by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.
1. BASED ON PRELIMINARY DATA TO NOVEMBER 30, SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES AROUND AUSTRALIA WERE THE WARMEST ON RECORD LAST YEAR, AS WERE THOSE FOR THE PAST DECADE.
The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate-extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate-extremist groups maintain.
2. THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANISATION SAYS THE YEAR TO THE END OF OCTOBER WAS THE WARMEST SINCE INSTRUMENTAL CLIMATE RECORDS STARTED IN 1850 – 0.55 C° ABOVE THE 1961-90 AVERAGE OF 14 C°.
It is easy to cherry-pick periods of less than a calendar year and say they establish a new record. The cherry-picking of the first nine months of 2010 is particularly unacceptable, since that period was dominated by a substantial El Niño Southern Oscillation, a sudden alteration in the pattern of ocean currents worldwide that leads to warmer weather for several months all round the world. The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, which tends largely to reverse the effect of its preceding El Niño and make the world cooler. Indeed, the calendar year from January to December 2010, according to the reliable RSS and UAH satellite records, was not the warmest on record. Besides, what is important is how fast the world is warming. In fact, the rate of warming from 1975-2001, at 0.16 C° per decade, was the fastest rate to be sustained for more than a decade in the 160-year record, but exactly the same rate occurred from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, when we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.
3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.
After 300 years of global warming, during nearly all of which we could not on any view have influenced the climate to a measurable degree, it is scarcely surprising that recent decades will be warmer than earlier decades. That is what one would expect. If one has been climbing up a steep hill for a long time, one should not be surprised to find oneself higher up at the end of the climb than at the beginning.
4. THE WORLD IS NOT COOLER COMPARED TO 1998.
Actually, it is cooler. There was a remarkable spike in global temperatures in 1998, caused not by manmade “global warming” but by a Great El Niño event – an alteration in the pattern of ocean currents that begins in the equatorial eastern Pacific and spreads around the globe, lasting a few months. In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.
5. THE TRENDS HAPPEN TO FOLLOW CLOSELY THE PREDICTIONS OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS OF TEMPERATURE RISES RESULTING FROM INCREASED GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
In the 40 years since 1970, global temperatures have risen at a linear rate equivalent to around 1.3 C°/century. CO2 concentration is rising in a straight line at just 2 ppmv/year at present and, even if it were to accelerate to an exponential rate of increase, the corresponding temperature increase would be expected to rise merely in a straight line. On any view, 1.3 C° of further “global warming” this century would be harmless. The IPCC is predicting 3.4 C°, but since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001 global temperature has risen (taking the average of the two satellite datasets) at a rate equivalent to just 0.6 C°/century, rather less than the warming rate of the entire 20th century. In these numbers, there is nothing whatever to worry about – except the tendency of some journalists to conceal them.
6. MOST SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT DOUBLING THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS LIKELY TO LEAD TO WARMING OF 2-3 C°.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling. The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft,
or satellites. Also, the models predict that every Celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1-3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes.
7. WARMING OF 2-3 C° RISKS SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC DAMAGE.
Actually, the IPCC’s current thinking is that up to 2° of warming compared with the present would be harmless and even beneficial. Since far greater temperatures than this have been the rule on Earth for most of the past 600 million years, there is no sound scientific basis for the assumption that “significant environmental and economic damage” would result from so small an additional warming. However, significant economic damage is already resulting from the costly but pointlessly Canute-like attempts governments to try to make “global warming” go away.
8. GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS ROSE BY 27.5% FROM 1990-2009.
Since anthropogenic effects on the climate are net-zero except for CO2, we need only consider CO2 concentration, which was 353 parts per million by volume in 1990 and is 390 ppmv now, an increase not of 27.5% but of just 10.5%.
9. ARCTIC SEA ICE SHRANK TO ITS THIRD-LOWEST AREA IN THE SATELLITE RECORDS, OFFSET ONLY SLIGHTLY BY GROWTH IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE.
In fact, the global sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, because the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice. Indeed, when the summer extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high. The record low was widely reported; the corresponding record high was almost entirely unreported.
10. GLOBAL SNOW COVER IS FALLING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, a new record high for snow cover was set in the winter of 2008/2009, and there is some chance that a further record high will be set this year.
11. GLOBAL SEA LEVELS ARE RISING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, the rate of increase in sea level has not changed since satellites first began measuring it reliably in 1993. It is a dizzying 1 ft/century – not vastly greater than the 8 inches/century that had previously been inferred from tide-gauges. A recent paper has confirmed what marine biologists had long suspected: coral atolls simply grow to meet the light as the sea rises, and some of them have even gained land mass recently according to a
just-published scientific paper. Professor Niklas Mörner, who has been studying sea level for a third of a century, says it is physically impossible for sea level to rise at much above its present rate, and he expects 4-8 inches of sea level rise this century, if anything rather below the rate of increase in the last century. In the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age, sea level has risen at an average of 4 feet/century, though it is now rising much more slowly because very nearly all of the land-based ice that is at low enough latitudes and altitudes to melt has long since gone.
12. MUNICH RE SAYS 2010 SAW THE SECOND-HIGHEST NUMBER OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES SINCE 1980, 90% OF THEM WEATHER-RELATED.
There are really only three categories of insurable natural catastrophe – meteorological, epidemiological, and seismic (volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). Except during years when major seismic disasters occur (such as the tsunami caused by an earthquake in 2000), or when major pandemics kill large numbers at an unexpected rate (and that did not happen in 2010), weather-related natural disasters always account for getting on for 90% of all such disasters. Because the climate is a mathematically-chaotic object, the incidence of weather-related disasters is highly variable from year to year, and there is no good reason to attribute the major events of 2010 to manmade “global warming”.
13. THE TEMPERATURE OF 46.4 C° IN MELBOURNE ONE SATURDAY IN 2010 WAS MORE THAN 3 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS HIGHEST FOR FEBRUARY.
February is the height of summer in Melbourne. Since the planet has been warming for 300 years, it is not surprising to find high-temperature records being broken from time to time. However, some very spectacular cold-weather records were also broken both in early 2010, when all 49 contiguous United States were covered in snow for the first time since satellite monitoring began 30 years ago, and in December, which was the coldest final month of the year in central England since records began 352 years ago. However, neither the hot-weather nor the cold-weather extremes of 2010 have much to do with manmade “global warming”; like the heatwave of 2003 in Europe that is said to have killed 35,000 people, they are known to have been caused by an unusual pattern of what meteorologists call “blocking highs” – comparatively rare areas of stable high pressure that dislodge the jet-streams from their usual path and lock weather systems in place for days or sometimes even months at a time. No link has been established between the frequency, intensity, or duration of blocking highs and manmade “global warming”.
14. IN MOSCOW, JULY 2010 WAS MORE THAN 2 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS TEMPERATURE RECORD, AND TEMPERATURE ON 29 JULY WAS 38.2 C°.
And the lowest-ever temperatures have been measured in several British and US locations in the past 12 months. Cherry-picking individual extreme-weather events that point in one direction only, when there are thousands of such events that also point in another direction, is neither sound science nor sound journalism.
15. THE HEATWAVE AND FOREST FIRES IN CENTRAL RUSSIA KILLED AT LEAST 56,000, MAKING IT THE WORST NATURAL DISASTER IN RUSSIA’S HISTORY.
More cherry-picking, and the notion that the forest fires were the worst natural disaster in Russia’s history is questionable. Intense cold – such as when General January and General February defeated Corporal Hitler at the gates of Stalingrad in 1941 – has many times killed hundreds of thousands in Russia.
16. IN PAKISTAN, 1769 WERE KILLED IN THE COUNTRY’S WORST-EVER FLOODS.
In fact, the floods were not the worst ever: merely the worst since 1980. The region has long been prone to flooding, and has flooded catastrophically at infrequent intervals when a blocking high combined with unusually strong runoff of snow from the Himalayas swells the numerous rivers of the region (Punjab, or panj-aub, means “five rivers”). The flooding was not caused by manmade “global warming” but by a blocking high.
17. THE HURRICANE SEASON IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC WAS ONE OF THE MOST SEVERE IN THE LAST CENTURY.
In fact, Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University, who maintains the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes round the world, says that the index is at its least value in the past 30 years, and close to its least value in 50 years. For 150 years the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has shown no trend at all: this is a long and reliable record, because one does not require complex instrumentation to know that one has been struck by a hurricane.
18. EVEN CAUTIOUS SCIENTISTS TEND TO SAY WE CAN BLAME MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE.
Cautious scientists say no such thing. Even the excitable and exaggeration-prone IPCC has repeatedly stated that individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to manmade “global warming”, and it would be particularly incautious of any scientist to blame the blocking highs that caused nearly all of the weather-related damage in 2010 on us when these are long-established, naturally-occurring phenomena.
19. CLIMATE CHANGE HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE 20% DECLINE IN RAINFALL IN PARTS OF SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS.
Climate change began 4,567 million years ago, on that Thursday when the Earth first formed (as Prof. Plimer puts it). The question is whether manmade climate change has contributed to the drought. Interestingly, there has been very heavy rainfall in previously drought-ridden parts of southern Australia in each of the last two years. Australia has a desert climate: it is no surprise, therefore, that periods of drought – sometimes prolonged – will occur. One of the longest records of drought and flood we have is the Nilometer, dating back 5000 years. Periods of drought far more savage than anything seen in modern times were frequent occurrences, and entire regions of Egypt became uninhabitable as a result. A 20% decline in rainfall in a single region, therefore, cannot be safely attributed to anything other than the natural variability of the climate.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
There is no such evidence. As the IPCC has repeatedly said, ascribing individual, local extreme-weather events to “global warming” is impermissible.
21. THERE HAS BEEN A SUCCESSION OF EXTRAORDINARY HEATWAVES, WITH BIG JUMPS IN RECORD TEMPERATURES, STARTING IN EUROPE IN 2003 AND CONTINUING ALL AROUND THE WORLD, CULMINATING IN RUSSIA LAST YEAR. MORE THAN 17 COUNTRIES BROKE THEIR MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE RECORDS IN 2010, AND “YOU REALLY HAVE TO STRAIN CREDIBILITY TO SAY IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE.”
The heatwave in Europe in 2003 is known to have been caused by a blocking high similar to those which gave Russia its record high temperatures in 2010 and kept the monsoon fixed over Pakistan for long enough to cause catastrophic flooding. You really have to stretch credibility to say it has anything to do with manmade “global warming”. Though that heatwave may have killed 35,000 right across Europe, a three-day cold snap in Britain the previous year had killed 21,000 just in one country. The net effect of warmer worldwide weather, therefore, is to reduce deaths, not to increase them. That is why periods such as the Holocene Climate Optimum, when temperatures were 3 C° warmer than the present for most of the time between 6000 and 8000 years ago, are called “optima”: warmer weather is better for most Earth species – including Man – than colder weather.
22. FOR 20 YEARS MORE HOT-WEATHER THAN COLD-WEATHER TEMPERATURE RECORDS HAVE BEEN SET.
This is merely another way of saying that temperatures today are generally higher than they were 20 years ago. Since there has been some warming, more hot-weather than cold-weather records have been set. Not exactly surprising, and not exactly alarming either: for the mere fact of warming tells us nothing about the cause of the warming, particularly when the rate of warming in recent decades has been no greater than what has been seen in two previous quarter-century periods over the past 160 years.
23. EVEN IF GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS WERE TO STABILIZE AT LITTLE MORE THAN TODAY’S LEVELS, 2 C° OF FURTHER WARMING WILL OCCUR – FOUR TIMES THE INCREASE OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.
This value of 2 C° – like too many others in this regrettably fictitious article – appears to have been plucked out of thin air. Let us do the math. We can ignore all Man’s influences on the climate except CO2 because, up to now, they have been self-canceling, as the table of “radiative forcings” in the IPCC’s most recent quinquennial Assessment Report shows. In 1750, before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 was 278 ppmv. Now it is 390 ppmv. Taking the multi-model mean central estimate from Box 10.2 on p.798 of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, plus or minus one standard deviation, we can derive the following simple equation for the total amount of warming to be expected in 1000 years’
time, when the climate has fully settled to equilibrium after the perturbation that our carbon emissions to date are thought to have caused:
ΔTequ = (4.7 ± 1) ln(390/278) F°
Let us generously go one standard deviation above the central estimate: thus, a high-end estimate of the total equilibrium warming the IPCC would expect as a result of our CO2 emissions since 1750 is 5.7 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration in the 260-year period: i.e. 1.9 C°. Even this total since 1750 to the present is below the 2 C° Mr. Setekee says is lurking in the pipeline.
Now, to pretend that manmade “global warming” is a problem as big as the IPCC says it is, and that there will be more warming in the pipeline even if we freeze our emissions at today’s levels, we have to pretend that all of the observed warming since 1750 – i.e. about 1.2 C° – was our fault. So we deduct that 1.2 C° from the 1.9 C° equilibrium warming. Just 0.7 C° of warmer weather is still to come, at equilibrium.
However, various climate extremists have published papers saying that equilibrium warming will not occur for 1000 years (or even, in a particularly fatuous recent paper, 3000 years). The IPCC itself only expects about 57% of equilibrium warming to occur by 2100: the rest will take so long to arrive that even our children’s children will not be around to notice, and the residual warming will happen so gradually that everyone and everything will have plenty of time to adjust.
Bottom line, then: by 2100 we can expect not 2 C° of further “global warming” as a result of our emissions so far, but 0.4 C° at most. The truth, as ever in the climate debate, is a great deal less thrilling than the lie.
24. ADAPTATION TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF “GLOBAL WARMING” WILL GET MORE DIFFICULT THE LONGER WE DELAY.
This assertion, too, has no scientific basis whatsoever. The costs of adaptation are chiefly an economic rather than a climatological question. Every serious economic analysis (I exclude the discredited propaganda exercise of Stern, with its absurd near-zero discount rate and its rate of “global warming” well in excess of the IPCC’s most extreme projections) has demonstrated that the costs of waiting and adapting to any adverse consequences that may arise from “global warming”, even if per impossibile that warming were to occur at the rapid rate imagined by the IPCC but not yet seen in the instrumental temperature record, would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective than any Canute-like attempt to prevent any further “global warming” by taxing and regulating CO2 emissions. It follows that adaptation to the consequences of “global warming” will get easier and cheaper the longer we wait: for then we will only have to adapt to the probably few and minor consequences that will eventually occur, and not until they occur, and only where and to the extent that they occur.
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A PDF version of this document is available here
The Lord has done well, he’s a hero in my books. Stekette should be held up to ridicule by the ABC’s Media Watch. Silly me, that will never happen.
Geez… can’t we just burn his book?
(and release some of the CO2 in it 😉
A good summary of the arguments against this scheme to transfer money to corrupt third world dictators via the Western governments (who take their fraction first!) and the UN’s nest of bureaucrats (who will take their fraction second, third, and always.)
Regarding the bushfires around Melbourne. There is a link to Global Warming. Ratbag left wing governments, under the influence of Global Warming fanatics, made it nearly impossible to burn off fallen branches in winter. Eventually the fuel build up made disaster inevitable. That same fanaticism kept in power a left wing government that appointed a chief commissioner of police who decided that she wasn’t needed to be in charge of evacuations and fire fighting, and that she should get her hair done while the fires raged.
John says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:24 am
Geez… can’t we just burn his book?
(and release some of the CO2 in it 😉 Perhaps his beard rather than his book. Once we start burning books we then have no hard record of stupidity for posterity.
Flood and drought dominated regimes have been well documented in Australian hydrology since the mid 1980’s. These are 20 to 40 years periods of floods or droughts as the name implies. Average rainfall has actually trended mildly upward over the 20th Century and the official BOM graph showing this is here – http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/rain.shtml
What the CSIRO did in their 2007 report was to implicitly assume that changes in regional rainfalls between the flood dominated regime (FDR) of 1945 to 1975 and the drought dominated regime of 1976 to 1998 was all caused by global warming. They then proceeded to linearly extend to apparent trend into the future.
This is such astonishing nonsense. As I say – FDR and DDR are so well known in Australian hydrology that I suspect that some poor bastard in the CSIRO was told to produce a report that had the answer that was wanted and no-one else had a bloody clue. The poor bastard had no option but to fudge it.
In the longer term (over a hundred years) – there might be a couple of areas in southern Australia that have recent records that are outside of the historic limits.
Much of Australian rainfall is of course driven by ENSO – both directly and through interactions with the Indian and Southern Oceans. One of the things I found especially galling in the Sketekee article is the attribution of the current La Nina to global warming. This is after a decade and more of attributing the “Great Pacific Climate Shift’ (from La Nina to El Nino dominant conditions) in 1976/1977 to global warming.
Nothing of course could be further from the truth. ENSO is of course a chaotic system – one that bifurcates every couple of decades. ENSO is not really an ‘oscillation’ – but it is a system that is non stationary and non Gaussian over decades to millenia. Recent speculation by Lockwood and Curry inter alia suggest a top down influence from UV warming of oxone in the upper atmosphere.
It was like watching Muhammed Ali fight a 50 pound weakling,
Copy edits:
Item 1, Monckton should have echoed Stekete’s original “sea surface temperatures,” instead of omitting it in his “As for sea temperatures,” which weakens and blurs the point he’s making. (Temperatures of the surface vs. temperatures of the volume.)
Item 13: “in early 2010, when all 49 contiguous United States were covered in snow …”. Change “contiguous” to “continental.”
Item 17 doesn’t rebut Stekete’s point, which should have been conceded, followed by the phrase “OTOH,” followed by the current text.
Item 18: Don’t hyphenate adverbial compound modifiers like “naturally-occurring phenomena.”
Item 24: Italicize “per impossibile”
Nice brisk job otherwise, as usual.
“THE TRENDS HAPPEN TO FOLLOW CLOSELY THE PREDICTIONS”
O rly?
http://i55.tinypic.com/14mf04i.jpg
Actually, there are only 48 contiguous states.
Readers, please realise that Mike Steketee is a journalist who writes about politics with a left-wing slant. His knowledge of politics and like social trivia- unfortunately- is no doubt considerable; his knowledge of science, minuscule, as so evident in his opinion piece on AGW in The Australian. So don’t waste your time – there are better things to do than being critical of left wing journos who populate the MSM – they won’t change their mind or appreciate that there is high uncertainty in the complex science of our dynamic climate – the science is too remote from and infinitely more complex than the shallow world of political commentary.
I haven’t checked but you might be able to say all 50 states. It does snow in Hawaii in winter, on the summits of Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea and Haleakala
Mike Steketee’s article contains one glaring error of fact which needs pointing out and which Monckton doesn’t do:
Steketee claims “So far the increase since the mid-18th century of all greenhouse gases has been 38 per cent, including a 27.5 per cent rise from 1990 to 2009.”
This may be true if you ignore WATER VAPOR, by far the most prevalent greenhouse gas at roughly 20 times the concentration of all other greenhouse gases. If you include water vapour the increase is a much less alarming 1-2% or so.
“The Australian” is by far Australia’s best newspaper. It, however, is pretty appalling in absolute terms and with only a few exceptions its journalists are pretty poor examples of their craft. Surely Rupert Murdoch can do better.
I always enjoy seeing Monckton spanking an ecotard.
Just wait for all the troll comments trying desperately to rubbish Monckton. I predict there will be a bumper crop! And all spouting the usual specious nonsense.
Monckton:
Can I ask where this 5000 year record is located? I have the Nilometer data for ~900 years (from 622-1469 CE) so where is this longer record?
Nice job that man. Have a g’n’t on me.
That Stekete didn’t wait to the end of the year to write all this suggests he was worried that the data for the entire year wouldn’t show it was the warmest on record.
Thank you Christopher Monckton. It was frustrating being unable to post comment to Steketee’s evangelism. Even though replies were invited and I submitted one, none was published. This is not unusual, the Australian has a habit of wasting people’s time. With this article especially, I would have been very surprised if it had been otherwise. The article was titled: “Global weather disasters a sign the heat is on”.
http://tinyurl.com/2ucc4hz
Well heat was not permitted to be applied to that assertion and those that followed.
Steketee knows he is misleading by trying to argue “trends follow closely the predictions”. The IPCC predictions for this decade have failed. As have Hansens. So he digs for a 40 year old prediction valid to the year 2000. That trend has failed to continue this decade.
Also, notice how the Australian is still inviting comments to this article, but has refused to publish any.
Not unlike the ABC webite the Drum, which shut down comments after only 12, for this ABC Science show justification for supporting the Earth Gaia Hypothesis.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/07/3108365.htm?site=thedrum
Excellent and he didn’t even mention Urban heat island effect giving an upward temperature bias and higher extreme weather impact because of increased wealth/infrastructure and building on flood plains and a growing population to be damaged by it.
One more mini copy-edit: Nils-Axel Mörner, not Niklas, unless that’s his long-lost brother.
The problem is that all those Warmista-claims is read by everyone in the MSM.
Only a few reads this.
So they keep on hammering the message, and a lot of people fall for it.
Goebbels would be proud.
