Monckton vanquishes Union College “Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds”
Guest post by Justin Pulliam
THE NEWS that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled. Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly.
Traveling with Lord Monckton on the East Coast leg of his current whistle-stop tour of the US and Canada, I was looking forward to documenting the Schenectady showdown. I have had the pleasure of listening to His Lordship at previous campus events. He is at his best when confronted by a hostile audience. The angrier and more indignant they are, the more he seems to like it.
The Union Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) sponsored the lecture, which was video streamed by CampusReform.org (where a video recording is available). The afternoon of the event, Lord Monckton appeared on the CFACT leaders’ hour-long weekly show on the Union College radio station. As a result, that evening 200 people packed a campus lecture theater to hear Lord Monckton speak.
As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.
“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy? From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.
Lord Monckton was shown a graph demonstrating a superficially close correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature over the past 150,000 years. Mildly, he asked, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it CO2 concentration that changed first, or temperature that changed first, driving the changes in CO2 concentration?”
The student clutching the graph mumbled that it was impossible to tell, and nobody really knew.
At Lord Monckton’s elbow, an elderly lady – presumably on faculty at Union College – said, “Perhaps I can help. It was temperature that changed first.”
“Exactly,” said Lord Monckton.
“However,” she continued, “CO2 then acted as a feedback, amplifying the temperature change. That’s one way we know CO2 is a problem today. And what,” she said, turning noticeably acerbic in a twinkling of Lord Monckton’s eye, “caused the changes in temperature?”
“Well,” said Lord Monckton, “we don’t know for certain, but one plausible explanation …”
“… is the Milankovich cycles!” burst in the venerable PhD, anxious not to have her punch-line stolen.
“Yes,” Monckton agreed imperturbably, “the precession of the equinoxes, and variations in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and in the obliquity of its axis with respect to the plane of the ecliptic. Actually, it is arguable that the cycles were first posited by an autodidact university janitor, a Mr. Croll.” The yakking crowd of environmentalists grew more thoughtful. Their propaganda had made him out to be an ignorant nincompoop, and they had begun to realize they had made the mistake of believing it.
Lord Monckton moved into the auditorium and began with his now-famous, exuberantly verbose parody of how the IPCC might describe a spade. This elegantly hilarious gem, delivered from memory, is rumored to be longer than the Gettysburg Address. Then he said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.
The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).
You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.
Lord Monckton then startled his audience by saying it was settled science that there is a greenhouse effect, that CO2 adds to it, that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, that we are largely to blame, and that some warming can be expected to result. But these facts had been established by easily-replicable and frequently-replicated measurements first performed by John Tyndall in 1859 at the Royal Institution in London, “just down the road from m’ club, don’t y’ know” (laughter). Therefore, these conclusions did not need to be sanctified by consensus.
The audience were startled again when Lord Monckton showed a slide indicating that the rate of warming since 1950 was equivalent to little more than 1 Celsius degree per century, while the rate of warming the IPCC predicts for the 21st century is three times greater. His slide described this difference as the “IPCC credibility gap”.
Next, Lord Monckton baffled his audience, including the professors and PhDs (whose faces were a picture) by displaying a series of equations and graphs demonstrating that, while it was generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 1 C° of warming in the absence of temperature feedbacks, the real scientific dispute between the skeptics and the believers was that the believers thought that feedbacks triggered by the original warming would triple it to 3.3 C°, while the skeptics thought the warming would stay at around 1 C°.
He moved on to show that the principal conclusions of each of the four IPCC “gospels” were questionable at best and downright fraudulent at worst. The 2007 gospel had concluded that the rate of warming was itself accelerating and that we were to blame, but this conclusion had been reached by a bogus statistical technique. By applying the same technique to a sine-wave (which the audience had agreed exhibits a zero trend), it is possible to show either a rapidly-accelerating uptrend or a rapidly-plummeting downtrend, depending on the choice of endpoints for the trend-lines on the data.
The 2001 IPCC gospel had abolished the medieval warm period by another piece of dubious statistical prestidigitation that was now under investigation by the Attorney-General of Virginia under the Fraud against Taxpayers Act 2000 (gasps of gaping astonishment from some of the environmentalists, who seemed not to have been told this before).
