one thing, the uncertainty in the aerosol forcing is large. There are also uncertainties in the temp trend, mainly due to natural variability. And, finally, what you measure is a transient climate response, not an equilibrium climate sensitivity. That is why better empirical constraints on climate sensitivity are derived from paleoclimate data (especially the last glacial maximum), the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and other things all combined together.
(2) I can’t follow your mathematical step in claiming that if the rise from 280ppm to 380ppm resulted in 0.6 C temperature rise, then 380 to 780ppm will only give another 0.5 C. That is slightly more than a doubling, so by your (incorrect) logic in concluding that the climate sensitivity for doubling is 1.2 C, you ought to get somewhere around that or slightly more for the additional rise from 380 to 780ppm.
(3) Your assumption that business-as-usual would be to keep emitting CO2 from fossil fuel burning at the current rate is not realistic. With a 1% per year rise, the amount emitted will double in 70 years. With a 2% rise, it will double in 35 years.
(4) Your claim that “Incidentaly, if you model from TOA at 255 K (as I did on your suggestion) then you are assuming that absorption of upward LW below TOA is 100%.” is not correct. The 255 K value is not the temperature at the TOA. It is the effective radiating temperature of the earth, so it already takes into account that some emission from the surface is escaping through the atmospheric window.
Phil Clarke,
I see that cognitive dissonance [Orwell’s Doublethink] afflicts you. My condolences. When it strikes, it is almost incurable:
So black is white, down is up, evil is good, and over 90% of scientists believe in CO2=CAGW?
You’ve got it bad, Phil. Better take an aspirin and lie down.
Phil Clarke:
Half is way way way too low. As I told you, people with my educational background (PhD in physics in similar field) are amongst the most qualified signers on there, but they make up only a small fraction of the total even by the petition organizers own claims. And, as I have noted, I don’t see where such an educational background alone particularly qualifies someone to evaluate the science.
REPLY: Great! I’ll remind you of this the next time a natural sciences paper on AGW comes up, and point out that we should ignore it simply because they don’t have a PHD in physics. As always Joel, your perceived self importance and arrogance is astounding. -Anthony
davidmhoffer says:
May 19, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Joel Shore says:
Since, I can’t read your mind, I am not yet sure where your confusion is.>>
That’s the tinfoil hat in action, great stuff. Keeps the aliens out too.
Joel Shore says:
However, my guess is that you are just rediscovering the fact that in the absence of feedbacks (other than that implied by Steffan-Boltzmann relation), the climate sensitivity is around 1.1 C for a doubling of CO2. [Actually, your numbers won’t quite bear that out because you are mistakenly using the temperature at the surface rather than the effective temperature at which the earth system is emitting back out into space [which corresponds to a temperature higher up in the troposphere], but they would if you correctly used the ~255 K value.]>>
Given your credentials, I accept that I should have used 255 K. Had I done so, I would have arrived at 3.84, 3.88 and 3.93 watts/m2 respectively. Let’s recap my previous comment with those values incorporated:
“normal” CO2 = 280 ppm
280 + 100 = 380 (+1.7 w/m2)
380 + 100 = 480 (+1.2 w/m2)
480 + 100 = 580 (+1.0 w/m2)
580 + 100 = 680 (+.85 w/m2)
680 + 100 = 780 (+.63 w/m2)
Earth Radiance from 255 K:
255K = normal
255 + 1 = 256 (+3.84 w/m2)
256 + 1 = 257 (+3.88 w/m2)
257+1 = 258 (+3.93 w/m2)
Analysis: Given that we are currently at just slightly over 380 ppm, and IPCC AR4 quotes the last few decades as exhibiting a 1.9 ppm/year increase in CO2, it will take about 200 years to arrive at 780 ppm. If we further total the forcing to be expected from 780 ppm we get an additional forcing of 3.68 watts/m2. While calculating sensitivity from 280 to double arrives at a 1.1 degree direct temperature increase, the combination of CO2 being logarithmic and earth radiance increasing exponentially, the sensitivity FROM WHERE WE ARE NOW is only 1 degree.
Further, both 1.1 degree (for CO2 doubling from 280) and 1.0 degrees (for CO2 doubling from 380) are theoretical values, as are the proposed feedbacks from water vapour claimed by IPCC AR4 to arrive at a positive feedback 2 to 4 times direct forcing from CO2. Observation however, suggests that the current CO2 concentration (just over 380 ppm) increased from 280 ppm during a time period when earth surface temperature increased by only 0.6 degrees. Given that the logarithmic function of CO2 should have resulted in 38% increase (380/280) which in turn yields 48% of the forcing arrived at by doubling from 280, we see that the combined sensitivity of CO2 AND water vapour, provided that we attribute 100% of the observed increase to CO2 plus feedbacks, is just over 1.2 degrees. Given that the earth warmed about the same amount in the previous century, 1.2 degrees seems very high as most of it is likely natural, but for now let’s accept that there was zero additional natural warming, and the entire 0.6 degree increase was driven by CO2 rising from 280 to 380.
If we apply Stefan Boltzman and the logarithmic nature of CO2, not to where we came from (280) but where we are now (380) and adjust for the observed sensitivity, we arrive at about 0.5 degrees, feedbacks included, for the next 200 YEARS of CO2 production at current rates.
Question: Where is the catastrophe?
Wren, hope you are still following along.
Barefootgirl, hope you are paying attention. Joel Shore responded to my questions by stating his assumptions about my math, and identifying the error that I made. When you bring that sort of approach to the discussion based on the knowledge that you claim, you will start getting respect around here rather than hostility.
Joel, looking forward to your rebuttal. Keep in mind that if I erred by a factor of THREE, that still results in only 1.5 degrees over the next 200 years, so to convince me that there is some catastrophe on the horizon from CO2 emissions, you are going to have to show me that I erred by a factor of 6 or more. Incidentaly, if you model from TOA at 255 K (as I did on your suggestion) then you are assuming that absorption of upward LW below TOA is 100%. Since we know that this is incorrect, that upward LW from earth surface does in fact escape through the atmospheric window in some proportion, I would think that the TOA number at 255 K is low.
——
I’m not going to fact check all of your work, but one thing caught my eye.
” Observation however, suggests that the current CO2 concentration (just over 380 ppm) increased from 280 ppm during a time period when earth surface temperature increased by only 0.6 degrees.”
What I found is average global surface temperature rose by 0.7 C or 1.3 F from 1980 to 2009 while CO2 concentrations rose from about 340 ppm to 380ppm. I calculated the absolute increases in temperatures from the anomalies in the linked source.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt
Smokey says:
May 19, 2010 at 12:56 pm
I see that Wren and Joel have their talking points in order: out of millions of people qualified to sign the OISM Petition, “only” 31,000 have signed.
So let’s deconstruct that silly argument: the alarmist contingent has repeatedly tried to get the *same* group of people to sign their petitions supporting CAGW — and they have come up with only about one-tenth the number of signatures.
===============
Well they haven’t been at it for years and years like the Oregon group. These things take time. I don’t think the Oregon group has revealed how many petition forms they sent out that weren’t returned, which of course would be an indication of how many people rejected the petition or just didn’t think the petition was worth signing.
As you may recall from my earlier post, the 31,000 petition signers only amount to 1 out of 610 when you take into account there are 18,927, 000 scientist and engineers employed in the United States. To put this in perspective, suppose in a town of 6,100 a petition was signed by a total of 10 people. I doubt you would think the petition had a significant amount of support.
Anthony says:
I am sorry that you have so painfully misinterpreted what I have written to say EXACTLY the opposite of what I have actually been saying. (Maybe you missed some of my previous posts and misinterpreted some of what I said in this latest one as a result?) As I said in an above post ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/consensus-what-consensus/#comment-393128 ):
My whole point is that a petition where a PhD in physics alone would put one amongst the most qualified signers just shows how pathetic the level of involvement in the field of almost all of the signers actually is.
REPLY: And my point is that if you start disqualifying people who signed the Oregon Petition because they “aren’t qualified to judge the merits of the data and arguments” then we’ll have to disqualify a bunch of people in that IPCC AR4 that you’ve come to love. Just looking at “qualified researchers” in it (and lack of hard science people, hell, they cited travel brochures) just shows how pathetic the level of involvement in the IPCC of almost all of the researchers actually is. Of course such disqualifications never happen, because the mantra is “skeptics are the unqualified ones”. You won’t see IPCC disqualify somebody that toes the line, no matter how weak the science is. Your argument is based on your personal bias and nothing else. -A
Wren;
What I found is average global surface temperature rose by 0.7 C or 1.3 F from 1980 to 2009 while CO2 concentrations rose from about 340 ppm to 380ppm. I calculated the absolute increases in temperatures from the anomalies in the linked source>>
Well why not go from 1917 to 1937 instead and only in the NH? That way you get an even bigger temp rise against an even smaller amount of CO2. You just aren’t very good at warmist strategy, are you Wren?
Wren,
Quit digging, you’ll hurt yourself:
“Well they haven’t been at it for years and years like the Oregon group.”
Phil Clarke’s link shows that alarmist petitions have been circulating for at least 13 years — much longer than the OISM Petition.
Jeff Brown- Actually, I work in private industry but have dealt extensively with academics so I know whereof I speak. I’m not sure what leads you to make assumptions about my age but I’m in my prime years. If you think the best work always gets the funding, you’re kidding yourself. Personally, my work has been quite successful so it’s not necessary to patronize me.
Phil, thanks for pointing this out:
– The brightest and best that the Heartland Institute can muster is a rump of predominantly retired, emeritus and elderley ex-scientists and a smattering of overzealous libertarian free-market idealogues. Oh, and Monckton.
The old-boys club is dying.
Then Robert, please share who you work for, and exactly what your credentials are if you are not Professor Emeritus at FSU. And if you work for private industry then how do you know how the government funding for universities works?
Joel Shore;
(1) You can’t get a good constraint on the climate sensitivity from the 20th century temperature trend.>>
Well said. So if I can’t get a good constraint on climate sensitivity from 100 years of temperature data, why is it that you quote the IPCC sensitivity number based on precisely the same data? Do they have different formulas to calculate standard deviation that only work for them?
Joel Shore;
so by your (incorrect) logic in concluding that the climate sensitivity for doubling is 1.2 C, you ought to get somewhere around that or slightly more for the additional rise from 380 to 780ppm.>>
380 to 780 = 3.85 watts, almost exactly 1 degree. So yes, I should have calculated for doubling which would be 380 to 760 = 3.63. So for doubling from 380 should be just UNDER 1 degree. I screwed up and gave CO2 more than it deserved.
Joel Shore;
3) Your assumption that business-as-usual would be to keep emitting CO2 from fossil fuel burning at the current rate is not realistic. With a 1% per year rise, the amount emitted will double in 70 years. With a 2% rise, it will double in 35 years>>
Let’s see, we’re at 380, so to double in 70 years we would need to go from current (1.9 ppm) to 5.43 over the 70 year period. You are proposing almost TRIPLE the current fossil fuel consumption, starting TOMORROW and going for the next 70 years. Guess what? Have you noticed the price of oil over the last couple of decades? Remember when the oil companies were all gaga because it might hit $20/barrel? What happened to that? We’re at $70 bucks or so now and demand is WAY down due to the recession, why is it $70? Because A) its getting harder to find and B) what we do find is more expensive to extract. a 10% rise in demand pops the price up over $120 in nothing flat. Even if we were capable of producing triple (which we’re not) the price spike would clobber demand. No way are we getting to triple, double, or even +50% from where we are now.
Joel Shore;
The 255 K value is not the temperature at the TOA. It is the effective radiating temperature of the earth, so it already takes into account that some emission from the surface is escaping through the atmospheric window.>>
Thanks. Always wondered where that came from. How did they get to this? Is the number based on the 20th century data you said wasn’t sufficient for calculating sensitivity? Was it adjusted for the aerosols and clouds and other things we don’t understand? Or was it calculated against the energy balance from measurement instruments that Trenberth admits he can’t get to add up properly and he doesn’t know where the heat is hiding?
Joel, I learned something from your responses, and I want to be clear I appreciate that. But I said you need to debunk my numbers by a factor of 6 before they become scary, and I don’t think you are anywhere near that. Your other argument was that I was applying a transient temperature change as an equilibrium measurement. Fair enough. But there has been no statisticaly significant warming for 15 years, the time period in which CO2 has been highest. If I accept that CO2 triggers no negative feedbacks that are unaccounted for (which seems less than plausible) and that water vapour triples the effects of CO2 (which seems even less plausible) then I must also conclude that there are natural cooling mechanisms that we don’t understand that are over whelming the effects of CO2 and water vapour combined.
What’s the word for the time period we’re in right now geologicaly? Interglacial?
If its in fact a transient response, then consider that even the polar bears are thriving. the last 4 centuries of warming have produced more arable land, more production per acre and less violent storm activity. Can we get more of that? Sadly no. It will take 200 years of burning as much oil as we can to get as much additional warming into the pipe as we have so far, so we’ll have to work real hard at it if we want to accomplish something positive and heat this planet up another smidge or two.