By a very happy coincidence, the annual mean average temperature of 1659, the very first year of the oldest temperature dataset in the world -Central England Temperatures-is exactly the same as for 2010 at 8.83C.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
Makes you think doesn’t it?
tonyb
Great work by Lord Monckton. I read the paper this weekend and found it rather annoying because even I could pick a hafl dozen glaring errors in the article. I am glad that someone of Moncktonc calibre has done the job properly.
Very important information from Carl Chapman above as well. Let’s make sure that that is not forgotten.
Chris Monckton scores: he wins!
Great job, as usual.
4. THE WORLD IS NOT COOLER COMPARED TO 1998.
Actually, it is cooler.
22. FOR 20 YEARS MORE HOT-WEATHER THAN COLD-WEATHER TEMPERATURE RECORDS HAVE BEEN SET.
This is merely another way of saying that temperatures today are generally higher than they were 20 years ago. Since there has been some warming, …….
Poor Chris sounds a bit confused here. Cooler one minute, warmer the next……………
Also, regarding point 2, La Nina dominated the last nine months of 2010. BOM data shows El Nino died in March 2010. Read about it here :
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/enlist/index.shtml
I saw the Steketee article in the Weekend Australian and quickly saw the tack that he was taking. I stopped reading it immediately because I have no respect for most Australian journalists who are just dumb sheep. I am delighted but also amazed that Lord Monckton took the time to demolish the Steketee garbage.
It is a sad reflection on this nation that there are only about four journalists that are capable of telling things as they are – the rest (many dozens) are group think, left wing morons who parrot each other endlessly. I hope for a day when broadbased investigative journalism comes to this country. In the meantime I hang desperately to the coat tails of the pathfinders Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman and few others.
Cheers for them and Lord Monckton
I begv of someone to please please please setup an account at forums.treehugger.com and post this in the their global warming proganda forum. i would but I’m permanently banned for calling into question their religion. It would make my day if someone could do that.
smacca says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:21 am
I respectfully suggest you read and digest both points more carefully.
you may note that 1998-2011 is less than 20yrs, so the two points do not cross as you suggest, but that would require careful reading (and understanding) of Moncktons words.
Tonyb said temperatures in 1659 were exactly the same as for 2010 at 8.83C, so I had a look at the agricultural records and found 1658 may have been colder.
‘The winter, in the early part of the year, is reported to have been the severest within living memory in England. The summer was cold with continuous northerly winds.’
Sounds like NAO negative.
Thank you again Lord Monkton!
and Anthony:-)
No Aussies are surprised the Australian or ABC wont print comments that prove how erroneous they are..simply isn’t allowed!
Murdochs on the CCgravytrain too, and I bet the ABC also has some pensions tied into a carbon scam somewhere..
anyone who needs an adrenaline rage rush could listen to the podcast of this Saturdays 8th Jan
science???show, where R williams gave an hour to inane and factually wrong reportage by some american bimbo..re climate scares, pathetic and annoying.
Anthony: I have a very limited connection, and I don’t know if this getting across (here or on Tips and Notes). I was involved in a discussion at SFGate, with a Peter Gleick. One of your moderators had challenged him to post here, which Gleick not so pleasantly declined.
In order to encourage him, I offered money to a charity of his choice, to post an article here, with your blessing, of course.
This is a transcript from the page:
macuser
4:37 PM on January 2, 2011
As a moderator on the internet’s “Best Science” site, I invite Mr Gleick to submit an article, which will be published.
Of course, Gleick probably doesn’t have the stones to stand and deliver an article. But the invitation is there:
http://wattsupwiththat.com
petergleick
1:01 PM on January 7, 2011
Don’t see Watt’s biased website on any list of “best science” on the web. And Watt was a runner up on the BS Award nominees because of the misinformation he consistently promotes.
LesJohnson
12:37 AM on January 9, 2011
Peter: Not much for research, are you? WUWT won 2008 Science Blog of the year, and is one of the top 4 science blogs of 2011.
http://www.wikio.com/blogs/top/Sciences
But, this begs the question: wouldn’t you want to try to reach out to a new audience, rather than preach to the choir?
Or do you feel out of your comfort zone, if skeptical, inquiring minds are present?
Tell you what, Peter. If you post an article to WUWT (with Watt’s approval, of course), I will donate $1000 to any charity you specify. All you have to do is answer any reasonable, science based questions posed by readers, for 3 days.
Am I good for the money? Joe Romm didn’t think so, and wouldn’t take my bet. But I did split Tom Fuller’s bet with Romm. I also tried to convince Romm to debate Roger Peilke jr, for $10,000, but Joe turned that down. However, Roger P. can confirm that I did donate the promised money (which was 2500 if Joe would not accept) to Roger’s charity, MSF.
So, what do you say, Peter?
REPLY: Works for me. You have my blessings. Still waiting for Tamino to accept his offer too. – Anthony
Monckton: Formerly of the Tory Party, now deputy leader of UKIP. Next election, I’m voting UKIP!
@Simon langton January 9, 2011 at 3:21 am
“The MSM crossed the line from any pretence at journalistic integrity into eco-activism. Any claim, no matter how ludicrous, was published without scrutiny or question. Any dissenting voice was openly called a “denier”. The reporting, what little there was of it, of any dissenting papers or studies was buried deep and usually marginalised by a pro AGW commentator.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/the-msm-and-climate-alarmism/
Pointman
Roger Knights says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:21 am
“….Item 17 doesn’t rebut Stekete’s point, which should have been conceded, followed by the phrase “OTOH,” followed by the current text,,,”.
It all depends upon how one classes “severe” and/or measures ‘severity’. As I understand and recall matters (without checking the data for which I apologise), the number of named storms was high but the total energy contents of the storms for the season was not particularly high. On such basis, it would be fair to say that the 2010 season was not severe.
From an economic and human terms perspective, the crucial factor is the number of storms making landfall. The 2010 season was low in this regard and therefore fair to say that the 2010 season was not severe.
It is always difficult to make century long comparisons particularly when measurement standards have altered. Pre the satellite era, there may have been many storms which simply went un noticed. Now we can spot storms well out to sea in the middle of nowhere (in the sens of being far from man’s habitat). Because of better methods of observing and tracking, one would inevitable expect to see an increase in the number of storms and an increase in those which are observed to develop into named storms. However, this may be no more than a reflection of improved methods of detection/observation/measurement and one should be slow to read too much into this and to ascribe a trend from this.
More generally, since I have not read the book, I would not wish to make comment or pass judgment. I find generally that Lord Monkton speaks much sense and is usually able to explain the significance of things at a level that the general public (not needing to be scientists) can understand and appreciate.
John A says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:51 am
Monckton:
One of the longest records of drought and flood we have is the Nilometer, dating back 5000 years
Can I ask where this 5000 year record is located? I have the Nilometer data for ~900 years (from 622-1469 CE) so where is this longer record?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I’m not writing for Christopher Monckton, but try this link:
http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/cairo/
They quote the 5000 years (in the first paragraph) but after only a brief look I can’t see any detail as to where that number originated.
Darren Parker says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:32 am
I beg of someone to please please please set up an account at forums.treehugger.com and post this in the their global warming propaganda forum. I would but I’m permanently banned for calling into question their religion. It would make my day if someone could do that.
+++++++++++++++++++
Your command is my wish – please follow the link:
http://forums.treehugger.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=14018&p=122607#p122607
Re “13. ….46.4 C° IN MELBOURNE.”
Odds on too that our frantically alarmist Bureau of Meteorology failed to make adequate or appropriate allowance for the urban heat island effect there.
Good stuff, but seriously, why bother? Steketee is a left-wing GW catastrophist rant-meister who knows nothing about the subject. Anyone with half a brain who reads The Australian knows to skip over Steketee’s column like they know to skip Phillip Adams’ – both of them should go and work for The Age instead. A sledgehammer to crack a nut, I’m afraid, or a nut-case, perhaps. Direct your efforts at a more worthy target next time.
During biblical times, there were many records of floods, droughts, hail, locusts, etc. Early Man’s attempts to explain these phenomena involved placing blame on himself and invoking god or gods who were punishing or sending a message. Now thousands of years later we observe the same phenomena, we also blame ourselves, but now we invoke ourselves as the cause. Nothing has changed except our egos have grown to the status of gods of yore and have even displaced the omnipotent and omniscient gods themselves. Are we gods? I think not.
I hope the next phase of human evolution is the acceptance of the laws of the universe and a humbleness of our knowledge and abilities.
It seems barely credible that alarmist ‘journalists’ get away with writing such error-laden nonsense – how do such individuals get published, or do these types sit at their computers and interview each other?
Science teaching in high schools in the English-speaking world has a lot to answer for when most of the populations who completed their high school education in that world in the last half-century don’t understand really basic stuff such as how to plot daily max and min temperatures, how the carbon cycle operates, or the differing physical mechanisms which propagate the fauna of forests that are native to the various and extremely different antipodean climates.
Lord Monckton has done a precision job debunking this ignoramus, but it saddens me that it is neccessary.
Nice – a typical ‘Monckton-Rebuttal’!
Just one minor quibble:
“Intense cold – such as when General January and General February defeated Corporal Hitler at the gates of Stalingrad in 1941 – has many times killed hundreds of thousands in Russia.”
Sorry, the defeat at the ‘gates of Stalingrad’ took place in 1943.
1941 saw the defeat at the gates of Moscow.
Don’t like nit-picking, but it is best to be precise and not leave loopholes for you-know-who to exploit.
Following Monckton’s Missives we now have Monckton’s Missile, a Weapon of Mass Debunking if ever I saw one.
smacca said:
I doubt anyone else got confused with Monckton’s citing then commenting. That resolution is not so with your poor rendering, which doesn’t distinguish between your own comments and quotes. Your remark, about his supposed confusion, was confusing itself – and a bit weird.
Except that that page doesn’t say when the 2010 La Nina cycle started, does it?. This one does:
http://tinyurl.com/37gaab6
It says it started to develop in late May and gained strength in recent months. In other words, it’s only in the last few months that it really took hold.
Your other mistake is one that many warmists make, assuming to talk down from struggling mediocrity.
How does one pronounce that name with all the e’s and a k in it?
Martin Brumby says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:46 am
“I always enjoy seeing Monckton spanking an ecotard.
Just wait for all the troll comments trying desperately to rubbish Monckton. I predict there will be a bumper crop! And all spouting the usual specious nonsense.”
I predict there will be a bunch of trolls bringing up the usual ‘membership of House of Lords’ argument as a strawman to try and discredit the article.
The Australian is quite open in its position about supporting AGW. However, they do not like references or being held to account.
The fact remains as Lord Monckton points out, that it is the skeptics who believe in climate change and the catastrophists who believe this is the ideal climate which should not be changed. They believe huge taxes and people dying from cold are desirable methods of stopping the climate from changing.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
They were made worse by environmetal laws stopping householders from clearing scrub/trees from the close proximity of their houses, this helped the spread not Global Warming.
Wrong. Here’s how Accuweather sums up the 2010 season–as in the top quintile in terms of ACE since 1950:
Wrong. The Atlantic Hurricane season’s impacts are not limited to the US. Including the Caribbean, the impact was not low. Here’s Accuweather again:
And landfalls are a mere matter of chance, says Accuweather below. If we’re talking about whether the climate is getting worse–and that’s what Steketee WAS talking about–the ACE is the relevant aspect, not whether we dodged a bullet. Some other aspect may have importance, but it’s a diversion to bring it in as though doing so was being “responsive.”
I wonder what happened to the hole in the ozone layer????
PS: The reason I point things like this out is that Monckton, by over-egging his pudding, gives his enemies an opportunity for a counterpunch and, worse, to say or imply that all or most of his criticism is similarly dodgy. That’s been their tactic so far, and it’s been lamentably successful.
DWH says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:40 am
Readers, please realise that Mike Steketee is a journalist who writes about politics with a left-wing slant. His knowledge of politics and like social trivia- unfortunately- is no doubt considerable; his knowledge of science, minuscule, as so evident in his opinion piece on AGW in The Australian. So don’t waste your time – there are better things to do than being critical of left wing journos who populate the MSM – they won’t change their mind or appreciate that there is high uncertainty in the complex science of our dynamic climate – the science is too remote from and infinitely more complex than the shallow world of political commentary.
“better things to do with our time….”
We ignored Steketee-types and MSM assertions too long. Lord Monckton does us all a valuable service taking the time to refute, point-by-painful-point, Steketeee’s dissembling. We wouldn’t be up against this wall of cap-n-trade if we had be more energetic earlier. Rise up and refute them. That’s why we got ’em on the run now. McIntyre invested so much energy into refuting Mann’s hockey-stick. Anybody could see Mann was expunging the medieval Warm period but somebody needed to do the math and PROVE him wrong. We need to refute all the journalistic and the scientific propaganda. Answering them is hard work, it’s time consuming, expensive, draining; so man up. Thank you Lord Monckton and all your comrades too. May your tribe increase. Please don’t go find something better to do with your time.
Roger Knights says:
January 9, 2011 at 5:17 am
The 2010 season has an ACE index of 160, ranking 12th overall since 1950. The ACE indices of 1995 and 1933 were 228 and 213, respectively.
===================================================
Roger, this is just moving the goal posts again.
There is no possible way to get an accurate comparison between 1933 ACE and 2010 Ace.
In 1933 storms had to be seen, which means they missed a lot of storms.
In 2010, they name, measure, and count every two clouds within sight of each other. Storms that you can count their lifetime in minutes.
I’m sure the 1933 ACE was a whole lot higher than what they think it was.
PPS: I’ve just noticed that I’m guilty of the same offense I condemn. My second “Wrong” above wasn’t justified. I should have said, “Not necessarily.” I don’t know how much the damage in the Caribbean amounted to, so I wasn’t sure enough of my facts to be so absolute.
This illustrates how one gets carried away in the heat of combat. It’s better to think strategically (long-term), not tactically, and avoid overstatement, etc.
This is such a useful summary, must bookmark for future reference!
According to Prof Ryan Maue ACE is at 50yr lows.
On the snow cover in the US last year–all 50 states, all 49 continental states, and all 48 contiguous states had some snow cover at the same time. But not all were snow-covered. To be snow-covered implies that the entire state was covered, and that just didn’t happen. Minor point, great article.
I hate the language, catastrophic weather events. Weather, for the most part, just is and sometimes man is in the way, like a tree falling on someone (tragic event), or no one (natural life cycle of said tree).
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 5)
*****
And then you ask yourself: “Self, how many other impossible things did they convince me to believe?
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/05/autism.vaccines/index.html?hpt=T1&iref=BN1
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin) . . [better posted at Tips & Notes ]
Interesting link on giss temp measuring
http://www.liveweatherblogs.com/prometweatherblogs/12/2/4064/The-Problem-with-Measuring-and-Understanding-Global-Temperature
I suppose Steketee’s column will be included as peer-reviewed literature in the next IPCC Report?
@tonyb.
Thanks for the link to central England temps (it opens with excel, folks). You’re right, mean temp 1569 same as 2010!
What a terrific conversation stopper 🙂
Oops — 1659. But what’s a century between friends?
A copy should go to our dear Department of Energy And Climate Change (why the two are linked I have no idea – how about a Ministry of Defence and Soil Mechanics..??) – James Hunter is the guy who wrote to me from the department with – you’ve guessed it – the throwaway line that ‘climate change is one of the serious threats which we face’…
The temperature reached a high of 46.4 C on February 7, 2009 (not 2010), coming in at 0.8C below the record set 160 years ago:
=========
“Thursday was one of the most oppressively hot days we have experienced for some years. In the early morning the atmosphere was perfectly scorching, and at eleven o’clock the thermometer stood as high as 117° [47.2°C], in the shade.”
–The Argus, Melbourne, February 8, 1851
=========
“Even cautious scientists ……
Well at least Steketee pegs the AGW lot as reckless, careless scientists.
Perhaps there are unknown effects on the brain from living close to the ozone hole over Antarctica. The UV fried the neurons or something.
I’m surprised that the pro-AGW Australian press hasn’t blamed the Queensland floods on global warming (maybe they have..!) – but as anyone who has seen the news footage of the floods in Rockhampton will have noticed, there is a brief shot of a pole showing dates of previous flood levels in that area. ALL the previous records are ABOVE the current level – the highest (way above the present level) was, I believe (the shot cuts away quickly) 1924…
Roger Knights says:
“And landfalls are a mere matter of chance, says Accuweather below. If we’re talking about whether the climate is getting worse–and that’s what Steketee WAS talking about–the ACE is the relevant aspect, not whether we dodged a bullet. Some other aspect may have importance, but it’s a diversion to bring it in as though doing so was being “responsive.””
Wrong. It was proper for Monkton to point out that total hurricanes worldwide were lower rather than cherry picking data to make it look impressive. He was only using landfalls in the example because reliable records don’t go back 150 years otherwise.
Monckton’s relevant quote:
“In fact, Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University, who maintains the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes round the world, says that the index is at its least value in the past 30 years, and close to its least value in 50 years. For 150 years the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has shown no trend at all: this is a long and reliable record, because one does not require complex instrumentation to know that one has been struck by a hurricane.”
5. THE TRENDS HAPPEN TO FOLLOW CLOSELY THE PREDICTIONS OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS OF TEMPERATURE RISES RESULTING FROM INCREASED GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
Two blatant lies in one sentence.
Firstly hindcasts are not “predictions”, they are made AFTER the event and hence do not suggest the non-prediction was made with any skill or insight. 20/20 hindsight is easy, as is fiddling your model to produce desired results over a limited backcast period.
Second, there is no “happens to” , it is the programming of the models that are DESIGNED to produce this result. When they do not produce the required match to recent temperature rise they are considered defective and are adjusted.
What they don’t “happen” to do is match the only period for which they did produce predictions: the beginning of the 21st century.
Here , the predictions “happen to” fail abysmally and clearly demonstrate that the totally speculative amplification of the CO2 forcing was a totally unfounded.
David L.’s comments- brilliant
“On the snow cover in the US last year–all 50 states, all 49 continental states, and all 48 contiguous states had some snow cover at the same time. But not all were snow-covered. To be snow-covered implies that the entire state was covered, and that just didn’t happen. Minor point, great article.”
Not so “minor”. Unfortunately HRH Monckton is just as prone to bullshit and exaggeration and is often quite simply ill-informed.
A moments reflection would show that Hawaii and Alaska are physically separate and that Monckton’s 49 contiguous states is as nonsensical as his “snow-covered” claim and as inaccurate as his assertion that Antarctic increase is “nearly the same” as Arctic loss.
It seems his main tactic is fight fire with fire , ie. to fight bullshit science with bullshit science.
I don’t think trying to contradict one lie with another is particularly convincing or useful. But then again I’m not a Lord of the Realm , I’m a mere surf, so I could be wrong.
The 5000 year time frame mentioned WRT Nilometers is the length of time that their use has been documented. A near continuous written record of observations from them is only available for about 1400 years.
You can find a discussion of this record here:
http://stuff.mit.edu/people/eltahir/www/Publications_files/1999%20Eltahir%20Wang%20nilometers%20GRL.pdf
“One of the longest records of drought and flood we have is the Nilometer, dating back 5000 years. ” is an inexact statement, since this record is by no means continuous and more than one Nilometer was involved.
LevelGaze says in reply to me
January 9, 2011 at 7:10 am
@tonyb.
Thanks for the link to central England temps (it opens with excel, folks). You’re right, mean temp 1569 same as 2010!
What a terrific conversation stopper 🙂
***
Yes, I’m dying to go to the pub and say casually, “by the way, did you know…”
tonyb
Srarzmun: I think if the entire state of Hawaii, or Florida for that matter, was covered in snow, that would be a reason to be alarmed about climate change. But not the sort of climate change the warmists are talking about.
P.
Monckton confused contiguous with continental.
an innocuous mistake.
Rather the same as substituting surf for serf.
Hang ten dude.
Enjoy your Serfing/
A minor quibble:
Para 21: “… a three-day cold snap in Britain the previous year had killed 21,000 just in one country.”
According to an Office for National Statistics report, excess mortality in England and Wales attributed to the cold winter of 2001/02 (Dec – Mar) was estimated at 27,230. Similarly, 2002/03 was provisionally put at 24,000.
Not quite 21,000 over three days in onecountry! This, of course, excludes Scotland, where historically the per capita rate is even greater because it’s colder.
Still, always good to see a wannabe alarmonger soundly and deservedly thrashed.
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/mort1003.pdf
Global sea ice, all in, has declined since 2000. But after a step change down, it has not varied much in the last several years. Arctic sea ice was at historically measured lows in December–a key reason why Britain’s temperatures were also at historically measured lows.
The rate of sea level rise, according to the Univ. Col. Boulder, has declined to 3.0-3.1 mm/year, from 3.2-3.4 mm per year a few years ago. That’s about a foot per century.
In December 2010, the world was cooler than in 1998. The year 2010 will be the second warmest in the satellite record. There has been no statistical warming since 1995 (Phil Jones).
The Great Tsunami occurred on Dec. 26, 2004, not 2000. 230,000 people are thought to have died. This year–2004–mostly likely saw the greatest number of deaths due to natural calamity in the last ten years.