The 1995 gospel had been rewritten by just one man, to replace the scientists’ five-times-expressed conclusion that no human influence on global climate was discernible with a single statement flatly (and incorrectly) to the contrary.
The 1990 gospel had claimed to be able to predict temperature changes for 100 years into the future. Yet an entire generation had passed since then, and the warming over that generation had turned out to be below the lowest estimate in the IPCC’s 1990 gospel and well below its central estimate. For eight years, sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century. Worldwide hurricane activity is almost at its least in the 30-year satellite record. Global sea-ice extent has scarcely declined in that time. Here, the message was blunt: “It. Isn’t. Happening.”
Next, Lord Monckton turned to climate economics and demonstrated that the cost of acting to prevent global warming is many times greater than the cost of inaction. The example of Australia’s carbon dioxide tax showed why this was so. Australia accounts for only 1.2% of global CO2 emissions, and the government’s policy was to reduce this percentage by 5% over the ten-year life of the tax. On the generous assumption that the entire reduction would be achieved from year 1 onward, the fraction of global emissions abated would be just 0.06%. Because this fraction was so small, the projected CO2 concentration of 412 ppmv that would otherwise obtain in the atmosphere by 2020 would fall to 411.987 ppmv. Because this reduction in CO2 concentration was so small, the warming abated over the 10-year period of the tax would be just 0.000085 C°, at a discounted cost of $130 billion over the ten-year term.
Therefore, the cost of abating all of the 0.15 C° of warming that the IPCC predicted would occur between 2011 and 2020 by using measures as cost-effective as Australia’s carbon dioxide tax would be $309 trillion, 57.4% of global GDP to 2020, or $44,000 per head of the world’s population. On this basis, the cost of abating 1 C° of global warming would be $1.5 quadrillion. That, said Lord Monckton, is not cheap. In fact, it is 110 times more costly than doing nothing and paying the eventual cost of any damage that might arise from warmer weather this century.
Australia’s carbon dioxide tax is typical of the climate-mitigation measures now being proposed or implemented. All such measures are extravagantly cost-ineffective. No policy to abate global warming by controlling CO2 emissions would prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit from climate mitigation. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable would be ineffective; strategies costly enough to be effective would be unaffordable. Focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such future global warming as might arise would be many times more cost-effective than doing anything now. “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure,” Monckton advised.
In any event, said Lord Monckton, the West is no longer the problem. Its emissions have been rising very slowly, but emissions in the emerging economies are rising many times faster. China, in particular, was opening one or two new coal-fired power stations every week. She was right to do so. The most efficient way to stabilize a growing population was to raise its standard of living above the poverty line, and the cheapest way to do that was to give the population electricity generated by burning fossil fuels.
Lord Monckton ended, devastatingly, by showing that a sufferer from trichiasis, a consequence of trachoma that causes the eyelashes to grow inward, causing piercingly acute pain followed eventually by blindness, can be cured at a cost of just $8. He showed a picture of a lady from Africa, smiling with delight now that she could see again. He said that the diversion of resources away from those who most urgently and immediately needed our help, in the name of addressing a non-problem that could not in any event be cost-effectively dealt with by CO2 mitigation, must be reversed at once for the sake of those who needed our help now.
Both in the Q&A session that followed Monckton’s address and in the counter-meeting held by the environmentalists (in which Lord Monckton sat in the front row taking notes), the questions flew thick and fast. Why, said a professor of environmental sciences in a rambling question apparently designed to prevent anyone else from getting a question in, had Lord Monckton not cited peer-reviewed sources? He had cited several, but he apologized that the IPCC – which he had cited frequently – was not a peer-reviewed source: indeed, fully one-third of the references its 2007 gospel had cited had not been peer-reviewed.
Why had Lord Monckton said that from 1695-1735 the temperature in central England had risen by 2.2 degrees (implying 0.55 degrees of warming per decade) when he had gone on to say that the warming rate per decade was 0.4 degrees? He explained that the warming rate was correctly calculated on the basis of the least-squares linear-regression trend, giving 0.39 degrees, which he had rounded for convenience.
