As you may know, I’m traveling this weekend to be with the founders and pioneers of The Weather Channel in Atlanta for an informal 30 year reunion, which I talked about in detail here.
Thanks, sincerely, to everyone for the help and support!
Blogging will be light this weekend, though I will post highlights and other items from the event when I can.
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I believe the “climate consensus” has developed during a period where concern about the environment became fashionable and considered by many, as indicative of moral quality and selfless social responsibility. I suspect that many in the press and entertainment media felt obligated to justify their high incomes by committing themselves to noble social causes–with some, starting with Rachel Carson, devoting themselves to exposing alarming environmental problems caused by modern industrial pollution, real or illusory.
Scientists are people just like everyone else and are not immune to being influenced by the noble causes promoted by the media and the social milieu about them. The shared desire to promote this ‘noble cause’ may have induced the runaway mutual generation of an unfounded body of soft evidence purporting to show the serious danger of CO2 in the environment.
In most cases, I believe, this was done by people who thought they were right–were sure they were right and the public must be quickly persuaded to accept these results to avert global catastrophe.
Good scientists know that what they believe doesn’t affect whether their theories are correct or not. Only empirical data can tell them that.
The problem is, not so good scientists and many non-scientists think belief is important, and with belief comes emotional attachment to those beliefs.
Well, I switched to Intellicast.com for that very reason. Not bad, no climate meme to push, just straight weather and forecasting.
Eric Simpson;
As I replied to Noblesse Oblige on Briggs’ site:
crosspatch says:
April 28, 2012 at 12:36 pm
The problem with a nuclear explosion in a densely populated modern city with a ….
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I watched a one hour special on Chernobyl last week. The whole area remains contaminated and humans no longer live there. But the animals have returned and they are thriving, even though they are exposed to high levels of radioactivity. The wolves, deer, beaver, eagles are all doing very well now that humans are gone. A worthwhile special to watch if you can find it.
An thanks for posting the “love of theory” video. It was excellent.
@Greg House.
I think you are hitting it spot on with your major point, and I have only minor differences with you on your other points.
Mainly, you are so right, when speaking to the public at large, we need to stick to the core concepts, in simple succint, and not overly technical, language. There are two main points. 1) It’s not unusually hot, current temps and rates of temperature change are not unusual. Show in graphic and unarguable terms that the hockey stick is fabricated bull. And, 2) contrary to what the ipcc led us to believe, there’s no empirical evidence that CO2 causes climate scale warming. (It can be presented to make it look accurately like it doesn’t have any significant effect, a trace gas in comparison to much more powerful elements like the sun and sea.)
In an ad campaign we would stick to those 2 main points, mostly. We should not deviate from the simple concise cores, except to cover some subsidiary points in separate but also concise packages. We don’t foist forward a doctoral dissertation or treatise when 30 words will do! Indeed, the (long) length of many skeptic rebuttals argues against the skeptic… the longer it is, the more the reader thinks we are full of it. When a warmist can take 10 words and say.. “it’s hotter than hell” and “look what CO2 did to Venus!” to make an argument, and we have 70 pages of this and rambling that??
Anyway, while John West argued for the effectiveness of our “guerilla war” (I took that to mean the blogisphere), you suggest that it’s not really done a whole lot. I do agree in that it (our guerilla internet war) doesn’t reach everybody effectively… yet the blogisphere is often the only available alternative to the liberal MSM (Fox can only do so much), and it’s a place where arguments have been honed, and the good arguments have risen to then be touted by key talking heads and op-ed writers in the traditional media.
But I would say that the change in public opinion has been a bit more than ‘slight.’ And not slight at all in terms of conservatives, at least in the USA. With conservatives, it has been a complete sea change. In the three years of 2009 to 2011, conservatives have en masse switched to the skeptic side. A few key things (with blogisphere help) combined to push conservatives into the skeptic column; they are: Climategate, arguably cooler temps, the debunking of the hockey stick, and the exposure as false of the original ipcc contention on CO2 (see Al Gore repeat this key deception on CO2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg). The problem is that most independents and Democrats have not listened so intently to the things conservatives paid attention to… so non-conservatives don’t understand much other than -perhaps- that it has not been as hot as predicted. Many don’t even know much of anything about Climategate, as the MSM did not cover it much. We need to change this.
