UPDATE: Below is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. Comments are open. – Anthony
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Various You-Tube videos by a former “science writer” who uses a speleological pseudonym “potholer54” sneeringly deliver a series of petty smears about artfully-distorted and often inconsequential aspects of my talks on climate change. Here, briefly, I shall answer some of his silly allegations. I noted them down rather hastily, since I am disinclined to waste much time on him, so the sentences in quote-marks may not be word for word what he said, but I hope that they fairly convey his meaning.
For fuller answers to these allegations, many of which he has ineptly and confusedly recycled from a serially mendacious video by some no-account non-climatologist at a fourth-rank bible college in Nowheresville, Minnesota, please see my comprehensive written reply to that video at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. The guy couldn’t even get his elementary arithmetic right – not that the caveman mentions that fact, of course.
The allegations, with my answers, are as follows:
“Monckton says he advised Margaret Thatcher on climate change. He didn’t.” I did.
“Monckton says he wrote a peer-reviewed paper. He didn’t.” The editors of Physics and Society asked me to write a paper on climate sensitivity in 2008. The review editor reviewed it in the usual way and it was published in the July 2008 edition, which, like most previous editions, carried a headnote to the effect that Physics and Society published “reviewed articles”. Peer-review takes various forms. From the fact that the paper was invited, written, reviewed and then published, one supposes the journal had followed its own customary procedures. If it hadn’t, don’t blame me. Subsequent editions changed the wording of the headnote to say the journal published “non-peer-reviewed” articles, and the editors got the push. No mention of any of this by the caveman, of course.
“Monckton says the Earth is cooling. It isn’t.” At the time when I said the Earth was cooling, it had indeed been cooling since late 2001. The strong El Niño of 2010 canceled the cooling, and my recent talks and graphs have of course reflected that fact by stating instead that there has been no statistically-significant warming this millennium. The caveman made his video after the cooling had ended, but – without saying so – showed a slide from a presentation given by me while the cooling was still in effect. Was that honest of him?
“Monckton says Greenland is not melting. It is.” Well, it is now, but for 12 years from 1992-2003 inclusive, according to Johannessen et al. (2005), the mean spatially-averaged thickness of Greenland’s ice sheet increased by 5 cm (2 inches) per year, or 2 feet in total over the period. The high-altitude ice mass in central northern Greenland thickened fastest, more than matching a decline in ice thickness along the coastline. Since 2005, according to Johannessen et al. (2009), an ice mass that I calculate is equivalent to some six inches of the 2 feet of increase in Greenland’s ice thickness over the previous decade or so has gone back into the ocean, raising global sea levels by a not very terrifying 0.7 millimeters. According to the Aviso Envisat satellite, in the past eight years sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 2 inches per century. Not per decade: per century. If so, where has all the additional ice that the usual suspects seem to imagine has melted from Greenland gone? Two possibilities: not as much ice has melted as we are being told, or its melting has had far less impact on sea level than we are being invited to believe.
“Monckton says there’s no systematic loss of sea-ice in the Arctic. There is.” No, I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009. The caveman, if he were capable of checking these or any data, would find this to be so. In fact, he knew this to be so, because the slide I was showing at that point in his video, taken from the University of Illinois’ Cryosphere monitoring program, shows it. Of course, the slide was only in the background of his video and was shown only for a few seconds. Since that particular talk of mine the Arctic sea ice has declined again and came close to its 2007 low in 2011. But it is arguable from the descriptions of melting Arctic ice in 1922 that there may have been less sea ice in the Arctic then than now.
“Monckton says there has been no correlation between temperature and CO2 for the past 500 million years. There has.” Well, there has in the past few thousand years, but the correlation since the Cambrian era has been spectacularly poor, as the slide (from a peer-reviewed paper) that the caveman fleetingly shows me using at that point demonstrates very clearly. For most of that long period, global temperatures were about 7 Celsius degrees warmer than the present: yet CO2 concentration has inexorably declined throughout the period.
“Monckton says a pre-Cambrian ice-planet shows CO2 has no effect on climate. It doesn’t.” No, I cited Professor Ian Plimer, a leading geologist, as having said that the formation of dolomitic rock 750 million years ago could not have taken place unless there had been 300,000 ppmv CO2 in the atmosphere: yet glaciers a mile high had come and gone twice at sea-level and at the Equator at that time. Professor Plimer had concluded that, even allowing for the fainter Sun and higher ice-albedo in those days, the equatorial glaciers could not have formed twice if the warming effect of CO2 were as great as the IPCC wants us to believe. At no point have I ever said CO2 has no effect on climate, for its effect was demonstrated by a simple but robust experiment as long ago as 1859. However, I have said, over and over again, that CO2 probably has a much smaller warming effect than the IPCC’s range of estimates. The caveman must have known that, because he says he has watched “hours and hours” of my videos. So why did he misrepresent me?
“Monckton said there had been no change in the Himalayan glaciers for 200 years. There has.” No, I cited Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey, who had told me on several occasions that the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change”: indeed, it is the opposite, for advance and retreat are both changes. Why did the caveman misrepresent me?
“Monckton says only one Himalayan glacier has been retreating. Many have.” No, I mentioned the Gangotri and Ronggbuk glaciers as being notable examples of glacial retreat in the Himalayas caused by geological instability in the region. To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating. Why did the caveman misrepresent me? It is this kind of intellectual dishonesty that permeates the caveman’s cheesy videos. He has not the slightest intention of being accurate or fair. If he had, he would surely have mentioned that the IPCC tried for months to pretend that all of the glaciers in the Himalayas would be gone by 2035. The IPCC’s own “peer-reviewers” had said the figure should be “2350”, not “2035”, but the lead author of the chapter in question had left in the wrong figure, knowing it to be unverified, because, as he later publicly admitted, he wanted to influence governments.
The caveman says I misquoted the lead author who had left in the erroneous date for the extinction of the Himalayan glaciers, but here is what that author actually said in an interview with the Daily Mail: “We thought that if we can highlight it [the erroneous date], it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” For good measure, he said I had misquoted Sir John Houghton, the IPCC’s first science chairman, who had said that unless we announced disasters no one would listen.
Sir John, too, tried to maintain that I had misquoted him, and even menaced me with a libel suit, until I told him I had a copy of the cutting from the London Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995, in which he had said, “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster”, and that I also had a copy of an article in the Manchester Guardian of July 28, 2003, in which Sir John had luridly ascribed numerous specific natural disasters to “global warming”, which he described as “a weapon of mass destruction” that was “at least as dangerous as nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or indeed international terrorism”. Perhaps the caveman didn’t know any of this, but here’s the thing: I do not recall that he has ever bothered to check any of his “facts” with me (though, if he had, I wouldn’t have known because he lurks behind a pseudonym and, even though I am told he has revealed his identity I have no time to keep track of the pseudonyms of people who lack the courage and decency to publish under their own names).
“Monckton says Dr. Pinker found that a loss of cloud cover had caused recent warming. She disagreed.” No, I drew the conclusion from Dr. Pinker’s paper, and from several others, that cloud cover does not remain constant, but waxes and wanes broadly in step with the cooling and warming phases respectively of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I did not misrepresent Dr. Pinker’s paper in any way: I merely used it as a source for my own calculations, which I presented at the annual seminar on planetary emergencies of the World Federation of Scientists in 2010, where they were well received. Less cloud cover, particularly in the tropics, naturally warms the Earth: the point is surely uncontroversial. If one removes the influence of this natural warming phase from the record since 1976, it is reasonable to deduce that climate sensitivity based on that period is much lower than the IPCC thinks. Strictly speaking, one should study temperature trends in multiples of 60 years, so as to ensure that the warming and cooling phases of the PDO cancel one another out.
