Rebuttal to the Skeptical Science "Crux of a Core"

Smokey says:
March 1, 2011 at 12:26 pm
@Mike:
There’s a difference between a climate scientist and an engineer.
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LOL, very nice, smoke!

J Storrs Hall —
> The graphs as presented are without any x-axis (time) shifting from the original data.
Thanks for that clarification.

Now, getting back to Catastrophic Climate Stagnation, …

I hope someone will correct me if I get this wrong.
The general public has been led to believe the Ice cores are a very granular look at temperature and CO2 changes over an extended period of time in Greenland and Antarctica. Part of the reason they think this is because the charts connect the sample points in a linear way.
When one looks at the amount of snow necessary to create an inch of glacial ice and the amount of ice core necessary to produce sufficient gas to sample, the picture radically changes.
The ice core samples are actually a very general look at temperature and atmospheric change over years to establish a single point on the graph and do not reflect seasonal changes like a warmer Greenland and Antarctica within the same year or season. Nor do they reflect simultaneous atmospheric change which isn’t even feasible due to atmospheric mixing and the difference in land mass in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
The charts are misleading, they should be bar charts which should also reflect the missing samples?

Smokey’s NSF overlay shows nicely that Arctic and Antarctic do fit well together, each affirms the other therefore both are basically trustworthy. So much for Honeycutt’s assertions.
Anyway, Honeycutt, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you don’t like the temperature records of the ice cores, then why should you trust the ice core CO2 records? though I trust the temperature records, based on isotopes, far more than the depleted records of the craftily absconding CO2 that are spliced into that highly-suspect Ice Hockey Stick flaunted by your article.
I bet you didn’t check with Dr Storrs Hall to see if he had any comments, before doing that article. But hey, why don’t you add my Primer (click my name) to your list of places that use his graph? I’ve done one of the best renditions I reckon. Oh, and read my Primer in the process… my, my, you’d have enough articles there to last you for a year. Might actually goad us into crowdsourcing answers to the whole of Skeptical Science. That would be a good idea. Yes, do.

Lucy Skywalker says:
March 1, 2011 at 1:42 pm
Anyway, Honeycutt, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. If you don’t like the temperature records of the ice cores, then why should you trust the ice core CO2 records? though I trust the temperature records, based on isotopes, far more than the depleted records of the craftily absconding CO2 that are spliced into that highly-suspect Ice Hockey Stick flaunted by your article.
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No doubt. Isn’t it interesting that we’re told about the last 800,000 years CO2 was never over 310 ppm, globally……..based on ice core samplings. But, the same cores are only local in terms of temps……. and there are people out there that believe this stuff!!!

This is good. We need more rebuttals of Skeptical Science

bubbagyro says “My guess is that Nanorex does not even have a Bunsen burner on site. Modeling for persuasive presentations is handy for separation science, however. Separating a VC investor from his money, that is.”
So bubba – how many bunsen burners do you think Gavin Schmidt has? And as far as separating people from their money at least investors make the choice to invest, the climate change fanatics are taking from the people without regard to full disclosure.

stupidboy says:
March 1, 2011 at 10:37 am
@Mike
You’re looking at the finger!”
For some the finger is more interesting than the moon. For others, it’s all they are capable to ponder.

I’d just like to say that nobody really uses bunsen burners anymore.

SØREN BUNDGAARD,
Thanks for the video. It seems as if, in that spot on Greenland anyway, that there was a Roman Cool period, according to the ice core.