Roger Knights says:
January 9, 2011 at 5:17 am
richard verney says:
January 9, 2011 at 4:00 am
Roger Knights says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:21 am
“….Item 17 doesn’t rebut Stekete’s point, which should have been conceded, followed by the phrase “OTOH,” followed by the current text,,,”.
It all depends upon how one classes “severe” and/or measures ‘severity’. As I understand and recall matters (without checking the data for which I apologise), the number of named storms was high but the total energy contents of the storms for the season was not particularly high. On such basis, it would be fair to say that the 2010 season was not severe.
Wrong. Here’s how Accuweather sums up the 2010 season–as in the top quintile in terms of ACE since 1950:
….The 2010 season has an ACE index of 160, ranking 12th overall since 1950. The ACE indices of 1995 and 1933 were 228 and 213, respectively…”
Personally, I consider my post to be correct in that it is a question of how one interprets the expression “severe.” Whilst I accept that there is a certian amount of subjective interpretation in all of this, I, personally, would not say that the 2010 season which ranked 12th on the basis of the ACE index and with an ACE measurement of just 70.1% of that of the 1995 season, justifies the statement used by Steketee “THE HURRICANE SEASON IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC WAS ONE OF THE MOST SEVERE IN THE LAST CENTURY.”
I agree with the observation of latitude when he says:
January 9, 2011 at 6:02 am
“Roger Knights says:
January 9, 2011 at 5:17 am
The 2010 season has an ACE index of 160, ranking 12th overall since 1950. The ACE indices of 1995 and 1933 were 228 and 213, respectively.
===================================================
Roger, this is just moving the goal posts again.
There is no possible way to get an accurate comparison between 1933 ACE and 2010 Ace.
In 1933 storms had to be seen, which means they missed a lot of storms.
In 2010, they name, measure, and count every two clouds within sight of each other. Storms that you can count their lifetime in minutes.
I’m sure the 1933 ACE was a whole lot higher than what they think it was.”
As I said in my post, I have not checked the data and therefore would not wish to argue facts in detail. As regards damage in the Caribbean, my recollection is that there was relatively little coverage in the UK MSM of susbtantial damage although problems in Haiti compounding the earthquake damage were reported. This, of course, does not mean that there was significant damage and I would not like to belittle the suffering caused to anyone caught up in a Hirricane and accordingly I will not expand upon my previous post.
Very informative piece, thanks!
Very interesting. Hard to find in Germany!
[snip – calls for religious connections, promotes religious website, take it elsewhere per our policy page – moderator]
In general, a typical Monckton piece: some of it very good, some a bit weak; a bit sloppy on some details (date of Stalingrad, as pointed out, and a typo in the reference to the number of contiguous US states, etc.). It’s a pity that his response to number 5 (whether actual temperature is tracking the models’ predictions) is not responsive to the point. There is one commenter (Juraj V) who linked to a (somewhat hard to discern) graph: are there any other useful commentaries on this point?
“In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.”
I think he’s got this backwards.
The first nine months of 2010 was warmer than the first 9 months of 1998. Even though, as he says, the el Nino of 1998 was stronger. Also in 1998 we weren’t in a deep solar minimum. That implies the world is comparatively warmer – all other things being unequal – in 2010 than in 1998.
“smacca says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:21 am
Also, regarding point 2, La Nina dominated the last nine months of 2010. BOM data shows El Nino died in March 2010. Read about it here :…”
As was pointed out before, it ended a month or two later, however UAH satellite data for September 2010 was at 0.48 which was a RECORD HIGH SEPTEMBER reading. Check it out at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
There is often a time lag between the end of a La Nina and the end of its effects on temperature. So with respect to UAH, I see nothing wrong with: “The cherry-picking of the first nine months of 2010 is particularly unacceptable, since that period was dominated by a substantial El Niño Southern Oscillation,..”
“In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed”
This is completely incorrect. The models predict that should happen through any cause of warming, not just if man is the cause
“3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.”
To this he claims to be unsurprised. He expects that. Why then in point #4 does he suggest the world has cooled since 1998. That would actually surely cause him not to expect the last decade to be the warmest on record.
Quote:
‘amicus curiae says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:50 am
Thank you again Lord Monkton!
and Anthony:-)
No Aussies are surprised the Australian or ABC wont print comments that prove how erroneous they are..simply isn’t allowed!’ Unquote.
I would be surprised that “The Australian” which is by far Australia’s most centre leaning newspaper would not print all views that aim to find truth.
But I would be not be surprised about the ABC which has been dominated by a culture of hard left leaning journalists for decades.
And I would not be surprised that the ABC ‘s Karen Barlow, on her mission to the Mertz Glacier in Antarctica on the Aurora Australis, will be finding lots more “evidence” of global warming that will make Lord Monckton choke over his cornflakes:
http://blogs.abc.net.au/news/2010/12/journey-to-the-white-continent.html
I posted a comment to ‘Heinrich’ Romm in which he blamed the revent rain deluge on the warmest sea surface temperatures on the record. I asked then why in the last decade of the warmest sea surface temperatures did Australia suffer years of drought. My comment never made it through. ;>)
Romm is living in denial. The Australian drought is almost over due to global warming / cooling / climate change / staying the same.
onion says:
“This is completely incorrect. The models predict that should happen through any cause of warming, not just if man is the cause”
First, if humans are not the cause of global warming, then it is natural, and there is nothing to be done about it. So sit back, and enjoy the pleasant weather.
Regarding the “fingerprint” of global warming – the tropospheric hot spot – sorry to disappoint you, but the “fingerprint” was the output of a model. It never existed in the real world; observation shows that it doesn’t exist.
Your CAGW conjecture is in complete disarray. Why do you keep digging your hole deeper? Do you enjoy being consistently wrong?
Dam the records, a little peer review:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.08.016
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFMPP11A0203F
http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/3/227
Historical perspective:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice-tony-b/
“a three-day cold snap in Britain the previous year had killed 21,000 just in one country” I have no memory of such a catastrophy! surely amistake of a factor of at least 100 ?
DWH says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:40 am
“Readers, please realise that Mike Steketee is a journalist who writes about politics with a left-wing slant….there are better things to do than being critical of left wing journos who populate the MSM – they won’t change their mind or appreciate that there is high uncertainty in the complex science of our dynamic climate – the science is too remote from and infinitely more complex than the shallow world of political commentary.”
I guess you haven’t noticed that “political commentary”, i.e., propaganda, is all ipcc CAGW Climate Science is – so that Steketee is actually practicing ipcc style Climate Science almost as well as it can be done, according to its own directedly anti-science “method”?
Or, DWH, maybe the problem is that you have noticed it?
It’s “University of Rochester”.
I just heard the Weather Channel talking about how Global Warming can cause all this cold weather. You’ll all be happy to know that the hot spot over the sea between Alaska and Siberia is due to the warm water melting the ice causing a high pressure system that is re-directing the jet stream. Too bad that warm water can’t get down to the three Russian fishing ships frozen in place just north of Japan.
onion says:
January 9, 2011 at 11:26 am
I thought it was quite clear that Monckton considers the natural warming over 300yrs and that therefore it would make logical sense that ANY later period (as in any time since 300yrs ago!) temps would naturally be slightly warmer than before. Ergo, any later decade would be more likely to be warmer than a preceding one. Is that really too difficult to grasp? You do understand that the climate is currently warmer than the last ice age? You do understand that in order for the climate to be warmer SINCE the last ice age, that some warming has occurred and that the most recent decades will thus be warmer than older ones? Duh?
“Smokey says:
January 9, 2011 at 11:43 am
onion says:
“This is completely incorrect. The models predict that should happen through any cause of warming, not just if man is the cause”
First, if humans are not the cause of global warming, then it is natural, and there is nothing to be done about it. So sit back, and enjoy the pleasant weather. Regarding the “fingerprint” of global warming – the tropospheric hot spot – sorry to disappoint you, but the “fingerprint” was the output of a model. It never existed in the real world; observation shows that it doesn’t exist.”
——
The hotspot is expected whether the warming is natural or man-made, thus my take on it is that the word fingerprint is wrong in this situation (fingerprint would describe a phenomenon that could distinguish between causes). The hotspot is a predicted response to global warming. I would say it’s a more fundamental prediction than ‘predicted by climate models’ would let on. It’s a prediction from the moist adiabatic lapse rate, so I would say it was more a meteorological prediction (that as the surface warms it will warm higher aloft – as the moist adiabatic lapse rate is curved, not linear) applied to longterm warming. In so much as climate models exhibit such a hotspot this is just following on from that meteorological prediction and that the models don’t exhibit anything that opposes that effect somehow.
I agree the hotspot isn’t found in observations, but wouldn’t rule out this being a fault of the observations. If it is a fault of the models it’s because a process that counters the effect is currently unknown. It bears mentioning that my take on this is that discovery and inclusion of such an effect into models may actually increase climate sensitivity or even not affect it significantly at all. This bears mentioning because I feel there is a general assumption is that a missing hotspot must mean model climate sensitivity is too high, but I have not seen any evidence for why that should be the case.
My view is that a missing hotspot in observations suggests climate models are wrong, but then that’s hardly the only thing that makes me think models are wrong. The cloud uncertainty is a bigger issue IMO as that more clearly and significantly directly bears on climate sensitivity.
I guess India should take comfort from the fact of global warming as deaths from freezing weather increase.
“Cold wave tightens grip over N. India, 51 deaths overnight in UP
United News of India
New Delhi, January 8, 2011
Cold weather conditions tightened their grip over North India with 51 deaths overnight in Uttar Pradesh as Leh in Jammu and Kashmir shivered at minus 14 degrees Celsius.
Severe cold weather has damaged 60 to 80 per cent crops and vegetables in 250 villages of Ujjain district in Madhya Pradesh. Besides it has claimed 20 lives in the state.
Fifty one people died overnight due to intensified cold conditions in Uttar Pradesh. With this the toll reached 188 in the state.”
http://netindian.in/news/2011/01/08/0009933/cold-wave-tightens-grip-over-n-india-51-deaths-overnight
Kev-in-UK says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:19 pm
I thought it was quite clear that Monckton considers the natural warming over 300yrs and that therefore it would make logical sense that ANY later period (as in any time since 300yrs ago!) temps would naturally be slightly warmer than before.
—–
My take on the line “3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.” is that it’s highlighting that the last decade (00s) was warmer than the previous one (90s), which is suggesting that the warming has continued past 1998.
Ergo, any later decade would be more likely to be warmer than a preceding one. Is that really too difficult to grasp? You do understand that the climate is currently warmer than the last ice age? You do understand that in order for the climate to be warmer SINCE the last ice age, that some warming has occurred and that the most recent decades will thus be warmer than older ones? Duh?
OT: another modeling career…
http://www.calgaryherald.com/technology/Another+century+emissions+will+fuel+years+climate+change+Study/4082721/story.html
1,000 years run on a radiative model, courtesy of taxpayers, here is what Shawn Marshall and another bunch of mannequins have come up with!
Simon from Sydney says:
January 9, 2011 at 4:23 am
“Good stuff, but seriously, why bother? Steketee is a left-wing GW catastrophist rant-meister who knows nothing about the subject. Anyone with half a brain who reads The Australian knows to skip over Steketee’s column like they know to skip Phillip Adams’ – both of them should go and work for The Age instead. A sledgehammer to crack a nut, I’m afraid, or a nut-case, perhaps. Direct your efforts at a more worthy target next time.”
Steketee or not, Monckton skewers MSM parrotts nicely.
It is too easy to get bogged down in detail and be fighting alligators while your aim is to drain the swamp.
Monckton missed a great opportunity to keep it short and simple and simply point out that Steketee is wrong about the increase in greenhouse gases because water vapor is greenhouse gas and in fact by far the most prevalent one and that the increase in total greenhouse gases is very small like 1 -2 % , not the 38% that Steketee claims.
Monckton’s criticisms will now get lost in the noise as shown on this thread.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
They were made worse by environmetal laws stopping householders from clearing scrub/trees from the close proximity of their houses, this helped the spread not Global Warming.
———————————
What is more, despite the knowledge that this was so, there is, once again, a huge regrowth of brush,(wattles, eucalypts, etc.) in places like Marysville. I felt a sort of despair when I visited and saw this for myself a few weeks ago.
onion says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:33 pm
Not sure I followed that post. But to be clear, trying to split hairs is rather tedious. In 2) Monckton clearly says
”Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.” Jones actually reckons its since 1995, but qualifies with the term ‘statistically significant’. I think you should accept the same qualification – basically, if there is any warming since the late 90’s its statistically insignificant but the fact remains that warming has been ongoing for at least 300 yrs, so on a decadal scale, a later decade would be expected to be warmer than a previous one. At least, that’s how I read Moncktons point(s), so I do not see any error.
David @ 7:45 am:
Yes, I saw that too, and wondered at the term ‘unprecedented’. The floods are very widespread though. I feel so sorry for all those affected.
There is one factor that might tend to make people think things are becoming worse. It is that, thanks to modern communications, we all know so much more, so immediately, of what is happening in the world. News media love disasters, so they will certainly ensure that we hear about them.
P Solar @ 8:23:
Did you mean ‘serf’ ?
Why should not a Lord of the Realm not have a valid opinion?
After reading this article & the comments ~ methinks even this coffee much needs ‘warming’…decidedly ‘local’, tho…’going global’ would be a tad too much.
I suggest this sport (while indeed necessary) this ‘verbal boxing’ (with Monckton indeed serving up KO’s to even seemingly adroit Aussie (chicken little) scientists) boils down ~ yet again ~ to a rather basic ‘them’ vs. ‘us’ scenario:
THEM: ‘WE ‘ARE’ GOD.’ which is merely: “We want to PLAY God” (said in the teensy tiny screeching tones of a few thousand Shirley McClains)
US: “NO… YOU’RE NOT.” (as hundreds of thousands casually look over shoulders toward the screeching) …because, “You’re all about HOT AIR and keeping folks: #1. AFRAID and #2. In the DARK” (said in a confident and polite ~ though, indeed – ‘thunderous’ – response.)
I thank Goodness for home schooling. I thank Goodness for the indomitable human spirit. I thank Goodness that ‘real men’ (while charmingly fallible, still) choose to boldly stand to inspire others & to refute propaganda – wherever it is found on this globe.
You all inspire. I thank all of you.
Now…rather than ‘nuke’ that coffee… I’ll put the kettle on the boil…grab my smokes… and lean back and enjoy life on the front veranda on yet another breezy & lovely South Australian morning
Cynthia Lauren
Us
I meant ‘Why should a Lord of the Realm not have a valid opinion?’….obviously it’s getting late and a bit of shut-eye is needed!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/21/worlds-worst-heatwave-the-marble-bar-heatwave-1923-24/
Better than ‘it was cold at Stalingrad’, is snippets from history of previous conditions of raging peat fires in Russia, posted by marchesarosa August 22,2010 at 8:49 am
Another great Monckton debunk-the-debunker piece. I’d like to recommend something really ripe for debunking – if Chris Monckton / everyone / anyone here would do it.
Start with the picture here. Have fun.
Proceed to the whole pdf “guide” here.
Then add the final de-debunk to the OurClimate app.
Kev-in-UK says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:40 am
smacca says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:21 am
I respectfully suggest you read and digest both points more carefully.
Kev,
I am well aware of the point you make. But Monckton, as always, is just a little vague in his responses.
As usual with a Monkton piece, its well written and persuasive, but has simple errors that undermine its plausibility when examined at a more than superficial level.
This seems common with media articles aimed at a non-scientific readership, the writing may convince the layman, (and the choir) but is rejected by the better informed. The same problem with errors and simplifications to the point of inaccuracy are seen in the article he is attacking. And I agree with a number of his criticisms.
Two aspects tend to reduce Monkton’s credibility from my POV.
One- The inclusion of Nils-Axel Mörner is rather like quoting Behe or Demski in a discussion on evolution. It instantly reduces your credibility to a very low level. The rest of the statement on sea level seems to gloss over the fact that the rise of a foot in the last 100 years follows sea levels that have been essentially unchanged for several thousand years. Certainly the recent rate of sea level rise is far greater than any seen since human societies kept written records.
Two- The assertion that it is to be expected that the records show decadel warming because we have been warming from ‘Natural’ causes since the end of the ice age.
This is not accurate. The Holocene maximum – so far! – was shortly after the Eurasian and American ice-caps melted. Since then temperatures have been falling with some decadel to century variation – LIA and MWP for instance. But ascribing the recent warming to one of these ‘natural’ variations begs the question – what is the CAUSE of the ‘natural’ variation.
‘Natural’ variation is only ever description, NOT an explanation.
EVEN IF GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS WERE TO STABILIZE AT LITTLE MORE THAN TODAY’S LEVELS, 2 C° OF FURTHER WARMING WILL OCCUR – FOUR TIMES THE INCREASE OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.
Wow, comparing an estimated rise over a century to the rise over 30 years, which already means a factor of 3.3 and getting worked up over an estimated factor of 4.
How to lie with statistics 101.
Smokey:
“Regarding the “fingerprint” of global warming – the tropospheric hot spot – sorry to disappoint you, but the “fingerprint” was the output of a model. It never existed in the real world; observation shows that it doesn’t exist. ”
The observations do show that the hotspot exists. It happens to be smaller than predicted. A good deal smaller. What one can conclude from this is as follows.
A. The method of comparing them is in error ( using a ensemble of models )
B. The models don’t represent the process accurately enough.
C. The observations have more error , bias than was thought.
D. Some combination of A,B, and C.
“Looking back, most of our Cape Verde systems over the past month have fortunately followed a similar track and recurved out into the open Atlantic and have not been significant threats to the United States. Why is this? well hurricanes are steered by the flow of air over a large depth of the troposphere. They typically move around large and deep areas of high pressure (ridge). Well typically during the peak of the hurricane season a well established ridge is present over the central Atlantic, known as the Bermuda-Azores High. Often tropical systems follow the southern extent of the ridge westward as this is the “path of least resistance”. If the ridge does not extent far enough westward the system will simply rotate around the ridge and move more northward. This has been the case this season, as a series of upper-level low pressure areas or troughs have passed through the flow and weaken or erode the western side of the Bermuda High, thus allowing tropical systems to follow the “easy” path northward around the ridge. In 2004 and 2005 this was a different story as the ridge extended far enough westward to simply push systems toward the continental United States. Although this is a very simplistic representation of the steering regimes of tropical cyclones it gives a general idea how Cape Verde storms often progress. Predicting this pattern prior to the season is quite difficult, thus estimating the risk to areas of coastline before the start of a hurricane season is a tremendous forecasting challenge. As far as activity for this season, despite the slow start it is well on its way to being a very active year. So far this season has featured 11 named storms, 5 hurricanes, and 4 major hurricanes (Danielle, Earl, Igor, and Julia), an average season has 10-6-2. So with about 45% of the season remaining it looks like the seasonal forecasts of an active year will verify.”
http://ttuhrt.blogspot.com/2010/09/2010-atlantic-hurricane-season-so-far.html
http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/MediaDetail.php?MediaID=595&MediaTypeID=2
Re UK Excess Winter Deaths
Government data here
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
and in more detail here (pdf)
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/deaths1110.pdf
or regional data from here
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=7089
Sean McHugh says:
January 9, 2011 at 4:53 am
smacca said:
Poor Chris sounds a bit confused here. Cooler one minute, warmer the next……………
I doubt anyone else got confused with Monckton’s citing then commenting. That resolution is not so with your poor rendering, which doesn’t distinguish between your own comments and quotes. Your remark, about his supposed confusion, was confusing itself – and a bit weird.
Sean,
as I stated earlier, Monckton is always a little vague. It gives him room to move if required.
In regard to El Nino, Monckton states,
“The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, “.
You should have read the BOM link a little more carefully. The last paragraph states.
“So Australia’s rainfall patterns had switched from being typical of El Niño well before the main ENSO indicators had shown strong signs of retreating to neutral values, although SSTs had been in slow decline since the end of December. A more emphatic sign was the 25.8 rise in the SOI from March to April 2010 which heralded the end of the event as far as broadscale indicators were concerned. ”
A positive SOI indicates La Nina, therefore, we entered a La Nina pattern in April 2010.
I prefer to go to the source of the data, instead of reading a newspaper report.
Why would this dude post in 2011 about things that have more current data? Hide the decline! It’s not the first time or last time, but when you think about it the only conclusion is they are cherry picking the data they want to push. Bastards!
the north qld floods are merely the biggest in 50 or nearly a hundred years. other flooding in the outback are the biggest in 70 years, but for Steketee it’s all “unprecedented”:
5 Jan: SMH: Kym Agius: Rocky may be spared from massive peak
The river reached 9.2 metres on Wednesday afternoon, short of the 9.4m peak predicted…
The 9.4m peak would have matched the 1954 flood but would have fallen short of the 10.11m reached in 1918…
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/rocky-may-be-spared-from-massive-peak-20110105-19fbs.html
8 Jan: SMH, Australia: Erik Jensen: A way of life for the proud swampers
But the royal visit did not earn a mention in town – all people wanted to talk about was how Rockhampton withstood the 1954 flood, the second highest peak since the devastating flood of 1918….
http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-way-of-life-for-the-proud-swampers-20110107-19ito.html
same day, same newspaper company, Fairfax, even the same journo, yet note the difference from the above account:
8 Jan: Age, Australia: Andrew Rule and Erik Jensen: When the water came
Climate change or not, there is little argument this flood is bigger than those of 1954 and 1991 and rivals legendary floods of 1918 and 1893, part of local folk memory…
http://www.theage.com.au/national/when-the-water-came-20110107-19ix0.html
btw, the rain is lovely.
smacca says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Monckton is vague? Yes, perhaps he is less than detailed in some of his repostes but you have to accept that he is trying to rebutt in a similar vein to the accusation – i.e. without detailed science and references, etc. Horese for courses and all that! I mean, there would be very little point in describing reams of science (which he personally may well not understand in detail anyway) against a basically presented set of premises by some clearly non-scientific journalist type!