Did Lord Monckton not accept that we could quantify the CO2 feedback? This point came from the professor. “Well,” replied Lord Monckton in one of his most crushing responses, “perhaps the professor can quantify it, but the IPCC can’t: its 2007 gospel gives an exceptionally wide range of answers, from 25 to 225 parts per million by volume per Kelvin – in short, they don’t know.”
Why had Lord Monckton said that we could learn about temperatures in the medieval warm period from the foraminifera on the ocean floor, when the resolution was surely too poor? Read Pudsey (2006), said Lord Monckton: the paper showed that the Larsen B ice-shelf, which had disintegrated a few years ago and provided a poster-child for global warming in Al Gore’s movie, had not been present during the medieval warm period, indicating that those who said the warm period applied only to the North Atlantic might not be right. He added that Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of peer-reviewed papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries establishing that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was at least as warm as the present and was probably warmer.
What about the methane from cattle? Should we give up eating meat to Save The Planet? The professor thought so. Lord Monckton, as always, had the data to hand. In the past decade, he said, methane concentration had risen by just 20 parts per billion, which might cause 1/350 C° of warming. This was too little to matter. Leave the cows alone.
What about peak fossil fuels? Should we not start cutting back now? No, said Lord Monckton. The recent discovery of vast and now-recoverable reserves of shale gas meant that we had several hundred years’ supply of fossil fuel. The professor agreed that shale gas had a contribution to make: it produced more energy per ton of CO2 emitted than oil or coal.
Why had Lord Monckton cherry-picked the Australian carbon dioxide tax as his economic example? He said that in a short lecture he could only take one example, so he had taken the Australian case because all other mitigation policies were quite similar to it. It was between 10 and 100 times more costly to try to make global warming go away today than to let the warming occur – even if the warming were at the rate predicted by the IPCC, and even if the cost of inaction was as high as the Stern Report had imagined – and to concentrate on focused adaptation when and where and only if and only to the extent that might be necessary.
Was not dendrochronology now so sophisticated that we could distinguish between the broadening of annual tree-rings caused by warmer weather and the broadening caused either by wetter weather or by more CO2 in the air? The Professor said this was now indeed possible. Lord Monckton replied that it was not possible. From 1960 onwards, the tree-ring series, even after all the complex adjustments made by the dendrochronastrologists, had showed global temperatures plummeting, while the thermometers had showed them soaring. That was why the Climategate emailers had spent so much time discussing how to “hide the decline” in the tree-ring predictions of temperature change from 1960 onward. This precipitate “decline” cast precisely the doubt upon the reliability of tree-ring temperature reconstructions that the IPCC had originally had in mind when it recommended against the use of tree-rings for reconstructing pre-instrumental temperatures. The professor had no answer to that.
The professor said he was emotional about the damage caused by global warming because in Peru and Ecuador he had seen the collapse in the water supply caused by the melting glaciers. Lord Monckton said that in nearly all parts of the world it was not the glaciers but the snow-melt that provided the water supply. Data from the Rutgers University Snow and Ice Lab showed no trend in northern-hemisphere snow cover in 40 years. He added that in the tropical Andes, according to Polissar et al. (2006), the normal state of all but the very highest peaks had been ice-free; therefore, it could not be said for certain that our influence on climate was causing any change that might not have occurred naturally anyway.
Why had Lord Monckton bothered to deal with the science at all, if the economic case against taking any action to address global warming was so overwhelming? Lord Monckton replied that it was necessary to understand that there was no scientific case for action either, and that it was necessary for policymakers and governments to realize that key elements in the IPCC’s scientific case – such as the supposedly “accelerating” warming that had been arrived at by the bogus statistical technique he had demonstrated with a sine-wave – were downright false.
The professor then asked the students in to raise their hands if they agreed with him that the IPCC’s use of the statistical technique questioned by Lord Monckton was correct. Dutifully, fearfully, about two-thirds of the hands in the room went up. Lord Monckton turned to the professor and told him he should not have done that. He then turned to the students who had raised their hands and asked them how many of them were statisticians. Just one student began to raise his hand and then – apparently realizing that admitting he was a statistician was to admit he had knowingly raised his hand to endorse a manifest statistical falsehood – slowly lowered it again, blushing furiously.