Take a look at the list of factors that the warmists are proposing to the Govt of the United States to reduce consumption. Ask yourself what they are talking about when they say they want to “influence” these things:
Population
Household Size
Income
Does having a government authorized to “influence” (read REDUCE) those things not sound a bit scary to you? Debunk my numbers by a factor of 6 and I might consider it. Otherwise I would WAY prefer to take my chances with mother nature.
jeff brown says:
May 19, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Then Robert, please share who you work for, and exactly what your credentials are if you are not Professor Emeritus at FSU. And if you work for private industry then how do you know how the government funding for universities works?>>
I work in private industry. Half my business is with universities. I usually know more about the processes than the researchers do because I deal with far more of them than a single researcher does. Sometimes I even help out with wording of a grant proposal, I do write business cases for a living and researchers don’t.
jeff brown says:
May 19, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Robert, that’s unfortunate that your experience with funding is as you describe. Must have been hard to stay funded doing biological work if you didn’t grab onto the flavor of the month. But the reality is, scientists who do good work will continue to get funded, while those that don’t, don’t.
———
Not so. In any biology/ecology related work now, if you attach climate change to your proposal your chances of getting funding rises exponentially. Let’s say you want to study newts. So you write up your proposal to study the impacts of climate change on newts, and bingo, you’re more likely to be a happy researcher. Even better, you need to monitor those newts for a long period to assess those climate impacts. And if you can actually find some impacts, you will get more funding. Thus we get all these absurd papers and news stories related to the impacts of climate change on x or y. Great one here lately on lizard extinction! LOL.
It only gets worse when we’re dealing with the new pseudoscience called Conservation Biology, the twisted sister of IPCC style climate science, and the ‘science’ of the EPA. Imagine a missionary with a white coat. In that field you not only get junk science but, as you describe it, those who do “good work will continue to get funded” – and here the emphasis is on “good work” in the missionary sense, not good science.
And if you do this “good work” you get environmental groups promoting you and your “good work” which also, conveniently, supports their “good work” and agendas.
The whole ‘endangered species’ business is built on this kind of ‘science.’ Yes, there are some genuinely threatened and endangered species but this thing has gone completely over the top and become absurd, and profitable, with a larger agenda. Now they invent species, or subspecies, or unique geographic populations – and they even fudge DNA work now for this – to ‘save’ and once listed, they become a franchise for researchers and a tool for land grabs, etc.
Save the Sacramento Valley Red Fox! They just invented that one.
Forgot I had this…
Sacramento Valley fox now found to be native – Sacramento News – Local and Breaking Sacramento News | Sacramento Bee
Source: sacbee.com
Published: Saturday, Jan. 2, 2010 – 12:00 am | Page 1B
“There isn’t much mystery left in the natural environment of the Sacramento Valley, a place completely reshaped by a century of intensive farming, urbanization and levee building. At least, that’s the usual assumption.
In fact, it’s a faulty one.
Genetically speaking, it turns out the red foxes of the Sacramento Valley are very different from the nonnatives elsewhere in California. They’re also different from gray foxes that are native across most of California.
Ben Sacks, an assistant professor of biology at both the University of California, Davis, and California State University, Sacramento, is calling this new subspecies the Sacramento Valley red fox. He has revealed through genetic testing that it is unique to lowland areas north of the American River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The subspecies is most closely related to the Sierra Nevada red fox, Sacks said, a native species thought to be at risk of extinction in its final stronghold within Lassen Volcanic National Park.
His research has been accepted by the peer-reviewed science journal Conservation Genetics, due for publication early this year.
“We can now say that the foxes of the Sacramento Valley are native to California,” said Sacks.
Genetically speaking, it turns out the red foxes of the Sacramento Valley are very different from the nonnatives elsewhere in California. They’re also different from gray foxes that are native across most of California.
Ben Sacks, an assistant professor of biology at both the University of California, Davis, and California State University, Sacramento, is calling this new subspecies the Sacramento Valley red fox. He has revealed through genetic testing that it is unique to lowland areas north of the American River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The subspecies is most closely related to the Sierra Nevada red fox, Sacks said, a native species thought to be at risk of extinction in its final stronghold within Lassen Volcanic National Park.
His research has been accepted by the peer-reviewed science journal Conservation Genetics, due for publication early this year.
“We can now say that the foxes of the Sacramento Valley are native to California,” said Sacks…
For some reason they’ve kept to themselves in the same area where nonnative Eastern red foxes were first introduced to California, probably soon after the opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869.
“The fact that the evidence is pointing toward it as a native species – and a native species that we didn’t know about – is kind of an amazing development,” said Armand Gonzales, a wildlife program manager at the California Department of Fish and Game. “That doesn’t happen very often.”
Gonzales helped Sacks with fieldwork. Fish and Game contributed about $168,000 toward Sacks’ research.”
———–
Yes, a truly “amazing development”! If this seems implausible if not absurd to you, you are right. This journal is an instrument of the wonderful world of Conservation Biology. Now this ‘unique native species’ must be saved! The story continues…
“A major question – and a sensitive one – is whether this new subspecies merits special protection, like the mountain red fox or San Joaquin kit fox.
Sacks and Gonzales said there isn’t enough information yet to know. More studies are planned to figure that out.
If it ends up protected by endangered species laws, the Sacramento Valley red fox could become another headache for farmers and developers.”
So…. do what we say or this unique species will die!!!
This inconvenient comment appeared below this story:
“I hate to interrupt a great theory but my Dad and his fox hunting buddies, they wouldn’t kill the fox just run their dogs.and that was the sport. The grey fox the run was real short. So in 1957 My Dad and friends ordered 7 pairs of Red foxes from Mo.I think Springfield. and turned them loose above Rancho cordova.”
P.S. All these red fox ‘species” and ‘subspecies’ are bogus inventions/franchises/tools.
Smokey: “You haven’t come up with even 20% of the OISM petition numbers with all your links put together.”
Climate science is about quality, not quantity, Smokey. The 90+% of climate scientists who endorse AGW are the cream of a small but brilliant crop.
It also pays to remember that climate scientists are fiercely independent individuals, critical thinkers who resist the easy groupthink represented by your 31,000 veterinarians.
Michael Mann has a degree in geology. James Hansen has a degree in physics. Malcolm Hughes has a degree in ecology. Lonnie Thompson has a degree in geology. Raymond Pierrehumbert has a degree in aeronautics. Rasmus Benestad is a physicist. Eric Steig is a geochemist. David Archer is a chemist. Gavin Schmidt’s degree is in math. Stefan Rahmstorf is a physicist. William Connolley is a numerical analyst. Caspar Amman is a geoscientist. Who am I missing?
Then we have this:
And Robert Fri, not just a member but the Chair of one of the panels of the National Academy of Sciences, what qualifications does he have? A PhD in climatology? A professorship in atmospheric chemistry?
No … he has … well … an MBA.
So please, spare me the sanctimonious pontificating about various lists of sceptical scientists, that they are not climate scientists because they are just geologists or mathematicians or physicists or numerical analysts … quite unlike the lists of AGW supporting scientists …
Brendan H,
My ‘31,000 veterinarians’? Really?
First off, consensus means nothing in science. But the alarmist crowd has made it a central talking point for years. However, the claim that they have the ‘consensus’ of scientists is clearly false.
The consensus issue has appeared again within the first dozen comments in this thread. I came to the party late, but no one has been able to refute the fact that the OISM Petition swamps the impotent efforts of the alarmist contingent to try and show they have the consensus on the AGW issue. They do not.
You say that ‘climate science is about quality, not quantity.’ But the CAGW crowd has neither. Your claim that ‘90% of climate scientists who endorse AGW are the cream of the crop’ is ridiculous puffery. They are for the most part rent-seeking fiction writers with both front feet in the public trough, who run and hide out from public debates; they have gamed the climate peer review system for the easy money, and for the endless expense-paid trips around the world, and for seeing their names in lights [until Climategate exposed their fabrication of the climate record; inventing entire data sets as they went along]. Now they still get the money and the trips, but they are on the defensive, and like Al Gore, they closely stage manage any public appearances.
Your characterization of this clique of self-serving scam artists as independent critical thinkers is contradicted by the fact that they live in a self-imposed echo chamber, sealed off from the real world because there is only so much loot to go around, and they are intent on keeping it for themselves.
The fact is that the enormous funding of what should really be a scientific backwater is starving other much more deserving areas of science of their share of public funding. It is the reason that scientists and science professionals in other fields, who are not a part of that small climate clique, resent their own lack of funding — and that is where much of the consensus against AGW comes from.
People are not stupid. They see the climate scare game being played, and that they are not part of it. Tens of thousands of them willingly signed the OISM Petition, each for his/her own reasons. Spin it any way you like, but the fact is that the consensus, for what it’s worth, is not on the side of these CAGW Elmer Gantrys, who are gaming the system for their own personal financial benefit and carreer advancement: they have simply sold out their professional ethics to the highest bidder.
Jeff Brown: I don’t need to provide details of my career to you, because the discussion thread is not about my credentials. If you think people who work in industry don’t know anything about science or about how academia works, then you’re just ignorant.
My original comment was in response to barefootgirl’s patronizing assumption that nobody who disagreed with her could be a scientist. You perpetuated that attitude by assuming that I knew nothing about how the funding process works, etc. Neither of you has responded to the actual question I posed. Typical.
By the way, do you academic types understand that the money you receive from government grants is ultimately generated by the activities of the private sector?
If the “CO2 drives the Climate” hypotheses were true, we would have home climate systems based CO2, but we don’t. Space Blankets would kept campers warm, but they don’t. Swamp cooler would be swamp heaters but they are not.
[snip – look, I’m fine if you want to discuss issues or even call me names here like you do on your blog, but your constant trolling for traffic is a no-no – Anthony]
[Subsequent post by “Brighton Early” moved to a separate folder. Nothing objectionable in it, but site policy makes it clear that bad behavior has consequences. ~dbs, mod.]
davidmhoffer says:
May 19, 2010 at 7:55 pm
Wren;
What I found is average global surface temperature rose by 0.7 C or 1.3 F from 1980 to 2009 while CO2 concentrations rose from about 340 ppm to 380ppm. I calculated the absolute increases in temperatures from the anomalies in the linked source>>
Well why not go from 1917 to 1937 instead and only in the NH? That way you get an even bigger temp rise against an even smaller amount of CO2. You just aren’t very good at warmist strategy, are you Wren?
====
I’m trying to be good at being objective and even-handed, the way a skeptic is supposed to be. It’s a struggle.
“The idea that there are only 50 scientists who believe that human activities are influencing our climate is a joke.” Why is the argument FOR always using this notion and never specifics? Might as well toss up a consensus statement that 100% of nutritionists agree “Food is good for you!” and hang that sign above the golden arches. Its every bit as accurate as the blanket statement about an agreement that man’s existence alters his surroundings hands the ball into the alarmist camp. May as well toss out there that “The vast majority of nutritionists agree that without at least bi-weekly visit to what the golden arches represents, an untimely death is assured.” and let the panicked public suckle on that.
In 2007 the American Physical Society (chief organization of professional physicists) published a statement that was quite alarmist and claimed
Such a statement was embraced by the CAGW crowd, but was yet another example of Conquest’s second law of politicsAny organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing
There was an almost immediate backlash from some of the physics membership, since the APS leadership didn’t actually bother to poll its membership before issuing this statement on their behalf. One of the key physicists in opposition was Willie Happer. More than two years later a supplemental commentary was finally issued.
A cursory reading of this commentary may still come across as alarmist, but keep in mind that this was put out by the same leadership that issued the original statement. However, a careful reading is much more qualified. It states in part:
Translation: the science is not settled.
“Mike says:
May 18, 2010 at 2:39 pm
You will at least admit that among climate scientists the “skeptics” are in the minority.”
I would be happy to admit that among “scientists” whose livelyhood depends on global warming hysteria; (a large number) there is a strong consensus. Among the crumudgeons who have positions not dependant on the funding provided to promote AGW the “consensus” doesn’t do very well at all.
Smokey: “The consensus issue has appeared again within the first dozen comments in this thread.”
Check again, and you will see that consensus is the subject of this post, and the word appears in the heading.
“I came to the party late, but no one has been able to refute the fact that the OISM Petition swamps the impotent efforts of the alarmist contingent to try and show they have the consensus on the AGW issue.”
The deciding factor is the work carried out in climate science, and the consensus there is with AGW. In addition, the vast majority of scientific societies support AGW.
“…scientists and science professionals in other fields, who are not a part of that small climate clique, resent their own lack of funding — and that is where much of the consensus against AGW comes from.”
Professional jealousy is not an adequate justification for scientific scepticism.
One of the most noticeable features of climate scepticism is the constant re-tread of faces. The same old, same old keep cropping up, and this has been a feature of climate scepticism for a good number of years.
On the warming side, however, studies supporting warming often reveal new and younger faces, for example as we have seen recently with the Lake Tanganyika study. They are the future of climate studies.
Despite the novels Barefootgirliegirl writes in this thread, and despite being asked at least twice, I am still waiting for Barefootgirl to answer Theo Goodwin’s question (in comment May 18, 2010 at 6:49 pm):
“So, please barefootgirl, tell me, are there empirical hypotheses that can be stated as universal generalizations and used to explain forcings and predict their behavior?”
should be easy for her and obviously readily available to her, given the fact that she is an esteemed climate scientist (and so in the know, right?) and a big supporter of the conclusions that are based (and heavily depending on) the answer to this question. Right?
Still waiting (in my case for a year or two already)…
Wren says:
May 18, 2010 at 11:13 pm
The world’s water supply is fixed at 332.6 million cubic miles, according to the source below. I’m sure that’s an estimate that could be off a little, but it seems likely the supply of water is fixed :
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/watercyclesummary.html
Of course water affects climate, but the question is how can a fixed supply of water cause long-term warming?