Conservatives are going to be hard to dislodge from their skeptical position now. But you never know, and if independents turn against us, we could be in trouble again. Instead of possible defeat, we want to end this war, to go home in victory, to put an end to the misguided policies, and to make sure that nothing like the radical cap & trade scheme (83% mandated CO2 cuts by 2050) that passed the U.S. House ever comes close to succeeding again. And we want to put the insulting warmist profiteers (like Zwick, Hansen) out of business. To do this, we have to get out of our blogisphere shell, and foray into traditional media… to change the opinion of the busy political independent and moderate Democrat (U.S.). Then it’s over… for them.
There are lots of member-vs.-member bets regarding future temperatures on a futures markets maintained at Intrade, here: https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/?eventClassId=20
Your time-scale would be too long for them, though, and for bettors, because the money would be frozen for the duration. so even the winner would lose money by not getting interest on it and being eroded by inflation.
As someone who periodically lectures in the subject of Psychrometrics, I have repeated to my classes ad nauseum the mantra that “temperature is not heat”. But it is ‘global temperature rise’ that is mentioned consistently whenever the AGW drum is beaten. Two enthalpy cases:
Air at 20,0 deg C 10% rh has an enthalpy value of 23,4 kJ/kg dry air.
Air at 20,0 deg C 90% rh has an enthalpy value of 54,0 kJ/kg dry air. A vast difference!
This is on an enthalpy scale which is based on a datum of 0 kJ/kg for bone dry air at 0,0 deg. Can anyone from out there enlighten me as to why enthalpy receives no consideration (so far as I can recognise) in the Global Warming debate?
Eric Simpson says:
April 29, 2012 at 5:31 am
There are two main points. 1) It’s not unusually hot, current temps and rates of temperature change are not unusual. Show in graphic and unarguable terms that the hockey stick is fabricated bull.
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I would rather challenge the calculations of the “global temperature” and “global warming”. My point is that those calculations are not based on science and thus pure fictions, the same goes for the past climate assertions, including “medieval warm period” and “ice age”. We do not really know, whether it is getting on average warmer or colder or whatever.
This would be an essential change of sceptic strategy, though, I understand that, and maybe a little bit painful for some sceptics.
Here’s another very good video.
And since this is Open Thread, read about an optical clock here:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2012/apr/26/germany-sends-optical-clock-signal-over-nearly-1000-km
Greg House says “I would rather challenge the calculations of the “global temperature” and “global warming”. My point is that those calculations are not based on science and thus pure fictions” and that this would be an essential change of sceptic strategy.
I thoroughly disagree – this is a _denialist_ strategy, unless the point is that temperature is not the same as heat – but I don’t think that was the point. The temperature measurements we make around the globe give an approximation to global temperature, and global temperature is an approximation (or proxy) to global heat. Most self-respecting sceptics accept that the world has, happily, warmed a bit since the Little Ice Age, and that it warmed from about 1975 to about 2000. All the questions are about why and how much is CO2 implicated and what will happen next.
And I don’t believe it is denialism that has changed conservative American thinking on AGW – it is scepticism (sorry, skepticism over there) with all its concentration on facts, especially the fact that the Sun is unlike anything for about 200 years.
Rich.
Be interesting to see if billionaire Julian H Robertson of the Environmental Defense Fund regains top donor status soon.
Billionaire William Koch gives another $1 million to pro-Romney ‘super PAC’ – Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/20/news/la-pn-koch-donation-romney-super-pac-20120420
http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/meet-mitt-romneys-billionaires
Romney Holds Unpublicized Fundraiser at Home of Controversial Billionaire’s Town House | The Moderate Voice
http://themoderatevoice.com/145417/romney-holds-unpublicized-fundraise-at-home-of-highly-controversial-billionaires-town-house/
Ed Mertin,
You ought to get out of your mom’s basement once in a whilst.
See – owe to Rich says:
April 29, 2012 at 1:05 pm
this is a _denialist_ strategy… Most self-respecting sceptics accept…
The temperature measurements we make around the globe give an approximation to global temperature, and global temperature is an approximation (or proxy) to global heat.
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Yeah, names calling, head counting… (sad).
My point about the calculations of “global temperature” and “global warming” is that they are not really scientific. I am not going to go into detail about it now, because I wanted just to outline the strategy I prefer.
Of course, if you are sure that those calculations are OK, then it logically will not be your strategy to challenge that, that is clear.
The problem is, as I see it, that a lot of people do not properly look into the issue of those calculations and simply accept them.