J StorrsHall says
‘The main reason we can have any confidence in questioning the current CO2-phobia orthodoxy in climate science is that it is reasonably cast as the hobby-horse of rebel paradigm shifters who took over the reins by political means rather than a fair scientific fight on the basis of evidence and experiment.’
This is an interesting hypothesis…..cast a bit longer as a small cabal of otherwise underemployed and career limited physicists at NASA, switching their focus to modelling the globe and prediction of futures….with a very expensive and very employment demanding computerised crystal ball. But they were still scientists and though limited in the fields of real world climatology – such as sediment and ice-core studies where the scientist actually spends hours in the field and lab, they really felt they could really find a place of scientific overview…using their incredible NASA-developed skills as modellers. And of course there was a genuine heartfelt desire, as many scientists feel, to bring the benefits of science to all of humanity, and certainly to protect from impending ecological disasters. It could be seen as a laudable quest….and when confronted with the real scientific uncertainties where choices of some variables (like converting a radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere measured in watts, to a change in temperature at the surface measured in degrees C ) thought it best to embrace the newly invented precautionary priciple and go with the scarier values for that constant. And also lend consideration to some theoretically large positive feedbacks.
So this was the rebel core….and within very few years, they had formed committees, lobbied governments and taken the issue to the very heart of the United Nations. They were supported by legions of political activists – from Greenpeace to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (in the UK, of course). Within fifteen years, their models were endorsed by every science academy across the globe. And finally, the political world responded with such far reaching plans and methods that a new global currency, accounting system, regulatory force and surveillance, trading, brokering and banking….even creating a new form of bank for the new paper currency – itself entirely built on a concept relating to something as common as charcoal.
Such alchemy was probably not their initial aim, I am sure. How could they have foreseen how many supporters they would have and such willingness to save the planet from a disaster that, well, okay, it does come out in the centre of a probability curve, and it really could happen, according to our best models, but well, there are also some very basic but potentially possible within the 95% probability boundary conditions or factors, gain factors and feedbacks closer to unity, where the future would not be that scary…but surely better to act.
That’s probably where these paradigm shifters are at today. Maybe a bit surprised at the support – but according to some appearances, one rebel at least, rages that all of this support is not enough and to hell with the uncertainties….the danger is real and changing the system like this is worthwhile. So what if people have to curtail their freedom – don’t we do that all the time with fire regulations and crash insurance?
I am just not sure what paradigm these guys were attempting to shift.
It could have been simply to redeem the fortunes of predictive modelling. I was active in the period 1980-1990 when these GCMs were developed. I was concerned with pollution control – the science and its regulation, and from an environmentalist standpoint. So I was often called to scrutinise predictive models – usually they predicted that nothing much would happen when you discharged this or that toxin.
And they had all gone spectacularly wrong. I actually held up the world’s top marine disperal model (also coupled to the atmosphere) that predicted zero consequences for dumping toxic and nuclear material in the ocean….on the floor of a UN Convention, and we, a small group of paradigm shifters, tore it to pieces. They saw the whole of their dumping programme outlawed, their research labs closed and their funding dry up right across the globe. Similar failures occurred with sulphur dioxide emissions, acid rain damage, mercury dispersion and a host of heavy metals. Their ancestors’ models of CFCs in the atmosphere initially predicted no impact at all, and even when they had to correct them after such an horrendous error – they could not model the rate of change or make useful predictions (most recently, it would appear a substantial part of the ozone hole is a natural consequence of increased solar UV radiation).
Even the modelling of nuclear reactor accidents – which I developed some expertise at running, as well as analysing the parameters, had been shown to be useless after Chernobyl in 1986…prior to that, all accident consequence models assumed the reactor core could (perhaps would) not melt down.
The scary climate story certainly redeemed modelling (well it is only now beginning to crack – this new paradigm). Billions have been directed to thousands of labs and research groups, PhD students and professorships. Perhaps that was the rather risky, – considering their history, goal of the shifters in the first place.
I can’t see any other rebels or movers in the carpet-bagging department. The people I knew in Greenpeace – real warriors for the planet, however naive at times, willing to place their life on the line….they have mostly retired and been replaced by a professional lobbyist. Along with lawyers and PR people and a whole secretariat. They now work hard just to maintain the company and its offices. The new paradigm is just great for that, and they haven’t bothered to check the science. In fact, nowadays, they are quite close to the UN, helping to shape its agenda and so they follow the UN Panel’s advice. Now that is more of a paradigm reversal that most people will ever know!
So the revolution in computerised planetary awareness IS the paradigm shift….I hadn’t wanted to elevate it to such heights, but there it is! What started out as a mere spark of concern in the heart of a NASA modeller, became a revolutionary movement that captured world statesmen, of the standing even of an American Vice-President and nearly ‘most powerful man in the world’ and UK Prime Ministers. It is true, it is a phenomenally successful movement – with millions of school-kids all over the world, and teenagers, allotment keepers, top bankers and even glamorous film stars….all in favour of the new global currency and of course, very grateful to the upper echelons of science (and modelling, for those in-the-know), their protective institutions and of course, the UN.
Wow – we could be living through the biggest paradigm reversal event since, well, records began. Could that incredible edifice crumble? And how quickly? Now that the secret is out – and the parameters of the model that were perfectly legitimate and we really knew were there, and if you read the fine print of the UN Working Group reports and ignore the hype in the Summary for Policy Makers, which we, the rebels, did not write by the way…..these apparently lower probability parameters are now actually, as borne out by the recent lack of heat accumulation in the atmosphere and the oceans and evidence that the fiercely positive feedbacks we theorised are actually not fierce at all…..
Is that simple truth, if admitted (could it ever be admitted?), able to bring down the revolutionary committees and panel and planning departments? Actually that part of the revolution is seldom discussed – the way the bureaucracy has latched on to the carbon part of the paradigm shift…and then the commodity brokers and the bankers. Then come all the industrial biomass burners, wind turbine makers, solar voltaic engineers and businesses across the planet. What one UK Green MP recently called the ‘Carbon Army’ (she was a woman too, but I guess she likes men in uniform).
It is going to be a very interesting time from a social anthropologist’s perspective ( I dabbled in that to get some broader view on the shenanigans of scientists and their variance alliances with industrial strategy). Already the revolutionaries are using religious language to consolidate and defend themselves from…..others who want to shift the paradigm back again. They think if so great a paradigm in the first place that these retro-shifters are placed on a par with flat-earthers!
I am not going to go into ‘climategate’ and what it says about the mindset of the shifters – that would be personal and cloud the overall picture….unless, I mean, could they have been really shifty from the start – but that would then question their real motives and integrity, and I am happier not to do that.
That ‘greatness’ is actually part of the pardigm shift – that it is a great shift, has to be a great shift, in order to save the world itself. The shifters of a simple equation and box model have perhaps unwittingly (unless they belonged to some secret cult with almost clairvoyant powers!) sparked a truly massive paradigm shift in a sense of planetary awareness and the illusion of being able to measure and control things on a global level, – as well as caring, of course…it is a special kind of caring, that kind of control.
So – the flat-earthers tend not to argue about equations and uncertain constants, rather…they are mostly in reaction to the remedies proposed for the future disaster. They especially don’t like the idea of more taxes, more bureaucrats, more bank deposits far removed from scrutiny and in particular, elected scrutiny. Some just hate turbines in beautiful places. Not many actually really care about scientific truth – the parameters like gain factors.
…I am rambling through the blessings of the blogosphere…apologies…just can’t resist responding to soulmates, when all about me have so little interest in the truth!