Wren, during the 90-100k yr active-glacial periods, the world’s rain-forests shrink dramatically into pockets of forest surrounded by savanna or tropical dry-forest. Deserts and savannas expand elsewhere. A few regional areas get more rain (like the US west) due to jet-stream changes, but overall precip decreases significantly. This is due to increases/decreases in the overall hydrological “machine”.
So the precipitable water in the atmosphere, from this empirical evidence, changes significantly w/the glacial/interglacial temperature changes. The water vapor isn’t “fixed”. This is the water vapor positive feedback, which I believe exists, but, like CO2, has a complementary effect on changing temps, but not a dominate one.
Also, tho it’s true that water-vapor doesn’t significantly “accumulate” like CO2 does, changes can affect local areas. Creation of lakes/impoundments of significant size certainly affect the nearby areas w/more greenhouse effect (especially in deserts). And elimination of moist, transpiring forests or fields in favor of concrete/asphalt does too — the UHI effect. But I don’t think those changes are of a big enough scale to have any global effect yet.
Brendan H,
I see you’re repeating the latest talking point of the alarmist contingent: “studies supporting warming often reveal new and younger faces.” Cognitive dissonance makes the climate alarmist crowd march in lock-step.
And note that skeptics are by definition immune from CD: skeptics question, while true believers wait for the flying saucers to appear on the appointed date. When they don’t show, the believers simply shrug and re-set the date. They never wonder if maybe there never were any flying saucers.
The true believers in CAGW also point exclusively to the Arctic, while studiously ignoring the Antarctic. Since the alarmist contingent makes a point of saying that CO2 is evenly distributed around the globe, why isn’t the Antarctic losing ice? The answer, of course, is that the Arctic is simply a local climate, influenced primarily by ocean currents. But the question has always be about global warming.
And as the article here points out, science is not decided by numbers, but if it were, there is the case to be made that the consensus is now on the sceptical side. Despite all the frantic handwaving by the losing side of the argument, the fact remains that the alarmist crowd has been trying for at least thirteen years to collect petition signatures — far longer than the OISM Petition Project — and they still don’t have even 20% of the OISM numbers, in all their various petitions added together.
The fact is that among professionals in the physical sciences, the consensus, for what it’s worth, is heavily on the side of skeptics.
Smokey writes:
The true believers in CAGW also point exclusively to the Arctic, while studiously ignoring the Antarctic. Since the alarmist contingent makes a point of saying that CO2 is evenly distributed around the globe, why isn’t the Antarctic losing ice? The answer, of course, is that the Arctic is simply a local climate, influenced primarily by ocean currents. But the question has always be about global warming.
Smokey, time to get your facts straight. It is the Antarctic that is primarily influenced by ocean currents as it is surrounded by the ocean, whereas the Arctic is surrounded by land. There are many studies and I have on several occasions given you the references on those studies that discuss the Antarctic sea ice and what is driving the observed changes. It appears that you have never bothered to read a single one of those papers. Because if you did, you would see the foolishness of your statements.
Wijnand says:
May 20, 2010 at 9:22 am
Wijnand, you seem to have missed barefootgirls last entry which said she was doing this blogging to learn more about how the skeptics try to argue their points. She’s probably sitting on the beach right now having a good laugh.
Wijnand May 20, 2010 at 9:22 am,
And I am still waiting for BFG to explain why she fabricated her malicious story about “crazy skeptics” making death threats.
Until/unless BFG responds with reasonable, verifiable explanations, she has no credibility. And why should anyone believe anything she says about her claimed qualifications?
I have a feeling we won’t be hearing much more from barefootgirl.
It is interesting that the trolls are back … wonder what has got their knickers in a knot?
jeff brown May 20, 2010 at 10:25 am,
Classic misdirection. Make no mistake: the alarmist claim is that a rise in human produced CO2 will cause catastrophic runaway global warming… even though human emitted CO2 is a tiny fraction of that tiny trace gas.
But if a rise in CO2 only causes slight to moderate warming, as appears to be the case, or if other unknown feedbacks nullify the effect of CO2, then the best course of action is to do nothing, because doing the wrong thing can easily cause more harm than a slight rise in temperature. So the alarmist position must be that a tiny, harmless and beneficial trace gas will cause a climate catastrophe. Climate alarmists cling to that evidence-deficient belief and feed off it.
OTOH, if you agree that we currently know too little to take action, or if you agree that the planet is not responding as predicted by CAGW
theoryhypothesisconjecture, or if you agree that a small increase in the global temperature will free up immense tracts of land for farming in Mongolia, Siberia and similar locations, and increase rainfall, and on balance would be beneficial to life on Earth, then we have no disagreement.But if you’re going to continue pushing the model based CO2=CAGW conjecture, then expect pushback, because you lack testable, verifiable, replicable facts based on empirical data; you’re asking us to buy a pig in a poke.
In that case, no sale.
Smokey, interesting how you avoid what my comment was in reference to. You should do your own background research/reading before making foolish statements about Antarctic sea ice. It’s the same with Arctic sea ice. You need to take the time to understand the processes that control the ice extent in both hemispheres.
I do agree with you that we don’t know enough yet to be alarmists about future catastrophic changes. I am no alarmist. But I do see the changes happening on the Earth today and while we can argue non-stop about what is causing those, they are nevertheless happening. So science that continues to try to understand the processes at work is important. And most scientific papers are exactly about that, process studies. I do think the Arctic Ocean is going to see ice-free summers in my lifetime. This is based on the fact that the changes happening today do not appear to be explained by natural variability. Seems it doesn’t matter what type of weather patterns you have each year, the ice is still going down. So something different is acting on the system. This extreme negative AO winter is a perfect example of that. And again while we can argue on and on about the causes of the sea ice decline, an ice-free Arctic Ocean will impact weather around the planet, so it’s something of importance to study.
jeff brown:
And there is the problem in a nutshell: even though the Arctic has been ice free many times since the start of the Holocene, somehow, for some unknown reason, this time it’s different?
I look at it from a different angle: from the point of view of a skeptic, according to the scientific method. What I see is simply natural climate variability; the null hypothesis. Everything observed today has routinely happened before.
The climate is well within its historical parameters. In fact, the current climate is almost ideal.
Others look at cyclical events like the Arctic, or other weather events, and get freaked out for no good reason. I don’t mind if they frighten themselves, but the fact is that the CAGW scare is being deliberately promoted by the government in order to jack up taxes and prices across the board. Anyone who doesn’t see that has a large blind spot in their view of reality.
So what if the Arctic melts? It has happened many times before. Sea levels will be unaffected. Ocean crossings will be more efficient. And in time, it will re-freeze again like it always has.
Attributing these events to human activity is pure hubris. The scientific method evolved as a means to advance science. But there is no true scientific method practiced in government funded climate science, or in the tightly controlled climate peer review process. Only those who can rise above the scare tactics being employed will be able to see clearly what nature is doing.
Smokey writes: So what if the Arctic melts? It has happened many times before. Sea levels will be unaffected. Ocean crossings will be more efficient. And in time, it will re-freeze again like it always has.
Smokey, it is not clear if the Arctic sea ice has melted entirely in summer since humans have been on the planet. Current estimates are at least 800,000 years of sea ice present (and the oldest human-linked fossil is 3 million years old). But if humans were here, there were a hell of a lot less of them. The impacts on weather from such a profound shift in the Arctic climate state, will affect us all, not just the folks living in the Arctic. And while sea ice in itself does not affect sea level rise, taking it away does amplify warming which impacts on places like Greenland.
So actually, it is an important issue because everything on this planet is connected. Scientists have a good handle on the causes of past major climate shifts (i.e. glacial and interglacial periods related to the Earth’s orbital variations). Unfortunately, those factors are not in effect right now. So research into understanding why it’s happening now is needed.
And you should be smart enough to realize that even if you don’t believe that we should reduce our CO2 emissions, that we should still be working towards alternative energy sources because there is not an unlimited supply of fossil fuels. I wonder too if you care about pollution from oil and gas industries, oil spills, acid rain, clean water, cancer, etc. etc. There are many good reasons to work towards cleaner energy.
jeff brown says:
May 20, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Well … umm … yeah, it is clear.
Please note that the polar bears didn’t go extinct during this time, the ungrateful wretches …
barefootgirl says:
May 18, 2010 at 9:26 pm
Not sure what your point is here, barefootgirl. I said that the organizers sent out lots of requests for AGW supporting scientists to come and speak. You seem to be objecting to the fact that they didn’t issue a blanket invitation to everyone to speak, but it’s not clear if that really is your issue.
For the record, here are the AGW supporting scientists that were invited, only two of whom agreed to speak.
Phil Jones
Michal Mann
Gavin Schmidt
Alan Robock
James Hansen
Noah Diffenbaugh
Timothy Hall
Steve Running
Brad Udall
Marty Hoerling
Caspar Amman
Rasmus Benestad
Raymond Bradley
Eric Steig
Tom Karl
Tom Wigley
Ken Briffa
Kevin Trenberth
Michael Oppenheimer
Michael Schlesinger
Alison Wise
Scott Denning
Tam Hunt
I’m sorry your name is not on the list … but then when you hide behind the name “barefootgirl”, it’s kinda hard to invite you to anything …
However, drop me an email if you’d like an invitation to speak at the next conference, I’ll see what I can do. I’m willis [at) taunovobay.com
And if you are not willing to speak either, like the others who declined to speak at the conference, what are you complaining about? Here’s your chance to put up or …
w.
Willis…but it doesn’t say completely ice free does it? Could be the ice was located someplace else.
And I’m curious, what makes you believe this study over another? Do you simply chose ones that fit your beliefs?
Oh and I wonder how many people were on the planet 6,000 years ago. Probably not a whole heck of a lot, and most were probably living in Africa.
Here’s a different study for you Willis. BWT, maybe best to use a published paper rather than a meeting abstract to make you point.
Moran et al., 2006
The history of the Arctic Ocean during the Cenozoic era (0–65 million years ago) is largely unknown from direct evidence. Here we present a Cenozoic palaeoceanographic record constructed from >400 m of sediment core from a recent drilling expedition to the Lomonosov ridge in the Arctic Ocean. Our record shows a palaeoenvironmental transition from a warm ‘greenhouse’ world, during the late Palaeocene and early Eocene epochs, to a colder ‘icehouse’ world influenced by sea ice and icebergs from the middle Eocene epoch to the present. For the most recent approx14 Myr, we find sedimentation rates of 1–2 cm per thousand years, in stark contrast to the substantially lower rates proposed in earlier studies; this record of the Neogene reveals cooling of the Arctic that was synchronous with the expansion of Greenland ice (approx3.2 Myr ago) and East Antarctic ice (approx14 Myr ago). We find evidence for the first occurrence of ice-rafted debris in the middle Eocene epoch (approx45 Myr ago), some 35 Myr earlier than previously thought; fresh surface waters were present at approx49 Myr ago, before the onset of ice-rafted debris. Also, the temperatures of surface waters during the Palaeocene/Eocene thermal maximum (approx55 Myr ago) appear to have been substantially warmer than previously estimated. The revised timing of the earliest Arctic cooling events coincides with those from Antarctica, supporting arguments for bipolar symmetry in climate change.
Joel Shore;
The 255 K value is not the temperature at the TOA. It is the effective radiating temperature of the earth, so it already takes into account that some emission from the surface is escaping through the atmospheric window.>>
I just re-read this and realised how misleading it is (not what you said, how the IPCC is modeling things). Modeling the earth system in this fashion may have some value in terms of an over all energy balance discussion, but if you stop and think about it, the original numbers I used (288 K) are the right ones.
By thinking of it as an average from surface to TOA we are confining our analysis to a representation of earth as a black body calculation at some height in the atmosphere at a temperature of 255K and assuming some sort of generalized response (for example CO2 doubling is 1.1 degrees) for the system as a whole. Well stop and think about it for a moment and we see how misleading that is.
The atmosphere does not warm (or cool) in a linear fashion. Even at a new equilibrium point we expect cold regions (high altitudes, arctic regions, etc) to increase temperature more than warm regions. So we are less interested in what the average temperature change is, and more interested in what happens to the gradient. If the average goes up 1 degree, but at earth surface it goes up 0.1 and at TOA it goes up 2.1, I’m not certain we care nearly as much. That said, let’s go back to forcing.
While we might be able to calculate an “average” temperature increase from surface to TOA for a given forcing, each layer must still obey the laws of physics. For the surface temperature of earth, the part where we live, work, play, and grow food, to increase by 1 degree, the additional radiance (from dirt, sea surface, etc) must be calculated against the average surface temperature which is 288 K, not 255. So… if we apply Stefan Boltzman, the surface radiance must increase by 5.5 watts/m2 for a 1 degree temperature increase as per my original comment. It can’t emitt +5.5 watts extra unless we put an extra 5.5 watts into it in the first place.
Since the forcing claimed by the IPCC is 3.7 watts/m2 for CO2 doubling, it is not possible to increase temperature by 1.1 degrees at surface. If we assume that 100% of the forcing arrives at earth surface (ie 0% gets absorbed in the atmosphere which would be near impossible) we get a surface temperature increase of only 0.67 degrees. If say 1/2 of it encountered CO2 on the downward journey, was absorbed and re-radiated back up, we would get a surface temperature increase of only 0.3 degrees. If we scale for 380 ppm that translates to a surface temperature increase of 0.34 (100 % at surface) and 0.15 (50% at surface) respectively. Seems pretty reasonable given that the last 100 years saw a 0.6 degree increase and the previous century was about 0.5 due to natural variability.