This kind of harks to the whole ‘fault’ of the AGW theme – which is that instead of it being correctly and honestly debated amongst scientists – it has been deliberately promoted in MSM for ‘effect’ – take your pick what that ‘effect’ is intended to be – but the end result is the same in that the general public are being spoon fed a half story. And that is frankly wrong (and I would say the same if it was simply anti-AGW stuff in the MSM).
“Wrong. Here’s how Accuweather sums up the 2010 season–as in the top quintile in terms of ACE since 1950: As November draws to a close, AccuWeather.com takes a look back at the intense and unusual 2010 Atlantic hurricane season. In what was one of the top five most active seasons on record, the United States was unusually spared most of the activity and severe conditions.”
Interesting that the ACE in the North Atlantic was specified here. I believe Monckton’s point was that world wide ACE was as low as ever observed in the satellite era. Isn’t this global warming, oops I mean climate change, oops I mean climate disruption GLOBAL in scope. Doesn’t selecting one of the few regions where there was an increase in ACE rather than a decrease represent cherry picking?
stevenmosher says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Steven – very valid points but there should be some suggestion of liklihood of where the ‘error’ lies.
A. The method of comparing them is in error ( using a ensemble of models )
– is kind of against observational based science because the theory (or model in this case) should at least reasonably match the observations otherwise the theory is usually assumed to be wrong – at least initially! (and after decades of AGW, you’d think that we were getting pretty good at ‘looking’ for the right data? – if not, then scrap it, because we have wasted an awful lot of time and money on it and still don’t have a clue!)
B. The models don’t represent the process accurately enough.
– this is surely a very high probability given the scale of the problem and the number and sizes of the various processes involved in ‘climate’
C. The observations have more error , bias than was thought.
– always difficult, but realistically, there is a low probability of major flaws – errors in measurements etc, will always be present but in the context of climate (i.e. the vast number of variables) any single set of measurements should not really be used as a defining characteristic.
D. Some combination of A,B, and C.
– of course, but I think if you asked anyone where the likely ‘errors’ are – they would mostly suggest that it will be the models and some (or many) of their assumptions that are wrong – not the ‘basic’ observations – I say, ‘basic’, because at this stage many observations are mostly basic!
Blocking (Omega) highs in the Canadian Prairies are a god send. They may not be everywhere in the world, but for us bring them on. BTW they seem to be declining lately, maybe they moved to Europe, Pakistan and Russia?
Monckton 1 vs Steketee 0
“Its like someone backed up a truck full of failure and dumped it all on Steketee’s nice green lawn…”
“onion says:
January 9, 2011 at 11:26 am
“3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.”
To this he claims to be unsurprised. He expects that. Why then in point #4 does he suggest the world has cooled since 1998. That would actually surely cause him not to expect the last decade to be the warmest on record.”
Both statements are completely true according to the Hadcrut3 data. As an illustration, imagine a mountain climber going UP A STEEP mountain between 1990 and 1998. He reaches the top in 1998 and then VERY SLOWLY goes down during the next 12 years. If you take the average height from 2000 to 2009, it is higher than the average height from 1990 to 1999. But this does not negate the fact that the peak was reached in 1998.
izen,
Being of sceptical nature and certainly not a member of any choir, I quite liked your comment.
Who said anything about 1933? I suppose the same criticism could be made of the 1950 hurricane assessment, but the counter argument to that would be that seasons in the satellite era have not been scored substantially higher than those in the preceding years, starting in 1950.
Even if that is not the case, if the difference is only a matter of 20% (say), that would only downgrade the 2010 season from its #12 ranking to (say) a #20 ranking (out of 60 years). That would still support my claim that the 2010 season could not remotely be called low one.
Not the Atlantic ACE, which is what Steketee, Monckton, and I were discussing.
Steketee’s claim was:
I have no argument with your statement that “It was proper for Monkton to point out that total hurricanes worldwide were lower….” Indeed, I suggested that he include it. My objection was to his implication that this diversion amounted to a refutation of Steketee’s claim, which it wasn’t.
OK, you’ve got a point. But so did I. Monckton should have put his second sentence first, since that’s the one that directly responds to the topic under discussion (North Atlantic hurricanes). Not doing so is diversive. And he should have prefaced it with this concession, “It’s true that we have had an active hurricane season this year, but it’s not anything to get alarmed about.”
2. THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANISATION SAYS THE YEAR TO THE END OF OCTOBER WAS THE WARMEST SINCE INSTRUMENTAL CLIMATE RECORDS STARTED IN 1850 – 0.55 C° ABOVE THE 1961-90 AVERAGE OF 14 C°.
Thank you, Christopher.
As you clearly establish, cherries are Mike Steketee’s favourite fruit.
We now know the UK has had its coldest December since nationwide records began a century ago. Temperatures averaged minus 1C, well below the long-term average of 4.2C. Presumably this “weather disaster” was also “a sign the heat is on”? In Warmerland, of course, whatever happens is caused by (human-induced) global warming, even (unpredicted) cooling.
For Steketee, the latest news on annual global mean temperatures (excluding Australia) – a dubious statistical artefact – is “not so promising”. The UN World Meteorological Organisation indeed indicated just before Cancun that 2010’s nominal value was “the highest on record”, and “currently estimated at 0.55°C ± 0.11°C above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14.00°C”.
However, the WMO’s selection of a 1961-1990 “standard reference period” is a (questionable) convention, even assuming “adjusted” annual average global temperature datasets are reliable. Had it used a different period, for example 1981-2010, the global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature anomaly for 2010 (January – October) would have been 50 per cent lower at only +0.28C ± 0.11°C.
Being duped may be “ preferable to being fried” for Steketee, but others would prefer less spin and more frankness from UN agencies like the WMO.
Alice (in Warmerland)
izen says: Jan 9 1:46 pm
Certainly the recent rate of sea level rise is far greater than any seen since human societies kept written records.
Geology is kind of record writ in stone, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/06/basic-geology-part-3-sea-level-rises-during-interglacial-periods/
Among those mentioned is India where archeology ongoing, but importantly where there are actual written records of great antiquity by which such great changes in sea level rise can be gleaned and compared (also by the astronomical data re events, found in this vast body of literature) – see section 5. (Not an easy page to read).
http://slideshare.net/amlanroychowdhury/the-mother-of-all-civilization
In Mahabharata’s Musal Parva, the Dwarka is mentioned as being gradually swallowed by the ocean. Krishna had forewarned the residents of Dwaraka to vacate the city before the sea submerged it.
…
Krishna asked Vishwakarman, the architect of the gods to build him a city more beautiful than any before it. Krishna ….built on the sunken remains of a previous kingdom, Kushasthali, which itself was built on older ruins, all underwater. Krishna reclaimed a hundred miles of land from the sea ..
izen says:
“The inclusion of Nils-Axel Mörner is rather like quoting Behe or Demski in a discussion on evolution. It instantly reduces your credibility to a very low level.”
==========================
Actually, it is YOUR credibility that just dropped into the sub-basement.
Nils-Axel Mörner is one of the premier if not THE premier sea-level experts on the planet.
Besides most of your post being trash, your statement above was the trashiest of all.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Steketee overstated with his “most” in “most severe.” He should have said, “one of the more severe….” That would be in agreement with Accuweather’s claim of it being “intense.” (Another case of overstatement coming back to bite one.)
But your original statement wasn’t a disagreement with “most severe.” It was a disagreement with “severe” alone. That’s what I took issue with, and that’s why you’re still Wrong. You stated:
Total energy contents the past season was in the top quintile (top 20%; 12th out of 60 past years). Top quintile qualifies as a five-star rating, or severe. On such basis, it would be fair to say that the 2010 season was severe. Far from “not particularly high.”
See my response above.
Oops–I meant to outdent that last paragraph (mine), rather than indent it.
13. THE TEMPERATURE OF 46.4 C° IN MELBOURNE ONE SATURDAY IN 2010 WAS MORE THAN 3 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS HIGHEST FOR FEBRUARY.
While Saturday 7 February was certainly a brutal day, 46.4 C° in Melbourne. There are a couple of points of qualification worthy of making.
First the Melbourne weather station is located such that temperature readings taken now would bear little relation to those recorded in Melbourne in 1855 when official records began. Melbourne’s population is now 4 million, compared with about 20,000 in early 1851. Also the site of the Melbourne Weather Station is hopelessly compromised by UHI.
Second there is doubt whether in fact the temperature recorded by BOM on 7 February 2010 was the highest temperature recorded in Melbourne. Andrew Bolt explains:
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE
The Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria on 7 February 2009 were catastrophic, no question. However, the Black Thursday fires that occurred in Victoria on 6 February 1851 arguably were worse in terms of area burned i.e. an estimated 5 million hectares compared 1 million hectares in 2009.
Khwarizmi is quite right about 1851 being hotter in Melbourne than 2009. Annei is also right about Greenie Laws putting communities at risk and I don’t know why a Class Action hasn’t been started against State and Local Governments over it
“David says:
January 9, 2011 at 7:45 am”
I saw that too. 1994/5 was higher than 2010/2011, 1954/5 was higher still and the highest I saw was 1910, considerably higher than todays flood. But there are more affected people this time around. But still I argue, if you live on a flood plain, expect floods at some point in time.
This flood event in Aus, IMO, mirrors the policies of the last few decades in the UK. Pro-AGW supporters planned for more warm events in the UK. We now know what poor policiy and planning leads to.
To be accurate my Lord, Mr. Steketee’s article states “The temperature of 46.4C in Melbourne on Black Saturday”, and a check of the records shows Black Saturday occurred in 2009, and not 2010. The highest recorded temperature for Melbourne in February 2010 was 35.3C according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM).
Mr Steketee’s article is full of emotive appeal, but little scientific import. However, I do not want you to be open to criticism of misquoting dates etc, as we both know how this can be exploited by the self-appointed furies of global warming.
As noted elsewhere in the comments above, the Melbourne temperature station is now on a sliver of land between two major roads, and large building developments, so I doubt it meets the BOM’s required basis of precise, reproducible, and independent measurement. I know this site well, as I walk past it every day during the traffic jams and tow-away zones that ensure idling trucks stand by it within 6-8 feet.
The only strange thing about the article in the Australian was that the Australian is well-known for mainly printing nonsense on climate change. The Australian might be starting to wake up to the realities of how we are warming the planet. (Or maybe it’s just a temporary sop to the critics of its woeful erroneous reporting in recent times.)
Of course it’s pretty hard to deny global warming these days if you live in Australia. The signs of AGW-induced climate change are everywhere from more frequent major flooding up north to heat, drought and when it rains it buckets down south. No more of that sweet Melbourne drizzle or mild temperate, if variable, climate – it’s extreme torrential rain or extreme heat and drought these days.
Khwarizmi says:
=========
“Thursday was one of the most oppressively hot days we have experienced for some years. In the early morning the atmosphere was perfectly scorching, and at eleven o’clock the thermometer stood as high as 117° [47.2°C], in the shade.”
–The Argus, Melbourne, February 8, 1851
=========
But that was before it was adjusted downwards to account for today’s warming. 😉
A few years ago, Mike Steketee wrote a column extolling the great things California was doing with green technology, how good this was proving for their economy and how Australia should follow suit. It was published in the Australian. In view of California’s current economic woes and the resignation of its governor, it would be interesting to read it again. Does anyone have the link?
Steketee is a serial Alarmist. He has been parrotting the IPCC’s claptrap for some time now, without even the slightest hint of journalistic analysis.
You might note that even though there is a comments section to his article, that as at the date of this message, two days after his article was published online, that not one single comment has been published in response.
I know, at least, that one response was made to Steketee’s article – my own – and it was made two days ago as soon as I read his ridiculous article, but I can only imagine it didn’t pass muster because it was critical of the article.
It would be a very interesting exercise indeed to obtain the full texts of the responses to Steketee’s article. I have no doubt that the comments would be almost unanimously critical and that that is the reason they are not published.
Greg J
Melbourne, OZ
@-savethesharks says:
“Nils-Axel Mörner is one of the premier if not THE premier sea-level experts on the planet.”
This statement is almost the inverse of reality. He is a joke in the scientific community for his views ungrounded in any data, the advocation of dowsing and strange beliefs in the racial origin of northern Europeans.
http://circleh.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/damning-evidence-of-fraud-by-nils-axel-morner/
Sou says:
January 9, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Of course it’s pretty hard to deny global warming these days if you live in Australia. The signs of AGW-induced climate change are everywhere from more frequent major flooding up north to heat, drought and when it rains it buckets down south. No more of that sweet Melbourne drizzle or mild temperate, if variable, climate – it’s extreme torrential rain or extreme heat and drought these days.
Well, Sou, since ipcc CO2CAGW Climate Science is not doing real, scientific method, science, it really can’t prove anything; and it hasn’t yet shown that any of the World’s ongoing weather-climate events it keeps frenetically bringing to our attention ex post facto and often even against its predictions, are outside the realm of normal variability. These events allegedly attributed uniquely to “your” CO2CAGW are instead always found to be not new! = FAIL
Climate Science’s CO2CAGW claims nearly always fail. For example, it can’t explain the past temp. record without CO2 – because it first dials in a significant CO2 effect to its Models, then simply adjusts the other factors as needed to fit – but it can’t make any successful predictions with CO2! = FAIL
And doesn’t it bother you at all that you never hear of any benefits to our World’s current state of warmth, or of benefits going forward given its increasing warmth, and in comparison to cooling? = FAIL
If not, then you are going to be easily deluded. = FAIL
Whats on in the Australian ? First up they let an IPCC warmanista (Pitman) try and bring out the same old tired (and now falsified) arguments in favour of warming – CO2 levels, sea levels, catastrophe, catastrophe and more catastrophe. Then the editor lets Steketee come up with this dose of surrealism.
From the comments above, it looks like they were swamped with comments about basic factual errors in the Steketee piece. The interesting thing is why the editorial staff let this go to print without some basic checking. Or did it have the imprimateur of the editorial staff for other reasons ?
A free murdoch press ride for a carbon tax in return for freeing up some of the anti siphoning rules or a slice of NBN perhaps ?
And do you think those little willies at the ABC will ask any questions ?
Forget the CO2, this needs more O2.
I’m curious about Steketee’s figure of 56,000 as the death toll in the Russian heat wave – it looks a bit on the high side. The only figure I can find online is an estimate of 15,000, and it’s not clear whether that’s meant to include deaths directly from wildfire.
Izen: if that ad hominem filled piece is really your rebuttal, perhaps you should consider a course or two in fundamental logic? Really, you people would get a lot more respect if you could simply debate facts aand science logically rather than commit every possible fallacy while asking people to accept you know what you’re talking about.
Mark
Mostly unsubstantiated cherry picking and personal observations. To pick up on some of the most glaring…
Even if 2010 does not come out the hottest it will still be in the top 3 even considering the La Nina event.
He does not dispute the past decade as the hottest on record, but dismisses it as like ‘climbing up a steep hill.’ Yes that makes a lot of scientific sense. Isn’t recent decades hotter than previous decades the whole definition of global warming? Proof of climate change dismissed with utter rubbish.
The figures do not support that the world is cooler now. (and you don’t give any)
Their is no basis to suggest that temp should increase at the same rate as CO2, their are positive and negative feedbacks and tipping points as well as natural variability. This proves zero.
Yes no individual weather event is proof of climate change but the increasing nature of extreme weather events is a disturbing trend that is predicted by climate change.
Recent satellite measurements do indicate the troposphere warming.
If this is the kind of disastrous weather we are experiencing with a 0.7 deg rise, I don’t think you are going to like 2-3 deg very much.
He dismisses Pakistan, Russia the floods, drought in WA etc as has happened before, but in the same year?
Yes climate change started 4 billion years ago, and how many humans were here then? also how many and where and what was the weather and the oceans like 200 million years ago. Statements such as these mean nothing and talk about the natural growth of the planet and not the man made effects that are changing the planet at an accelerated rate now.
I could go on but I am probably to long now. This article is nonsense.
Sou says:
January 9, 2011 at 8:13 pm
“No more of that sweet Melbourne drizzle or mild temperate, if variable, climate – it’s extreme torrential rain or extreme heat and drought these days.”
You mean it’s “ops normal” as it has always been in Oz. I spent 5 years in Melbourne in 1971(it felt like it anyway) doing my BoM meteorologist course.
Only solution for Melborne is to nuke from orbit.
izen says:
January 9, 2011 at 10:48 pm
@ – savethesharks says:
“Nils-Axel Morner is one of the premier if not THE premier sea-level experts on the planet.”
This statement is almost the inverse of reality. He is a joke in the scientific community for his views ungrounded in any data,
But…, this is the argument he has with AGWScience, that it doesn’t use real data, but computer models. The reason the Met can’t get a grip on the weather, or the effect of the volcanic ash from Iceland and grounded all flights. AGWScience isn’t actually rooted in real science which still insists on looking at what’s actually happening.
The worst aspect of the AGWScience imagination fraud, is as he pointed out in his letter to the governor of the Maldives, that it creates a climate of fear for the people where none exists.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/20/maldives-president-all-wet-on-sea-level.aspx
This man has spent his working life actually measuring sea-levels, before all the hype from AGW began messing with it, if you’d rather rely on AGW science which chooses to ignore real information for which it substitutes skewed computer models that’s entirely up to you, but to force such an opinion on the people who are actually affected by this kind of misinformation is doing them a great disservice.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
What I think particularly sad for those promoting such deliberate lies coming from selfish interests of others, is that the wealth of knowledge we do have about the way our world works, such as land rebounding at the start of the Holocene after the ice covering melted and raised sea levels c350 ft and the way coral atolls are formed and our links with our past through recorded history and archeology and so on, are still an unexplored territory. Massive sea-level rises have been part of man’s immediate and long term history and because we now understand this we can make sense of all kinds of things associated with it such as being able to answer questions like ‘why does Ireland have fewer animal species than England?’
Real science doesn’t need to keep re-adjusting ‘data’ to fit a theory.
@-Myrrh says:
“Geology is kind of record writ in stone,
Among those mentioned is India where archeology ongoing, but importantly where there are actual written records of great antiquity by which such great changes in sea level rise can be gleaned and compared”
Such local geology and written records only indicate local changes, NOT global sea level and represent shifts in land level rather than sea level.
The Page you link to from Watts about past sea level rise has a graph that shows quite clearly that after the rapid rise at the end of the glacial period there is little indication of sea level rise since around 6000 years before the present.
This is confirmed by early written records. Chinese and Summerian records report the time and location of solar and lunar eclipses. These constrain the rate at which tidal slowing of the Earths’ rotation has occurred. This slowing is closely related to the sea level, if sea level had been rising at a foot per century since 6000 BPE the difference in sea level would have altered the tidal slowing and the eclipse dates would not match.
The historical reports of flooding or inundation are local. The eclipse data indicate global sea level and are unequivical. There has been no significant change in sea level for around 6000 years until the last century.
Sou:
What ‘sweet Melbourne drizzle’? I lived there a total of 16 years plus quite a few more recent visits. I’ve never remembered ‘Sweet Melbourne drizzle’….just a highly variable climate interspersed with torrential downpours. The climate left me wishing to be back in England with ‘Sweet English drizzle’.
izen – land movements haven’t stopped since the last great melt, which was local to the local people of the time, happening on a global scale…
Southhampton is still sinking into the sea and Scotland is still rising, from this real global warming effect which had nothing to do with us or CO2.
http://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/the-national-academy-of-sciences-forecasts-sea-level-rise-of-22-mmyr/
The reason this con has been so successful is because it is so huge. It’s difficult to believe that something promoted by so many people world-wide could possibly be a lie. My first delve into this argument brought out my first objection, that AGW kept going on and on and on about the last hundred years. Of course it’s got warmer since the little Ice Age. If you’re going to take your temperature measurements from the end of an extreme cold event that’s what you’ll get as we come into a warm cycle after it. That’s why they created the Hockey Stick, to hide the MWP and LIA. Since it has been shown conclusively that these same people fiddled data and even went so far as to go to places as New Zealand to manipulate their temperature records, why on earth would you trust them?
Real scientists do their best to put real data into their computers to analyse for possible outcomes. In the real world where the workings of real machines depend on such veracity it becomes obvious pretty quickly if the data are wrong. Yet somehow in AGWScience, people can put into their models whatever they want, and as long as the scare story is big enough their funding keeps coming.