The real reason AGW true believers can not change.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2136547/Power-really-does-corrupt-scientists-claim-addictive-cocaine.html
“More than a hundred years after noted historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ scientists claim the saying is biologically true.
The feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain to cocaine by increasing the levels of testosterone and its by-product 3-androstanediol in both men and women.
This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine, the brain’s reward system called the nucleus accumbens, which can be very addictive.”
“He added that power has also been found to make people smarter because dopamine improves the functioning of the brain’s frontal lobes.”
Now even the Department of Home Land Security is in the environment business
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/mgmt/dhs-environmental-justice-strategy.pdf
Hey Vince I see you are Joy over at Climate Etc, I guess that is one way of increasing your following!
In my Notes From Skull Island I list nearly 20 things that we climate contrarians (“skeptic” is too mild a term) would be doing differently if we were in fact well organized and well funded:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/05/out-manned-but-what-happened-to-the-science/#comment-760039
See – owe to Rich says:
April 29, 2012 at 1:05 pm
“I thoroughly disagree – this is a _denialist_ strategy, unless the point is that temperature is not the same as heat – but I don’t think that was the point. The temperature measurements we make around the globe give an approximation to global temperature, and global temperature is an approximation (or proxy) to global heat.”
Shannon’s theorem is violated so massively you can’t even know what you’re missing, say, by collecting the data from 6,000 thermometers around the globe. You can and will have aliasing artefacts in temporal as well as in the spatial dimensions. Or even better, in a mixture of both. The only hope of getting anywhere near an approximation would be the satellites but they have their own issues, limited lifetime, switchover and recalibration to another satellite, a tomography-like algorithm to deduce temperature in a certain atmospheric layer, aging of sensors…
The honest approach would be to talk about the development of continuously measured temperature time series in one place only, and discontinue that series on station moves. All other measurements, extrapolations, interpolations, adjustments, splicings and griddings should be left to the yellow press.
The global temperature anomaly is not a measured value. It is a construct.
Thanks rogerknights on your link for Notes from Skull Island. A must read for those interested in improving our standing with public opinion:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/05/out-manned-but-what-happened-to-the-science/#comment-760039
My mom passed coming up on 15 years. Arrows from clown republicans, think it bothers me? No
So Wal~Mart lost 12 billion in Mexico in two days. Bush lost that much in the deserts of Iraq in one day. 383 tons of $100 bills, poof! Gone. At least some fools who lose our money are at least trying to create jobs.
Eric Simpson says:
April 29, 2012 at 11:17 pm
A must read for those interested in improving our standing with public opinion:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/05/out-manned-but-what-happened-to-the-science/#comment-760039
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In his 10. the author suggest to talk more about mitigation and says in the article nothing about challenging the fundamental fictions the AGW concept is based on. This is a wrong strategy.
It’s the right strategy if you want to win votes. Our side is already “challenging the fundamental fictions the AGW concept is based on” in blogs like this and in some scientific papers. I didn’t suggest that this activity should be reduced. I said nothing about it because nothing needs be said except “carry on”—which will happen without my blessing anyway.
What I suggested was that that sort of strategy is not a vote-winner among the public, because it can so easily be countered by the consensus card. That card is a “winner,” PR-wise. It’s the other side’s strong point in terms of public perception.
If we wish to “move the masses,” we should attack the enemy at its weakest point: “the costliness and ineffectiveness of mitigation strategies” that the other side greatly over-sold in the past, and is now coming home to roost. That will put them on the defensive and raise doubts about their credibility on other matters—like the science. I reproduce my item #10 below.
rogerknights says:
April 30, 2012 at 4:49 pm
…because it can so easily be countered by the consensus card. That card is a “winner,” PR-wise. It’s the other side’s strong point in terms of public perception.
If we wish to “move the masses,” we should attack the enemy at its weakest point: “the costliness and ineffectiveness of mitigation strategies”
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If the consensus card is a winner, they will come with the consensus card on mitigation, too.
The second reason is that you the issue of “costliness and ineffectiveness of mitigation strategies” is too complicated and I am afraid is based on very much speculation. It is definitely not a winner to me.
rogerknights says:
April 30, 2012 at 4:49 pm
…because it can so easily be countered by the consensus card.
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I have just posted something on the issue of consensus:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/consensus-argument-proves-climate-science-is-political/#comment-972119