So… in addition to the next few hundred ppm of CO2 being almost meaningless because CO2 is logarithmic, it now becomes plain that the IPCC claims of 1.1 degree sensitivity for CO2 doubling are an average from surface to TOA (or perhaps top of Troposphere?) and can’t possibkly support a 1.1 degree temperature increase at surface. If surface temps go up by 0.15 degrees and top of the troposphere 10 kilometers up goes goes up by 2.05 degrees for an average of 1.1, do you really think anyone will care? Will anyone even notice?
There was a statistical analysis on WUWT of the surface temp record concluding that surface temp sensitivity to CO2 was less than 0.2 degrees. The IPCC is not only misleading us in terms of how much additional forcing the next 200 years of fossil fuel consumption will bring, they’ve presented a math calculation that is reasonable in terms of the assumptions used, and completely and totaly useless and astoundingly misleading in determining what increase in temperature we should expect in the part that matters, earth’s surface.
All the misleading hooey that I caught them on this last six months and I didn’t twig onto this one until just now. Thanks for bringing it up Joel. Can’t believe I almost let them get that one past me.
nedhead says:
May 20, 2010 at 12:43 pm
Well, it says “the Arctic Ocean was free of sea ice”, which seems clear.
Willis, no it says: dropped boulders indicate that the Arctic Ocean was nearly free of sea ice in the summer at the time when they were formed.
Nearly is not the same as ice free. And it’s not the only study out there looking at the last time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free. There is no consensus right now as to the last time the Arctic was ice free.
jeff brown says:
May 20, 2010 at 12:50 pm
Yeah, peer review has been such an outstanding indicator of good climate science in the past …
How about you comment on their findings rather than where they were published?
In addition, the study was published in EOS, and was cited in the US CCSP Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.2, which was peer reviewed.
[snip – look, I’m fine if you want to discuss issues or even call me names here like you do on your blog, but your constant trolling for traffic is a no-no – Anthony]
Anthony, I looked into your blog’s policy and I looked into the definition of troll.
1. Your policy: No links to commercial websites that are not relevant to the discussion.
2. Troll: In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion [source language=”wikipedia”][/source][/source].
A link to an article relevant to the topic that is published/posted elsewhere does not constitute a violation to your site’s policy or ‘trollism’. Alone your linking of commenter’s name and website could be considered ‘trolling for traffic’, which it isn’t in this case, but would be if the link was, let’s say, to the coca cola website. This was not the case.
Since you guys are constantly attempting to re-invent the wheel, is the commenter advised by you to do the same and copy and paste the stuff over?
You have my email address!
P.S. 3 words on calling names:
1. If somebody takes seasonal 2D snow extent in the northern hemisphere as evidence of AGW or not AGW or whatever, then my toenails roll up and down. You as a weatherman should know better [and if not, here are the keywords: short-term; regional]. In Calgary, we had the warmest winter on record – which still says absolutely nothing on AGW/not AGW.
2. If somebody starts a discussion on satellite vs. surface temps…and this has been discussed by relevant people (who deal with this on a daily basis), why is this ignored in your blog? Answer: because the your discussion woul a non-issue. You just use this to create doubt on AGW.
3. Most of what Mr. Helmer says is factually, errr., not feasable. Examples:
“you end up with fifty or so true believers” [referring to climate scientists]
“…Hockey Stick graph, perhaps the most discredited artefact in the history of science.” [by who?]
“small and incestuous group of scientists ”
“They work closely together, jealously protecting their source data, and they peer-review each other’s work. This is the “consensus” on which climate hysteria is based.” [I would say this is paranoia]
This is true creationism!
Below is the text I had attempted to link to, but the linking had been critisized and the post removed. I think it is a very subtle rant that applies extremely well to Mr. Helmer.
Some skeptics consider proponents of what the broad body of science and the IPPC say, that global warming is manmade and real, as true believers: knowledge vs. belief. This is principally true, albeit it is the other way round.
That is because this ‘belief’ that AGW is true is not contained in a confessional framework, which only holds together by a multitude of non-testable additional statements. It is rather a reasonable assumption based on the knowledge of physical laws and empirical observations.
In other words, proponents of AGW do not believe this in a religious sense but in a pragmatic one, based on knowledge.
People who do not believe that AGW is real do this in a dramaturgy that has religious patterns. The opposite of knowing is not not-knowing but believing. Not knowing something can be remedied by knowledge. Just ask somebody who knows that and you know it, too.
Things that are believed in a religious way are being corrected by the normative power of fact because the statement to be believed was formulated without knowing the facts. Is the fallacy obvious and provable, then the believed statement is not revised, however blocked from the harsh reality by a false, protective statement, in which facts should run out of steam. An example is intelligent design.
What does this mean for climate change denial? Climate skeptics believe that global warming cannot be triggered by greenhouse gases because this is physically not possible. But this does not hold water. Science proves that wrong. Now the skeptics could say: ‘Wow, I didn’t know that, I have learnt something. Done deal!’ This would be the case if we were talking knowledge – but this is not the case.
Therefore, an additional statement is attached to the believed item: it is a conspiracy. The physicists are wrong. This statement is supported by the fact that ‘these physicists’ use the elitist language that has been disliked from school days on: the language of maths, which is considered a secret language, but only by those who do not want to learn it. Maths is actually quite a public language. Once a group of people has been caught using secret language, this opens the door for a conspiracy theory.
Somebody believes that something like a moon landing cannot have happened. Another person knows that this was very well possible. He could even prove it with maths. The ‘believer’ might say: cannot check it 100% because I am not a math whiz, but I am assuming that the experts arrived at the right decision and don’t all lie simultaneously.
Or he believes something new that supports the original claim and is in contrast to its rebuttal. This includes isolated studies that contradict the broad body of scientific research or simply fringe-science. Whatever is convenient.
The ‘skeptic’ says: all physicists are lying (Al Gore is lying; Michael Mann is lying; Phil Jones is lying)! This removes all facts from the equation.
But why is belief sometimes more attractive than knowledge?
Knowledge involves a rather inflexible, tedious learning process, based on testable statements. Belief is easy: one just has to be ready to believe something. This requires much less work and failure is excluded because belief is not subjected to the principles of falsifiability.
In contrast, scientific statements underlie the demand to be testable.
If a test turns out wrong, then the statement is proven wrong. Science is principally no surrogate religion. It distinguishes cause and effect. Failure is acknowledged and part of the equation. It sends the scientist back to the drafting table to revise the statement. The path to knowledge leads always through error. Per aspera ad astra. A painful, repetitive process.
In summary, the world is not as we believe it to be, the world is as it is.
Comment: This rant was addressing people who claim the moon landing was a hoax. Do you see how interchangeable the thinking patterns of deniers are? They do actually not rely on a certain topic at all.
REPLY: You can post comments so long as they aren’t off topic, insulting, or trolling for traffic by making excessive links. You were pushing links to generate traffic. This post is borderline, and was removed from another section because you posted it in error making it off topic, but I’ll allow it. Given your labeling/name calling and treatment of me and others, I’m not concerned if you think you are being treated fairly of not. As I mention, this is my home on the Internet, and like a boorish dinner guest in my home, I have no compunction of tossing you out on your ear. You aren’t off to a good start with the tired old moon lander deniers shtick. Bottom line, be civil and treat people with respect, stop on the names/labels and you can stick around. Bear in mind that I and other moderators have alow tolerance level for the sorts of arguments you make, we’ve heard them all before, and aren’t worth the effort to moderate. – Anthony
Well Willis, first off they can’t say “ice free” can they when they are looking at only 1 location in the Arctic, the North Greenland coast. And while wave action does indicate the presence of open water, there is no way they can say the entire Arctic was ice free. So until you can present a paper that gives scientific evidence that the entire Arctic was ice free at some point during the summer, you nor I really know the last time it happened.
jeff brown says:
May 20, 2010 at 2:14 pm (Edit)
Thanks, Jeff. I don’t know if they “can’t say ‘ice free'” … I just pointed out that they did say the Arctic Ocean was nearly free of sea ice. Here’s why they said it:
My point was simple, that there is good evidence that ice free conditions occurred during the Holocene. You are correct that we can’t prove it happened, so we really don’t know for sure (and never will) … but we have good evidence. Unless you have some other explanation for the striated boulders and the “staircase” beach ridges, I’ll go with that. In other words, current conditions are not outside historical variation.
Willis, since you seem to have read the paper, then tell me how high were the waves and what sort of fetch was that related to? i.e. what length of open water did they need to achieve it? Just because there is no ice in that region for a period in summer to allow for the wave action results they looked at it doesn’t mean that the distribution of ice in the Arctic Basin wasn’t different than it is today. Yes, today the oldest and thickest ice is found north of Greenland and in the Canadian Archipelago, but what if things were shifted so that it piled up elsewhere in the Arctic 6,000 years ago? That’s entirely possible and until they take cores, or do similar analysis at other land locations around the Arctic to match up with what is observed in Northern Greenland, you really don’t know. If conversely, a paper had said the evidence is that the Arctic Ocean had not been ice free in a million years based on one location, I’m sure you would find fault with the study. Apply the same rigor to all studies, regardless of your known bias as to the outcome you want to see…
jeff brown says:
May 20, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Like I said, YMMV … all you can do is read what they say, and judge for yourself. What you say is certainly possible.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Once you tell us which study you’re talking about, I’ll let you know. I judge each study as it actually appears.
Willis Eschenbach says:
May 20, 2010 at 3:04 pm
Oh, yeah, to your question. In addition to the beach ridges, they found striated boulders. This indicates that the ice melted there, rather than moving away from there.
Also, if wind was blowing the ice away from North Greenland, you wouldn’t get much wave action on the shore because the wind would be blowing offshore.
But like I said, YMMV, all we can do is consider these issues and decide what the preponderance of evidence indicates …
Brighton Early;
There are so many fallacies in your comment that refuting them would take considerably more time than I have right now. Two points:
1. Anthony’s Blog. His. The amount of tolerance he displays and insists that others display is remarkable. But still his blog.
2. Your comment as follows:
” Climate skeptics believe that global warming cannot be triggered by greenhouse gases because this is physically not possible.”
I’m certain there are skeptics out there that believe this. I’m also certain that the bulk of us that have investigated the matter in detail readily admit that this is possible. Our objection is NOT, as you assert, based on dissmissing the physics and math. It is exactly the opposite. The physics and math is presented in such a manner that it is technicaly accurate, and incredibly misleading. When the physics and math is presented in a straight forward and honest manner, AGW follows apart, not by dismissing the physics, but by endorsing it. Yes CO2 absorbs LW and re-emitts it such that some of what would otherwise have escaped into space is instead returned to earth. Agreed.
1. CO2 suffers from the law of diminishing returns because it is logarithmic. Sound prinicples of physics that the IPCC quietly ignores.
2. A warming planet increases the amount of radiance to space exponentially, also sound physics, and further diminishes the effects additional CO2 can have.
3. IPCC projections are predicated upon a continued acceleration of fossil fuel consumption that cannot physicaly be achieved, and so arrive mathematicaly at CO2 concentration projections that are unrealistic. The math is sound but rests upon a false assumption.
4. IPCC projections claim a climate sensitivity of 1.1 degrees for CO2 doubling from pre-industrial levels. They fail to make clear that this is a number representing the average for the surface to the atmosphere, that the effects are much amplified at higher altitudes, and much diminished at near surface. They compound this misleading statement further by failing to provide a graph of the sensitivity beyond their computed range as this would expose the law of diminishing returns alluded to above in a most convincing fashion.
5. The IPCC claims positive feedbacks from water vapour based on the assumption that water vapour levels will consume the available capacity of the atmosphere as temperatures increase. Observation suggests that this hasn’t happened on a long term basis, it doesn’t happen on a short term basis such as daily fluctuations in temperature 15 times those suggested for CO2 forcing, and if this were possible in the first place, there have been conditions in earth’s past that would have triggered a tipping point, but did not.
So you see, I reject AGW not by dismissing the math and physics, but by understanding math and physics and properly applying them.
The manner in which you attempt to characterize skeptics across the board is disingenuous at best. It is like me asking you… is it true that you have stopped beating your wife?
davidmhoffer says:
[1. CO2 suffers from the law of diminishing returns because it is logarithmic. Sound prinicples of physics that the IPCC quietly ignores.]
By the time we have doubled once to 560 ppm, we will be warm enough. If there are diminishing returns later, it won’t matter by then.
[2. A warming planet increases the amount of radiance to space exponentially, also sound physics, and further diminishes the effects additional CO2 can have.]
Increasing CO2 actually reduces the longwave output, and the earth has to respond by warming to rebalance the solar input.
[3. IPCC projections are predicated upon a continued acceleration of fossil fuel consumption that cannot physicaly be achieved, and so arrive mathematicaly at CO2 concentration projections that are unrealistic. The math is sound but rests upon a false assumption.]
No, they have optimistic and pessimistic projections in terms of CO2 levels. These bracket the expected range, though the pessimistic ones are looking more realistic at the moment.
[4. IPCC projections claim a climate sensitivity of 1.1 degrees for CO2 doubling from pre-industrial levels. They fail to make clear that this is a number representing the average for the surface to the atmosphere, that the effects are much amplified at higher altitudes, and much diminished at near surface. They compound this misleading statement further by failing to provide a graph of the sensitivity beyond their computed range as this would expose the law of diminishing returns alluded to above in a most convincing fashion.]