Real data show that our Holocene is coming to an end if the same pattern of the last 600,000 years or so is anything to go by, there are rises into higher and dips into lower temperatures during the last 10,000 years, but the trend is downward. If you really want something to worry about, at least worry about something that could really be a real problem for us.
Monckton is as sloppy as his opponents in his research. I have no idea what his source is for saying the floods in Pakistan were only the worst since 1980, but I suspect that he is here misreporting the widely-disseminated media statement “worst flood in eighty years”, referring to the 1929 floods. But apparently even that info is wrong, at least a source i found at my first Google attempt (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/pakistan-denies-graft-worsened-floods/story-e6frg6so-1225903148901) says the following: “That 1929 flood discharged 250,000 cubic metres per second (cusec) [a cusec is one cubic foot per second you mean cumec surely . . mod] of water into the river systems. This month’s discharge exceeded 440,000 [cumecs].”
Some of the points made by Monkton have been refuted by Steketee in a recent post on the Australian’s web site.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
Monkton has a record of distortions and misrepresentations which should make anyone skeptical of anything he says.
Mike Steketee’s response to Christopher Monckton
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
Seems a fair reply.
On #20 what made the bush fires worse was that “environmentalists” ignorant of the fact that natural fires are part of the eco-system had, for many years, prevented the burning off or other removal of brushwood. Hence when the fire inevitably came it was far more irresistable than necessary & many people unnecessarily died.
So not only a lie but a cynical abuse of a tragedy caused by the se eco-fascists.
We must accept that that claim & so many others here represent the very highest standard of honesty to which Steketee & indeed any other “environmentalist” unwilling to openly dissociate themselves from it, aspires.
They remain lies which no remotely honest person or movement could maintain.
Now we have a La Nina and colder sea temperatures, will the seas start absorbing more CO2 and decrease the atmospheric CO2 concentrations?
.
There are so many errors in Monckton’s article that it is hard to know where to start. Here is one egregious example.
“6. MOST SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT DOUBLING THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS LIKELY TO LEAD TO WARMING OF 2-3 C°.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling.”
I wonder what other method Monckton can suggest to make predictions besides “mere modelling”.
” The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft,
or satellites.”
The tropical hot spot is predicted by basic physics of weather and climate, anytime the tropical oceans warm due to the lapse rate of warm moist air. It is not exclusively a property of warming created by Greenhouse gases. The past impression that the upper troposphere has not warmed is a result of equipment problems with the balloons and satellite data analysis problems. Both the satellite and balloon have been corrected and the warming of the upper atmosphere has been found. [ you need to provide proof rather than a simple declaration . . . mod]
“Also, the models predict that every Celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1-3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes.”
I am not familiar with the papers that say evaporation should increase by 1-3%.
In fact simple physics says that a 1C increase in temperature results in a 6% increase in moisture content, based on the water vapor pressure curve, which should increase the greenhouse effect according to the models. In fact this 6% has been observed by satellite measurements in agreement with the models.
If Monckton doesn’t know these basic well known items, he should not be listened to on the subject of climate at all.
Neil Craig says:
January 10, 2011 at 9:24 am
“On #20 what made the bush fires worse was that “environmentalists” ignorant of the fact that natural fires are part of the eco-system had, for many years, prevented the burning off or other removal of brushwood. Hence when the fire inevitably came it was far more irresistable than necessary & many people unnecessarily died.
So not only a lie but a cynical abuse of a tragedy caused by the se eco-fascists.
We must accept that that claim & so many others here represent the very highest standard of honesty to which Steketee & indeed any other “environmentalist” unwilling to openly dissociate themselves from it, aspires.
They remain lies which no remotely honest person or movement could maintain.”
I haven’t found any evidence that opposition to clearing of brush was implicated in the incidence of multiple bush fires in the neighborhood of Melbourne in Feb of 2009. There were multiple fires due to drought and arson, some in forested areas and some in grasslands. Here is an exhaustive account. No word of clearing of brush. Naturally occurring and human set brush fires are an old story in Australia, but with increasing drought and temperatures in recent times they are becoming more severe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires
As many as 400 individual fires were recorded on 7 February. Following the events of 7 February 2009, that date has since been referred to as Black Saturday
Steketee has replied to Monckton’s article:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
49 Contiguous States? Did he get his geography lesson from Obama? 😉
Myrrh says
“Real data show that our Holocene is coming to an end if the same pattern of the last 600,000 years or so is anything to go by, there are rises into higher and dips into lower temperatures during the last 10,000 years, but the trend is downward.”
Really: then how do you explain this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Nothing explains the current warming in such a short time frame except by the influence of man made actions.
“Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 8:04 pm”
It is rather unfortunate for you to use Wikipedia link for your science references.
[But if the Wikipedia data is accurate and adequate, then the Wikipedia data is acceptable and useful – but it must be checked as firmly as NASA’a/NSF/NSRDC/NOAA’s data … 8<) Robt]
Michael says:
“Nothing explains the current warming in such a short time frame except by the influence of man made actions.”
That, folks, is a classic example of an argumentum ad ignorantium: the fallacy that argues, “Because I can’t think of any other possible causes, then global warming must be due to human activity.”
Nonsense. There are other causes. The current temperature rise has happened repeatedly in the past, as this chart based on Phil Jones’ data clearly shows.
And current temperatures are right in the middle of normal for the Holocene.
Finally, there is no correlation between temeprature and CO2 – which follows temperature rises on millennium scale time frames.
Thus, Michael’s argument is simply baseless opinion; conjecture. Whatever effect CO2 has is minuscule and insignificant – except on agricultural production, which has risen substantially as a result of the addition to this essential trace gas.
Mike Steketee’s response to Christopher Monckton:
“That puts a bit of a dent in the argument that the world has been cooling since 1998.” In other words, warming did not end in 1998, as some argue.”
A closer look at Hadcrut3 reveals something interesting. (Although the year 2010 was very warm, the warmth was more due to the relatively strong El Nino at the start of the year rather than CO2.) But despite the warm 2010, according to Hadcrut3, the average anomaly for the last five years (2006 to 2010) was 0.42. However the average anomaly for the previous five years (2001 to 2005) was 0.46. This basically means it cooled off during the decade. An analysis of other data sets in a similar manner also shows this cooling trend.
The above is also totally consistent with Phil Jones comment in the February interview:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
C – Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.
“[But if the Wikipedia data is accurate and adequate, then the Wikipedia data is acceptable and useful – but it must be checked as firmly as NASA’a/NSF/NSRDC/NOAA’s data … 8<) Robt]"
Yes IF, and its a big IF. Wiki has been proven to be inaccurate plenty of times before, and not only in science. I will take any post with a link to Wikipedia with a pinch of salt.
““[But if the Wikipedia data is accurate and adequate, then the Wikipedia data is acceptable and useful- but it must be checked as firmly as …”
Thats funny, I don’t see anyone else providing a similar graph that plots data from multiple sources. You provide one cherry picked data set that vaguely fits your argument.
The Hadley data shows that the trend down was shorter and so the trend up at 1975 has begun at a higher point, so even though it is still .16/decade it is higher than the previous 2. Proof for climate change, thank you.
Similarly the co2 v temps data shows that as co2 has risen the downward trend has stopped at a higher point and the upward trend is longer, again suggestive of the effect of co2 on the temperature. Werner starts breaking up the decade to try to cherry pick a period like all climate denialists to fit their religious belief that man can do anything without consequence. You are not going to get smooth graphs their are seasonal, annual, decadel and longer natural variability cycles to contend with, such as the el nino which cannot excuse the longer trends as that happens cyclically.
Thanks for all the data the help proving climate change is appreciated.
Didn’t take long but the floods in Queensland, Australia, is being spun as proof of climate change. LMAO Trouble is, the floods were worse in 1974 and, at least in Brockhampton, higher in 1910.
“Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 10:13 pm”
Cheery picking huh? In the style of Mann, Hansen, Jones, Briffa etc etc etc…? Sorry, I like cherries, but I don’t pick them.
Hi Patrick
I think the point that is being missed is the amount of climate related disasters in such a short period of time. Obviously no one weather event is proof or disproof of climate change as you can often find worse in the historical record, the fact is that all these are happening in such a short space of time, and happening repeatedly in the case of those floods. Surely does it not make you pause and worry, just a bit?
Add to that 18 nations set record highs in 2010 and all the other records broken and talked about lately and I certainly get the uneasy feeling something is wrong. It makes sense when you look at the science, weather is just the movement of air dependent on many factors including the difference in temp between the land, ocean and atmosphere. As temp changes the weather shifts and becomes more extreme, add to that the increase of moisture in the atmosphere has by 4% due to the warming and you have a recipe for concern. Please think about this more critically as we need to do something.
“Michael says:
January 11, 2011 at 1:04 am”
Really? The problem with “historical records”, in terms of the modern, computer generated, era, is that thay are all “adjusted”, or “corrected”.
It appears there is nothing more extreme than what is in the minds of climate scientists, and more worrying, climate modellers.
Questions for you. Which century and year did more people die and did more hurricanes strike land in the US? Is that proof of “climate change (CC)” (As no-one “denies” CC), or more importantly, which it appears in this instance that you are missing the point, proof of AGW? Also, can you prove C02 is driving, unstoppable and catastrophic, climate change given the carboniferous period?
Michael says:
January 10 2011 at 8:04 pm
<Really: then how do you explain this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Nothing explains the current warming in such a short time frame except by the influence of man made actions.
What warming? The main graph shows the decline from the extremely steep and rapid rise out of the last ice age glacial into the Holocene. This is when gazillion tons of ice melted as temperatures soared. This is real warming. Sea levels rose c350 feet. Where there was dry land before now there was the North Sea. From the maximum it’s been downhill ever since. Look at the Vostok graph – the same pattern repeated for hundreds of thousands of years. Like a heartbeat reading.
The only data going against that shown in these studies is that marked in the little box, which it says wasn’t used in main map, the Recent Proxies which have conclusively been found to have been designed to show a trend which isn’t there.
It doesn’t make clear which lines belong to which study, but the Reconstructed Temperature shows which is out of phase with the general drift of the Holocene, the Hockey Stick. Shown to be fraudulently constructed and maintained by political control.
In the blurb it says that our Holocene appears relatively stable compared with the previous, this is not saying that our Holocene had stable temperatures until the Hockey Stick proved we’re AGWarming.
If you look at the Vostok you’ll see an interesting difference at the beginning between previous and our Holocene. What should have been an even steeper rise at the beginning of our Holocene was stopped and then continued up to the great melt. This is when the Younger Drayas came and hit us, bringing us back into the ice age for a thousand years – when practically all the animals associated with previous hundreds of thousands of years, like the mamoth and sabre tooth tiger, from large to small were caught out in a mass extinction event. To date this is thought to be from a comet which hit somewhere in Canada. After this set back the temperature began to rise again but with the momentum of these regular rises now somewhat curtailed, not quite reaching the height expected. The drop since our high is still according to the general pattern of 100,000 year beat, going down, down, down, but with more hiccups on the way down.
Some speculate that because of this set back at the beginning, it might extend our Holocene a tad longer than expected before the recurring pattern of rapid decent back into ice for another 100,000 years.
There have been many studies now which now show how rapid these changes have been, but what is important to remember, is that these really dramatic global warming and global cooling events had NOTHING to do with US.
Not in the last million or so years and not now. And, NOTHING to do with CO2.
The only anomaly here is the artificially constructed temperatures designed to put the blame us and CO2.
There is your explanation. You are quite right, nothing else explains it except man’s influence by his actions in fiddling with temperature records.
You can continue to dance to their tune and believe all their excuses against all the evidence which shows how they manipulated and lied about this, or you can see for yourself that if it was really as they were saying, they wouldn’t have needed to fiddle and lie. The New Zealand manipulation is now known and beyond dispute, the government has had to back down from using the CRU’s Salinger constructed temperatures. What that also shows is how long in the making this con has been, no wonder by now it’s so difficult to untangle all the threads which have gone into making this man-made blanket of conman warming.
A malignant influence.
The models need adjusting to take into account factors in position or measuring instruments or patchy data or to take out influencing factors that don’t apply now etc, that is the problem with historical, and it is what computers are good at. What proof would be good enough for you? I certainly think that the body of evidence is more than enough, see here for a pictorial summary http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-many-lines-of-evidence-for-global-warming-in-a-single-graphic.html .
Most of the graphs of trends are quite clear as I explained above, the weight of evidence is enough to justify action.
A response from Steketee.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
The term “weasel words” springs to mind when reading his ineffective attempt to counter Monckton.
Michael, you’ve got the wrong end of the argument from me, I’ve already found so much proof that this is a con that I’m no longer looking for proof that it isn’t. However, even though you think AGW and all associated is correct, Monckton’s last point should be the clincher even for you.
This is already an obscene amount of money being conned by taxes and idiotic fuel solutions which aren’t from the majority people who can’t afford it, all to make fat cats even fatter. Just as they first created the banking crisis and conned the people to pay their gambling debts by taking cuts in salaries and jobs and services, so AGW is a scam. Control by fear over something that doesn’t exist, and so vocally supported by the very people being conned.
And what don’t we have yet? We don’t have one smidgin of proof from AGWScience that CO2 can raise global temperatures. We certainly have proof that it has not done so in the last 600,000 years of really genuinely dramatic global warming and cooling.
I’ve even seen the Vostok graph printed backwards.., mustn’t draw attention to the fact that CO2 rises follow temperature 800 years later.
Which is where we are now, 800 years after the MWP.
Michael says:
“Most of the graphs of trends are quite clear as I explained above, the weight of evidence is enough to justify action.”
I prefer not to click on a mis-named alarmist blog run by a cartoonist, but I will respond to your panicky call to action.
The central argument in the entire debate is over carbon dioxide [or “carbon” to the scientifically illiterate]. The demonizing of CO2 is necessary to governments because modern society cannot exist without emitting this harmless and beneficial trace gas. And because CO2 emissions can be quantified, they can easily be taxed.
That is what the entire scare is about – as Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the UN/IPCC’s Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change has made crystal clear.
Edenhofer stated:
Edenhofer admitted that “climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth” and said “it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization.” In other words, ‘climate policy’ is the excuse for world government and the confiscation of your wealth, to be handed out to governments willing to join the push.
Edenhofer further admitted that expropriating the wealth of the G-8 countries “has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, or with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.”
Any excuse to raise taxes and prices, eh? When an IPCC chieftain admits that the global warming/CO2 bunkum is a front for a big one-world government, how can you cling to their propagandistic narrative that global warming and more CO2 is bad?
What is bad is the push toward totalitarianism by the thoroughly corrupt UN. The climate scare is simply a pretext to justify the money/power grab, as Edenhofer now admits.
“Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Werner starts breaking up the decade to try to cherry pick a period like all climate denialists…”
James Hansen and others also talked about the last decade at:
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20101211_TemperatureAndEurope.pdf
A quote from this article is:
“Contrary to frequent assertions that global warming slowed in the past decade, as discussed in our paper in press, global warming has proceeded in the current decade just as fast as in the prior two decades.”
Please reconcile the above statement with the five green bar graphs for 5 and 10 years, including GISS at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates
Myrrh says: “The only data going against that shown in these studies is that marked in the little box, which it says wasn’t used in main map,” So your saying lets discard the recent data because the current rise is so steep over such a short space of time it can’t be shown on a map covering thousands of years? and
“Michael, you’ve got the wrong end of the argument from me, I’ve already found so much proof that this is a con that I’m no longer looking for proof that it isn’t. ” So may I assume you no longer call yourself a skeptic and are actively looking at ways to discount every proof with coloured glasses?
I do not demonize CO2, yes it is a gas, an important gas that has been shown in experiments and by explanation using simple physics to be a greenhouse gas that helps our planet regulate its temperature to make it livable for humans. To little or to much and we would be in trouble. This is fact accepted by even most [snip . . skeptics]. That being said how can anyone think that disturbing that balance by pumping billions of tons of it into the atmosphere at a rate that the planet cannot absorb and thereby increasing its % in the atmosphere could be done without consequence? This is arrogance at its most extreme. There is overwhelming proof from multiple sources (link above) and the hockey stick has been confirmed several times with other sources of data.
Instead you wish me to believe that governments (mostly democratic and therefore can be chucked out), and a majority of the worlds climate scientists and scientific organisations are colluding on a massive scam that is designed to redistribute wealth for…really why would they do that, how does it be benefit democratic governments and scientists? Do you believe we landed on the moon or was it staged?
Finally adaptation only works if you believe the changes will occur slowly enough for us to be able to adapt. I think the evidence supports the fact that it will happen quicker than we can adapt even if we start now and the sooner we do act the less painful and cheaper it will be.
“Please reconcile the above statement with the five green bar graphs for 5 and 10 years, including GISS at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates”
Easy, the trend is obviously going up, what are you looking at?
Michael says: So may I assume you no longer call yourself a skeptic and are actively looking at ways to discount every proof with coloured glasses?
Right, but through my research into this, and I spent a long time following the arguments and checking things for myself, the coloured glasses I’m looking through are sunglasses to protect against being blinded by AGWScience’s global warming claims. I can now recognise it as a con. There’s no reason to change my mind, it’s just become easier now to spot the deceptions. Real science is based on fact, on data, on observation, on rational analysis – if AGWScience was real science, its promoters wouldn’t have to lie and manipulate temperature records and cherry pick single trees to con us.
I do not demonize CO2, yes it is a gas, an important gas that has been shown in experiments and by explanation using simple physics to be a greenhouse gas that helps our planet regulate its temperatuere to make it livable for humans.
Yes it is an important gas, all carbon life forms developed because of it. You are around 20% carbon, your lungs need around 6% carbon dioxide in each breath to use oxygen and transport it to the rest of your body, without it or with reduced levels, less than 5.5% is going down into danger levels, you will struggle to breathe. It is the food source of all plant life on earth which uses photosynthesis, plants breathe it in to form sugars and so on and breathe out oxygen in doing so, it’s the building block of their bodies and through them ours; the oxygen in our atmosphere comes from plants producing it from carbon dioxide in photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is food for all carbon life in the Carbon Life Cycle, we are Carbon Life Forms. It is insignificant in any other role, insignificant to anything known as a ‘greenhouse gas’, which is primarily water in the Water Cycle. Carbon Dioxide’s primary purpose is to produce life on earth as we know it.
Too little or too much and we would be in trouble.
Exactly. At 250 ppm or less plant life everywhere would begin to struggle for survival, carbon dioxide is not “well-mixed” in the atmosphere because it is heavier than air and so sinks to where plants are able to use it, and in growing conditions in the warmth, summer and so on, the levels around plants is around 400-450 ppm. Much higher levels are introduced in greenhouses (real ones) to improve plant growth, stress levels go down and they need less water, anywhere from 550ppm to 1500ppm. If you have pot plants in the house, talk to them, you will be delivering the c 4% of CO2 in your exhaled breath and so feeding them, they will be healthier for it. When not utilising CO2 for photosynthesis plants breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide as we do, so they add this to their surroundings also, raising levels.
This is fact accepted by even most [snip ..skeptics]. that being said how can anyone think that disturbing that balance by pumping billions of tons of it into the atmosphere at a rate that the planet cannot absorb and therby increasing its % in the atmosphere coul be done without consequence? This is arrogance at its most extreme.
Not the real facts as I’ve just presented. What balance? The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the healthier the plants around the globe will grow and so better food production for us and for all the animal life dependant on them. The only arrogance here is from AGWScience which promotes and teaches children that carbon dioxide is a poison. This is either in ignorance or deliberate, whichever, the effect is downright evil.
There is overwhelming proof from multiple sources (link above) and the hockey stick has been confirmed several times with other sources of data.
Instead you wish me to believe that governments (mostly democratic and therefore can be chucked out), and a majority of the worlds climate scientists and scientific organisations are colluding on a massive scam that is designed to redistribute weath for .. really why would they do that, how does it benefit democratic governments and scientists?
Shrug, if you only read AGWScience excuses for their deliberate manipulation of data that’s what you’ll end up thinking. If the Hockey Stick was truly representative of our temperature changes since coming our of the Little Ice Age, there would have been no need for them to spend so much time and effort distorting the temperature records.
Do yourself a favour re governments, read the history of the New Zealand alterations by Salinger from CRU going there and fiddling the figures, there’s been a long fight about this and finally the NZgovernment has conceded that these CRU artificial warming data was designed to show rises in NZ temperatures where no such warming existed, they, the actual records, were corrupted. What Salinger couldn’t do there was what has been done at CRU on home territory, to ‘lose’ the original data.
This has been a scam for a long time, the long con. The ‘idea’ of this being to redistribute wealth is also part of the scam, it’s a distraction, the people of the third world are being stopped from developing their resources to better their lives. The con is to take financial control of people and resources globally by the same people that print your banknotes. If you don’t know how money is created out of debt and crashes manipulated for the greater wealth grab of only some, then you’d do well to explore it. If you’re American then read up on how the government gave printing banknotes to private banking companies, the Federal Reserve, in 1913 – that’s the scam. The FR charges interest to the government for this service and taxes are collected via the IRS, a private company, to pay these interests. Etc. If you want to know who is behind such a long con, follow to those who had the money to organise it. Lots of bit players have come on board, they are useful fuel to keep the machine turning.
