From The Legend of the Titanic at RealClimate (bold mine):
However, if the notion that information makes little impact is correct, one may wonder what the point would be in having a debate about climate change, and why certain organisations would put so much efforts into denial, as described in books such as Heat is on, Climate Cover-up, Republican war on science, Merchants of doubt, and The Hockeystick and Climate Wars. Why then, would there be such things as ‘the Heartland Institute’, ‘NIPCC’, climateaudit, WUWT, climatedepot, and FoS, if they had no effect? And indeed, the IPCC reports and the reports from the National Academy of Sciences? One could even ask whether the effort that we have put into RealClimate has been in vain.
Look at the data, then you be the judge:
From Alexa.com – note that the lower number for traffic rank is better
(Google is traffic rank #1 for example)
Source for comparisons: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com+realclimate.org#
Seems like an order of magnitude slam dunk to me, RC can’t even get out of the grass at greater than 100,000 traffic rank…they aren’t even being tracked anymore. Here’s the last 6 months:
Source: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/realclimate.org#
Rasmus goes on to say at RC:
What do I think? Public opinion is changed not by big events as such, but by the public interpretation of those events. Whether a major event like hurricane Katrina or the Moscow heat wave changes attitudes towards climate change is determined by people’s interpretation of this event, and whether they draw a connection to climate change – though not necessarily directly. I see this as a major reason why organisations such as the Heartland are fighting their PR battle by claiming that such events are all natural and have nothing to do with emissions.
The similarity between these organisations and the Titanic legend is that there was a widespread misconception that it could not sink (and hence it’s fame) and now organisations like the Heartland make dismissive claims about any connection between big events and climate change. However, new and emerging science is suggesting that there may indeed be some connections between global warming and heat waves and between trends in mean precipitation and more extreme rainfall.
This is a good time to remind readers and the few remaining RC denizens of why Rasmus Benestad is clueless on the “emerging science” of severe weather = climate change:
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There is a very direct correlation between CAGW and the Titanic sinking.
‘Belief’ in climate change is, first and foremost, a guilt reflex – a belief that the transportation and energy technologies man has developed over the past couple hundred years are a hubris that must, just MUST have a nemesis right around the corner.
A similar pattern of somber hand-wringing can be found in the literature that followed the Titanic sinking – the certainty that mankind’s efforts to master the forces of nature had been proven not just technically but morally wrong.
@ur momisugly Ken Coffman – “Gavin is a public employee and it is apparently a large part of his day job to monitor and post at RC”
I find it odd that there is a lot of focus on ad hominem on a site that purports to be about science
They really are obsessed with Heartland, aren’t they?
wikeroy says:
May 3, 2012 at 12:14 pm
Oh, we get a certain amount of that here too.
The San Francisco newspaper’s website will sometimes float some alarmist scare-piece on their front page, for a while the most common examples of this were blog posts from a guy named Gleick you may have heard of.
The rate at which these posts disappeared from the front page, indeed in some cases became almost impossible to find anywhere on the site, was almost entirely driven by the volume of skeptic commentary the piece attracted.
Tom Deutsch says:
May 3, 2012 at 10:10 am
“Real Climate is not funded with taxpayer money.”
Maybe not on your planet.
But on this planet Schmidt and Mann definitly have their snouts in the taxpayer trough, and RC is being run 24/7 by them.
I still visit RC as I want to hear both sides of the argument, but they don’t impress me at all. In fact I would say the effect of RC on me is to harden my sceptic stance. Their arrogance really gets to me, and the way they are so dismissive of “deniers”. Having a few innocent and polite comments deleted didn’t help either. Can’t they see that they are offending the very people they are trying to convert?
There really is no hope for them.
Hi Scottish Sceptic
You said: “I wonder whether we sceptics shouldn’t re-examine the case for catastrophic global warming because who knows what kind of mistakes these fifth rate guys have made and where the truth lies with these kind of charlatans”.
That’s a FANTASTIC idea! Yes, why don’t you publish original science that shows that (for example) C02 isn’t a GHG or that the GE doesn’t exist, or that sensitivity is low, or that you can explain glacial-interglacial cycles without C02?
Of course you won’t…you let never have (except in Energy and Environment!).
The article above sounds like the pleading of a condemned man. Not a single bit of science, says so much for their science. they actually don’t mention any science. I think that article sums up the warmists and shows that warmists have lost this fight. Like many here I have noticed how they are looking for other causes to replace man made global warming. Keep hearing noise about consumption, air pollution etc. They will never stop.
I have also learned a lot about politics. I now know socialists just hate us, they just hate the west. I now know socialists just lie. Everything they say must be treated as a lie until proven true. They have no answers or solutions to problems we face. Socialism is just another belief system like Moonies, Scientology, [SNIP: Let’s not do anything to get this thread derailed, OK? -REP]. In this belief system capitalism is Satan. Anyone who disagrees is of course working for Satan.
Big up for AW, I learnt a lot about science and, again I learnt more about the stupid, fascist left.
It would help if Gavin wasn’t stuck on old talking points.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/05/the-tragedy-of-climate-commons/
In this post, he totally ignores that China has become the leading emitter. Tries to cover up his mistake as he was talking about population, but even that doesn’t make sense.
Real Climate disappoints. – gavin.
I’m delighted.