This is where the 255 K number comes in. That is just a temperature equivalent to the actual longwave output, but people understand temperatures better than Watts per square meter, so it is expressed that way to improve understanding. For CO2 forcing, warming occurs at the surface and cooling at the top of the atmosphere.
[5. The IPCC claims positive feedbacks from water vapour based on the assumption that water vapour levels will consume the available capacity of the atmosphere as temperatures increase. Observation suggests that this hasn’t happened on a long term basis, it doesn’t happen on a short term basis such as daily fluctuations in temperature 15 times those suggested for CO2 forcing, and if this were possible in the first place, there have been conditions in earth’s past that would have triggered a tipping point, but did not.]
The water vapor feedback is based on the idea that as the air warms, so will the ocean, and the equilibrium vapor will increase with ocean temperature. The feedback factor is not sufficient for a runaway greenhouse, just an amplification of the CO2 effect by 2-4. No credible scientist talks about runaway greenhouse in the context of Earth (maybe Venus).
“So, please barefootgirl, tell me, are there empirical hypotheses that can be stated as universal generalizations and used to explain forcings and predict their behavior?”
Let me try instead. Empirical hypothesis: What comes in, goes out. This is earth’s energy balance in equilibrium. Incoming is solar, outgoing is reflected solar and emitted infrared.
What can upset this balance? CO2 can.
How? It prevents energy from getting out by reducing outgoing infrared.
How is equilibrium re-achieved? Either outgoing infrared increases (atmosphere warms or CO2 is reduced or high clouds are reduced) or reflected solar increases (more clouds, aerosols, ice cover). Note that high clouds have both positive and negative effects, and are generally a wash regarding the budget.
Consensus is: atmosphere warms, but increasing pollution aerosols can mitigate it too (see global dimming) as can volcanoes (Pinatubo).
Furthermore atmospheric warming eventually leads to a warmer ocean and more water vapor which has a heat-trapping effect of its own. Reduction of ice cover also feeds back positively, but that effect is less important now than in the Ice Ages when more ice was around.
Is this empirical enough? Bottom line is that the earth’s energy balance, as viewed from space, is the driver, and we are doing things that affect that. Hope this makes it clear as there is some confusion here that became evident from this question.
davidmhoffer says:
There is a good reason why climate scientists consider the first-order (no-feedback) case to be what happens at the effective radiating level and that is that this is what controls the energy balance of the earth (with sun and space), since the only significant thermal communication that the earth has with the sun and space is via radiation. And, it doesn’t make sense to look at the radiative balance at the surface because it turns out that the surface temperature relative to the temperature in the rest of the troposphere is determined not so much by radiation as by turbulent mixing, e.g., convection, latent heat, … [There is a particularly nice little calculation in the book “Global Warming: The Hard Science” by L.D. Danny Harvey in which he shows that (under the assumption of a 2 C per CO2 doubling climate sensitivity), a 10 W/m^2 change in the greenhouse effect produces a warming of about 5 K at the surface whereas a 10 W/m^2 in the amount of downwelling radiation from the atmosphere to the surface produces only about a 0.1 K increase in the surface temperature while warming the atmosphere by about 0.3 K.]
So, no your 5.5 W/m^2 number is not particularly relevant. That said, there is a little germ of truth in your post, namely that it is expected that the mid-troposphere will warm faster than the earth’s surface. This is especially true in the tropics (and actually reversed at the poles), but on a global scale the warming is still expected to be modestly warmer at altitude than at the surface. This is included in all of the climate models by what is called the “lapse rate feedback” and this is a negative feedback that “takes back” some of the temperature rise at the surface due to the positive water vapor feedback. It turns out that while different models have different strengths for these two feedbacks, models with stronger water vapor feedbacks tend to have stronger lapse rate feedbacks (since the same convective processes play into both) and so the sum of the two feedbacks (one positive and one negative) tends to vary considerably less from model to model than the two individual feedbacks do.
There’s lots of interesting science to read about in the climate system and I encourage you to read more about our current understanding rather than just ignoring it. A little humility and respect for what other scientists have learned through the collective scientific enterprise goes a long way in all branches of science!
Right Willis, but you are the one who said that the issue was clear in your 12:32 post. So now you are saying it’s not certain the last time the Arctic Ocean was ice-free? Which is it? And if the ice melted there again that doesn’t mean the entire Ocean was ice-free right? It only indicates that in that region for some time there was some open water present.
Willis Eschenbach says:
I think you are missing the question here, Willis. It is not whether subjects like physics do or do not provide a good grounding for getting into the field of climate science…Of course they do. Rather, the question is whether, say, a degree in physics automatically qualifies one as any sort of expert in climate science, absent any evidence that the person has actually done a significant amount of studying in the field, has actually become an active participant in the field (publishing papers in reputable peer-reviewed journals), and so forth.
Another issue is how broadly representative a sample is of the actual viewpoint of the people it purports to be sampling. The Oregon petition is not representative both because it chooses from a very large sample of people (e.g., there are probably millions of Americans qualified to sign by their standards) and because it doesn’t do anything close to a random sample of these people…It only records the opinions of those who agree with it, not those who disagree.
Dr. P says:
And who has said it is? Obviously, we want to continue to reduce the uncertainties and so forth. However, also note that the APS does not advocate doing nothing to mitigate emissions on the policy side until the science reaches some higher level of certainty. In fact, they argue quite directly for taking action. And, this is because the APS understands that uncertainty is a natural part of science and that it is not an excuse for inaction. They know that in science, we never know everything but just because we do not know everything, it does not mean we know nothing. In general, we know different things to different degrees of certainty and we always have to make choices of how to act in such an environment.
Jim D
May 20, 2010 at 6:33 pmdavidmhoffer says:
[1. CO2 suffers from the law of diminishing returns because it is logarithmic. Sound prinicples of physics that the IPCC quietly ignores.]
By the time we have doubled once to 560 ppm, we will be warm enough. If there are diminishing returns later, it won’t matter by then.>>
Do you know what logarithmic means? We started at 280 and now we are at 390 which is +1.8 watts for an extra 110 parts per million. It would require an additional 170 (about 1.5 times as much)to get us to 560, but that would only add an additional 1.9 watts, about the same as what we got from the first 110. Of the six stabilization strategies presented in AR4, three are in that range or higher. Why bother with a stabilization strategy at 660 to 790 if we’re all going to die at 560? Scenario VI in AR4 is 790 ppm, 210 ppm more than 580, but only another 1.6 watts. The mean surface temperature of the earth is 15 C. Do you know what it takes to heat it up one degree? 5.5 watts. Ooops.
[2. A warming planet increases the amount of radiance to space exponentially, also sound physics, and further diminishes the effects additional CO2 can have.]
Increasing CO2 actually reduces the longwave output, and the earth has to respond by warming to rebalance the solar input.
Exactly right and still wrong. During a transient temperature response the LW output is reduced. At equilibrium it is the same as before, but at a slightly higher temperature. The dispute is about how much higher the temperature would be.
[3. IPCC projections are predicated upon a continued acceleration of fossil fuel consumption that cannot physicaly be achieved, and so arrive mathematicaly at CO2 concentration projections that are unrealistic. The math is sound but rests upon a false assumption.]
No, they have optimistic and pessimistic projections in terms of CO2 levels. These bracket the expected range, though the pessimistic ones are looking more realistic at the moment.>>
AR4 quotes CO2 annual increase at about 1.9 ppm and growing 25% or more per year which would get us to 4 ppm in just a few years. Here’s the link to Manua Lao, you decide if that makes sense or not. AR4 was 2005 data so we conveniently have several years since then to see if 1.9 +25% per year makes any sense at all. Quick math that should mean about 4 ppm/year by 2010. Ooops. Scroll down to the full record, does it look linear or exponential? Ooops.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html
[4. IPCC projections claim a climate sensitivity of 1.1 degrees for CO2 doubling from pre-industrial levels. They fail to make clear that this is a number representing the average for the surface to the atmosphere, that the effects are much amplified at higher altitudes, and much diminished at near surface. They compound this misleading statement further by failing to provide a graph of the sensitivity beyond their computed range as this would expose the law of diminishing returns alluded to above in a most convincing fashion.]
This is where the 255 K number comes in. That is just a temperature equivalent to the actual longwave output, but people understand temperatures better than Watts per square meter, so it is expressed that way to improve understanding. For CO2 forcing, warming occurs at the surface and cooling at the top of the atmosphere.>>
255 K is the temperature at about 4 kilometers above sea level. 3.7 watts would cause about a 1.1 degree temperature rise. But at earth surface, where the mean temperature is about 288, 3.7 watts would only cause a 0.65 degree increase. This is precisely how the various models expected things to happen, a temperature rise mid troposphere of about double that of the surface. But as the plot of actual trend at various altitudes versus what various models predicted, we can see that they got it really, really, wrong: http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407074.pdf
Scroll down to the very last page where you can see all the graphs. The green lines are the models which predicted the numbers I just quoted based on the physics claimed by the IPCC, high change mid troposphere and low change surface, the blue lines wandering off in the opposite direction are what actually happened. Ooops.
[5. The IPCC claims positive feedbacks from water vapour based on the assumption that water vapour levels will consume the available capacity of the atmosphere as temperatures increase. Observation suggests that this hasn’t happened on a long term basis, it doesn’t happen on a short term basis such as daily fluctuations in temperature 15 times those suggested for CO2 forcing, and if this were possible in the first place, there have been conditions in earth’s past that would have triggered a tipping point, but did not.]
The water vapor feedback is based on the idea that as the air warms, so will the ocean, and the equilibrium vapor will increase with ocean temperature. The feedback factor is not sufficient for a runaway greenhouse, just an amplification of the CO2 effect by 2-4. No credible scientist talks about runaway greenhouse in the context of Earth (maybe Venus).>>
Wrong. Water vapour feedback is based on the properties of water which include the fact that for every 10 degrees of temperature increase of the ATMOSPHERE, the amount of water vapour the atmosphere can hold at maximum about doubles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Relative_Humidity.png
Since water vapour vastly exceeds CO2 as a greenhouse gas, the calculations of the IPCC were that water vapour feedback would about triple the direct effects of CO2 increases because of this property of water. However, water vapour concentrations have NOT increased with temperature. In fact, if the IPCC calculations of 3 degrees for CO2 doubling were correct, the temperature increase from CO2 should have added 1.0 degrees by 1975. By 2005, there should be enough forcing from CO2 and water vapour feedback to give us almost 1.5 degrees. What did we actually get? About 0.6 degrees. What was the temperature increase in the century before CO2 emissions became significant? 0.5 degrees. Ooops.
CO2 projections, wrong, see the link.
Troposphere modeling projections wrong, see the link.
Sensitivity wrong.
Water vapour increases wrong.
Logarithmic CO2, ignored
Exponential increase in radiance ignored.
Proposed solution => reduce emissions by 80%.
Number of people who will starve to death if we do… I dunno. 2 billion? 3 billion?
nedhead says:
May 20, 2010 at 8:04 pm
I’m not going to get into the semantics of “clear”, “kinda clear”, “pretty clear”. For me, the evidence presented is sufficient to let me know, as a seaman who has spent some time fishing in the Bering Sea up among the ice, that rafted boulders and ridged stairstep beaches on North Greenland are pretty convincing evidence of a degree of summer lack of Arctic ice that has never happened since we started keeping records.
Does it mean “ice-free”? No, there were likely a few areas with a few bergs, or some brash ice, or some areas of pack ice, or even enough ice cubes to chill a few martinis, so no it wasn’t ice-free, are you happy now? But … so freakin’ what? You want satellite pictures from 8,500 years ago? For me, the issue is that we haven’t seen waves on the beach or melting ice dropping boulders on North Greenland in human memory, but the study shows it definitely has happened during the Holocene. I see that as very significant. You don’t. So?
In closing, let me say for the third time, in the hope that you can take the hint:
Judge the dang thing for yourself, nedhead, but please stop pestering me about how I judge it. I’ve been very clear what I think, and I know what you think, so give it a rest.
Smokey: “And note that skeptics are by definition immune from CD: skeptics question…”
Except when they’re making dogmatic claims about the “climate alarmist” crowd walking in lockstep, all the while claiming a consensus of climate sceptics.
Smokey’s “definition”, meet reality.
“Despite all the frantic handwaving by the losing side of the argument…”
I’ve been reading a report by the US National Academies of Sciences, which begins:
“A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
This doesn’t sound like “frantic handwaving” by losers. And the report is also optimistic and inclusive: “decision makers of all types – including individuals, businesses, and governments at all levels – are now taking or planning actions to respond to climate change.”
There’s also a photograph of a farmer in his field, so you shouldn’t feel left out.
http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/Science_Report_Brief_Final.pd
Joel Shore;
There’s lots of interesting science to read about in the climate system and I encourage you to read more about our current understanding rather than just ignoring it. A little humility and respect for what other scientists have learned through the collective scientific enterprise goes a long way in all branches of science!>>
WELL EXCUSE ME MR HUMILITY!
Joel Shore;
So, no your 5.5 W/m^2 number is not particularly relevant>>
So may I ask, with all due humility, if the sea and land surface of the earth, at a mean temperature of 15 C, increases in temperature by one degree, and begins radiating an additional 5.5 watts/square meter at equilibrium, where the energy input to support it comes from? Is Stefan Boltzman suspended? Are the laws of thermodynamics suspended? Does magic work? You’re the one with the PhD in physics, you say the number isn’t relevant. Fine. Is it wrong? If so, explain why. Is it right? If so, then explain where the power is coming from to support it.