Another student asked, in that shrill tone beloved of environmental extremists everywhere, whether Lord Monckton was a statistician. No, he said, and that was why he had taken care to anonymize the data and send them to a statistician, who had confirmed the obvious: since the same technique, applied to the same data, could produce precisely opposite results depending upon a careful choice of the endpoints for the multiple trend-lines that the IPCC’s bureaucrats had superimposed on the perfectly correct graph of 150 years of temperature changes that the scientists had submitted, the technique must be defective and any results obtained by its use must be meaningless.
Lord Monckton, sternly but sadly, told those who had raised their hands: “You know, from the plain and clear demonstration that I gave during my lecture, that the IPCC’s statistical abuse was just that – an abuse. Yet, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to your professor, you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”
That pin, if you had dropped it, could have been heard again. Many young heads were hung in shame. Even their professor looked just a little less arrogant than he had done throughout the proceedings. Quietly they shuffled out into the darkness.
That night, the Gore Effect worked overtime. Temperatures plummeted to 14° F. The following morning, as we drove through the snowy landscape of upstate New York towards the next venue the following morning, I asked Lord Monckton what he had thought of the strange conduct of the professor, particularly when he had abused his authority by asking his students to assent to the correctness of a statistical technique that he and they had known to be plainly false.
Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”
Justin Pulliam is the Northeast Regional Field Coordinator for CampusReform.org. He graduated Cum Laude with University Honors from Texas A&M University in December 2011, where he led the local Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow Chapter. He can be reached at justinpulliam@gmail.com.
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A Ustream video recording of the event is available here
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Joel Shore says:
March 12, 2012 at 11:46 am
Richard S Courtney says:
“So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say.”
========================================================
Well Joel, perhaps you should look in a mirror as you defend most everything Mann and Hansen do, including the Hockey stick and the recent new wild predictions of accelerating Sea Level rise.
Not even the team, in their e-nails support the historic proxy climate reconstructions, in private condemming Mann’s work, calling it the garbage it is, and admitting that even if they did their best work of all the proxy papers, they know “[SNIP] all” about past climate. Lindzen always responds cogently to criticisms, which his last paper well addressed, unlike the unscientific team members.
So unfortunately for you, when you defend the indefensible, and attack a very honorable honest scientist who’s papers you are not qualified to carry, your credibility is in fact justly reduced to the company you keep.
Joel Shore,
“So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say.”
================================
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Justin Pulliam,
that is great writing. Powerful piece with an inspiring finish.
This is the best written article and the best news I have read in 2012!
Thank God that the truth is being defended against the popular propaganda lies and agenda of the globalists and their “useful idiots”. Thank you Lord Monckton!
Joel Shore, yet again, cannot resist crude, impolite sniping that adds no ornament to the debate. He had already been warned on this thread that when I had earlier answered a legitimate question from a commenter far more polite and sensible than he, I had replied with a straightforward account of how Professor Lindzen, in a talk that he had given under my chairmanship at the Houses of Parliament, had calculated that if the increase in evaporation from the Earth’s surface with warming was thrice that which the models predicted then climate sensitivity was one-third of that which the models predicted.
Yet Mr. Shore, ridiculously, writes: “Fine…So your claim is based on a completely unsubstantiated claim by Lindzen.” By now it will be self-evident to the meanest intelligence, and will in due course be self-evident even to Mr. Shore (if we do him the kindness of assuming that he was not fully aware of the position from the outset) that I had made no “claim”. I had merely given a straightforward, quantitative answer to a straightforward, quantitative question not about any presentation by me but about a presentation given by Professor Lindzen, because the questioner knew that I had been at the meeting at which Professor Lindzen had spoken and that I might be able to answer.