Frankly, that’s quite enough of these dull allegations. There are others, but they are all as half-baked and dishonest as these and it would be tedious to deal with each one. You get the drift: the caveman is a zealot and we need not ask who paid him to watch “hours and hours” of my YouTube videos to realize from these examples that his videos are unreliable. More importantly, it would interfere with my research: I hope shortly to be in a position to demonstrate formally that climate sensitivity is unarguably little more than one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate. My objective is to reach the truth, not to distort it or misrepresent it as the caveman has done.
He concludes by challenging his small band of followers to check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible”. Of course the Earth has been warming since 1750: I have at no point denied it, though that is the implication of the caveman’s statement.
And of course there are scientists who say CO2 is “largely responsible” for the warming: that is the principal conclusion of the IPCC’s 2007 report, reached on the basis of a fraudulent statistical abuse: comparison of the slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines on the global-temperature dataset falsely to suggest that “global warming” is accelerating and that it is our fault. Not that one has ever heard the caveman utter a word of condemnation of the IPCC’s too-often fictional “science”. But it is also reasonable to mention the growing band of scientists who say CO2 may not be “largely responsible” but only partly responsible for the warming since 1950. Would it not have been fairer if the caveman had pointed that out?
Climate skeptics have come under intensive attack from various quarters, and the attacks have too often been as unpleasantly dishonest as those of the caveman. Also, there is evidence that someone has been spending a lot of money on trying malevolently to discredit those who dare to ask any questions at all about the party line on climate.
For instance, after a speech by me in in the US in October 2009 went viral and received a million YouTube hits in a week (possibly the fastest YouTube platinum ever for a speech), a Texan professor who monitors the seamier side of the internet got in touch to tell me that someone had paid the operators of various search engines a sum that he estimated at not less than $250,000 to enhance the page rankings of some two dozen specially-created web-pages containing meaningless jumbles of symbols among which the word “Monckton video” appeared.
These nonsense pages would not normally have attracted any hits at all, and the search engines would normally have ranked them well below the video that had gone platinum. The intention of this elaborate and expensive artifice, as the professor explained, was to ensure that anyone looking for the real video would instead find page after page of junk and simply give up. The viral chain was duly broken, but so many websites carried the video that more than 5 million people ended up seeing it, so the dishonestly-spent $250,000 was wasted.
At one level, of course, all of this attention is an unintended compliment. But no amount of sneering or smearing will alter two salient facts: the Earth has not been warming at anything like the predicted rate and is not now at all likely to do so; and, in any event, even if the climate-extremists’ predictions were right, it would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective to wait and adapt in a focused way to any adverse consequences of manmade “global warming” than it would be to tax, trade, regulate, reduce, or replace CO2 today.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
==========================================================
Note: for anyone who wishes to see what this is about, you can see “potholer54” aka Peter Hadfield on Monckton at YouTube here – Anthony
UPDATE: Here is Peter Hadfield’s response in entirety, submitted Feb 7th, 2012. I’ve made only some slight edits for formatting to fit. – Anthony
Response from Peter Hadfield:
In January, Christopher Monckton criticized me on WUWT after I made a series of videos exposing errors in most of his claims. I have asked Anthony Watts for the opportunity to respond in kind, so that we can put Mr. Monckton’s verbatim assertions up against the documentary evidence he cites.
At first I was puzzled as to what Mr. Monckton was responding to in his WUWT guest-post, because he failed to address any of the rebuttals or the evidence I showed in my five videos. Then I realized he must have watched only the last video in the series, including a light-hearted 30-second ‘mistake count’. So in this response I am going to deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, as shown and rebutted in my videos, rather than what he thinks I think he said, and what he thinks I rebutted.
Mr. Monckton doesn’t claim to be an expert, and neither do I. All I can do is to check and verify his claims. So the question is whether Mr. Monckton has reported the sources he cites accurately in order to reach his conclusions. I have made it very easy for you to check by playing clips of Mr. Monckton making these assertions in my videos, then showing images of the documentary evidence he cites. Since this response is text I will write out Mr. Monckton’s assertions verbatim and quote the documentary sources verbatim (with references in the body of the text.) References to the relevant video (linked at the bottom) and the time on the video where they are shown, will be shown in square brackets.
ON THE COOLING EARTH:
Since Mr. Monckton failed to address the evidence, but implies I was duplicitous in my timing, let’s see what my video actually showed. In a speech given in Melbourne in February 2009, Mr. Monckton said: “We’ve had nine years of a global cooling trend since the first of January 2001” [Ref 1 – 4:06] — and St. Paul in October 2009: “There has been global cooling for the last eight or nine years” [ibid.].
So in my video, the period Mr. Monckton was talking about was clearly identified in his own words, as well as in the graphs he showed, and I showed the dates the speeches were made, and the studies I cited covered the same period.
[“Waiting for Global Cooling” – R. Fawcett and D. Jones, National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, April 2008]
[“Statisticians reject global cooling” — Associated Press 10/26/2009 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33482750/ns/us_news-environment/]
ON THE MELTING OF GREENLAND:
Again, let’s deal with what Mr. Monckton actually said, which is what I rebutted. In a speech in St. Paul in 2009, Mr. Monckton cited a paper by Ola Johannessen, and told the audience: “What he found was that between 1992 and 2003, the average thickness of the vast Greenland ice sheet increased by two inches a year.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM 11:40)
No, he found no such thing. Johannessen said he only measured the interior of Greenland above 1,500 metres [1 – 11:59] In fact, he specifically warns that the very conclusion Mr Monckton reaches cannot be made: “We cannot make an integrated assessment of elevation changes… for the whole Greenland Ice Sheet, including its outlet glaciers, from these observations alone, because the marginal areas are not measured completely…. ” [“Recent Ice-Sheet Growth in the Interior of Greenland” Ola M. Johannessen et al, Science November 2005]
ON THE LOSS OF ARCTIC ICE:
Mr. Monckton claimed there is no long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic, and I rebutted this with studies showing a decline in Arctic summer sea-ice extent since satellite measurements began in 1979. [1 – 8:20 onwards]
Mr. Monckton’s response: “I said that the 30-year record low ice extent of 2007 had been largely reversed in 2008 and 2009.”
So, as I said, he did not tell his audience there had been a 30-year decline. Quite the opposite – he said there was no long-term decline. Mr. Monckton showed his audience a slide covering just three years, referring to the 2007 low as a “temporary loss of sea ice” which had recovered by 2009. Then he told them: “So we’re not looking at a sort of long-term systematic loss of ice in the Arctic.” [1 – 8:27]
ON THE CORRELATION BETWEEN CO2 AND GLOBAL TEMPERATURES SINCE THE CAMBRIAN:
Mr. Monckton’s conclusion about a lack of correlation rests entirely on a graph showing CO2 concentration and temperature over the last 500 million years [3 – 0:04]. The graph uses temperature data from Scotese and CO2 data from Berner. Neither researcher supports Mr. Monckton’s ‘no correlation’ conclusion. On the contrary, Berner writes: “Over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the greenhouse effect.” [“Geocarb III: A revised model of atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic time” — R. Berner and Z. Kothavala, American Journal of Science, Feb 2001]
How so? Because paleoclimatologists have to factor in solar output, which has been getting stronger over time [3 – 4:45]. If the rising curve of solar output is compared to global temperatures over the phanerozoic (500 million years) there is a similar lack of correlation. But it would be absurd to draw the conclusion that the sun therefore has no effect on climate.