Joel Shore;
there is a little germ of truth in your post, namely that it is expected that the mid-troposphere will warm faster than the earth’s surface.>>
Not! It finaly dawned on me the slimy trick they played to portray 3.7 watts as 1.1 degrees by modeling the earth “surface” at an altitude of 4,000 meters where the temperature is about 255 K. I worked my math based on what I finaly understood was the way they were making the claim. Its their claim though, not mine. I spent the last couple of hours and found some projections from some models, and YUP! that’s what they do. Claim one number at 4000 meters to disguise the smaller number at earth surface because 0.65 degrees is a lot less alarming than 1.1 degrees. Of course I’ve never been a fan of modeling in isolation, I like confirmation by measurement. OOOPS SOMEONE DID!
http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0407/0407074.pdf
So Mr Humility (out of respect I hesitate to call you Joel) could you please put the full weight of your PhD in physics behind explaining why the models act the way the IPCC portrays them, they act the way YOU portray them, but they just don’t act like the real world. All the graphs are on the very last page ( I’m making it easy for you to find them so that your giant brain isn’t taxed with petty details that us poor ignorant layman have to slog through so your time can be free for PhD stuff).
You didn’t debunk my arguments except for trying to dismiss the surface radiance of the planet as “irrelevant” and you condescendingly advised me to educate myself after explaining to me how the troposphere works based on models that that are clearly refuted by observation. Pride goeth before a fall. Sir.
davidmhoffer says:
The IPCC statement is based on the combination of empirical that I mentioned, which while they include 2oth century data, also include other empirical data that gives stronger bounds on sensitivity, such as the last glacial maximum and the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. The strongest bounds (although still not that strong, since the range of the IPCC sensitivity estimate is still quite broad) are obtained by combining all of this together.
You have misunderstood my statement. I said the RATE of emissions doubles in 70 years if the emissions increase at 1% per year. (You may have misinterpreted this as stating when the CO2 level in the atmosphere will double.) This is standard mathematics. (The more naive assumption might be that it would take 100 years but it doesn’t because of compounding.)
I have one word for you: COAL. (Although also at high enough prices, more exotic sources of petroleum like the tar sands become very economically viable.) Coal is the fossil fuel that is most dangerous from the standpoint of the amount of potential rise in atmospheric CO2 levels it can produce given the known or estimated reserves.
Calculating the effective radiating temperature of the earth is straightforward, something you can have first-year physics majors do just based on what we receive from the sun (which can also be calculated from the sun’s temperature) and the earth’s albedo. It can also be quite accurately measured now. The fact that the measurements of energy transfers aren’t good down to a few W/m^2 or better that Trenberth would like them to be is a problem if you are looking at what is happening “at the margin” (as an economist would say); they matter not a wit for calculating the effective radiating temperature of the earth to an accuracy of, say, 1 K.
No…You could also conclude that for a function that consists of a slow (approximately) linear trend with significant fluctuations imposed, one has to collect data over a long enough period of time to get good enough signal-to-noise to determine the trend. Trends computed over periods of 10 or 15 years come with big error bars because of this. So, saying there has been no statistically-significant warming for certain (often cherry-picked) fairly short periods of time does not mean that the system is not still warming. It is just a statement about how long one has to wait to get small enough error bars to accurately determine a trend. (It is easy enough to confirm this sort of thing by generating artificial “data” on the computer; in this case, you know what the true underlying trend is because you determine it yourself.)
The BBC never misses a chance to promote AGW. A recent news item concerned a tiny water lily unique to, I believe, Malawi,which has been saved from extinction at Kew. The preliminary voice over implied that the near extinction was due to climate change. It was amusing to hear the scientist explain that a demand for more agricultural land was the reason. Needless to say, no apology was forthcoming from the BBC
nedhead May 20, 2010 at 8:04 pm,
Quibbling over whether the Arctic was ice free in the past, or 99.9% ice free, avoids resorting to plain old common sense. Some folks here are clearly implying that the Arctic will soon be ice free due to a very small 0.6° rise in temperature.
Since the deep ocean is cooling, and the SST has risen but not by very much, that leaves ocean currents and wind as the main suspects. But the need to predict an ice free Arctic based on global warming is obvious.
So using common sense, explain how the Arctic would not have been ice free when temperatures were much higher than they are now. Because you can’t have it both ways.
The surface of the earth communicates with the environment (i.e., atmosphere) by much more than just radiation. There is latent heat transfer from evaporation and condensation, sensible heat transfer by convection and advection, etc. The Stefan-Boltzmann Equation describes only the radiative transfer part of this.
However, radiative transfer is the only game in town in regards to heat transfer for how the earth & its atmosphere can communicate with space. This is why, as I explained, the effective radiating temperature of the earth is what is of interest. That is the thing that is constrained by simple radiative energy balance between the sun, earth, and space.
Well, you can have whatever paranoid fantasies you want but there are good reasons, as I explained above, why scientists look at the problem the way that they do. I think that you may be projecting your general approach to this problem onto how they approach it (i.e., toward getting the desired answer rather than doing the science correctly).
What you cite is one paper by one group of people who have been working very hard for many years to discredit the models with satellite (and radiosonde) data. As the satellite record has gotten longer and the errors that Spencer and Christy now admit that they made in analyzing the data have been corrected, the disagreement between models and data has gotten quite a bit smaller. But, just as one can always posit a “God of the Gaps”, so one can always blow up any remaining disagreement and use it to discredit the models if that is one’s motivation. Douglass & Christy et al. made some really silly statistical errors in their last attempt to discredit the models in this regard; I don’t know if the paper that you link to is better or not.
It is also worth noting:
(1) What that group doesn’t tell you is that it is only for the multidecadal trends that the amplification of trends in the tropics is not seen. Such amplification is seen in the fluctuations that occur, say, due to La Nina and El Nino, thus severely constraining the way in which the models could be wrong in the handling of the issues that control this amplification. The data sets have problems that would tend to contaminate the multidecadal trends (and, indeed, what trend you get depends on whose analysis or re-analysis of the data you look at), but not the fluctuations on the timescales of a few years. So, it is interesting that the agreement is good where the data is known to be quite reliable and the agreement is less good where the data is known to be problematic. That may be give you a hint as to where much of the problem is likely to lie.
(2) Interestingly, the most direct effect of believing that the datanot showing this amplification of the trends as one goes up in the atmosphere are correct is that one is forced to conclude that the lapse rate feedback does not appear to be operating as the models predict. Since this is a negative feedback, that is not necessarily a point of view one would want to take if one wants to believe that the climate sensitivity is lower than the models predict.
One observation that you happen to like does not negate all other observations. And, even if the models do have problems with certain things, it doesn’t mean that they are worthless. No model is perfect and it is only in climate science that there seems to be this idea (among a certain group of people) that if they can find any aspect where the models and some empirical data disagree then one must necessarily conclude (1) that it is the models and not the empirical data (and its analysis) that are at fault (no matter how clear it is that the data do have certain problems) and (2) that the models not being perfect disqualifies them from being useful at all.
Whoops! Just after I submitted my last post, I realized that the paper that you linked to was worse than I thought: I had thought it was a new submission by Douglass et al., but now it turns out that it actually dates from 2004. That means that, not only was it published before their later paper that has been found to be highly erroneous, but it was published before some of the significant corrections were made to the UAH satellite data set. (See here for the file containing Spencer and Christy’s own discussion of the various corrections made at various times to their data…The corrections have been particularly important in the tropics.) This was also before there was as good an understanding in regards to the problems with the radiosonde data sets (due, e.g., to adopting better shielding of the temperature sensor over time) and some attempts to re-analyze them!
The link to the UAH README file that I meant to include: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/readme.13Apr2010
Joel Shore;
The surface of the earth communicates with the environment (i.e., atmosphere) by much more than just radiation. There is latent heat transfer from evaporation and condensation, sensible heat transfer by convection and advection, etc. The Stefan-Boltzmann Equation describes only the radiative transfer part of this.>>
Of course that’s all correct. But in order for the system as a whole to heat up one degree, there must still be energy balance between all the layers no matter how you model them. If we accept that the system as a whole retains 3.7 watts/m2 that would otherwise have escaped into space, then that’s all we have to work with. If we model the system as a whole at 255K arriving at a sensitivity of 1.1 degrees, then we must arrive at a temperature change higher in the atmosphere of more than that, and lower in the atmosphere of less than that, 0.65 degrees by my calculation. In my explanation in the comment above on this matter, you responded in part:
Joel Shore;
Well, you can have whatever paranoid fantasies you want but there are good reasons, as I explained above, why scientists look at the problem the way that they do.>>
So you are saying there are good reasons for saying this, your not saying it is wrong? What ever problems the models do or don’t have, are we in agreement that the proposed sensitivity of temperature to doubling of CO2 is 1.1 degrees for the system as a whole, but that we would expect this to be only 0.65 degrees (or in that range) for earth surface? And higher than 1.1 at top of troposphere so that the average of the new gradient at equilibrium is 1.1 degrees?
davidmhoffer says:
No. Your calculation of the surface change is based on incorrect assumptions of how the atmosphere actually exchanges energy. It is true that the change is expected to have some variation with height in the atmosphere…but the variation, on a global scale, at least, is certainly not as large as you suggest. Because, while in the tropics, the warming is expected to be higher at altitude, in the polar regions it is actually modestly the other way (i.e., the surface warms more than at altitude)…and I believe that globally the factor enhancement of the warming at altitude relative to the ground is only something like 1.2.
The other point is that to the extent that the warming at altitude is expected to be greater at altitude, it is already accounted for in the models (by the lapse rate feedback). And, furthermore, the physics of this feedback is closely tied in with the physics of the water vapor feedback, which is of course a positive feedback.
davidmhoffer
I can’t paste replies to replies, so I’ll just go by numbers.
1. 390 is 40% more than 280. We know that doubling CO2 is like two factors of 1.4, so we are half way towards a doubling using a more reasonable exponential growth rate than your linear rate assumption.
2. I am glad we agree. More CO2 leads to a warmer planet.
3. The scenarios range from 388 to 391 for 2010, and don’t increase as rapidly as you say. Nobody thinks we will have 4 ppm/year in just a few years. I would say 0.5% per year is about right (exponential rather than linear). This is a slow exponential, so short parts of it might look linear.
4. I was trying to explain that 255 K is a fictitious value representing the physically more meaningful Watts per square meter, which is what the actual budget tells us. Doubling CO2 increases this by 1 degree without feedback, but what that means for temperatures near the surface is dependent on what happens to the profiles. However the temperature increase does increase downwards, except in the tropics where water vapor dominance prevents much CO2 effect near the surface.
5. Obviously CO2 is not the only thing going on because aerosols counteract the warming, especially as seen in the more industrial northern hemisphere. I could say that the temperature has increased 0.5 C since 1970 with only 0.2 C expected from CO2 giving a 2.5 feedback, but I won’t play that numbers game. Yes, water vapor feedback implies water vapor keeps up with the warming, and if it didn’t we would have lower relative humidity, less clouds and precipitation, which would also be a mess due to drought and reduced cloud albedo. However water vapor is expected to maintain the relative humidity, mostly because we have a large ocean surface to maintain the air/sea equilibrium. What physical basis is there for relative humidity decreasing over the ocean? It makes no sense.
According to the IPCC AR4 Synthesis Report, we were consuming about 30 GT of carbon per year in 2004:
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/spm3.jpg
Below are the various projection scenarios, the higher ones being at 40 GT, a 33% increase, by 2020.
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig3-1.jpg
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig3-4.jpg
http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig5-1.jpg
IPCC reports above should have been addressed to Jim D.
Jim D;
1. 390 is 40% more than 280. We know that doubling CO2 is like two factors of 1.4, so we are half way towards a doubling using a more reasonable exponential growth rate than your linear rate assumption.>>
38% more than 280 = 48% of doubling.
76% more than 280 = 78% of doubling.
100% more than 280 = 100% of doubling
200% more than 280 = 160% of doubling
These are all within the IPCC scenarios. Point being that we would have to grow fossil fuel consumption not a little bit exponentialy, but a whole lot, to get anywhere near that.
Joel Shore;
No. Your calculation of the surface change is based on incorrect assumptions of how the atmosphere actually exchanges energy. It is true that the change is expected to have some variation with height in the atmosphere…but the variation, on a global scale, at least, is certainly not as large as you suggest. Because, while in the tropics, the warming is expected to be higher at altitude, in the polar regions it is actually modestly the other way (i.e., the surface warms more than at altitude)…and I believe that globally the factor enhancement of the warming at altitude relative to the ground is only something like 1.2. >>
The explanation for 255 K rests upon the assumption of a uniform global temperature in order to arrive at an average approximation. Despite this having no basis in reality as the earth is certainly not uniform, I calculated the surface temperatures using the same basic model. So now we cry foul and say no no no the earth isn’t uniform. Fine, back to reality.
The earth spins and so the temperature fluctuates daily. It fluctuates by altitude, possibly up possibly down depending on how high we are. It declines by latitude, but sesonal variance increases. Add convection, evaporation, violent storm activity… no such thing as a uniform “average” temperature. .. like 255 K for example.