If Mr. Shore disagrees with Professor Lindzen on this point, then it is most inappropriate for him to make an unpleasant and unscientific personal attack on the Professor, as he has in this thread. Instead, he should privately contact the Professor, obtain clarification of any points that my own fumbling attempt at an account of his opinion may have left obscure, discuss the science with him in a straightforward fashion, and then think before shooting his mouth off.
I am beginning to get the impression that Mr. Shore, and too many others like him, are deliberately venting their untutored and ignorant malevolence here, over and over again, with less and less scientific credibility, not so much because they want to silence the likes of Professor Lindzen (they know that all their venom cannot do that to so brave a man who has endured their snarling viciousness so imperturbably for so long) but because they and their political allies on the climate-extremist hard Left want to frighten off anyone else who dares to question the IPCC/RealClimate storyline so that they are deterred from saying anything publicly for fear of being mistreated and abused and hollered at and smeared in a similar fashion.
Frankly, it is time that this sort of systematic, organized (and, in some quarters, paid: one thinks of the convicted internet-banking fraudster Lefevre’s funding of the paid PR hacks at Desmogblog, for instance) bullying were made a criminal offense. Science cannot advance while the likes of Mr. Shore behave with such poisonous, mean-spirited, anti-scientific intolerance towards those eminent scientists who, for sound reasons of physics and mathematics, do not share their faith.
Vince Causey,
Joel Shore’s comment is a corrollary of: Fen’s Law:
“The Left believes none of the things they lecture the rest of us about.”
In Joel Shore’s case, he incessantly charges those he disagrees with, with having an “ideology” [used twice in his comment above], being “ideologues”, etc. That’s what passes for science inside Joel Shore’s head.
Shore is motivated entirely by the debunked CAGW politics he continues to flog, and his ‘science’ is simply a veneer used to cover that repeatedly falsified conjecture.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen instead to what the ultimate Authority, planet earth, is saying.
. . .
And Evan Green, surely you must be aware that the Potholer doesn’t have the cojones to stand toe to toe with Lord Monckton and debate the science. Instead he hides out and makes his cherry-picked, ad hominem propaganda videos. Only a fool would accept them at face value. Only a fool.
Brilliant writing, Mr Pulliam – thanks!
And to those, such as Don S, who think that ‘those who can’t, teach’ – try teaching a class of healthy 14-yr-old boys inside on a hot day when they want to be outside doing something/anything else.
Lord Monckton is, in my view, the quintessential teacher and us Sceptics are damn’ lucky he’s on the side of honesty and reason.
I hope you do understand that a thread was setup for direct engagement between Mr. Hadfield and Mr. Monckton right here at WUWT. It wasn’t Mr. Hadfield who tucked-tail and scurried away. This apparently left Mr. Watts no choice but to signal Monckton’s true courage level by closing comments.
Most grateful to UKIP Scotland for explaining where various versions of my lecture can be seen. For the fullest version (not for the faint-hearted: it’s 100 minutes, followed by questions), watch the Hartford University talk, which has the slides incorporated into it.
And, finally, many thanks to Justin Pulliam for having looked after me so effectively during the East Coast leg of my US tour. The article that stands in his name (as Their Lordships say it) has gone viral all over the Web.
On to Canada, to give the annual Nerenberg Lecture on Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario (watch this space). Then back to the US to face the Democrat-controlled State Assemblies of California and of Colorado. No peace for the wicked!
Monckton of Brenchley says:
It is not impolite sniping to ask a legitimate question about a claim that is being discussed here by Prof. Lindzen that to me seems quite extraordinary…A claim that seems to imply that basically all that we need to know to determine the climate sensitivity is how rapidly evaporation increases with warming.
I had not fully read the entire train of comments that caused you to discuss this claim by Prof. Lindzen. If this is truly a claim for lower climate sensitivity that you have not yourself put forward in any of your writings or speeches, then I apologize for my incorrect inference that it is a claim that you have made.
It was hardly a personal attack to note how another recent scientific claim by Lindzen had been found to be incorrect and to suggest that people who consider themselves skeptical might actually want some reasonable evidence to support another, quite extraordinary, claim that Lindzen is making.