So when gradually rising solar output is taken into account there is a very clear correlation between CO2 and global temperatures, and the source of Mr. Monckton’s data points that out. So does another senior researcher in the field [“CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate” — D. Royer et al, GSA Today, March 2004].
ON THE PRE-CAMBRIAN ICE PLANET:
Again, let’s look at what I showed in my video, which was a clip of Mr. Monckton himself, speaking in a debate:
“750 million years ago, a mile of ice at the equator, ice planet all round, therefore at the surface 300,000 ppm of CO2. Will you tell me how that much CO2 could have been in the atmosphere and yet allowed that amount of ice at the equator?” [3 – 5:17]
Since Mr. Monckton thinks this is a puzzle for climatologists, let’s go through the well-understood explanation step by step.
Mr. Monckton agrees with the experts that the frozen planet was due to very weak solar output (about 8% less than today.) And he agrees that the high albedo (reflectivity) of this white surface would have reflected most of what little solar warmth the Earth did receive.
But he doesn’t seem to accept that volcanoes would have continued releasing CO2 into the atmosphere of this frozen planet over millions of years, and that this eventually warmed the planet enough to unfreeze it [“CO2 levels required for deglaciation of a ‘near-snowball’ Earth” T. Crowley et al, Geophysical Research Letters, 2001]. He cites no peer-reviewed research showing why paleoclimatologists are wrong. (No, the opinion of “a leading geologist” is not the same thing.)
ON HIMALAYAN GLACIERS:
Mr. Monckton writes in his WUWT response: “the pattern of advance and retreat of these glaciers was much as it had been in the 200 years since the British Raj had been keeping records. That is very far from the same thing as saying there had been “no change””
Then let’s look at what Mr. Monckton actually said to his audience in St. Paul:
“The glaciers are showing no particular change in 200 years. The only glacier that’s declined a little is Gangoltri.” [3 – 10:20]
So is it a pattern of advance and retreat? Or no particular change? Or only one glacier retreating? Which?
In his WUWT resp onse, Mr. Monckton went on to say: “To discuss one or two retreating glaciers is not the same thing as to say or imply that only one or two glaciers have been retreating.”
But you DID say it, Mr. Monckton. Here it is again: “Only one of them [Himalayan glaciers] is retreating a little and that’s Gangoltri.”
ON MISQUOTING MURARI LAL:
Speaking about Murari Lal, the man behind the IPCC’s 2035 disappearing glaciers fiasco, Mr. Monckton told his audience there was: “….an admission that he [Lal] knew that figure was wrong but had left it in anyway because he knew that the IPCC wanted to influence governments and politicians.”[4 – 3:50]
This is not even borne out by Monckton’s own source, cited in his response, which is a quote from Lal in the Daily Mail about the 2035 date: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.” Nowhere does Lal say he knew the figure was erroneous.
MISQUOTING SIR JOHN HOUGHTON:
Mr. Monckton claims Houghton wrote this in the Sunday Telegraph of September 10, 1995: “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” [4 – 5:50]
And I maintain Houghton wrote: “If we want a good environmental policy in the future, we’ll have to have a disaster. It’s like safety on public transport. The only way humans will act is if there’s been an accident.”
Who is right? Well, both Mr. Monckton and I have exactly the same source [Sunday Telegraph, September 10, 1995], but I actually show an image of it in my video [4 – 7:24]. Take a look. Even though it turns out my quote is correct and Mr. Monckton’s is clearly a gross misquote, he still insists in his WUWT response that he got the quote right.
ON HIS CLAIMS ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE SUN…
Mr. Monckton showed and quoted an extract from a paper by Sami Solanki: “The level of solar activity during the past 70 years is exceptional, and the previous period of equally high activity occurred more than 8,000 years ago. We find that during the past 11,400 years the sun spent only of the order of 10% of the time at a similarly high level of magnetic activity and almost all of the earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episodoes on to come.” [5 – 1:21 onwards]
That could suggest the sun is a likely culprit for recent warming. But why didn’t Mr. Monckton tell or show his audience what Solanki wrote in the very next line?
“Although the rarity of the current episode of high average sunspot numbers may indicate that the Sun has contributed to the unusual climate change during the twentieth century, we point out that solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades.” [“Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the last 11,000 years” — S.K. Solanki et al, Nature Sep 2004]
ON THE ROLE OF THE SUN IN RECENT WARMING:
Mr. Monckton said: “The solar physicists – you might take Scafetta and West, say, in 2008, they attribute 69% of all the recent global warming to the sun.” [5 – 3:48]
No, they don’t. In my video [5 – 4:32] I showed the actual document Mr. Monckton refers to (an opinion piece) where Scafetta and West wrote: “We estimate that the sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in the Earth’s average temperature.” [“Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” Nicola Scafetta and Bruce J. West, Physics Today March 2008]
I hope we all understand the difference between “69%” and “as much as 69%.” But what about all those other “solar physicists” who purportedly support Monckton’s position? Well, they don’t. Solanki’s figure is up to just 30%, Erlykin less than 14%, Bernstad 7%, Lean ‘negligable’and Lockwood –1.3% [5 — 4:40]
[4:41 “Can solar variability explain global warming since 1970?”– S. K. Solanki and N. A. Krivova, Journal of Geophysical Research, May 2003]
[“Solar Activity and the Mean Global Temperature”
A.D. Erlykin et al, Physics Geo 2009]
[“Solar trends and global warming” — R. Benestad and G. Schmidt, Journal of Geophysical Research” July 2009]
[“How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006” J. Lean and D. Rind, Geophysical Research Letters, Sep 2008]
[“Recent changes in solar outputs and the global mean surface temperature. III. Analysis of contributions to global mean air surface temperature rise” — M. Lockwood, June 2008]
Mr. Monckton then asserts that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) agrees with this conclusion (that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming.) After he had been confronted during a TV interview with the plain fact that it didn’t [5 – 5:49 “Meet the Climate Sceptics” BBC TV Feb 2011], Monckton gave a reason for the error in his WUWT response:
“I cited a paper given by Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov at the 2004 symposium of the IAU in St. Petersburg, Fla, but put “IAU” at the foot of the slide rather than Dr. Abdussamatov’s name.”
Maybe so. But that doesn’t explain why Mr. Monckton continued to make exactly the same claim elsewhere. At St. Paul he said:
“Most solar physicists agree [that the sun is largely responsible for recent warming]. The International Astronomical Union in 2004 had a symposium on it, they concluded that that was the case.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:27]
And in his film ‘Apocalypse No!’ a slide headed ‘International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004’ was shown to an audience, along with its main conclusions. Third on the list, Monckton read: “The sun caused today’s global warming.”
Monckton told the audience: “This is not my conclusion, this is the conclusion of the International Astronomical Union Symposium in 2004. This is what they said, this is not me talking here.” [Monckton rebuttal – WUWT 16:34]
Mr. Monckton has to accept that this claim is completely spurious. This is why he dislikes detailed examinations of his sources. While he takes every opportunity to debate on stage, where his speaking skills are essential and his assertions can’t be checked, an online debate is far tougher, because every paper and fact CAN be checked. So come on, Mr. Monckton, let’s debate this on WUWT to see which of us has correctly read your sources.