Do you believe we landed on the moon or was it staged?
One tactic, well understood psychology of manipulation, is to treat others as if they’re insane or stupid by saying things such as the above and so implying that whatever they say can be discounted; and another good example is to label those questioning the AGWScience ‘conspiracy theorists’, as if this is some kind of slight and insulting and again, that because these kind of people therefore ‘believe all kinds of stupid things’, though unproven, implying they’re not really intelligent as those who don’t.
What I’ve found is that people are generally intelligent, different talents, but this is subject to information they’re getting in. If a child taught now in school that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, a toxic, a poison, that putting more of into the atmosphere will create a climate catastrophe and it will all be his fault if he does this, then that is brainwashing. It doesn’t matter how intelligent they are, people being people generally take things on trust. That’s what makes us human, our capacity for co-operation often to extreme unselfish ends (in defending others for example). The only way to get through to the truth here is to examine it for yourself. That means exploring both sides of the argument. When I was doing this I found the weight of evidence showing that AGW was deliberate manipulation, for all kinds of reasons, and so a manufactured scam, grew to the point where my doubts had to be put aside – it became obvious then in all sorts of areas. Bearing in mind that much of it is regurgitated without thinking, because people generally have no reason to distrust the continual pushing of this being ‘scientific consensus’ and so on and taken as real, is only part of the picture. Most people don’t think about it because of that and because they’re involved in living their own lives. These are the ones who won’t understand what is happening, why they are being taxed ’til they squeak and having fuel rises several times a year… We’re all in this together aren’t we? Yes, we should tighten our belts and take pay cuts ‘to get our economy back on track’.. And we’re so easily distracted from the implications of the poor being forced to become poorer by outrage genenerated for a while about bankers’ bonuses or something equally insignificant in the financial scheme of this.
Sadly, the deeper one explores the more extraordinary the scam is found to be. It’s very clever to manipulate ‘science’ to give credibility, because science has a reputation for being realistic, rational and based on facts. But as any totalitarian in history of politics and religion shows, sell the story and people will follow, as long as there’s something in it for them they’ll even go to the extremes of waging war on others and counting the carnage an expression of ‘bravery’. I have a dream… that there will come a time when humanity doesn’t forget its history, and reflecting properly on it will find another way to exist together. It’s the Nelson Mandela’s of this world who I consider to be heroes.
“Michael says:
January 11, 2011 at 9:19 pm
“Please reconcile the above statement with the five green bar graphs for 5 and 10 years, including GISS at: http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Comparing%20global%20temperature%20estimates”
Easy, the trend is obviously going up, what are you looking at?”
I am looking at the green bar graphs below the first set of graphs. And specifically, the 5 year and 10 year ones. Note that the most recent 5 years ones are smaller than the 10 years ones in every case. So in other words, it was cooler from 2006 to 2010 on the average than from 2001 to 2005.
Now in order for Hansen to make the claim that “global warming has proceeded in the current decade just as fast as in the prior two decades”, he would have had to “break up the decade” like I did, right?
But in my opinion, those bar graphs prove Hansen wrong. Remember we are not talking about high temperatures during the decade. They were high. What we are talking about is the rate of change of those temperatures, and if we neglect El Ninos and La Ninas, there has basically been no change for the last dozen years, and possibly a slight cooling, but certainly no warming rate as was the case between 1975 and 1998.
Have you posted the response by Steketee anywhere?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/mike-steketees-response-to-christopher-monckton/story-e6frg6xf-1225985171179
I really can’t comprehend why you still post the fact-free paranoid ramblings of Monckton.
REPLY: Has the Australian printed Monckton’s response anywhere? If you can convince the Australian to give equal time to Mr. Monckton for his rebuttal, I’ll happily make Steketee’s response front page here. Certainly seems fair. BTW what do you do for the Museum Victoria? Do you manage the AGW scare exhibits? – Anthony
“I am looking at the green bar graphs below the first set of graphs. And specifically, the 5 year and 10 year ones. Note that the most recent 5 years ones are smaller than the 10 years ones in every case. ”
Your cherry picking again and ignoring all the graphs where the trend up is fairly clear. You also cannot ignore El Ninos and La Ninas as they are part of the climate system and becoming more intense due to the ocean warming. They become part of all the averages being looked at. There are also other seasonal, annual and decadal cycles to take into account and so looking at a single short period is deceptive. Generally climate wise you are supposed to look at at least 30 years. The trends are clear and the warnings in the climate trends itself are becoming stronger every day. The increasing extreme weather events the science predicts are being seen.
Myrrrh their is not much more I can say, your mind is made up. I am quite happy to accept how useful and beneficial co2 is for us and our plants in our everyday lives but that does not detract from the well accepted fact that it is a greenhouse gas and tiny concentrations mean very little in science. Their are many examples where a tiny amount of some chemical can catalyse a large reaction at slightly larger amounts than an even tinier amount. Since I believe that, and after all the reading I have done and science I have seen, it is not hard to see that pumping billions of tons of the co2 that was trapped over millions of years, to give us the favorable conditions we currently enjoy, can and will probably be disastrous for us. Don’t forget the feedbacks that are increasing the water vapour in the atmosphere you mentioned, currently 4%.
Also while governments do manipulate and individual leaders have focussed on their own personal interests I cannot see how that can translate into a situation where most if not all governments, most scientists and scientific organisations are colluding in some massive scam. Also with everything I have read and seen and with the evidence and personal observations of conditions on the planet it seems logical that we are warming and that co2, a well known greenhouse gas that is increasing at the same time is the cause. The planets may love it but will we? How habitable will our planet be with the increasing levels of disasters and records broken? How can changing the composition of the atmosphere which regulates our temperature and determines the movement or air (weather) not cause things to change.
What you say I cannot reconcile with basic logic, actions have consequences, those consequences affect governments and scientists and have them worried about our future. Sometimes they are over zealous as they try to convince us to change our ways for our own good but they are human. We should let them do their job and they need our support, and with it, they can develop newer and better technologies and methods for the next revolution of sustainable and renewable advancement to take the human race into their next golden age. Keep putting up road blocks and we may very easily be retrofitting caves while the planet rebalances itself.
“Michael says:
January 12, 2011 at 7:04 pm
Generally climate wise you are supposed to look at at least 30 years.”
True, and I can do much better than the last ten years. See page 21 of http://sciencespeak.com/MissingSignature.pdf
Here we see a pattern over 130 years. A sine wave repeats itself every 60 years and what has happened over the last ten years is very consistent with what has been happening over the last 130 years. The IPCC predictions are way off from the actual temperatures. So there is no reason at this time to be alarmed.
[There] is not even agreement on the exact signature or even if the same signature may apply to several different types of forcings and [there] is also disagreement on whether it is a signature at all. Some measurements in the short term do confirm predictions and long term don’t. This area of climate science is [too] murky and the measurements to questionable to confirm anything, it also assumes that if one line of evidence is wrong then it must all be wrong. http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/2/9/2148/pdf
Climate change depends on many lines of evidence from sea level change and warming, surface temp from stations and satellites, increased coral bleaching, atmospheric energy imbalance, retreating glaciers and ice sheets etc, changing and increasing weather events. To throw the baby out with the bathwater on one line of evidence that nobody on both sides is sure about is illogical.
Michael – my mind is made up because I have never seen any rational data supporting the idea that CO2 has the power to raise global temperatures and because all the data produced by AGWScience shows consistent massaging to fit its claim that it does.
I, for one, do not see any reason to doubt my own analysis of the argument.
Show me actual proof that CO2 is even capable of doing this. There is none, I’ve asked and asked and asked, but AGWScience which claims this is robust and settled can’t give actual data for proof.
Instead, it keeps coming up with revised excuses to explain the non-existence of any actual cause and effect. Where is the proof that it accumulates in the atmosphere defying gravity and known science re molecular weight? Where is the proof that it has been shown historically to be the cause of global warming?
This is religion, not science, AGW insists we put our faith in these people who have consistently shown themselves corrupt because they are not real scientists and this now has a political agenda going at great pace to produce more of this corruption. Real scientists extrapolate from data, AGW tweaks data to fit. This is a scam of such vast proportions because it has taken decades to grow to that, with more and more disparate interests coming on board for the ride having been educated in the non-science fact of AGW. Most operate out of ignorance, governing bodies and lay people both; told to trust the science, they do. It’s only those who actually make the effort to explore the claims who can see how the facts of AGW are claimed but never proved, but, this is for all practical purposes hidden in the noise of the overblown faith position. Thanks but no thanks.
A well known fact, the more CO2 we pump in the more plant life will eat it, the stronger it will grow the more benefit there will be for our food production. Plants need warmth to grow.
There isn’t a problem in the first place.
“Michael says:
January 12, 2011 at 10:48 pm
Some measurements in the short term do confirm predictions and long term don’t.”
Since things are not too conclusive, perhaps we need more study before making huge expensive changes? When I debated things about a year ago, I said to others that if two of the next four years beat the 1998 mark, I would seriously reconsider my position. (By the way, I trust the satellite data and Hadcrut3, but not GISS.) Now 2010 came close, however 1998 was not beaten. And with this La Nina, it does not look like 2011 will beat 1998. So I would like to wait and see if 2012 and 2013 beat 1998. If not, I would not consider global warming a crisis.
Myrrh you did not explain what sort of proof you require? Even your own cycles explanation predicts we should be cooling, so even no warming should give you pause. Instead NASA has just released that 2010 was tied hottest year on record with 2005 and that the previous decade was the hottest on record, how do you explain that? Their is evidence all around us, temperatures, mass coral bleachings, oceans warming, ocean acidification, increasing extreme weather events and more all at a time when our sun is in a stable or cool period and your own cycle theory predicts we should be cooling.
It is irrelevant if a few plants are happy if all the fish are dead and our environment is so inhospitable we can’t find anywhere safe to live. The proof is all around you, the climate is not the kind of thing you can put in a test tube and measure ph balance. It is determined by a large range of effects at the same time as there has been a measurable increase of co2 in the atmosphere. A + B = C. There is no other precipitating event that you can point to that can cause the range of effects we are experiencing. Simple physics tells us co2 is a greenhouse gas, co2 rises, effects are observed, you spend all your time looking for ways to discount the facts and then say proof isn’t their. Yes it is.
“Since things are not too conclusive, perhaps we need more study before making huge expensive changes? ”
We should always continue studying as the more information coming in the better models and the better decisions we can make, but we should not wait. The consequences for waiting if mainstream science is right far exceed the cost of doing something now. Ocean warming and acidification is bleaching our coral, affecting our algae and phytoplankton, deforestation and urbanisation are all reducing our ability to absorb CO2, while at the same time we are increasing by billions of tonnes a year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, it does not make sense that this can be done without consequence. This is irrational and illogical and is more like a religious belief. We influence nature every day and we influence the atmosphere as can be seen in the increased CO2.
http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/warmest-equal-year-ends-warmest-decade-record/5/78431
So Werner you only trust data from Hadcrut3, and just released it shows that 2010 ties with 1998 and that the 2001 to 2010 decade was the hottest on record and that the previous decade was the 2nd highest, will you reconsider your position now? Surely you can see that basing your position on a single year is illogical.
Michael – I’m asking for actual proof that CO2 has the power to effect these nightmare cataclysmic scenarios which AGWs keep spouting in ever greater degrees of shrillness and rising threats of violence against those who don’t belong to the Church of Climatology.
Even your own cycles explanation predicts we should be cooling, so even no warming should give you pause.
What makes you assume it hasn’t already?
Instead NASA has just released that 2010 was tied hottest year on record with 2005 and that the previous decade was the hottest on record, how do you explain that?
Perhaps I haven’t explained myself well enough, but I thought my references to corrupt data would not have raised such a question. Again, please read the saga of New Zealand re this deliberate corruption organised from CRU. Add to that all the other ‘adjustments’ and I now don’t give any temp data credibility that begins with the same scare tactic to bolster the con. If you look for it, and WUWT is a very good resource here, you’ll find plenty of detail of this corruption of data; and the book on the front page here, The Hockey Stick Illusion, is recommended. I haven’t read it yet, but I spent a considerable amount of time on this aspect researching it for myself while I was trying to understand the arguments.
Their is evidence all around us, temperatures, mass coral bleachings, oceans warming, ocean acidification, increasing extreme weather events and more all at a time when our sun is in a stable or cool period and your own cycle theory predicts we should be cooling.
Evidence of what? That climate changes. What exactly does that prove? I’m asking for specific proof, specific data, there should be reams of it, proving that CO2 has the capability of doing what AGWScience says it can do. I’ve yet to find it. And have never been given it whenever I’ve asked for it. What I get instead is the variation on a theme as you give it here – “simple physics, CO2 rises, effects are observed” etc.
But no such simple physics exists, just absurd claims about the properties of CO2 using a mangling of real science; no such effects are ever observed, just the continual repetition that it is proved without ever giving proof. Really, I’ve looked. And you’re doing it here too. Avoiding it.
An example. Bandied about by AGWs as ‘settled science’ is the: ‘CO2 levels have remained constant for x hundred thousand years and only since man has been burning fossil fuels the amount is rising and and the world is warming and it’s all mankind’s fault because it shows that CO2 is causing the warming.’
? I don’t mean to be rude here, because my head was spinning from all these kinds of statements when I first heard them, but does that really make any sense?
When I began to explore the subject to understand this I learned a lot more about ice ages than I had known before, fascinating subject and I get really easily distracted, but think about it. What this is saying is that for these hundreds of thousands of years carbon dioxide had nothing at all to do with the dramatic and really cataclysmic events of global warming and cooling as we went in and out of interglacials. Nada, zilch. It all happens regardless of the CO2 level, is what this is actually saying. Therefore, it is saying, CO2 is irrelevant to the huge changes of temperature in the cataclysmic global warming events with real hundreds of feet sea level rises, as shown in Vostok. Interglacials come and go.
So why should this particular warming event in our cycles be any different? If CO2 was irrelevant to the changes all this time, it can’t be relevant now.
Then you might realise, actually this cycle is being downplayed by AGW and time time lag of c800 years brushed aside. Vostok is only referenced to ‘prove’ that CO2 levels haven’t changed in this time, and the pretence is immediately pushed to the fore that temperatures have ‘remained constant until CO2 was introduced with industry’. Now that’s a disjunct. One can only see it’s a sleight of a magicians hand by not forgetting that our global temperatures as Vostok shows are not at this mythical ‘hardly changed until man’s industrial output’.
That’s why AGW denies that the MWP and LIA were global, for example, and an immense amount of effort went into producing the Hockey Stick to further this deception, and by continually bringing attention around to the ‘last hundred years’ as a distraction from the fact that in the statement that CO2 levels haven’t changed for hundreds of thousand of years, actual, real, cataclysmic global warming and cooling were going on.
So, what I’m asking for is something you can’t provide, because AGWScience doesn’t provide it and you can’t prove it. Because it’s obvious from well-established knowledge of ice ages and data such as Vostok that we can all see for ourselves, CO2 was irrelvant. That’s simple logic. AGW works very hard to distract us from this simple observation which immediately falsifies its claims about CO2.
You don’t provide me with proof that CO2 causes global warming because there is none. Instead you come back with the same catalogue of scare stories attributing these to CO2 levels when you haven’t yet proved that CO2 drives global warming. And no, I’m not getting distracted this time, I’ve looked into all those also.
Examples such as these and others of their ilk contain the same sleight of hand relying on suspension of logical connection by stirring up the emotions as a distraction in lieu of proving cause and effect.
Prove that CO2 drives global warming.
Myrrh so many issues…
For starters science does not work how you understand it. Most of science is based on theories, predictions are made and if the predictions hold then the theory is strengthened, otherwise it is adjusted or dumped for a new theory. Some well known and well accepted theories have stood for hundreds of years but cannot be proved in your simplistic sense. Your CRT tele and GPS uses calculations from the theory of relativity to work but you cannot prove it.
The proof I give in actual data you don’t accept because you have fallen for skeptic propaganda. Science is a huge field with the wide range of people and all their failings as in any other discipline, because one has let you down(in your eyes) or conspiracies have been manufactured to discredit others does not deter from all the real science and data this theory rests on. I have no way to counter that, I accept well known and renowned organisations and their data over ramblings of the few disgruntled.
You rely on history to much, all data before several 100 years is guesswork and even then nobody says that co2 is the only driver of the planet. Their are many other greenhouse gases, volcanos, planetary wanderings, temp changes of the sun over its lifetime, heat from our centre plus much more. Most episodes in the past we have good workable theories for but their are no proofs there. Similar conditions to our distant past will be unlikely to occur again as the sun and the planet has past that point in its development.
Regardless this point in our history is the only time man has been significant enough to influence the planet to this degree, co2 levels are rising (do you dispute those as well), the isotopes tell us the majority of the excess is from burning fossil fuels and that our planet cannot cope with the excess or they would not be rising.
Temperatures are rising, ocean acidification and warming is rising, extreme weather events are rising, plus more and there is no other cause found. Like I said A+B=C, if you refuse to accept mainstream science data and organisations I have no more to add, you are unwilling to accept the proof that is at 90% confidence according to predictions, which make it a fairly strong theory in Science terms. Waiting until the planet is inhospitable so you can have the type of proof you require is unacceptable.
For the record, Monckton is shown to be absolutely and without a doubt wrong on the following post.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/monckton-skewers-truth/
Not even close actually. It is regarding Sea Ice. Isn’t there some quality control we can keep here with some of the posts that are allowed through?
Robert:
Is “quality control” the new alarmist euphemism for the routine censorship that tamino practices daily?
Lord Monckton has probably forgotten more about the climate than Grant Foster ever learned. That being the case, I propose a debate between Viscount Monckton and Mr Foster. Of course, “tamino” doesn’t have the stones for it. But it would be very interesting.
Alarmists don’t even realize it, but they suffer from Monckton Derangement Syndrome, just like the Left are victims of Palin Derangement Syndrome and Bush Derangement Syndrome. The common thread is derangement.
@Myrrh, try this link for starters: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm
“Michael says:
January 13, 2011 at 11:48 pm
So Werner you only trust data from Hadcrut3, and just released it shows that 2010 ties with 1998”
Thank you for that. I must confess to some confusion regarding the 0.52 values for both 1998 and 2010. The following site that I go by has 1998 at 0.548 and 2010 at 0.493 up to November of 2010.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
But even so, 2010 was a strong El Nino year. And even though the El Nino ended around the middle of the year, its effect on temperature lasted much longer. UAH had the warmest September on its record, and GISS had the warmest November on its record. Had 2010 been tied without the help of an El Nino, that would have been much more impressive.
With regards to other comments, I do believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas and I fully accept that the concentration went from 280 ppm in 1750 to 390 ppm today. However of the 0.8 C that the temperatures went up since 1880, I would only give man-made CO2 credit for 0.2 C. So at this point, I do not believe any catastrophe awaits us due to man-made CO2. We have far more urgent things to worry about. For starters, the Mexican president should be far more alarmed about the drug killings in Mexico than the tiny effect our CO2 is having on Mexico.
Michael – AGWScience doesn’t work the way I understand science to work. Most of science is bases on fact, theories stay theories unless facts are obtained to prove them. The general theory of relativity is still a theory, not a science fact. Most theories are created by first examing the facts found in the natural world, and trying to make sense of them. Like the man who first proposed that continents moved. If you don’t know that history do read up on it.
What science isn’t is imagining a theory and then claiming it is proved when every part of the theory is already falsified. That’s called scientific fraud. Which is why we see this constant pattern from AGW of having to re-adjust past temperature data and now this sad about face from years of proclaiming CO2 will cause steep rising global temperatures that will end up in us living in a baked and flooded world to ‘warming means cooling’, because it can’t account for the weather.. And, even sillier, that ‘our models are improving all the time’, having failed to show any relation to real conditions in any of the models past or present. GIGO, AGWScience continues to put in parameters which it makes up, as in the example Emile gives, my post below.
You can make up anything you want as a hypothesis, but until you can prove it has legs it can’t walk even as theory, which might have some use in the real world. To demand from an already falsified and full of illogical constructs that people change their lives and be forced to pay loads of money in green taxes to support the Greenshirt elites, is criminal. That is obviously a con in any other adventure of the unprincipled. The old folk that get targetted by the oh so concerned ‘builder’ who sees dreadful problems with their roofs and can fix it for a small sum which cost grows with the availability of funds. So AGW ‘scientists’, claiming they are real scientists doesn’t pass the discernment test, by their fruits we know them, they can’t think and they act as any petty con artist. The bigger the scale the more successful they are in convincing that this scale gives them credibility, but organised crime is what they’re successful at; by creating a ‘pyramid scheme’ of oiks below them, wittingly or unwittingly bolstering the crime, they can continue to brainwash that they’re the experts and there really is something dreadfully wrong with your roof, you can trust them.
The proof I give in actual data you don’t accept because you have fallen for skeptic propaganda.