Have you read what some of the people around here have said about scientists like Jim Hansen, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and others?!? I hardly think that my noting a particular recent instance regarding one of Lindzen’s recent scientific claims and suggesting that one might want to actually have evidence to back up the claim constitutes “abuse” or “smear” or “holler[ing]”. In fact, my treatment of Lindzen was extremely mild…I did not suggest he was a fraud or that he was an incompetent scientist, as people regularly do here in regards to the scientists I mentioned above, and in fact I wouldn’t do that. I have not suggested that he should be hauled before a Congressional committee or that a state attorney general should pursue a witch-hunt against him, nor would I.
Heck, on this very website, I have noted before that I myself am quite skeptical of Jim Hansen’s recent claims that if we really go to town burning fossil fuels then we could / likely would trigger a true Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. And, I have said that I would like to see him present more details and evidence to back up this claim. That is what being a good skeptic is all about…It is about being skeptical even of claims that you might be predisposed to believe because of whatever biases or preconceptions you might bring to the discussion.
Science cannot advance if we don’t subject all scientific notions to scrutiny, including notions that might suit our fancy. It is hardly “poisonous, mean-spirited, anti-scientific intolerance” to be critical of quite extraordinary claims that, to my knowledge, have not been supported by significant evidence.
Joel Shore:
I quote all of your mendacious post at March 12, 2012 at 11:46 am
“Richard S Courtney says:
I know Richard Lindzen’s track-record so I trust what he says unless and until shown he has made an error.
And I know the track-record of RealClimate. So, if RealClimate disagrees with Lindzen (you assert they do) then that can only be taken as confirmatory evidence that Lindzen is right.”
So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say. (By the way, it is not hard to verify that RC is correct on the particular point in question that I provided as an example.)
I honestly I can’t say that I am at all surprised, but it is still interesting to have it so directly confirmed.
——————————
So, you state you do not understand the difference between
(a) Recognition of the track-record of a pack of liars
and
(b) Ideology.
Nobody could say they are surprised, but it is still interesting to have it so directly confirmed.
Richard
Unfortunately Lindzen at the meeting chaired by Monckton at the Palace of Westminster accused GISS of manipulating data to show a false trend. On further investigation it transpired that Lindzen’s source had made a mistake and no such manipulation had taken place! Lindzen has since apologized for his mistake.
“You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
Will Rogers, New York Times Aug. 31 1924
US humorist & showman (1879 – 1935)
I’m thankful that there are so many here, including Monckton of Brenchley, that are not ignorant of the composition of the wool that Goraphiles are trying to pull over our eyes so they can pick our pockets while they restrict our freedoms.
Evan Green says:
“It wasn’t Mr. Hadfield who tucked-tail and scurried away.”
The scurrying away is always done by the testosterone-deficient alarmist crowd like pothole and Abraham, who cherry-pick what they want to broadcast, but never have the balls to go toe to toe with Lord Monckton in a real, honest, moderated debate. Why not?
The answer: because ad hominem attacks are easy and cowardly, therefore the alarmist contingent adopts those tactics. Yes, you are cowardly. All of you, from the reprehensible charlatan Michael Mann all the way down to… you.
Prove me wrong. Get Michaerl Mann, or Abraham, or pothole, or anyone else you choose, to agree to a real, honest debate with Lord Monckton. Cherry-picked drive-by hit pieces are not debates, they are not science, and they only happen because your side lacks the huevos to debate the science, and fears giving someone the opportunity to respond in front of a live audience to the pseudo-science emitted by alarmist numpties. You wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit you on the a …nkle. But the audience would see who is knowledgable, and who is winging it. And via YouTube, the world would see real scientific knowledge pitted against numpties.
So let’s have you or one of your ilk set that debate up. If you have what it takes. From where I’m standing, you are just trying to stack the deck with your usual cherry-picked attacks. In a real, moderated debate, you wouldn’t get away with attacking the man. There would be a specific debate question, and it would be limited to science, not character assassination — which is all you’ve got.
That’s why the alarmist side consistently loses the debates: they rely on pseudo-science to back their CAGW nonsense, and scientific skeptics easily corner them by saying: “It’s your conjecture; prove it.” Show us that runaway global warming. Where is it? Show us that mythical hidden heat in the pipeline. Where is it? Show us that your scary belief system is anything but nonsense. But you can’t. That’s why you lose all the debates, and that’s why you’re scared to death of a real debate.