The rebuttals I made are not “inconsequential aspects of my talks” as Mr. Monckton claims; they include almost every major topic he covers, from the melting of Arctic and glacial ice, to the role of the sun and the correlation between CO2 and temperature. His only recourse in his WUWT response was therefore to call me names, attack my character and my competence, and question my financing and my motivation… anything but answer the documentary evidence I presented. And then he adds one more error — a ridiculous claim that I asked my “small band of followers” to “check the scientific literature for themselves to establish that the Earth has been warming and that CO2 is “largely responsible.”
Since I can’t establish that myself, I certainly wouldn’t advise other amateurs to have a go. So I ask Mr. Monckton to cite the source for this claim, sure in the knowledge that once again we will see a yawning gap between what the source actually says (in this case, me) and what Mr. Monckton claims it says.
References: (Hadfield’s own videos)
1 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbW-aHvjOgM
2 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTY3FnsFZ7Q
3 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpF48b6Lsbo
4 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3giRaGNTMA
5 — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRCyctTvuCo
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TGB,
By putting quotation marks around “skeptic”, you demonstrate that you are not a scientific skeptic. Skeptics are the only honest kind of scientists, so I’ll leave it at that.
And by trying to denigrate the world’s premier climatologist, you demonstrate impotend rage at the fact that MIT’s Prof Lindzen has forgotten more about the subject than you could ever possibly know. So intelligent folks will listen to Dr Lindzen on the subject, rather than know-nothing ankle biters. Thus, your impotent rage.
Actually, the quotation marks were to signify the hijacking of the term by the scientifically obtuse in a way that arrogantly assumes some heroic level of critical thinking not applied by the majority of scientists. It’s stupid, and I much prefer another word which starts with a D and isn’t permitted by site policy. In other words, I’m skeptical of the skeptics.
Again, what makes Richard Lindzen the world’s “premier climatologist” by any measurable, objective standard? I certainly don’t doubt for one second that he knows more than -I- do, as I’m not a climatologist. But that’s really not the point, is it? You are raising a silly strawman argument. The issue is whether he knows more than his contemporaries and peers in the scientific community, and whether his work holds up to scrutiny in the world of academic publishing.
Why is he the best? Just because you say he is? Your own delusional confirmation bias really doesn’t carry enough weight when proving these things.
TGB says:
“…what makes Richard Lindzen the world’s “premier climatologist” by any measurable, objective standard?”
Answer: read his complete CV, and maybe you will begin to understand. He heads MIT’s atmospheric sciences department, and MIT is arguably the best engineering school in the country.
And it is you who denigrates Prof Lindzen, demonstrating your insecurity. Therefore, the “delusional confirmation bias” is yours alone. That’s why I regularly point out that if it were not for psychological projection, the alarmist contingent wouldn’t have much to say.
If you want to see incompetence and climate charlatans in action, click on The Hockey Stick Illusion on the right sidebar. Buy the book. You will find extensively documented fraud, gaming of the system, pal review, incompetent, scandalous, self-serving climate scientists, tax suckers, and mendacious fools galore – all the antithesis of the internationally esteemed, completely scandal-free Dr Lindzen, whom you clearly hate and fear because he is honest, competent, educated, extremely well respected among his scientific colleagues, and in a supremely eminent position. You? You’re just an impotent ankle biter of no account, who gets his misinformation from a cartoonist: John Cook. You can’t get much more pathetic than that.
Smokey says:
February 18, 2012 at 9:35 am
No it doesn’t, where do you come up with this stuff smokey, do you make it up as you go along like Monckton does?? CO2 primarily comes from volcanos and is the bases for snowball earth. You even link the graphs which disprove your clownish statement http://tinyurl.com/6mbxcho How could CO2 reach 8000ppm if the earth temperature has not gone higher then 25°C as you point out in your other link http://tinyurl.com/7zo7vfm ?? And how could CO2 be lowering if the temperature is staying at 25°C?? You link all this stuff and don’t have a clue what it means do you smokey?? CO2 increases in the atmosphere from volcanos and is weathered out by rivers. The only time CO2 decreases or increases due to a temperature change is during Milankovitch cycles, where the orbit or tilit of the earth causes a temperature change and the ocean increase or decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I have already explained to you that the CO2 acuminating in the atmosphere is not coming from the ocean and has a fossil fuel fingerprint. Repeating the wrong answer when you have been given the facts is what you people do so well.
You clearly state that the earth will rise by ≈1°C ± ≈0.5°C I don’t know what world you live on but a 1°C warming is going to wipe out the Arctic during summer and cause droughts around the world. Sea rise along would be a serious problem let along reduced glaciers.
Tell me about it, your claims are becoming more ridiculous by the hour, I take it you are just going to ignoring all the facts and keep on repeating your deluded self. Like I said this is what you people do so well, I have explained everything to you. Everyone can see what you are doing Smokey and it’s sad, at least you’re not as bad as Monckton.
I find it curiously ironic that you should bring psychology-related terms such as projection, as well as emotionally-charged words such as “hate” and “fear” into this parlance of ours.
My posts have been nothing but calm, rational and measured thus far. You, on the other hand, have been quite noticeably growing increasingly heated/unbalanced, and now appear to be taking this somewhat personally.
I will nonetheless address your points.
Whilst professor Lindzen’s legacy and stature are indeed eminent, invoking a title alone is merely an empty appeal to authority without sound, conclusively corroborated research to back up controversial statements. This brings us back to the unavoidable issue of peer-review and knowing exactly who to trust without it, which I would still like you to address.
I would also like to take issue with your mention of Prof. Lindzen’s “squeaky-clean” background. A brief scan of SourceWatch reveals a long history of ties to the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry as well as notorious right-wing think thanks such as the Heartland Institute. His published work challenging the orthodoxy of climate science is NOT widely accepted in an academic light, and has in fact been scathingly criticized for errors and selective observations.
It mostly comes down to a matter of plausibility when considering the odds of one person in a specialized field of science being right versus the majority. We see the very same confirmation bias, suspension of reality and straw grasping in the whole evolution/creationism debate. When dealing with these “controversies” one must consider the arrogance of a contrarian in the minority (especially one with little or no qualifications to back them up) not being able to simply stand back and consider that perhaps they are the ones who are getting it wrong.
Scientific consensus isn’t the same as mob rule. It’s about multiple experts being more reliable than one, and being able to paint a more complete and comprehensive picture that is less less prone to human error.
As for the book you mentioned, why should I treat it as anything more than just another nutty piece of propaganda? Anyone can claim anything they like in a book, which is not subject to the same stringent guidlines as a peer-reviewed paper. So far, most of the criticism surrounding the overblown Hockey Stick controversy I have seen has been regurgitated nonsense, just like the Climategate hysteria. I will take what the National Academy of Sciences has to say over some random sensationalist writer, thank you very much.
Lastly, when did I ever mention John Cook or claim him as a source of information? Not that I’m opposed to the man or his website, but the problem is you are jumping way ahead of yourself and pulling assumptions out of your rear left and right.
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Smokey>> doesn’t understand that rises in CO2 always follow rises in temperature, on all time scales
Yeah, and the sun goes round the moon.
The reason the average Internet (or more formal publishing) skeptic who goes into “side show” territory as mentioned here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/11/monckton-responds-to-potholer54/#comment-890631 is not going to get far with serious policy makers and major groups of scientists is that it is easy to just say, “no, you are wrong, I am right,” but that carries no strength in scientific circles. Policy makers are not about to dump scientists to listen to Internet talk of people who have little beyond talk and belief. You (the sideshow theorists) have to move beyond talk and belief to have a strong impact where it counts.