You haven’t given me any proof. That facts here that you keep giving me data from the people who are in control of faking it does not constitute proof. I am asking you for specific proof re your claims for CO2. Prove it has the capacity to drive temperature, prove it. All data shows it is irrelevant to global temperature changes. In other words, the vast amount of data we already have already falsifies this claim for CO2. That’s why you, and generic you, never come back with anything rational. You have not proved that there is any connection at all between CO2 and global climate changes. You have not proved by experimentation that CO2 has any of the abilities claimed for it in AGW. You have not shown any connection between A and B, actual real science in between is missing. It may well seem entirely reasonable to you that ‘CO2 is rising and cataclysmic global climate changes are happening therefore CO2 is the cause’, but there’s a gap there, a logical disjunct. It goes against actual data which show that CO2 is irrelevant to these changes.
Those who forget history … The ‘last hundred years’ mantra is full of junk ideas, claiming junk ideas are science is no substitute for producing real science. You have yet to do so.
……………………………………………….
Emile – from your link above: CO2 amplifies warming
Prove that CO2 can even do this.
Nothing in CO2 following temperature rises, which this link admits was not caused by CO2, by around 800 years would suggest any link anyway, rationally. What your site proposes is that 800 years of rising temperature is being influence by rises of CO2, but, what the data actually show is that there is no rise of CO2 until 800 years after temperature rises. What’s so difficult about 800 years after? It means that CO2 doesn’t begin rising until 800 years have passed. Showing that CO2 is not playing any part in driving temperature and has nothing to do with the rising temperature levels for all those 800 years. For example, we’re at c 800 years after the MWP, we’d expect to see rising CO2 levels, now.
Again, this is data showing that CO2 is not playing any part in driving temperature and irrelevant to the AGW concept that CO2 is ‘amplifying’ it, therefore driving is global warming is disproved.
Another example of the magicians sleight of hand by disjunct and distraction, whether by unthinking repetition of the trick or as primary creator of the disjunct, he presents flawed logic as rational science. Why would anyone want to put their faith into ideas propounded by people who can’t even think straight?
Myrrh Says “…The old folk that get targetted by the oh so concerned ‘builder’ who sees dreadful problems with their roofs and can fix it for a small sum which cost grows with the availability of funds. So AGW ‘scientists’, claiming they are real scientists doesn’t pass the discernment test, by their fruits we know them, they can’t think and they act as any petty con artist. The bigger the scale the more successful they are in convincing that this scale gives them credibility, but organised crime is what they’re successful at; by creating a ‘pyramid scheme’ of oiks below them, wittingly or unwittingly bolstering the crime, they can continue to brainwash that they’re the experts and there really is something dreadfully wrong with your roof, you can trust them…”
What would you accept as proof?
Michael – I’d accept real science, but, I’ve really looked into this and I haven’t found any. I ask that question because that’s what I asked for in the beginning of my journey into this argument and not getting any proof I investigated for myself why I wasn’t given any. What I was given was as examples above, claims that kept having this disjunct between A and B. It happens in every aspect of the statements AGWScience makes so it is very difficult to get to grips with it, I had the time and the interest, most people take it on trust because they’ve got better things to do with their lives as I once did.. (grin).
Just looking at the things you’ve said, there’s an awfully big area of knowledge required to find out about CO2 and its properties and the history in science and the history of it in this argument; temperature likewise, ocean acidification, rising sea levels.. I began by questioning two things I was told, temp and CO2.
When I said, ‘hold on a minute, of course the temperature has gone up since the Little Ice Age as it had gone down to that from a previous higher one so any measurement taken from the depths of the LIA is going to show upward trend’, I was given Mann’s Hockey Stick to prove that temperatures ‘had remained flattish and unchanged for the last 1000 years’ – which is contrary to everything we already know because we do actually have an enormous body of knowledge through the history of the last 2000 years. What I saw in the AGWScience claim was that this beginning point of taking the LIA and claiming it represented ‘a constant and benign climate which we’re now changing’ couldn’t make sense, ‘couldn’t’ being the operative word. Then finding that this claim was being deliberately maintained by all kinds of methods, from creating the Hockey Stick in the first place to hide that great changes in climate had happened in the last two thousand years, to eliminate the MWP and LIA, which entailed cherry picking data, one tree Biffa, and designing a number cruncher which gave the hockey stick regardless of the numbers given it to crunch, to the deliberate tampering of historical temperature records, such as in New Zealand, where the original data could still be accessed and so this claim of rising temperatures eventually disproved, and in England, where the FOI request came back with the excuse that the originally records had been lost. Both these last organised by CRU, Salinger went to NZ in the early ’70’s to cook the books, so exploring that history takes one into the politics of the day. And so on.
And that’s together with having to learn about ice ages and interglacials and CO2 measurements – which is necessary to explore to see the point I’ve made here, that there’s a disjunct in the logic between A and B, A:CO2 levels haven’t changed for hundreds of thousands of years and B:rising CO2 levels from our production are driving warming. If CO2 had nothing to do with the vast and dramatic changes we went through in glacials and interglacials then it is irrelevant now, etc., but how will you see that if you don’t have any knowledge of ice ages? And more importantly, if you don’t link this knowledge once you have it, to the actual AGW claim relevant.
The etc. being all the nuances that come in this AGWScience package, such as you’ve given, that CO2 levels have gone up. There are two ways of approaching this, to look at the measurements in the ice cores and the science behind that, are these methods good enough to establish what the levels were over all these hundreds of thousands of years, and to look at the recent history of measurements in science, Beck v Mauna Loa. I explored Mauna Loa, there is no way they can say they are measuring ‘background’ CO2 and that their measurements come from a ‘pristine site uncontaminated by local imput’ – they’re sitting on the world’s largest active volcano for a start.. And the history shows that Keeling began by cherry picking a low number for CO2 levels from all the previous work that had been done looking at levels, and he did this because he had an agenda. And that agenda takes us into the maintaining the fiction through his son in Scripps and now, with other interests in the wider political background exploiting it in seriousness since the 70’s.
And that’s before exploring the claims for the molecule carbon dioxide. I’ve grown very attached to this molecule, it is much maligned in AGW. And my CO2 molecule is feeling just a tad envious that it can’t do all the things the AGWCO2 molecule can do; it can’t defy gravity and air pressure and rise of its own volition to mix thoroughly in the atmosphere, it can’t stay up in the atmosphere accumulating for hundreds and thousands of years defying its weight through the lighter air molecules around it. I reassure him, supermen models, hero and antihero, are for comic books, to entertain because they defy real science. That’s why we enjoy them, because we understand the disjunct in the tale they’re telling, supermen can fly through the air, we can’t.
So, I’m asking for proof of any real science that backs up any of the claims made. I haven’t found any in the areas I’ve explored, and as you read the imput from posters here you’ll find the same in the areas they’ve explored. What we do keep finding is these logical disjuncts in the claims.
A really good discussion to read through is the one currently on the go about Trenberth http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/12/trenberths-upcoming-ams-meeting-talk-climategate-thoughts/ which looks at the logic content of his statements.
When one gets to grips with this, it becomes astonishingly obvious that what is happening is that science in AGW has been sidelined completely, they’ve changed the definition and claim their definition is science; facts no longer matter and any fact that contradicts, falsifies any of their claims, shouldn’t even be heard.
Sorry, that should be AGW taking a temperature base for their graphs from the end of the LIA, not from the middle. They do say there was a drop in temp before but they’ve flattened this out to make it appear insignificant.
Werner you keep changing the goal posts “But even so, 2010 was a strong El Nino year. ” Earlier on you said if it was beaten, you would reconsider. Also keep in mind that 2010 finished with a La Nina and it still matched the El Nino year of 1998.
Myrrh remember when I said this…
“You rely on history to much, all data before several 100 years is guesswork and even then nobody says that co2 is the only driver of the planet. Their are many other greenhouse gases, volcanos, planetary wanderings, temp changes of the sun over its lifetime, heat from our centre plus much more. Most episodes in the past we have good workable theories for but their are no proofs there. Similar conditions to our distant past will be unlikely to occur again as the sun and the planet has past that point in its development. ”
but you say “If CO2 had nothing to do with the vast and dramatic changes we went through in glacials and interglacials then it is irrelevant now, ”
Just because co2 is not the only driver of Climate Change, and I freely admit it doesn’t come even close, that does not follow that it isn’t now. At no time in Earths history have we been able to influence the atmosphere to this degree over such a short space of time and in that regard history has only limited relevance, especially when a lot of the temperature of history and its causes are guesswork, but even then their are workable theories for most of it.
I also believe in the basic goodness of most people and believe that the majority of scientists and governments have the well being of the planet at heart. In their zeal they might overreact to some things and some do have their own agendas, just like their will be some skeptics with their own agendas who are only famous because they are controversial. I also understand and agree with the science and do a lot of reading on the topic from the science sites as well as regularly troll skeptic ones.
I also acknowledge the data presented in the form of temperature rises, co2, ocean warming and acidification, coral bleaching, loss of arctic ice, increasing extreme weather events (especially flooding as the moisture from evaporation increases, see pakistan, queensland, victoria, brazil) etc and accept with a high degree of probability that the effects of increasing co2 in the atmosphere is the cause. (note co2 is not bad or good, just the effects of it increasing and the changing balance of the atmosphere).
I also have a different understanding of theory in science and the meaning of proof, as most accepted facts in science are theories and most of what we know and accept cannot be proved in the simplistic understanding of the word. Relativity works and is accepted, the weight and size of an electron, the composition of the atom, the distance to stars and galaxies, gravity itself etc, cannot be measured or ‘proved’ in that understanding of the word.
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Theories_as_models
see: http://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/kitp-explained/role-of-theory-in-science
I know this won’t make any difference to you as your mind is made up, and anything I offer is dismissed as tainted, made up and unacceptable, so in that respect I can’t argue the science with you. But that is where I am coming from.
Far be it from me to pretend that I am a climate specialist – I am just an engineer, and instead of listening to Al Gore and his mob – I prefer to do some numbers.
It is not hard to calculate the total energy delivered to Earth by our Sun – from Sun’s temperature, black body radiation, the size of Sun, Earth, and distances involved.
The power of solar radiation calculated this way is slightly over 1.3KW per square meter.
This gives total energy delivered to Earth as about 5.4×10^24 Joules/year, about half of which reaches Earth’s surface – say 2.7×10^24.
Total energy production by mankind is currently about 5×10^20 Joules/year.
Our contribution to energy balance is then less than 0.02%. We can’t even measure the total energy with error as small as this.
Nature is many things – but is not stupid. In other words – it is a stable system.
What the “climate change fanatics” propose is that we tax everyone until they bleed in order to slightly influence the 0.02% of the energy balance – and this somehow is going to change the balance of the whole system.
Somehow I do not think that this would work, or that the “climate change fanatics” are stupid – but for sure, a small, selected group of people would become very, very rich – if the proposed carbon tax etc. becomes reality.
Life on Earth survived for hundreds of millions of years – all without Al Gore, IPCC, climate “experts” and carbon tax.
It is a nice con, though.
“Michael says:
January 15, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Werner you keep changing the goal posts “But even so, 2010 was a strong El Nino year. ” Earlier on you said if it was beaten, you would reconsider.”
My original goal post was the Hadcrut3 data at
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
Your Hadcrut3 data is very different. It is a real puzzle to me how two strong El Nino years can have opposite effects. Namely the above site had 0.548 for 1998 and 0.493 for 2010, but this still only goes to November. Yet both end up at 0.52 somehow. Can you please provide a link to a data set that lets me verify for myself that the 2010 actually ends up at 0.52? Not even the following has it to December:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
“Far be it from me to pretend that I am a climate specialist – I am just an engineer, and instead of listening to Al Gore and his mob – I prefer to do some numbers.”
Les you are not measuring a plank of wood, in a building, being out by a minuscule % may not mean much, but when it comes to chemicals it is all about reaction and balance. The make up of your body also includes sulphur, phosphorous, chlorine, copper, lead, iron, uranium, thorium, mercury and arsenic, among many others. Arsenic for instance can be beneficial medically in tiny amounts, but add just a tiny bit more…I think you know where I am going with this.
The typical skeptic says “hey it is a tiny portion of the atmosphere or it is a tiny warming effect or it has happened millions of times without us etc”. None of these are relevant or really have any meaning when discussing whether the changing balance of the atmosphere can cause changes harmful to us or whether we are the ones causing it now. Negative arguments are not proof, they are beliefs. Beliefs that are not borne out in many areas of nature where small amounts can precipitate big reactions. Just look at the change of certain chemicals in your body that effect moods, heart rate etc. Like most things in nature it is about balance, and we are changing that balance and it is illogical to believe that changing balance will not have an effect.
[snip. Let’s have a discussion, instead of constantly linking to a blog that lacks the courtesy to put WUWT on their blog-roll, as WUWT does for them. ~dbs, mod.]
Michael says:
“Like most things in nature it is about balance, and we are changing that balance and it is illogical to believe that changing balance will not have an effect.”
I am in total agreement. The effect of increased CO2 is apparent, and entirely beneficial:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
“I am in total agreement. The effect of increased CO2 is apparent, and entirely beneficial:”
Smokey, I am not a plant! what about the effects of the warming on coral, algae and phytoplankton? I hope you don’t like eating fish. What about the climate change effects on weather. Pretty hard to grow something when your farm keeps getting flooded out, I certainly don’t see my fruit and vegetables getting cheaper anytime soon.
Michael – thank you for a condescending explanation regarding the difference between a plank of wood and the processes governed by nonlinear partial differential equations with variable coefficients.
You actually provide arguments against your own reasoning.
Yes – the system is complex. Yes – small changes can lead to relatively large responses. Yes – we didn’t even start understanding all the feedbacks, not to mention actual description of the system. As such – all computer models are an exercise in futility – as by definition they can’t describe a complex system where chaotic changes take place.
What is known, however, is that:
-the system is stable in general terms – the best proof is you being alive today
-the climate was much hotter and much colder too -before the humanity even came into existence
-levels of CO2 have been both higher and lower than today – before the first barrel of oil was pumped.
-the computer models are not consistent – and require fudge factors – conveniently selected to provide the politically correct answers.
Trying to convince everybody that we actually can control and influence processes of this scale and complexity by means of taxation – requires a lot of arrogance, or a lot of stupidity, or both.
In reality, though, maybe it just requires a cynical and unscrupulous attitude – knowing that if taxation doesn’t help – at least some people can get rich on the scheme.
Maybe the time will come when climate science will have a right to be called Science – but this time is somewhat distant yet. People like Gore (with eager participation from people like you) would like to announce that this time has already arrived – because this would open the door for them to start trading in earnest – selling nothing – for a very real cash.
You may not call it a scam. I do.
Michael you said:
Myrrh remember when I said this… “You rely on history to much, all data before several 100 years is guesswork and even then nobody says that CO2 is the only driver of the planet. Their are mnay other greenhouse gases, volcanos, planetary wanderings, temp changes of the sun over its lifetime, heat from our centre plus much more. Most episodes in the past we have good workable theories for but their are no proofs there. Similar conditions to our distant past will be unlikely to occur again as the sun the planet has past that point in its development.”
but you say “If CO2 had nothing to do with the vast and dramatic changes we went through in glacials and interglacials then it is irrelevant now,”
Just because CO2 is not the only driver of Climate Change, and I freely admit it doesn’t come even close, that does not follow that it isn’t now. At no time in Earths history have we been able to influence the atmospher to this degree over such a short space of time and that regard history has only limited relevance, especially when a lot of the temperature of history and its causes are guessswork, but even then their are workable theories for most of it.
Yes, I remember you saying that. It sounded exactly the argument made by AGWScientists, that the facts don’t matter and shouldn’t be listened to. As you’ve brought it up again I guess I’ll just have to deal with it, I was put off by the length of reply I’d have to give. I’ll try and shorten it.
Our knowledge of history and the changes in climate is far from being guesswork, we are now in an extraordinarily wonderful position of global communication and amazing scientific advancement. We have access to the histories of peoples all over the world through our lives now, our stories, our own accounts in traditions and literature and through archeology – there is much that has been lost of course, but as it stands we have never before, to our present knowledge, known so much about ourselves and our world. Our advancements in knowing how the world works has come on in leaps and bounds over the last few centuries in all kinds of fields; genetics, geography, astronomy, medicine, language, biology and so on.
One of the things we know very clearly from our past is our history of ice ages, we might not yet know all the detail of the how and why, but we know them really well now.
We have established, for example, how what is now the islands in ‘Britain’ came to be an entity over timescales of millions of years during which the different parts travelled in the movement of tectonic plates, we know from the rocks which parts where attached to North America, we know how much was covered in the several ice age glacials, we know that huge temperature changes to hot happened by the bones of the rhinos and fossil plants we’ve found before the beginning of the last glacial 100,000 years ago, we know how much land we lost at the beginning of our present interglacial, our Holocene, when the glacial ended and the Irish and North Sea were created from the gazillion tons on melting ice raising sea levels over 300 feet; it’s a fascinating history.
We know this through the co-operation and communication from all kinds of specialist fields putting the pieces of the jigsaw together for our mutual enlightenment; this is what science is, the exploration of our natural world for the love of it. Hence it is called Natural Science, and the Natural Philosopher for example, a physicist. This is our history and we are very far from being ignorant about it.
If CO2 was irrelevant in all these changes as a driver of temperature, it can’t suddenly become relevant now. That’s simply illogical. In saying “That CO2 is not the only driver of temperature”, you are being illogical.
If it had nothing to do with any previous driving of temperature then it can’t be included in ‘those things that drive temperature now’.
Just because you’re saying it, doesn’t make it true. You’ve pulled that out of thin air, like a rabbit from a hat.
That’s why you don’t like history, or all the knowledge we have gained in it, because the history of Carbon Dioxide shows it has never been a driver of global warming. Instead, what you have replaced the lack of cause and effect with, is superstition.
You are no different here to the primitive who establishing himself in a position of power tells his people that the sun will stop rising if his priesthood of hand picked cronies don’t have a human sacrifice every week from which they must tear the still living heart from the body even though there is no relationship of cause and effect between doing this and the sun rising every day.
There’s no correlation of cause and effect in your claim because it is established that CO2 had nothing to do with previous driving of temperatures. You admit this in your AGWScience. You say CO2 levels have not changed for all these hundreds of thousands of years of dramatic Climate Change..
Do you notice something there? You don’t actually ever say that. AGWScience never finishes the sentence. It stops at ‘the CO2 levels haven’t changed for hundreds of thousands of years’. And then it skips to superstition. ‘CO2 levels have changed because of man’s imput since the Industrial Age, so CO2 is driving the warm we are experiencing now after the immense cold of the LIA..’ Except you don’t say that do you? You skip the actual reason we are experiencing warming now, because we’re still coming out of the very low temperatures of the LIA which we sank into from the previous high of the MWP.., because superstition isn’t about cause and effect, and as real cause and effect contradicts, it so it does in AGW, so you flatten out LIA and MWP and produce Hockey Sticks, which programme manipulates any set of random numbers given to produce them.
Some might well have remembered that the sun rose regularly before these priests began demanding living hearts to keep it rising every morning, but they were probably bullied to agree, and the next generation taught it was true and so the tradition established as true scientific fact taught by consensus priesthood in authority over them who must be believed and obeyed.
AGWScience is exactly that, superstition. At every claim look for the elision, the conflation, the disjunct in logical connection. Magicians tricks to distract, together with the constant bombardment by the establishment in the ‘authority of the priesthood’ for use against the oiks browbeaten to believe it’s true and ostracised if they don’t. Because they only our best interests at heart.. Some of us still remember real science. And can see the sleight of hand in presenting superstition masquerading as fact by those more interested in establishing egotistical power over others and their destinies, than actually giving a damn for their real welfare or real science.
Measurement of something is of course ‘relative’ to the what is decided to be the rule against which it is measured. But through that we can know the weight of molecules relative to each other, and from this we know that a Carbon Dioxide molecule is much heavier than air which obviously makes nonsense of AGWScience claims that it can ‘stay up in the atmosphere for hundreds and thousands of years accumulating in a blanket’.
The other examples you give are of this same sleight of hand ilk, “ocean warming and acidification, coral bleaching, loss of arctic ice, extreme weather events (especially flooding as the moisture from evaporation increases etc” . What proof do you have that this has anything to do with the CO2 molecule? Just because you say it has is not a proof.
When I began exploring this argument I read both sides of it and questioned both sides. I am convinced that there is no real science behind AGW claims. All I have found is this recurring pattern of logical disjunct in the explanations and claims, and an extraordinary amount of effort to present this as ‘true’ when it is obviously not -which is a technique mastered by magicians and dictators. I have made my judgement of it, what I am giving you is some of what I found.
Look for the disjunct in the facts presented, don’t get distracted by analysing what is a theory.
The “ocean acidification scam” is the latest out of the AGWScience Propaganda Ministry. http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/ocean-acidification-scam/
All I can say is, if you really care about the environment, care that AGWScience is perverting the truth by replacing natural science education of the the next generation with emotive fear fuelled superstition, and full of deceit to maintain that superstition. Some of those involved know exactly that it’s this they’re doing, even if the majority are ignorant of being manipulated because they take things on trust.