So even with the trend by altitude at the arctic zones being opposite that of equatorial regions, we still get a similar result. In equatorial regions, the surface number has to be teeny weeny. Check hadcrut, giss, what ever by latitude and it is. Arctic zones, they go up faster because the same amount of forcing drives a lot more temperature swing at lower temperatures than it does at high ones. But annual mean temp at 80N to 90N is about 255 to 260 K. Hmmm. So we might expect 1.1 sensitivity there, more like 0.3 in the tropics, average that out…. gosh 0.7 on average at surface.
But wait…. for water vapour feedback to triple that we need lotsa water. Let’s see, at the equator the temperature increase is really small so even with tripling it from water vapour we’d get a small number. the big damage will be in the arctic where we get a bigger temperature swing for a given forcing.
But wait. Its a smaller forcing in the first place. Let’s see, how much water vapour can the atmosphere hold at -25 versus -24? Huh? Almost zero and nearly zero?
So enough with my silly math based on things I don’t understand, let’s see some of yours. What SURFACE temperature change should we expect for +3.7 watts? Break it up by latitude if you want to make it more realistic. But I don’t see you getting to 1.1.
davidmhoffer
The scenarios are expressed in ppmv for each year. A couple of them reach 560 in the 2050’s. This corresponds to about 0.7% per year exponentially after 2010, which is half the world population growth rate to put it in perspective.
davidmhoffer says:
It is not based on a uniform global temperature. You can calculate an average for something that varies. In fact, that is the only reason to calculate the average of something, since if it uniform the average is trivial.
Hand-waving arguments are fine as far as they go but at some point one actually has to do real calculations. (One of the interesting thing about the “skeptic” movement is that they have vilified models to the extent that it now seems that they have more respect for hand-waving arguments and than for real calculations. That is too bad because you can pretty much prove anything that you want by hand-waving, whereas the numerical models are severely constrained by the actual known laws of physics. Yes, there is some room for variation in cloud parametrizations and such…but even then you are usually constrained by physics and empirical data. Without these sort of constraints, you can basically come up with anything that you want.)
The two basic problems that I see in what you have said above are: (1) While cold air might not hold very much water, where there is little water there is a much stronger dependence of the radiative effect on the water concentration. In fact, it is in the relatively cold regions of the mid- and upper-troposphere where the water vapor feedback is most important. (2) You are still very focused on local effects of where things, such as the radiative forcing due to added CO2 occurs. With the dynamics of the atmosphere, your intuition on this is not necessarily very good. Your conclusion that the polar regions are expected to warm more than the tropics is in general correct, although I don’t necessarily think that the reasoning that got you there is (and your actual numerical estimates based on that reasoning).
Well, yes, if you consider the negative feedback due to the lapse rate but don’t consider the positive feedbacks, then you will likely get modestly less than 1.1, maybe 0.8-0.9 K for the surface warming due to a doubling, I imagine. But, it doesn’t seem too realistic to include this negative feedback and not the positive ones, particularly when in the case of the water vapor and lapse rate feedbacks, these rely on much of the same convective physics. (After all, if climate scientists were running models that included the water vapor feedback and not the lapse rate feedback, people like you would be yelling bloody murder…and justifiably so.)
Joel,
I do the calcs without feedback because they are two different questions.
Question 1 – how much forcing and temperature change should be expected from CO2?
Question 2 – what is the sign and magnitude of the resulting feedbacks
I think you would agree that since Q2 is a consequence of Q1, any errors made in quantifying Q1 would invalidate the answers to Q2. So let’s get Q1 correct first. To that end:
IPCC => CO2 doubling => 3.7 watts => 1.1 degrees @ 255K.
If we were to presume latitudinal temperature bands at earth surface (which I have made up just now on the spot for illustrative purposes only, these aren’t from real data, they’re just, an, uhm, model)
Tropics @ 303K => 0.58 degrees
South Temperate @ 291 => 0.65 degrees
North Temperate @ 279 = > 0.74 degrees
Arctic @255 => 0.97 degrees
Yielding an average 0f 0.74 degrees. But, just as the temperature isn’t uniform from equator to arctic, it isn’t uniform by season either. So let’s consider the example of the North Temperate Zone where (in my home town at any rate) a really hot day is +40 and a really cold day is -40. If we apply the forcing to those numbers we get:
Cold day @233 => 1.26 degrees
Hot day @ 313 => 0.53 degrees
So just as the models expect more warming in the mid to upper troposphere than at surface, they also expect more warming in arctic regions as opposed to the equatorial. So where does that get us to?
The hottest days go up perhaps 0.53 degrees but the coldest ones go up 1.26 degrees, with an average of 0.74. Living in a winter city I’ll take that deal. Oh wait we have to triple for feedbacks. That gives 2.22 for an average increase which equates to forcing at 288 (surface) of 12.36 watts/m2. If I adjust my hottest and coldest days in my home town by that amount, the coldest day goes up by 4.1 degrees. Sounds horrid. Starting at -40 sounds like not enough for my taste. Now the hottest day goes up by 1.74. I’ll take the deal, feedbacks in.
Observation suggests that the feedbacks have been far over estimated, that’s why the models have over estimated. Fine. But the point is that the presentation of the numbers has carefully avoided that:
1. The estimates relate to a temperature of the troposhere at about 4 km up.
2. Surface temperature increases will be less than that.
3. The warmest parts of the planet will see much smaller temperature increases than the coldest parts.
4. The coldest parts of the planet will see most of the temperature rise in the winter, and far less in the summer.
If we think in terms of where on the planet we see how much temperature increase, and in what season, we get a very different picture, don’t we?
davidmhoffer: First of all, you are continuing to do the calculations as if you can just balance radiative forcing locally, which is not the case.
The estimate of the first-order effect in the absence of any feedbacks is. The final IPCC numbers with feedbacks are global average surface temperatures, i.e., they include the lapse rate feedback in addition to the other feedbacks.
Surface temperature estimates are what everything beyond the first-order estimate is.
Roughly speaking, that may well be true…although your numbers are based on a very naive approach, so they are essentially meaningless. And, you neglect other less convenient facts, such as the fact that the continental areas will see larger temperature increases than the areas over the oceans. (In fact, I believe that the mid latitude continental areas where much of the world’s population lives are expected to see temperature changes larger than the global average.)
Not sure how true that is (particularly the “far less” part).
Yeah, maybe, but you are conveniently neglecting the facts that would give a more balanced picture, such as the greater warming over continents, the other changes in weather patterns (drought, extreme rainfall events), how these changes will affect sea levels, how these changes will affect flora and fauna already stressed by pollution and habitat encroachment and fragmentation, etc., etc.
You might also remember that the global average temperatures were only about 6 C cooler during the LGM…and that had a profound effect on things, with the place where I am sitting covered in a couple of miles of glacial ice.
Joel,
Roughly speaking, that may well be true…although your numbers are based on a very naive approach, so they are essentially meaningless.>>
Itz really easy to call my approach naive and meaningless while refusing to suggest what the approach should be or providing any hard numbers or calculations of your own. Repeating over and over again that my approach is meaningless provides no value. Here’s some actual value. I pulled NASA/GISS temperature records broken down by latitude a few months ago, so what the heck, let’s stop using Dave’s made up on the spot model for illustrative purposes and use some actual numbers:
http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/temperature-anomaly-by-latitude-nh.png
Well waddya know.
Arctic +1.7
North Temperate + 1.1
South Temperate + 0.8
Equatorial + 0.6
So, Dave’s naive theory appears supported by observation. Could be coincidence. Everyone gets lucky sometimes. Well if we could further confirm Dave’s theory by looking at temperature swings on a seasonaly basis… I haven’t yet got my hands on a dataset broken down by seasonal, but I can look at the DMI web site for daily temps at 80 degrees N:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Zip through the years and what do we find?
Well waddya know.
Almost ALL of the variation comes in the COLDEST parts of the year. To be fair, there’s not much variation once temps rise to 273 because the ice starts to go through a state change instead of a temperature change. So just look at 270 and below. You will find that the VAST bulk of the temperature variation from normal that combine to result in warming at that latitude occur at the COLDEST time of year. The warmest parts of the year, even excluding the melting point temps, show almost no variability at all.
So, you’ve accused me of arm waving, yet put no facts, numbers, formulas, or predictions on the table of your own while calling mine naive. I am always amused when people accuse my of arm waving while waving their arms. You can complain all you want that my approach is naive, it ignores feedbacks and lapse rates and mid continent versus edge continent and what ever else you don’t like about my approach, but the OBSERVED facts are:
1. The warmest part of the planet see much smaller temperature increases than the coldest parts.
2. The coldest parts of the planet see most of the temperature rise in the winter, and far less in the summer.
Even if my explanation for the reasons is completely wrong THOSE ARE THE OBSERVED FACTS FROM 130 YEARS OF TEMPERATURE DATA.
Explain it with any physics you want, any models you want, those are the facts. Regardless of what drives the change, the bulk of it happens in the depths of winter in the highest latitudes.
davidmhoffer is right. Prof Freeman Dyson agrees:
Dyson’s article is well worth reading.
Smokey;
Thanks, interesting guy.
Joel Shore;
I could not find temperature data by month by latititude, only by hemisphere. So I looked at NH by season, and waddya know, summer changes the least, winter changes the most:
http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/seasonal.png
Of course if we could break it up by latitude we would see the influence we already know is there from the latitude graphs I posted previously. That is that in the Arctic the divergence between winter and summer would shrink with the bulkj of the change being in winter. I even looked at it just as January (coldest month) versus July (hottest month) and got the same result:
http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/monthly-jan-versus-july.png
Again, if we could break it up by latitude, we would find that the change is biased toward the Arctic in winter. So, not by naive theory but by OBSERVATION we see that:
1. The warm areas of the planet experience the LEAST warming.
2. The coldest areas of the planet experience the MOST warming.
3. Most of what the cold areas experience is in the WINTER
4. If we had daily data we would expect the same thing; namely that even on the hottest days, most of the temperature increase would be at night (the coolest part of the day) and the least at the peak.
End result? Not much warmer in the tropics. Temperate zones milder winters but only slightly warmer summers. Arctic much milder winters, somewhat better summers. Hottest days mostly elevated night time temperatures, peak temperatures not so much. In other words very little change where it does harm, most of the change where it does the least harm or is beneficial (check the polar bear population increase last few decades).
So now that we understand (from observation) that a temperature increase is of far less significance due to the distribution of temperature change by latitude and season, let’s worry about things like extreme weather. Warmer planet = more energy in system = more extreme weather events, right?
WRONG!! What drives weather?
TEMPERATURE DIFFERENTIAL. It all starts with wind and convection driven by temperature differential.
What did I just show you by observation? Less daily temperature differential, less seasonaly temperature differential and less latitude differential. Less extreme weather, exactly opposite of what the IPCC predicted. And what have we seen? Hurricane index down. Tornado index down. Droughts? Half of North America was in a drought in the 1930’s, itz warmer now than it was then…. no drought. Must be something else making that happen.
SO… if the IPCC “knows” this stuff they certainly aren’t sharing it with the public. they’re presenting it as a catastrophe. The are representing the warming as if the hottest days get hotter by the same amount as the coldest days. They pretend that the Arctic is going to melt when most of the warming will take place well below the freezing point. They are claiming more extreme weather when clearly warming can only diminish extreme weather.
So tell me Joel, why are they doing this? Are they incompetant? Or just liars? Or both? If you have a credible answer, put it on the table. But no more arm waving. Facts, theory, calculations and predictions followed by comparison to the data.
And that paper I threw at you that you claimed was biased? Have a look at AMSU which gives you the temperature trends this last decade at various altitudes. Ooops.
davidmhoffer:
Let’s see, we’re at 380, so to double in 70 years we would need to go from current (1.9 ppm) to 5.43 over the 70 year period.
Joel Shore;
You have misunderstood my statement. I said the RATE of emissions doubles in 70 years if the emissions increase at 1% per year>>
Based on current 380 and 1% year over year increase in emissions we would get to double the rate in 70 years. To get to double 380 (th number I was working with) would require 115 years. At the end of the 115 year period we would be producing 5.9 ppm/year additjonal CO2 which would require TRIPLE our current production and NO negative feedback from increased biomass growth and assumed no switch to nuclear, higher engine efficiencies, or ower energy farming techniques and so on. Not a chance. Even with China and India industrializing coal isn;t going to triple our prodiuction capacity any more than oil will.
davidmhoffer says:
I don’t know what sort of negative feedback you are imagining in the carbon cycle. Your assumption imagines that the biosphere, oceans, etc. continue to absorb the same ***FRACTION*** of our emissions as they do now. That is about the most optimistic scenario possible. There is some debate over whether and when sinks will begin to saturate…but I haven’t heard any belief that they will actually get bigger so that they absorb more carbon even as a fraction of ever increasing emissions.
As for switching away from coal, using more energy-efficient farming techniques etc.: Simple economics says this will happen much faster if we put a price on the use of these energy sources that represents all of their costs, rather than keeping their prices artificially low because the costs are externalized.
davidmhoffer: As for your other posts, you are basically only considering…and exaggerating…the trends that work toward your favored conclusion and are ignoring the rest. Hence, you choose to emphasize (and exaggerate) the extent to which the warming is and is expected to be in the coldest places at the coldest times of year and ignore other inconvenient facts such as the greater warming over the continents than over the oceans.