You are losing the scientific debate because you do not provide mathematics and a model that can be tested against the future. When you do provide a model, it is full of flaws. Yes, it is easy to criticize but not easy to propose something that does an OK job (eg, see http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-ipcc-far.html ). Most of you are not putting your money where your mouth is.
You have no quantified theory that will attempt to predict when temp will rise and when CO2 will rise and by how much.
You have no theory that people can prod to see if it holds against reality already explained by mainstream physics.
What the climate scientists have is much more than what I have seen Smokey or any other Internet skeptic provide.
I am skeptical, but I don’t assume that what climate scientists provide is worse than zero. If they are so far off, by all means come up with something better. I don’t think they are so far off. So far, my doubts are kept in check because those who argue for low sensitivity are proposing more flawed analysis, so at best they are simply helping to keep climate scientists more honest and working harder. This is good, but strength is still with the climate scientists.
Although I haven’t found his latest paper (and the only one I have looked at a little) too attractive, Lindzen is much more likely to have success at some point (maybe by raising his sensitivity predictions .. or not) than most every other skeptic I see. This will likely be more true of any given skeptic the more that skeptic rejects mainstream science. It’s no wonder those skeptics are not providing much math and physics.
Skeptical (sideshow) science is mostly just qualitative belief science. You won’t let go of your belief you own the null hypothesis because you don’t have an alternative. As long as this is the case, the skeptical argument is not *that* strong at all in the scientific realm.
As a bit of an aside, I hope more than just a few readers here read the following from skepticalscience http://www.skepticalscience.com/Breaking_News_earth_still_warming.html . Plugging your ears is not going to make you more believable. You don’t have to believe even 50% of what skepticalscience says in order to recognize that they do have points in their favor.
“Natural variability” is not hard science terminology. It is a vague concept that would even be used to “explain” the earth exploding tomorrow because we pumped it with nukes. It truly means nothing when you can’t clearly identify cause and effect at some confidence level with some success in mathematically quantified predictions. Policy makers want cause and effect that can be tested and has some degree of success, not invocations of “natural variability” or “null hypothesis” because humans (and death and suffering and chaos…) are merely a part of nature.
I would like to engage people in interesting and useful conversation on climate science, and this is why I try to read papers I come across by skeptics. [Amateur papers tend to be easier for me to digest (since they tend to appeal to easier concepts and use more primitive models).] I don’t see that kind of dialog much on this thread. Does someone want to point me to a WUWT article where math and physics are a part of the discussion and the comments are kept open long enough that people have time to digest and comment? Here is one http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/09/scaffeta-on-his-latest-paper-harmonic-climate-model-versus-the-ipcc-general-circulation-climate-models/ . Hopefully, the crowd will be patient explaining the math, etc.
Good luck here Smokey the Gardener, the mild-mannered forest ranger, the bandit, and the various other null hypothesis that continue to hold.
Major9985,
National Geographic and models are not evidence for what happens with 1 degree C of warming. Droughts in the American SW are associated with la Nina type cooling in the Eastern pacific, not the more frequent el Nino type conditions associated with warming. The models have severe problems reproducing precipitation, increasing precipitation less than half the amount of the precipitation increase seen in the observations in association with the recent warming (Wentz 2007 in the journal Science).
You seem to fail to understand how slightly lower solar forcing can still be attributed some of the warming, try starting a pot of water other stove at 9 and then lowering the temperature to 8, and seeing if it still warms. Or for the science, read the climate commitment studies of Wigley, et al, and Meehl, et al. The only reason CO2 explains the recent warming better in the models is because it was paired with other anthropogenic forcing, mainly anthopogenic aerosols, which not only explain most of the warming but also explain most of the difference between models that “match” the climate while having sensitivities differing by up to a factor of three. Pair the huge unknowns in aerosols with solar and tweak for effect, and voila, the warming gets attributed to solar. Pair volcanoes with CO2, and it has problems. Anthropogenic vs natural forcings was not the way to test the relative attribution of CO2 vis’a’vis solar.
Stratospheric cooling is expected with more CO2 because it is an efficient radiator of infrared radiation, and it is not diagnostic of the relative attribution, since it would occur even if CO2 was only responsible for its direct effects (about 30% of the recent warming) rather than also for net positive feedback as required to support the IPCC’s projections.
>> You seem to fail to understand how slightly lower solar forcing can still be attributed some of the warming, try starting a pot of water other stove at 9 and then lowering the temperature to 8, and seeing if it still warms.
It would be great if you could provide the math you think explains the sun’s relationship to temperature so we could test it.
This example you gave is a little ambiguous to me. My first reaction was, “not the pots I have in my kitchen!”
My second reaction was, “if you mean how there is a delay in reaction time for the burner to cool fully towards 8, then it still is true the temp should turn around almost immediately (and hence not “warm” further) because electricity (even with capacitance and inductance of a typical kitchen) through a burner and the ensuing radiation still should start its effect almost instantaneously after the downshifting at the controls. [Like my many educated guesses, feel free to provide contradictory evidence or suggestions.]
Another reaction I had was, “we aren’t just talking about a large lag because that atmosphere temp was fairly closely tracking solar in the past (both up and down), quite contrary to the new pattern where many believe CO2 has been making a noticeable and increasing contribution to helping establish a new equilibrium position wrt solar forcing before it again starts tracking closely (assuming CO2 concentration levels out).”
But my main reaction continues to be, “we need some quantifiable math/physics and cohesiveness to help separate wishful thinking from actual reality; you have to pick a relationship among the factors and stick with it.”
>> The models have severe problems reproducing precipitation
When you come up with something better, we can talk…
>> increasing precipitation less than half the amount of the precipitation increase seen in the observations in association with the recent warming
…since it appears the models are barking up a tree in the right neighborhood.
Remember, if weather models try to predict 20 days out and get it horribly wrong, no one says they are worthless junk. It’s more than a little likely that climate models can be right in many ways and within parameters while missing elsewhere.
A lack of a competing and superior model is the main reason I can’t take your criticisms too seriously or harshly, and it almost seems you are not too far from being a skeptic hoping to see improvements rather than condemning the whole show.
>> The only reason CO2 explains the recent warming better in the models is because it was paired with other anthropogenic forcing, mainly anthopogenic aerosols, which not only explain most of the warming but also explain most of the difference between models that “match” the climate while having sensitivities differing by up to a factor of three. Pair the huge unknowns in aerosols with solar and tweak for effect, and voila, the warming gets attributed to solar. Pair volcanoes with CO2, and it has problems. Anthropogenic vs natural forcings was not the way to test the relative attribution of CO2 vis’a’vis solar
This sounds to me like another case of wishful thinking. You possibly really want this to be the case, but you are going to have to provide a sound competing physics model that is also quantified with math. Without a model we can prod, you can wishful think quite a lot. .. Maybe it was our unprecedented trips to the moon and into outer space in the 1960+ time period that has thrown the earth’s climate a bit out of whack! Maybe the Climate is only now getting accustomed to seeing earthlings and their crafts orbiting and bypassing all its force and furor!
We need math/physics models to test your theory and keep you honest. You need this to play the game.
Wishful thinking and stabs at contradictory hypotheses are fine when you are trying to get started along a new path, but you should recognize that until you do come up with something that withstands scrutiny, what you have is a little hard to discern from a hope and a prayer.
>> Stratospheric cooling is expected with more CO2 because it is an efficient radiator of infrared radiation… [regardless of the sign of the feedback]….