So prove me wrong. Get the charlatans you’re carrying water for to stand and deliver. Prediction: they’ll run and hide instead, hoping their water boys will keep taking potshots from the sidelines. Despicable and cowardly, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from the gang that’s afraid of a real debate.
Slowly, the truth makes progress. Joel Shore now admits, at last, that he had not taken the trouble to read this thread before accusing me of having made a “claim” that I had not made. Yet he remains insufficiently self-critical to be aware that the language in which he criticized Professor Lindzen is not acceptable. If, despite repeated warnings, he continues to write in such a malevolent tone, he must not be surprised if fewer and fewer people here pay any regard to anything he has to say. No one objects to reasoned debate on scientific matters, or to questioning of scientists’ conclusions, however eminent the scientists may be: but I am by no means the only one to have warned Mr. Shore that his manner of conducting discussion is inappropriate, petulant, and childish, and, therefore, valueless.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
March 12, 2012 at 8:08 pm
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Lord Monckton, I pointed out to him at least two years ago that his modus operandi, basically made him a non-scientist. He got stuff published in minor journals to make out like he was capable of doing research. Naaaah.
If you follow his posts for the last year or two, you will see that he is incapable of learning the basics of not starting with the conclusion, something that would not allow conferring a Ph.D. where I studied.
It goes like this:
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so therefore it must cause cAGW, i.e. THE conclusion
Someone posts something questioning his belief system, based on acquired data.
It doesn’t lead to Joel’s conclusion when the data is analyzed.
Therefore it must be wrong.
Therefore, since he or she is wrong, Joel must be right.
Therefore, this is proof that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and it must cause CAGW.
Count Trenberth in this category too.
Lord Monckton your insight on the truth is a breath of fresh air,so to speak,among the daily lies that we usually hear from the Gillard-led government. We desperately need more people speaking out on this subject. I ask,please would you consider another tour in Australia lecturing on this,as all forms of government here seem to be joining in on this idioticy,to our great dismay..
Joel Shore says, “Heck, on this very website, I have noted before that I myself am quite skeptical of Jim Hansen’s recent claims that if we really go to town burning fossil fuels then we could / likely would trigger a true Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. And, I have said that I would like to see him present more details and evidence to back up this claim.”
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Actually Joel, you were defending Hansen’s insane claims of disasterous impending Sea level rise, contrary to all observed evidence. Yes, later you bravely voiced a thought of the need for more evidence. As their is zero evidence of Hansen[s insane propaganda, you demeen yourself by your several posts “defending the indefensible.” But here you out do yourself by comparing Hansen’s outrageous predictions to some minor criticisms of Lindzen, which he addressed in his subsequent paper. What Lindzen did was open science, and happens all the time as science progresses. There is no shame in not being perfect. The end result is still a paper that clearly demonstrates that the earth is conforming to a far lower senstivity then the models predict. On the other hand the projected positive feedbacks you support, which are COMPLETELY theoretical, depend on the LEAST understood aspects of the affect of water vapor and cloud formation, so the strong feedbacks PROJECTED are the least dependable, while the “OBSERVATIONS” used by Lindzen, Spencer, and others, support the lower estimates of climate sensitivity. Additional peer reviewed studies support stronger solar influences on albedo and cloud formation then previously projected, further supporting lower sensitivity. These studies are reinforced by OBSERVATIONS. Other papers have demonstrated that observations of the oceans as well as the trophsphere indicate that the models vastly overstate climate senstivity.
If Dr. Lindzen did any of the following, then your demeaning remarks may be justified. The scientist you support, have done all of the following…
From the National Association of Scholars website:
“How to detect an obvious fraud:
If a researcher will not show their raw data.
If a researcher will not show the “adjustments” they have made to their raw data.
If the researchers historical “adjusted data” conflict rather dramatically with other generally accepted data sets without any rational explanation.
If a researcher will not show the internals of the model that processes their adjusted data to produce their results.