CO2 is Good For You
And – Michael – any theory of a small change causing huge effects must rely on a positive feedback loop.
There are very few natural processes that rely on a positive feedback – one of them being a nuclear reaction. Even so – the Sun appears to be stable enough…
But then – you will probably tell me that a controlled fission reaction is not too far away…
One can’t argue with a religious (or cult if you prefer) belief…and let’s not forget, that every cult promises hell and damnation for non-believers, while quickly and efficiently extracting good old cash from brainwashed believers.
“If CO2 was irrelevant in all these changes as a driver of temperature, it can’t suddenly become relevant now. That’s simply illogical. In saying “That CO2 is not the only driver of temperature”, you are being illogical. ”
Saying that “CO2 is not the ONLY driver of temperature” is not the same as saying “If CO2 was irrelevant in all these changes as a driver of temperature, it can’t suddenly become relevant now.” You put a lot of words in my mouth and assign meaning that do not reflect what I said.
Illogical and arrogant is thinking that you can pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as you like without consequence. No we cannot control the climate but we can and should monitor and control what we put into our atmosphere that are determinants of climate. History is full of examples of harmless and safe coming back to bite us in the bum.
[But, do you actually have any evidence linking Anthropogenic CO2 to temperature change? Robt]
Michael
I have just had the mind-numbing experience of reading the entire thread and my hat is off to you. You have remained polite in the face of arrant stupidity and kept on fighting the good fight. Keep up the good work.
If “fighting the good fight” means constantly trumpeting disaster scenarios based not on evidence, but on Al Gore-style scare tactics, then there is nothing “good” about it.
I’ve shown conclusively in my links @ 5:42 pm above that more CO2 is beneficial. Yet there is not one bit of proof that the increase in this harmless, beneficial trace gas has caused any problems. None.
Thus, Michael must be counted among the dwindling ranks of True Believers. Facts will not have any effect on him. His mind is closed to the benefits of more food growing in a warmer climate, and all he is capable of seeing is looming disaster.
“I’ve shown conclusively in my links @ 5:42 pm above that more CO2 is beneficial. Yet there is not one bit of proof that the increase in this harmless, beneficial trace gas has caused any problems. None.”
I base all my decisions on facts. The well known fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The fact that temperatures are rising at the same time as CO2 is rising. The facts of warming oceans, increased coral bleaching events, rising oceans, lower atmosphere warming while upper atmosphere cooling, increasing extreme weather events consistent with models and much more. The moisture in the atmosphere has increased by 4% and as I have pointed out I am not a plant, and that happy plants will not be much good if they are flooded out regularly. These are all based on data by climate scientists, and just because you dispute the data does not follow that I am not making rational and logical decisions.
A believer is somebody who believes that he can change the composition of a crucial gas in our atmosphere by an undetermined amount without consequence. You cannot prove that such spewing of billions of tonnes of CO2 per year into our climate system cannot and will not change the climate and our weather patterns. Mere observations should cause most reasonable people to pause. Their is no belief necessary to me the evidence is increasing daily.
“Mulga Bill says:
January 17, 2011 at 6:33 am
Michael
I have just had the mind-numbing experience of reading the entire thread and my hat is off to you. You have remained polite in the face of arrant stupidity and kept on fighting the good fight. Keep up the good work.”
Thanks 🙂
Michael says:
“The well known fact that CO2 is a minor anthropogenic greenhouse gas.” Fixed it for you. De nada.
“The facts of warming oceans” Wrong. ARGO data shows cooling oceans.
“increased coral bleaching events” Wrong. Turns out this is an annual phenomenon unrelated to AGW. No connection whatever with CO2. The actual correlation shows increased calcification with increased CO2.
“rising oceans” Wrong. The change – due to the emergence from the LIA – is decelerating. And ocean heat content is falling.
“upper atmosphere cooling” This is a red herring. The “fingerprint” of AGW was trumpeted as the prediction of the tropospheric “hot spot.” When that failed to happen, the goal posts were then moved to stratospheric cooling. Typical of the shenanigans and mendacity coming from the globaloney crowd.
” The moisture in the atmosphere has increased by 4%” Wrong. Where do you get your misinformation? ‘Skeptical’ Science? climate progress? realclimate?
“increasing extreme weather events” Wrong. Catastrophic weather events have been steadily decreasing: click1, click2, click3.
“…and much more.” Since your “facts” have been debunked, no doubt your “much more” would be equally easy to deconstruct. For example, as beneficial CO2 rises, the rate of change of temperature increase is declining, thus breaking the assumed link between CO2 and temperature.
In addition to Lord Monckton’s 24 points refuting Steketee, the spurious correlations between CO2 and the warming due to the planet’s emergence from the LIA are no more valid than this.
Here’s my model prediction: Michael and the couple of other True Believers here will reject all facts which refute their belief system, and they will pay no attention to the dozens of commentators who are all trying to reason with them by using verifiable facts. Against all the evidence, the True Believers will continue to believe that a harmless and beneficial trace gas is the principal driver of the climate, and is the cause of all their problems.
That’s my model prediction. And as we shall see, it is more accurate than any climate model.
What is a dead give-away in this whole scam is the lack of any consistent proposal.
No one says this (for instance): “In the next 10 years a legislation will be introduced to limit fuel consumption of an average passenger car to less than 5l/100km. All coal and oil fuelled power plants will be phased out during the next 20 years. Research on alternative energy sources will start next year in the following facilities: etc. etc. The objective is to reduce/increase/change this and that – and it will be measured and assessed in the following manner etc. etc.”
No – they can’t say that – because this would require actual budget, the progress could be monitored, and (God forbid) – some people could actually be held accountable.
In short – an average whorehouse has a better business plan and management.
Instead – they propose introduction of carbon credits – which is exactly a no-product, which requires no investment, is almost impossible to control, and creates vast opportunities for the high priests of the scam – to get rich. And – when it does not change the climate – it will, of course, be the fault of the public…
Make no mistake – this is the largest economic scam in the history of humankind. The principle – a new tax on everything you do – including breathing (well – it produces the “poisonous” gas – CO2 – doesn’t it ?). This tax will affect everything – from cooking your meal to taking a bus to work.
In other words – diverting a significant portion of everyone’s income – into private pockets and into the coffers of world governments. Trillions of dollars are at stake – no wonder that no punches are being pulled, and that the original data has a habit of disappearing, being lost, or being selectively used and manipulated. After all – how many people in a hospital will ask for credentials when they see a guy in a white coat saying “Good morning, I am your doctor” ? Or – how many will question the existence of fire – when seeing a guy in a fire-proof suit and helmet who says “Fire Brigade – get out, there is a fire” ?
There is a good reason for subjects such as history or physics being taught at a very superficial level in schools today. No one needs educated citizens – at least not in their majority. Which in turn will allow any kind of social engineering – and, of course, vast, uncontrolled profits – for the selected ones.
I have sufficient education and preparation to at least understand the scale and complexity of the problem. Also – to critically assess the quality of at least some of the arguments presented by the high priests of the climate change cult. And – it does not convince me.
We live in times where information overload is common, and where all kind of bogus, biased or irrelevant information is delivered to the public with the preceding qualifier: “Experts say that ….” – and it replaces thinking and common sense in most cases. We are being conditioned to be compliant, to be politically correct, to not ask embarrassing questions, to not rock the boat, to give away the responsibilities and rights – and it starts in pre-schools.
It is a good thing that I will not be walking this world for very long now. But while I live – certain things are going to happen only over my dead body – and I am not joking.
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.”
Les says:
January 17, 2011 at 1:35 pm
Excellent post!
Most of your links were cherry picked regional issues, hardly meaningful, but typical. I can also paste a bunch of links.
See my first post on this thread on Monckton.
I also believe that you will reject all facts which refute your belief system, and you will pay no attention to the dozens of commentators who are all trying to reason with you by using verifiable facts.
“What is a dead give-away in this whole scam is the lack of any consistent proposal.”
This is nearly impossible on a global system and with 3 or 4 year cycle political systems. Far from Climate change being a rort for governments, it is very difficult for them to get anything done. Unless you have a price on carbon (and I prefer a tax, more straightforward and less rortable by business), business’s will not put the necessary R&D and effort into changing to more sustainable and renewable sources of energy. The cost to the planet needs to factored into the price of fossil fuels to send the signal that other sources are more desirable and now more cost effective.
Michael re Saying that “CO2 is not the ONLY driver of temperature” is not the same as saying “If CO2 was irrelevant in all these changes as a driver of temprature, it can’t suddenly become relevant now.” You put a lot of words in my mouth and assign meaning that do not reflect what I said.
Not what I was doing. What I’m referring to is this as an example of the logical disjunct inherent in AGWScience claims. That two statements are made with critical information elided, giving the impression of logical continuity where none exists.
The AGW claim is that CO2 level has not changed in any significant degree for the last 600,000 years or so. What is missing here is that during this period very real and dramatic global warming happened as we came out of ice age conditions and into interglacials in recurring cycles of around 100,000 years. Since the AGW claim is that CO2 hasn’t changed in all that time what it is actually saying, is that CO2 has been irrelevant to the massive global warmings in this vast amount of time.
EXCEPT, it doesn’t actually say it. One has to read between the lines and know something about the regularity of our ice ages to make that connection for oneself. That’s the logical conclusion from the AGW statement that CO2 levels haven’t changed.
So, what I am saying is, you cannot then say that CO2 is one of the drivers now, because looked at logically, the AGW claim is actually saying that CO2 was never a driver.
Why has CO2 suddenly become a driver when it showed no propensity to be that for over 600,000 years?
The gist of my post was that AGW does this kind of thing all the time, it takes out bits from one statement to the next by jumping directly to another claim about CO2 which, in this case, is proved false by its first statement. In other words, ‘that CO2 is a driver now’ is already falsified by the AGW claim that ‘CO2 levels didn’t change in our past history’. Since it had nothing to do with it then, I am saying, you cannot say it has something to do with driving temperature now.
And Robt’s question.
Anyway, there are two aspects in this argument about AGW which bother me particularly, that science has been usurped to promote particular agendas and the nature of some of these agendas.
Rather a mixed bag of interests have jumped onto the AGW bandwagon since the early environmentalism of the thirties against coal (which brought in Keeling in the fifties to cherry pick a low CO2 ‘background’ level, from which less than two years later he confidently announced there was a definite trend upwards from man’s industrial output which he found while measuring CO2 from the world’s highest active volcano in an area of extreme volcanic activity where he was guaranteed a copious supply of the stuff to use in further adjustments), through to the banking and big business interests of today which had got their act more of less together by the seventies and have been driving governments and global warming ever since.
Trenberth’s upcoming speech, link below, touches on two aspects I’d like to bring to your attention.
The first is the science with the aide-memoire “Hide the decline” – an example of how science fact is manipulated purely to fuel anthropogenic global warming claims:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html
Please spend time going through it, it’s a very good introduction to the background and methods rampant in the corruption of temperature data, necessary for AGWScience claims, because if temperatures now are not outside any natural variation we’ve had in our past climate changes, then there is no basis for the AGW scare blaming man’s production of CO2.
It is imperative then for those promoting AGW, as Trenberth is doing in the speech he’s to deliver at the AMS, to continue to produce data backing up this AGWScience created scenario. He does so by continuing to claim that he and AGWScientists represent science fact which cannot be argued about, and that those arguing against this are charlatans and shouldn’t be listened to. Who are the real charlatans here? Those who have to manipulate temperature records or those arguing against the corruption of data?
Trenberth says those involved in Climategate were exonerated of any wrong doing and therefore what he is saying is approved real science and can’t be argued about. That these hearings were fixed by the powers that be, the government et al, in order for this crucial evidence of corruption to be downplayed you can research for yourselves, but remember, that CRU’s active involvement in fixing temperature records extends beyond Britain. New Zealand in the early seventies an example, is part and parcel of CRU’s agenda from the very beginning of serious political and business interests in promoting AGW. Still funded by oil interests and the EPA.
Read what Trenberth is hiding here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/13/trenberths-upcoming-ams-meeting-talk-climategate-thoughts/
The second aspect I want to cover from this speech relates to one particular agenda backing AGW. There are so many on the bandwagon now, but this goes back to the roots and as a concept is being disseminated widely now, overpopulation as a problem.
Trenberth begins his speech by saying the talk is in honour of his “friend and colleague Stephen Schneider, who was pre-eminent in communicating climate change to the public”. Schneider of course famously said that scientific integrity could be replaced by dishonesty in promoting one’s cause and Trenberth’s dishonesty clear in just the above example, but what else is Trenberth advocating for?
Beginning in part 6, Trenberth says re what can be done to reduce emissions and change climate, “However, by itself, I view this as short-sighted, as the steps required are so revolutionary as to be highly unlikely to be achieved. Instead, we must recognize that while there is considerable merit in slowing the pace of climate change, and we should work to reduce emissions, it is also essential that much stronger steps be taken to plan for and adapt to the change that is surely coming. How we cope with challenges ahead and build more resiliency in our system, are major questions that should be higher on the agenda.”
Then a paragraph of filling, then:
“The growing population and demands for higher standards of living mean that the planet is already over-poulated, and far too many things are simply not sustainable in anything like their current form. The atmosphere is a global common, shared by all. As we continue to exploit it and use it as a dumping ground, the outcome is the “tragedy of the commons” and we all lose. Unfortunately, society is not ready to face up to these challenges and the needed changes in the way we create order and govern ourselves. Population issues are largely missing from the discussion, such as it is. Nonetheless, a number of pragmatic steps are possible, but they require planning for decades ahead, not simply the time until the next election.”
And then he goes into more blurb without elaborating on this theme, or viral meme, the acceptability of eugenics by government control.
Where does it come from? Did he get it from his honoured friend and colleague Schneider, or from somewhere else?
UNESCO (United Nations Educational Social and Cultural Organisation) It’s Purpose and its Philosophy – Julian Huxley 1946 – ‘Thus even though it is quite true that radical eugenics policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible it will be important for UNESCO to see that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that is now unthinkable may at least become thinkable”.
A short intro for the Huxley connection: http://fgservices1947.wordpress.com/2010/09/global-warming-eugenics-and-the-fabians
And further to the beginnings from Mead to the Schneider connection: http://dradge.com/2010/07/where-the-global-warming-hoax-was-born/
So, nothing in the confirmed AGWScience corruption or in the philosophy of its leading lights, steeped in and proud of using dishonesty to spread their belief in their own superiority to manage others, leads me anywhere but to wonder if they share a common sociopathic gene, now that would be ironic. And what can be done about it if they do, perhaps a tweak here and there..?
..of course, it would be purely on a voluntary basis..
Whether it’s from ego to rule, from some form of sickness, a desire for accumulating wealth regardless of consequences to those enslaved in bad work practices or from asset stripping of countries, even to creating wars for control, what a lot of the agendas have in common is not really giving a damn about others. That’s just sad. Perhaps there will be a different paradigm shift from the one the Huxley crowd are hoping for, that these agendas will be seen for what they really are and perhaps instead what will come to the fore is that quality which is at the heart of all our intelligent creativity, co-operation to mutual benefit.
[Extra info on hide the decline history – http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part1_PreHistoricalRecord.htm
and state of play with Mann –
http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/enviro-extremists/8119-the-global-warming-court-battle
and Salinger/CRU cooking NZ data
http://www.suite101.com/content/legal-defeat-for-global-warming-in-kiwigate-scandal-a294157
If after having read through all these links, Michael, not just mine, you still think I should change my mind and become a believer in AGW, I’d be interested in hearing your reasons. Until then, there’s nothing more I have to add.]
Be well.
Its not working, so I will remove some bits?
Most of your links were cherry picked regional issues, hardly meaningful, but typical. I can also paste a bunch of links.
See my first post on this thread on Monckton, where I answer all his half truths and irrelevant statements.
I also believe that you will reject all facts which refute your belief system, and you will pay no attention to the dozens of commentators who are all trying to reason with you by using verifiable facts.
“What is a dead give-away in this whole scam is the lack of any consistent proposal.”
This is nearly impossible on a global system and with 3 or 4 year cycle political systems. Far from Climate change being a rort for governments, it is very difficult for them to get anything done. Unless you have a price on carbon (and I prefer a tax, more straightforward and less rortable by business), business’s will not put the necessary R&D and effort into changing to a more sustainable and renewable sources of energy. The cost to the planet needs to factored into the price of fossil fuels to send the signal that other sources are more desirable and now more cost effective.
Myrrh and all. I would respond to your ridiculous claims in regards to the past proving it can’t happen now, but I fear I am being censored. None of my posts are coming up.
Typical
[Nope, not censored. Several of your posts did repeat the same things, and repeated phrases in repeated posts on different threads with repeated similar links automatically (and properly) go to “spam.” But none were censored. Robt]
Ok, I am doing something wrong with my html.
In the quotes after the href I am putting the website, and in the quotes after title I am putting what I want displayed. Is that not the right way to do it?
[Reply: Don’t use quotes, just do the href thing. Close the tag with /a in brackets. ~dbs, mod.]
okay I will give up on trying to use HTML tags for now.
These were the links I was trying to put up.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/what-is-it/why
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/global-weather-disasters-a-sign-the-heat-is-on/story-e6frg6zo-1225983256858
http://www.skepticalscience.com/evidence-for-global-warming-basic.htm
http://climateprogress.org/2010/12/29/ben-santer-attribution-extreme-weather-events-to-climate-change/
http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/12/noaa-2010-tied-with-2005-for-hottest-year-on-record/
http://www.coralcoe.org.au/news_stories/regionalbleaching.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/abs/nature07080.html
So Myrrh, you start by saying that you were not trying to put words in my mouth and then you do this…
“EXCEPT, it doesn’t actually say it. One has to read between the lines and know something about the regularity of our ice ages to make that connection for oneself. That’s the logical conclusion from the AGW statement that CO2 levels haven’t changed. ”
This has got to be the most ridiculous argument I’ve heard so far, you said it, not them, nobody else is saying it. The Vostok ice core records show CO2 jumping as often as temperature. You’re again putting words in people’s mouth and completely making up your own argument.
“So, what I am saying is, you cannot then say that CO2 is one of the drivers now, because looked at logically, the AGW claim is actually saying that CO2 was never a driver. ”
No they are not. This is where the sceptic argument is more a belief than science, you are so convinced that you are right you see things that aren’t there. As I understand it, and I could be wrong, is that 600,000 years ago as we came out of a major global ice age, it was the CO2 and methane emitted by volcano that got it out of the ice age in the first place, and if that is true we have CO2 to thank or we might still be a snowball.
“Since it had nothing to do with it then, I am saying, you cannot say it has something to do with driving temperature now. ”
This is the same as saying that if forest fires occurred naturally in the past they cannot be lit by man now. I guess we better stop looking for those arsonists. This is clearly a ridiculous argument, for one thing this is the first time in Earth’s history that man has been spewing billions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere in such a short timeframe. If this has happened in the past and nothing bad happened then you might have an argument, (note I said might, we would still need to look at solar activity, planetary activity and other drivers), but this has never happened before. You make the same sort of claim over and over again,
“because if temperatures now are not outside any natural variation we’ve had in our past climate changes, then there is no basis for the AGW scare blaming man’s production of CO2. ”
1+2 does not equal 10. There has been something like 6 different investigations on the so-called climate gate and they have all been cleared. It was nothing but a beat up of cherry picked data taken out of context in people’s personal e-mails, how about you publish all your e-mails, personal and business, for the last decade and I’ll see if I can make it out to be nasty by picking stuff out. I have looked into climate gate and it was a mountain in a molehill and even then with only about one small area and doesn’t change the avalanche of climate science on climate change.
Your conspiracy theories don’t hold any weight with me, to say that most governments in the world and the vast majority of scientists and scientific organisations are part of some huge conspiracy for some nefarious ends stretches credibility beyond breaking point. It is an attack on science itself and that is both wrong and dangerous. Like I have said before most governments and scientists primary goal is the betterment of humankind. Democratic governments don’t stay in government long enough to benefit from such a long-term strategy, and clearly since this has been going on for decades most governments have already changed power several times.
While we continue to put hard-working scientists, that have done nothing more than to try to save mankind from himself by selflessly promoting and explaining the science of climate change, through endless investigations and committees, the planet will suffer through severe droughts, increasingly severe floods, an increasingly hostile ocean for its inhabitants (our food) and a less inhabitable planet for us all. This is no less than this generations witchhunts or McCarthy era.
Correction, I meant 600 million not 600,000. Didn’t realise my error until I reread it once it was posted.
While I am here though and just to reiterate, I know CO2 on its own is a fairly harmful gas, I know it has changed in the past, i know that it hasn’t always forced temperature, 4 billion years is a long time and its been through a lot. Their are lots of factors that have influenced the development of the world as we know it and none of them mean that in this unique point in our history, with the industrialisation of man that we cannot influence our world in a bad way, and that a harmless gas in excess can destabilise the balance and make life more uncomfortable for ourselves.
Lets not let our arrogance, self importance and self interest, much this up for our children.
Thanks for reading