So come up with a cohesive model we can analyze and try to verify has negative feedback. [Actually, CO2 is not treated as a “feedback”, and, even if one does, accepting the +1C contribution from it rejects the idea it would be *negative* feedback.. so I am not sure I understood that part.]
CO2 is also an efficient absorber of radiation that would otherwise escape into space leaving a cooler planetary system behind.
CO2 is also an efficient radiator back down towards the earth.
When we have a model we can prod, these are the sorts of things we will consider. And ultimately, mother nature will provide numbers as well.
>> National Geographic and models are not evidence for what happens with 1 degree C of warming.
Newton’s models aren’t evidence either, but they have been providing the best core model we have had for understanding and anticipating most reality for centuries now. I can sit here and talk about all the experiments I have seen where Newton’s laws apparently failed, but do I have a competing model that is superior? Nope. Are there ways to add complexity and reinterpret, still using Newton’s models, to get fairly accurate agreement with those experiments? I think so.
Newton has been a failure. We know. But he is among the least problematic failures we have had. Because we don’t have a superior alternative for most uses, Newton wins.
TGB says:
“A brief scan of SourceWatch reveals a long history of ties to the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry as well as notorious right-wing think thanks such as the Heartland Institute.”
You get your misinformation from George Soros-funded propaganda outlets like SourceWatch?? No wonder you’re wrong. The “tobacco industry” canard was the factual debunking of the “second-hand smoke” scare. And mis-labeling an ethical, law-abiding organization like Heartland as “notorious” shows what a credulous dupe you are. You’re spoon-fed dishonest propaganda, and you like it.
Heartland is a privately supported think tank, unlike your government-funded propaganda megaphones, which only credulous fools accept at face value. Now run along back to Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science, or RealClimatePropaganda for some new talking points, and take the über-clown [and laughably self-described “skeptic”] Hose_B with you.
Hose_B, minor 9985 and you are following in these footsteps. So wake me when any of you numpties ever start to follow the scientific method, or even begin to understand the null hypothesis, or Occam’s Razor – all of which solidly debunk your ridiculous CO2=CAGW beliefs. And the ultimate Authority above all else is planet earth, which is decisively falsifying all of your beliefs. Now, who should we believe? Planet earth? Or the Three Stooges of Climate Alarmism?
And just to show how completely clueless Hose_B is, when I patiently explained to him several times [with links] that rises in CO2 always follow rises in temperature, on all time scales from months to hundreds of millennia, Hose_B’s ignorant response was: “Yeah, and the sun goes round the moon.” How about that for a stupid non-sequitur? I provided citations, but Hose_B provided… his nonsensical opinion. Based on his free-association ramblings, and his constant avoiding of the central issue, it is clear that Hose_B knows as much about science as a typical Scientologist.
Finally, once again I note that no one has been able to falsify my hypothesis that CO2 is beneficial and harmless. They do not even attempt to falsify it. That is because there is no verifiable evidence that stands up to the scientific method, showing any global damage or harm due to the rise in CO2 — but there is verifiable satellite evidence showing that the planet is greening as a direct result of increased CO2. The only rational conclusion is that the “carbon” scare is a false alarm; honest folks admit it. Dishonest folks continue arguing their lost cause.
Jose_X,
You still haven’t read the climate commitment studies, it takes centuries for the oceans to reach equilibrium with a new level of forcing. So obviously the climate had not been at the plateau of solar forcing it reached earlier in the century long enough to complete the climate response to late century solar forcing that was still above what it had been for most of the 20th century.
No matter how much we apportion to solar vs CO2, the question really is what caused the mid-century cooling that was inconsistent with the levels of either forcing. The temperature recovery from that was more dramatic than can be explained by the variation in either forcing.
>> the factual debunking of the “second-hand smoke” scare
I am curious about what that scare was. http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerCauses/TobaccoCancer/secondhand-smoke summarizes risks of second hand smoke, but I don’t know if that is the “scare” you are talking about.
>> when I patiently explained
Smokey, you “patiently” preach. I would like to introduce you to mathematics one day if you feel differently about it.
>> rises in CO2 always follow rises in temperature
You have no clue about the scientific method, do you? When you learn a little math and physics, I think you will start to understand.
CO2 always follows rises in temperature just like little children always cries after Smokey talks. Always.
>> Finally, once again I note that no one has been able to falsify my hypothesis that CO2 is beneficial and harmless.
CO2 has killed people. Are you calling that beneficial and harmless? [The little children’s screams just got more intense.]
I’ll give you a better null hypothesis. CO2 can be beneficial and harmless and it can be damaging and harmful. I know you won’t falsify that.
>> it takes centuries for the oceans to reach equilibrium with a new level of forcing
Try providing a mathematically based physical model to show what you mean.
You need to add numbers to your vague statements. Not being at equilibrium can mean it was .001% off equilibrium or it can mean being 10000% off. So how far off equilibrium was it? I have been 100% in agreement that equilibrium has not and will almost surely never be reached. Did something I said make you think otherwise?
Complaining is rather easy to do when one avoids putting up a competing quantifying model. Really skeptical individuals should challenge climate scientists a little bit more instead of making it so easy for them by almost exclusively painting with such broad strokes what everyone knows is there.
Should I ask if next month the focus will shift to pointing out how Newton’s laws are a complete failure in predicting anything?
Complaining that doesn’t produce an alternative testable model is not too interesting. For example, Smokey’s illogical claim to essentially “own” the CO2-is-always-beneficial “null hypothesis” is neither science nor convinces very many scientists.
>> No matter how much we apportion to solar vs CO2, the question really is what caused the mid-century cooling that was inconsistent with the levels of either forcing.
Being so vague makes it hard to judge how accurate or inaccurate your hunch is.
Can you point to a webpage or paper that clearly explains this issue?
>> The temperature recovery from that was more dramatic than can be explained by the variation in either forcing.
Paper or webpage? [I likely can’t access non-free papers.]
Martin Lewitt, my last comment was addressed at what you wrote earlier, but it’s tinged too much with what I might have said to Smokey. Smokey, would I be accurate in saying that anything that doesn’t spit upon the IPCC you view as very likely evil, very flawed, or at least almost surely unscientific.. no matter the details of the argument?
Martin Lewitt,
Debating these three clowns is pointless. They never pay attention to the points you’re making, and they just go off on another tangent when they are unable to refute your facts. The mid-century cooling you referred to debunks the idea that CO2 drives temperature to any measurable degree. It is a bit player, if that. And I’ve posted countless charts showing that ΔCO2 follows ΔT on all time scales out to hundreds of thousands of years. Their response to that fact is always the same.
Next, Jose once again shows his total ignorance of the climate null hypothesis. It is clear that he has no understanding of what it is based on, or what it even means. He just doesn’t know. By definition, there can be only one null hypothesis. Everything else is referred to as an alternative hypothesis, which is tested against the null hypothesis. So far, every alternative hypothesis has been falsified. No exceptions. That’s why Kevin Trenberth wants to change the definition of the null hypothesis: he knows it falsifies CAGW.
Jose preposterously claims he is a skeptic, even though his mind is closed tight. And he believes he understands the scientific method. Here, I’ll help him with an off-the-cuff definition: The scientific method: one posits assumptions [conjecture; hypothesis], then uses mathematics, logic and experiment to arrive at predictive/descriptive conclusions, and checks the empirical, testable evidence and replicable experiments against reality. If the evidence and experiments do not agree with the conjecture or hypothesis, then the assumptions are changed, and the process is repeated. If the conjecture or hypothesis does not ever predict accurately, as with AGW; and if it disaagrees with observation, and if it disagrees with experiment, then the hypothesis is falsified; it is wrong. That’s all there is to it. Prof Richard Feynman explains. But I doubt Jose will listen, because he is a true believer and his mind is closed.