If a researcher attempts to destroy anybody who disagrees with them, instead of attempting to refute their position.
If a researcher attempts to destroy their raw data/adjustments/models rather than have them released.
If a researcher attempts to destroy their communications with other researchers rather than have them released.”
Dr Lindzen, not guilty, The CAGW team, guilty as charged. This verdict, the world will reach.
Does anybody remember James Cameron ( Avatar guy ) doing a slow lateral Arabesque to get out of debating skeptics a while back?
That is the calibre of so many of these believers . . they swan around pretending they have a clue when all they have are emotions. Watching our very own little clique of believers here reminds me of his mega swerve. Sniping without result because they have no clue.
Let’s see Mann or Jones or Hansen go up against a real skeptic, in public live. I would nominate Lord Monckton to put the skeptic argument forward but there are many others, all grounded in science. Let’s see if the warmists Avatar up too.
Phil:
At March 12, 2012 at 7:18 pm you assert:
“Unfortunately Lindzen at the meeting chaired by Monckton at the Palace of Westminster accused GISS of manipulating data to show a false trend. On further investigation it transpired that Lindzen’s source had made a mistake and no such manipulation had taken place! Lindzen has since apologized for his mistake.”
I do NOT believe you!
GISS and Hadley frequently alter historical temperature data. I was Lead Author of a paper which analysed that data and was prevented from publication by these changes: the data kept changing between submission of the paper and publication.
These data changes were the subject of the email from me that was leaked by the Climategate whistleblower and, therefore, they – and how they prevented the paper’s publication – was the subject of my submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry that whitewashed the nefarious ‘Team’. The nature of the data changes is explained in that submission.
Provide evidence for your assertions or apologise. On face value your assertions are merely another set of lies and smears from an anonymous internet troll who promotes the AGW scare.
Richard
Moderators:
My post in reply to Phil seems to have vanished.
[it was automatically directed to the spam bin as it contains words or phrases that may be indicative of fraud or automated trolling, this happens quite often but as the blog is moderated this automated trapping can be corrected by an actual human. Sometimes it takes a bit longer than you might wish for reasons of staffing or workload but you need not fear that it will be deleted if it is not fraudulent or spam. That being said mistakes do happen so please do continue to alert us when you feel a post has gone into the delete bin inadvertently . . kbmod]
It said;
Phil:
At March 12, 2012 at 7:18 pm you assert:
“Unfortunately Lindzen at the meeting chaired by Monckton at the Palace of Westminster accused GISS of manipulating data to show a false trend. On further investigation it transpired that Lindzen’s source had made a mistake and no such manipulation had taken place! Lindzen has since apologized for his mistake.”
I do NOT believe you!
GISS and Hadley frequently alter historical temperature data. I was Lead Author of a paper which analysed that data and was prevented from publication by these changes: the data kept changing between submission of the paper and publication.
These data changes were the subject of the email from me that was leaked by the Climategate whistleblower and, therefore, they – and how they prevented the paper’s publication – was the subject of my submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry that whitewashed the nefarious ‘Team’. The nature of the data changes is explained in that submission.
Provide evidence for your assertions or apologise. On face value your assertions are merely another set of lies and smears from an anonymous internet troll who promotes the AGW scare.
Richard
Richard S Courtney says:
March 13, 2012 at 2:36 am
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Thank you Richard, however most now never think for a moment that their words are true. Little Peter Gleicks in training is what I see, taking innoncent minutiae of facts, and spinning an completely artificial air of nefarious motive behind it.
Richard S Courtney – I suggest you check out the internet site of the group that organised Lindzen’s appearance where you will see his apology is clearly stated.
http://repealtheact.org.uk/blog/apology-from-prof-lindzen-for-howard-haydens-nasa-giss-data-interpretation-error
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Feynman
Louise says:
March 13, 2012 at 6:37 am
Lindzen apologises for one chart and is very candid about the reasons for his error. No hiding the decline. I don’t see an blanket apology for saying GISS manipulates data, which it does constantly.
Are you Louise Gray of the Daily Telegraph by any chance? See you’ve been promoted to the gossip column of late.