Your view of extreme weather is also too simplistic. The weather extremes come from a variety of factors. One factor is the amount of heat energy available. One factor is the temperature gradient. Yes, the temperature gradient at the surface between the tropics and the poles is expected to decrease but that is only part of the story. Another part of the story is that the temperature gradient at altitude between tropics and poles may actually increase. And, there are expected to be general poleward shifts in weather patterns, greater drying of soils due to higher temperatures, etc., etc. There is a reason why dispassionate scientists are coming to a very different conclusion regarding the warming and its effects as you are.
Joel Shore says:
May 24, 2010 at 10:31 am
davidmhoffer: As for your other posts, you are basically only considering…and exaggerating…the trends that work toward your favored conclusion and are ignoring the rest. Hence, you choose to emphasize (and exaggerate) the extent to which the warming is and is expected to be in the coldest places at the coldest times of year and ignore other inconvenient facts such as the greater warming over the continents than over the oceans.>>
The seasonal comparison was done with CONTINENTAL ONLY.
Really Joel, all you’ve done is more arm waving. If the best you can do is say that I am exagerrating (but don’t explain what is exagerated) that I am ignoring other data (but don’t say what) that there’s expected to be greater drying of soils (hey! what happened to the greater humidity we were promised?) and now your claiming temperature gradient between poles and might increase GOOD GOD MAN LOOK AT THE EFFING DATA THATS NOT WHAT IT SHOWS.
Joel Shore;
I don’t know what sort of negative feedback you are imagining in the carbon cycle.>>
Good god many do you know what a plant is? Have you not seen any of the studies about the effects of CO2 increases on plant growth?
Joel Shore;
As for switching away from coal, using more energy-efficient farming techniques etc.: Simple economics says this will happen much faster if we put a price on the use of these energy sources that represents all of their costs, rather than keeping their prices artificially low because the costs are externalized>>
So now you are arguing that the price of oil is subsidized? There are tons of subsidies in the energy market… for biofuels, for wind farms, for solar, despite which they aren’t catching on. And I have news for you. any farming practice that can reduce energy costs, regardless of what the energy source is, will be implemented. Trucking companies, shipping companies, air craft companies, ALL spend ENORMOUS amounts of money on R&D trying to squeeze every last penny out of their energy budget. Trucking companies are installing data loggers on their rigs and analyzing the number of gear shifts and timing over a specific haul to figure out if they can improve the driver’s skill set to save fuel. Shipping companies are experimenting with sails to reduce fuel use in ocean tankers. An efficiency increase of just 1% will get an engine manufacturer a huge market share increase. R&D in the billions is already being spent on efficiency because energy costs are so high.
Your statement shows you know even less about economics and current industry practices than you do about climate. You claim to have a PhD in physics, but the best you can do is arm waving. When I show you ACTUAL MEASUREMENTS you attempt to refute them with predictions from models. What mickey mouse kind of university awards a PhD to someone who thinks model results are more accurate than ACTUAL MEASUREMENTS?
You’ve had multiple opportunities to bring value to this discussion, but you have descended into arm waving, and retreated into claims of what models say as if they were the reality and the planet we live on just a representation of the models. Why you bother to continue to look the fool is beyond me.
davidmhoffer says:
Yes, but the point is that you are considering only effects that tend to minimize the importance of the effects and conveniently ignoring those that do the opposite. So, it may be true that the increase in temperature is larger in the cold season than the warm season (and that this happens to hold for continental only data). However, what you are neglecting to mention is that the continental rise in general is greater than the rise over the oceans. So, this fact works against your conclusion that the rise in the warm season will somehow be insignificant. Yes, it will tend to be less than the global rise because of the seasonal effect but it will also tend to be more than the global rise because of the continental effect. How the exact magnitudes work out, I am not sure, but the point is that you can’t just selectively look at the things that support your pre-conceived point-of-view and ignore everything else. That is why objective reviews of the data and literature, such as that of the IPCC endorsed by various national academies of sciences, paint a very different picture from those who are selectively looking at the science with the intent of trying to re-enforce what they want to believe.
This statement is typical of your level of analysis. The point is that the current ratio of the increase in atmospheric CO2 to our emissions already includes the effects of increased uptake of CO2 by plants. What you are proposing is that this effect, which to my knowledge every serious scientist believes must eventually start to saturate, will not only fail to do so but will in fact become an ever larger player, absorbing a larger and larger fraction of our increasing emissions.
Joel Shore;
Yes, but the point is that you are considering only effects that tend to minimize the importance of the effects and conveniently ignoring those that do the opposite. So, it may be true that the increase in temperature is larger in the cold season than the warm season (and that this happens to hold for continental only data).>>
You’re the one that said continental was more important so that’s the data I used, now you accuse me of ignoring the ocean because suggenly it is more important in your mind and claim that the relationship hold only for continental data. Wrong again. Here’s NASA/GISS Land and Ocean:
http://knowledgedrift.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/seasonal-land-and-ocean-nasa-giss.png
Same relationship though variability in fall was a bit of a surprise. Is it muted? Well sure it is, ocean doesn’t heat up or cool off as fast as land does so the amplitude is less. Same relationship hold though. Most warming in the cold areas, least in the warm areas.
Joel Shore;
How the exact magnitudes work out, I am not sure,>>
Meaning despite your claim to expertise you don’t actually know what the models say nor have you looked at he data yourself.
Joel Shore;
That is why objective reviews of the data and literature, such as that of the IPCC endorsed by various national academies of sciences, paint a very different picture from those who are selectively looking at the science with the intent of trying to re-enforce what they want to believe.>>
Let’s see, would that be reviewed work of respected climatologists who contributed to the IPCC like:
Michael Mann, who produced a computer program that drew the same basic hockey stick graph regardless of dataset?
Kieth Briffa, who produced a 1000 year temperature reconstruction for the whole planet based on just 12 trees with one tree weighted to be 50% of the data?
Phile Jones and Michael Mann who produced a composite tree ring temperature reconstruction for the front cover of AR4 (since replaced) with the last few decades of data discarded in place of temperature data instead? And then insisted this was standard scientific procedure? And then said that even though the last few decades the tree rings did not track temperature there was no reason to believe that they had the same problem for the previous 960 years?
Phil Jones who says he collaborated with China on data they say may not have existed but he can’t find the raw data he says they gave him so that they can be compared?
The IPCC, whose models can’t reproduce the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period and so instead set out to do studies showing that the LIA and the MWA never existed, and published AR4 on the basis of a handfull of reconstructions that don’t show it despite dozens of reconstructions from all over the world that do, here’s just a few:
http://www.c3headlines.com/temperature-charts-historical-proxies.html
And you want to accuse ME of being selective while endorsing THEM?
Joel Shore;
This statement is typical of your level of analysis. The point is that the current ratio of the increase in atmospheric CO2 to our emissions already includes the effects of increased uptake of CO2 by plants. What you are proposing is that this effect, which to my knowledge every serious scientist believes must eventually start to saturate>>
Wrong. Again. Most greenhouses shoot for about 1300 ppm, way, Way, WAY past the point where the IPCC insists we’re all gonna die. In fact, here’s a time lapse video of seedlings in 450 ppm atmosphere versus 1270 ppm. We’re talking some serious biomass uptake here as CO2 increases, not to mention that plants need less water in high CO2 environment, so what is now marginal desert becomes arable land for even MORE biomass to grow on. If you actually knew what you were talking about you would have brought up positive feedback due to outgassing from the oceans instead of trying to pooh pooh negative feedback from plants when clearly you haven’t a clue about what to expect.
I’ve noticed your comments here and there and they always seem to be the same. You shoot your mouth off, reference your degree, and expect to be believed because of it. When pressed for details, you don’t have any. Asked for facts and numbers, you don’t have any. Confronted with actual data, you make vague references to models. Backed into a corner with oberved data that refutes the models and IPCC reports you hold so dear, you call the arguments naive, simplistic, typical of this level of analysis, selective and not from a peer reviewed source like your vaunted IPCC. In brief your whole argument rests on “I have a PhD so shut up and listen to me”.
You’ve walked face first into a left hook so many times that if you want to get up off the matt one more time I will start calling you Rocky.
In fact, I’m going to tell you what I think. I think you are a sell out. Your carreer in physcis has petered out and you are trying to remake yourself. You have colleagues with less talent that you but they’re doing really well because they are on the climate gravy train. They get grants, media interviews, speaking engagements. So you’re trying to get on the bandwagon. Defend the IPCC ina few blogs. Volunteer for speaking engagements on climate change for low end audiences who can’t challenge your PhD. Make a career change because theoretical physics is a tough gig to make a living off of. I think you know the science is fraudulent, you’re letting yourself be seduced by the money and glammour. Is that how you want your grandchildren to remember you? Because by the time they grow up this debate will be over.
If you want to be serious about this debate then don’t be shooting your mouth off about CO2 and plants without looking at it first. If you’re going to defend the IPCC models, then you better have a technical explanation and data prepared to explain the discrepancies. Better still, grow a pair and start telling the truth. Leave a legacy that your grandchildren won’t be embarrased about. Until then, this is who you are:
http://knowledgedrift.wordpress.com/climate-humour-page-the-climatologist-and-follow-the-money-series/the-physicist-and-the-climatologist-follow-the-money/
Is that who you want to be?
davidmhoffer says:
I have enough faith in your abilities to comprehend written English to believe that you can determine that this is not what I was saying at all. Did you just misread what I wrote or are you actively distorting it and then setting up strawmen” that have little to do with what I said?
Again, you invent strawmen. Even if you were correct that 1300ppm is optimal, that would not be evidence to support your notion that somehow the plants are going to uptake a larger and larger FRACTION of our annual emissions as the CO2 levels increase. At best, you might hope that they continue to take up the same fraction that they do now…although this seems doubtful, particularly given the fact that greenhouses don’t go even higher than 1300ppm, which suggests diminishing returns as you approach such levels.
However, you are also ignoring the fact that plants growing in greenhouses are very different from plants growing in the real world. In particular, the plants that respond strongly to increases in CO2 are the ones where that is the primary limiting factor. If the limiting factor is something else, then you will get little response. In a greenhouse, you are able to adjust the other factors too, so there is a larger payoff for adjusting the CO2 than there would be in the real world where the growth is often primarily limited by another factor.
Your psychoanalytical skills are not very impressive. I have considered a switch toward climate science…but it would be no gravy train for me. In fact, it would be much more difficult than staying within the confines of the areas that I have successfully worked in. The question is not whether it would be more lucrative or glamorous but rather whether the price that I would have to pay, financially and in terms of stature in going from fields where I have a reputation and experience to ones where I don’t (and also likely a geographic move from a place where I am settled), is worth it in order to work on problems that I think may be more important and that I find more motivating.
Unlike you, I will not question your motives or sincerity in your beliefs on the subject. I just think that those beliefs on the science are captive to your predispositions, probably on the basis of your political ideology.
Rocky,
You want to get pummeled again, its up to you.
To summarise:
I offered a physical explanation of certain issues.
You said I was over simplifying, but offered no explanation of your own.
I offered sample calculations to support my explanation.
You said I was naive, but offered no calculations of your own.
I offered real world observations to support my explanation.
You pooh poohed that, referenced models as if they somehow trump reality and admonished me that what happens over land is more important that what happens globaly, but offered no explanation of your own, let alone observations.
I offered land based observations that supported my explanation.
You said oceans were the larger part of the planet and would not follow the same pattern, but offered no explanation.
I provided combined land and ocean based observations that support my explanation.
You complained that I was deliberately misunderstanding what you wrote. Which part of “(and that this happens to hold for continental only data)” did I misunderstand?
I provided you an example of a negative feedback to atmospheric CO2 concentrations with evidence from greenhouses and you respond that greenhouses aren’t the real world. Here’s a database listing hundreds of species and the dozens of studies that have been done on CO2 uptake of plants in high CO2 environments. The odd one goes down, almost all go up, and they go up by 50% or more. Rough biomass estimates are +60 GT/Year from breakdown, -120 GT/Year photosynthesis uptake. +50% wipes out our ENTIRE fossil fuel consumption and then some, we’re only contributing 30 GT/Year.
You complain that other limiting factors would limit CO2 uptake benefits. Like what? High CO2 environments reduce water consumption and increase heat tolerance. What limiting factors are you speaking of? Oh I forgot, you just make claims you don’t offer explanations or data.
You claim my pshychoanalytic skills are limited, but admit you are considering a career change. you imply your motives are altruistic. I snorted coffee all over my keyboard on that one, thanks.
Then there’s the points I made which you never even responded to, which I won’t bother listing.
Your parting shot, having provided no explanations, data, or observations of your own, having attempted to refute my real world data with models, having disputed my facts and reasoning with logical well thought out comments like “naive” “simplistic” “selective” you now resort to suggesting that I am incapable of understanding the subject matter because of how you think I vote? OOOOOH NOW YOU’VE GOT ME!
Rocky, you’re on the canvus. Stay down.
There will be an article out soon drilling into these issues in detail based entirely on AR4 data, formulas and references. I’ll drop a note here when it is ready. Of course since it relies on facts and realk world data rather than faked and falsified peer reviewed literature, I’m expecting you won’t believe it.
Rocky,
Itz considered good advice to study your opponent while preparing for Rocky II. Here’s the article as promised.
http://knowledgedrift.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/catastrophic-global-warming-refuted-data-source-ipcc-ar4/
If you can look me in the eye after having read this and still maintain that there is any value to climate mitigation efforts, then I expect you to do so with facts, explanations, and confirming data.