The problem with the CO2=CAGW promoters is that they ignore the scientific method. Reality always invalidates their assumptions, but they do not change them, thus turning them into beliefs. Not one prediction based on CO2=CAGW has come to pass. They have all failed. In any other branch of the hard sciences that would be the end of the debate, and funding would cease. The conjecture would be falsified for failure to predict, and scientists would agree that we learned something new: CO2 does not cause the effects claimed. But the demonizers of CO2 have become true believers, and thus they ignore the inconvenient scientific method. The only kind of logic they use is inductive logic; from the particular to the general. Every wind storm or drought is caused by CO2. But honest scientists use deductive logic; from the general to the particular. Deductive logic is the essence of the scientific method, which attempts to create a testable hypothesis from which one can accurately deduce individual events, such as accelerating global warming. It is clear from his comments that Jose doesn’t understand the scientific method at all.
Every other projection-based comment made by Jose can be just as easily debunked. Jose believes skeptics should put up their own models, when skeptics know that climate models don’t work. Jose erects one of his army of strawmen by irrelevantly saying that CO2 can kill people, when I specifically qualified my [still unfalsified] hypothesis with: “current and projected” atmospheric CO2 levels. And so on. Jose is wrong about every assertion he makes, because he is a true believer. The climate witch doctors have convinced Jose, and no amount of logic or deductive reasoning can change his mind now. Jose has become a lunatic on the subject. Therefore, I will take the advice of someone with much common sense, and move on to a current thread, because this one has devolved into fact-based arguments by rational skeptics, versus belief-based arguments by the lunatic fringe:
For all the lemmings out there who thing the science is on their side, and are /certain/ they have the right of it… take up potholer’s challenge, and find ONE thing that Monckton gets right, that has serious implications to the scientific consensus on climate change. To complete that challenge, you must verify the sources for yourself. So no copy-paste from someone’s blog. You actually gotta do something which you’ve never done (be honest with yourself) and check that the original sources support the claim that Monckton is making.
Martin Lewitt says:
February 19, 2012 at 9:37 am
Because you’re a skeptic, this information means we should disregard the models, when in reality it means the complete opposite.
“We used satellite observations and model simulations to examine the response of tropical precipitation events to naturally driven changes in surface temperature and atmospheric moisture content. These observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods. Furthermore, the observed amplification of rainfall extremes is found to be larger than that predicted by models, implying that projections of future changes in rainfall extremes in response to anthropogenic global warming may be underestimated.” (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/321/5895/1481.abstract)
No, it would seem you have failed to understand, I clearly state that there are many factors to consider when calculating natural and Anthropogenic forcing. The graph I used was to focus on CO2 as the primary driver, but my point still stands (http://tinyurl.com/77w296t).
Smokey says:
February 19, 2012 at 12:48 pm
You accept that CO2 is a greenhouse gas which you associate a climate sensitivity value of ≈1°C warming per doubling [CO2], ± ≈0.5°C. You get this value from the most skeptical scientific papers which I have shown are wrong, and you disregard real climate sensitivity studies that when all averaged out come to a value of 3°C. Because of your inability to learn from your mistakes, let’s just debunk your claim of 1°C sensitivity. You want this in the form of a scientific experiment following the scientific method and so forth. So we have the Null Hypothesis: At current and projected levels, CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. Alternative Hypothesis: At current and projected levels, CO2 “Isn’t” harmless, and “Isn’t” beneficial to the biosphere. With your current projected levels of 1°C warming we are expected to see the Arctic free of ice for summer (not good) rising sea levels (not good) disappearing glaciers suppling water to billions of people (not good) increased migration of malaria (not good) more devastation from pine beetles (not good) increased heatwaves (not good) etc etc etc etc… Lets not forget CO2 is plant food “Across all multifactor manipulations, elevated carbon dioxide suppressed root allocation, decreasing the positive effects of increased temperature, precipitation and nitrogen deposition on productivity.” (not good). I think the Alternative has it smokey, the ball is in your court now.
It is a shame you don’t understand climate change, you make it very easy to debunk your claims. Your other problem is an inability to acquire new information and learn from it. But I will try again to explain it to you. The moment CO2 increasing in the atmosphere will not raise the temperature of the planet straight away because it takes time to heat up the oceans. At present we have only seen 0.8°C temperatures rise from CO2 with an expected 0.6°C more to come at current CO2 concentration. That might be a bit hard for you to understand so let’s just focus on the resent flat line in temperatures. There is this thing called the El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) which produces large cooling and warming of the planet. At present there is a lot of cooling happening which you show in your graph and is explained in this graph (http://tinyurl.com/6mlhbon). There is also cooling periods on earth associated with volcanos which is shown in this graph (http://tinyurl.com/886ptzu). Skeptics like to cherry pick these events, but we can see what they are doing (http://tinyurl.com/5sbf3kd).
Your first graph shows that more CO2 is being released into the atmosphere when temperatures rise, but it does not show the increasing accumulation of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels, which you clearly show in your previous link (http://tinyurl.com/75pfwmz). Your second link shows how the Earth goes through Milankovitch cycles which change the temperature of the Earth. This positive or negative change in temperature will increase or decrease CO2, causing the planet to warm or cool even more. This explains how CO2 is a greenhouse gas which drives temperature change. CO2 does follow temperatures but it can also accumulate from volcanic eruptions or in our case the burning of fossil fuels. As your Milankovitch cycles graph shows, CO2 has a great inference on the temperature of the Earth.
Smokey >> The mid-century cooling you referred to debunks the idea that CO2 drives temperature to any measurable degree.
After all of this time, you still make statements like this?
I’ll give you another analogy because I have so much sympathy for you.
Have you ever played tug of war as part of a large team? OK, you basically have several people tugging together on a rope in one direction going against another team tugging in the opposite direction. During this tugging, each person rests and pulls with varying force. Even if you were consistent and pulled with the same steady force the entire time, you would find that the rope would not move steadily. Why? Duh, because you are not the only force pulling. Now, let’s say that you start to pull harder and harder over time. Would it be so strange to find out that in the early part your team was losing but over time you started to win more and more, even though we still saw oscillations (back and forth) on the rope?
Here is another analogy. You are on a sailing ship in the open ocean amid lots of high waves. You start to climb a long mast of the ship upwards. As you climb up, there will be times when your eyesight level and view is very good and other times where it is not so good because the ship is moving down into a trough during those times. All the time, you are moving upwards yet your eyeline will not move upwards consistently but will instead bob up and down, if with a steadily increasing upward drift.
Here is an exercise. Get a graphing calculator or equivalent and graph the function y=.1x^2+.3x+sin2x+.7sin3x+2sin10x. You will note as you follow this curve to the right that it will go up and down a lot. This is true despite the fact that one part of this function, the .1^2+.3x part, is a monotonically increasing function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function (simulating CO2 warming, let’s say). If you were to graph just this one part, you would find that the curve simply goes higher and higher as you move to the right, but when you add in the sinusoid components, you will find it going up and down quite a lot.. at least until you get very far to the right and the cycles end up almost having negligible contributions in relative terms.
I gave three examples that demonstrate again that your simplified view of “CO2 warming is disproved because of mid century cooling” is an incorrect view. If you don’t understand these examples, I can try to explain more clearly if you decide you want to embrace mathematics and science. Let me know, and I’ll check back tomorrow.
Smokey >> And I’ve posted countless charts showing that ΔCO2 follows ΔT on all time scales out to hundreds of thousands of years.
Will you show me a chart that shows this relationship for the 20th century? I want to take a closer look at it.
>> Jose erects one of his army of strawmen by irrelevantly saying that CO2 can kill people, when I specifically qualified my [still unfalsified] hypothesis with: “current and projected” CO2 levels.
Heat can kill people with them overheating. A lack of water because of greater evaporation from greater heat can also kill people. We have these deaths at today’s CO2 levels. If CO2 were at much lower levels, we likely would have fewer such deaths. Today’s level of CO2 has a relationship to these types of deaths.
You don’t get to own “the null hypothesis”, Smokey. You have not proved that CO2 at today’s levels is safe or safer than at lower levels.
And you surely haven’t proved that the Earth’s temperatures after it loses it’s .3 albedo due to widespread ice melts would be liveable anywhere near the equator at today’s health rates.
It’s funny, but if we were speeding out in the countryside headed for a cliff, you would invoke a “null hypothesis” as proof that we should continue along the same path. Lol.
>> Next, Jose shows his total ignorance of the climate null hypothesis. ..there can be only one null hypothesis.
The null hypothesis depends on the hypothesis. I have asked you already (to the silence of crickets) to give me a list of papers by climate scientists who have specified a hypothesis to which you think your null hypothesis applies.
I have really tried to explain to you that climate science cannot have experiments repeated. We have only one planet. Scafetta says this much right at the beginning of his latest paper, but you don’t see to understand that and keep talking of imaginary AGW null hypothesis.
[Scafetta] > One of the greatest difficulties in climate science, as I see it, is in the fact that we cannot test the reliability of a climate theory or computer model by controlled lab experiments, nor can we study other planets’ climate for comparison. How easy it would be to quantify the anthropogenic effect on climate if we could simply observe the climate on another planet identical to the Earth in everything but humans! But we do not have this luxury. Unfortunately, we can only test a climate theory or computer model against the available data, and when these data refer to a complex system, it is well known that an even apparently minor discrepancy between a model outcome and the data may reveal major physical problems.
Once again, can you please show me a paper which hypothesizes AGW so I can take a look at it?
AGW is a question science helps us understand. It is like most issues humans deal with. You rely on science to give you insight into a particular problem and then you do risk management.
Jose_X,
Still trying to assign me homework? You need to understand that you’re debating yourself [and still losing the debate]. Assigning homework isn’t going to change that. And you either didn’t read, or you couldn’t comprehend, what I told Martin above:
“I will take the advice of someone with much common sense, and move on to a current thread, because this one has devolved into fact-based arguments by rational skeptics, versus belief-based nonsense analogies by the lunatic fringe: ‘The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane’.”
Your endless threadbombing appears to be intended to convince yourself. It certainly isn’t convincing others. So feel free to continue on with your pointless, logic-free ramblings. For me, I’m very interested in the Gleick scandal, not in your repeatedly deconstructed globaloney. It is obvious that you still cannot understand the concept of the climate null hypothesis, which debunks all of your long-winded commentary. If and when the current global temperature exceeds the parameters of the Holocene, wake me. At that point you will have a valid argument, but not before. The null destroys all your wild-eyed alarmist beliefs. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening, much as you wish it would. And after a 40% increase in harmless, beneficial CO2, exactly none of the alarmist predictions have occurred. That is a monumental FAIL.
But even as I move on to take part in the destruction of the amazingly stupid and dishonest Forbes blogger Peter Gleick, you can continue to post your CAGW nonsense here, where probably not even a half dozen readers still check in. Not very cost effective, but have at it if you need to convince yourself that runaway global warming is gonna getcha. At least you’re harmless, and you are adding to WUWT’s fantastic traffic numbers. A time-waster for you is good for WUWT.
So try to understand: having repeatedly refuted your failed claims, I’m moving on now to the current topic of interest, the Gleick exposé. I am not going to continue with an endless back-and-forth with a numpty who doesn’t understand that the planet is falsifying your beliefs. I like the Gleick articles because they show the rampant dishonesty endemic to those pushing the CAGW scare. So it’s no wonder you would rather hide out here, in this six week old thread.
I hope the moderators let this comment pass this time since it’s at least the 3rd time I post it by itself.
>> Jose believes skeptics should put up their own models, when skeptics know that climate models don’t work.
Lindzen, Scafetta, and Spencer (to name 3 whose names I know) appear to disagree with you.
It seems Smokey you are throwing in the towel on science. There is no science without modeling.
REPLY: automatic SPAM Filter looks at keywords – don’t blame moderators, and we are overwhelmed at the moment – Anthony
Smokey, you show little understanding of the null hypothesis. I hope one day you will actually read up on it so you can competently address all the questions I have posed but which you ignore. There are many null hypothesis, and the one you picked can only be a null hypothesis to someone else’s hypothesis. You haven’t shown me a single person who has made the “AGW” hypothesis. You can’t assume your “null hypothesis” is true point blank. Clearly CO2’s rise has overlapped with harm to humans and the environment by way of increased heat. You have not proved CO2’s rise over the last 2 centuries is not linked to the harm humans have suffered and will suffer in larger amounts if the Earth is unable to reflect as much heat radiation from the sun as it current does thanks to lots of polar ice.
Let’s assume God knows X-rays harm people but being late 19th century, humans haven’t really realized it yet.
We can’t just assume X rays are beneficial and harmless even if almost everyone appears to think that is the case.
“Tomorrow”, we might be thinking of installing X ray machines outside all public buildings to run nonstop and show people’s skeletons as they walk by. Just because X rays have not been proven to be harmful by some point in time doesn’t mean they are beneficial and harmless. You have to first prove it.
Of course, most scientists in the “hard sciences” don’t use vague words like “beneficial and harmless” as you are doing Smokey. Everything requires context and most science deal with more objective information like measurable amounts in some precise unit or other.
And “X rays are beneficial and harmless” could conceivably be a null hypothesis to a hypothesis claiming to link X ray radiation above a certain dosage over the course of a year to malignant cancer of some form in 50% of human test subjects. In this case, we have to make sure the cancer cases aren’t statistically expected were X rays beneficial and harmless.
Smokey says:
February 21, 2012 at 5:48 am
You continue to claim there is a null hypothesis that can disprove Anthropogenic Global Warming, yet you fully understand that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that has a forcing which will raise the temperature of the planet. You repeatedly explain that the projected temperature raise is going to be beneficial. I have clearly shown you that it won’t be good for the inhabitants of this planet, yet you brazenly disregard the facts and continue to make your self look a fool.
This has absolutely no bases what so ever, for you to even make this claim shows you have no understanding of anthropogenic climate change. All the warming over the last half billion years has all been accounted for, from the warming power of CO2 (http://tinyurl.com/6u65g8l) to solar forcing when CO2 levels are steady http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/image17.png. All these forcing are understood and graphed to show how temperatures should be without added manmade CO2 (http://tinyurl.com/77w296t).
This is your time to stand up like a man and show how these predictions have not occurred, but it is clear you are just rambling garbage which fits so well with this Monckton beat down thread. To try and explain who
[Note: nothing was snipped from this comment. Sadly, it appears that the commenter has run out of steam… -mod]