Lovely pic, Anthony.
Nice touch too, that it was the cold iceberg that hit the proverbial “unsinkable” pride.
RC = More big government BS…
It’s the simple things that confound those that think they are wise.
Scottish Sceptic says:
May 3, 2012 at 12:30 pm
At the end of the day … I consider these fraudsters such bad scientists … that I wonder whether we skeptics shouldn’t re-examine the case for catastrophic global warming because who knows what kind of mistakes these fifth rate guys have made and where the truth lies with these kind of charlatans.
Precisely the same thought has occurred to me. And how would we know the real truth? As an engineer, I am particularly interested in actual measurements and measurements in relation to historical backgrounds. Also of interest are real human responses to real weather events and even longer term phenomena like land subsistence as seen in the southern United States gulf coast.
I think buried somewhere on the blogosphere Anthony has posed the question of Arctic ice trends on solid earth as opposed to sea-borne ice trends as a better indicator of warming since sea ice extent is dependent on many factors, not just warming, like ocean currents, ocean current temperatures, wind, precipitation patterns and possibly other factors as well.
Mankind’s fractional addition of CO2 to the atmosphere might just be entirely trivial – or not. Atmospheric science is important. Too bad the topic was hijacked by political hacks and second-stringers. Sad really.
Hi Anthony,
for any linear trend fit, even given the warming in the very late 90s, is visibly going to be what, 0.01, across over 100 years.
I’m not sure why they painted it, but if you zoom out on the location and note the following (from the RDU History site, section on “the 80s”):
Terminal A opens to great fanfare in 1981.
Trans World Airlines begins service in 1984 as the sixth carrier to serve RDU passengers.
American Airlines begins service in 1985 as RDU’s seventh carrier.
RDU opened the 10,000 foot runway 5L-23R in 1986.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Air Traffic Control Tower opens in May 1987.
American Airlines opens its north-south hub operation at RDU in the new Terminal C in June 1987, greatly increasing the size of RDU’s operations with a new terminal including a new apron and runway. American brought RDU its first international flights to Bermuda, Cancun and Paris Orly.
I started school at Duke in 1973. At the time the airport was a single terminal and serviced maybe two or three airlines with infrequent flights. Cary was still a sleepy little town outside of Raleigh, and so was Morrisville. Most of highway US-70 was still forested between Durham and Raleigh. There was just one runway, and it was a small one, so the planes that came and went from RDU were similarly small.
In the 1980s, as you can see, they opened two new terminals! Terminal A was four or five times the size of the original terminal (which became Terminal B and is still there and still functioning, although for some reason they’ve closed Terminal A and are ready to tear it down). If you back off on the overhead map you post you can easily see the relative sizes — Terminal B is at the east corner of Terminal Blvd, with A running southwest of it and C the BIG terminal — bigger than A and B combined — due west of the two on the other side of the Terminal Blvd U. The old runways are still there on the Southeast side. The “new” runway — built in the early 1980’s and completed in 1986 — is clearly visible west of Terminal C.
Note that it is huge. As they say, 10,000 feet long. It may have even been built that long partly so that RDU could land a B-52 — in the late 70s a friend of mine was a B-52 pilot located in Goldsboro and he said that RDU wasn’t likely to be a nuclear target because its runway was too small to land a B-52, and somebody in SAC may have decided to nudge it somehow for strategic reasons. Then look at where they located the weather station — right there at the end of the big runway, with the entire airport complex to the south and a big expanse of hot asphalt runway a hundred meters or so away.
And there are so many better places! Probably the best place is the southeast corner of the complex, over next to the William B Umstead State Park, in that patch of ground past the National Guard. But even where they built it, they could have gone across the street and put it in the open patch in the woods a quarter mile or more away from the actual runway and it would have been better.
Now, look back at the GISTEMP record for the site. That peak in the early 90s was sure impressive (although check out 1890! WUWT too!) but it strangely enough happened just after they built a huge new runway and started landing a lot more, and bigger, planes at RDU. Did I mention that from 1987 to 1996, RDU was the US North-South hub for American Airlines, so basically every flight up or down the east coast ran through RDU? Or that they began international service with flights to e.g. London, Paris, Bermuda in that time frame? It was probably the single busiest stretch of air traffic in the entire record — flight numbers have gone down since (the cold war ended abruptly, no more need for big runways for B-52s and:-) they shut down the hub.
Even with a half a degree jump from the “are we starting the next ice age” hysteria of the early 60s — an event that they failed to “erase” from the RDU record, at least — what fraction of the jump was due to the steady blanket of CO_2 and water being dumped every five minutes all day long as jumbo jets were burning huge volumes of gasoline taking off literally over the top of the weather station? What fraction of it is due to the warming of air as it passes over the hot summer asphalt of at least one square mile of almost unbroken buildings and asphalt that lies due south of it, beginning a mere 100 or so meters away? What fraction of it is from the further CO_2 enhancement from the eight lanes of jammed rush hour traffic that uses the roads that bracket the airport on three out of four sides now? Only one of those roads was even there in the 60’s, and what is now I-40 was a lightly travelled four lane highway in the 70s (I once drove a friend from Duke to the airport in 10 minutes flat to catch a flight — try that now!)
And with all of that, we see less than 1.5 C warming from the coldest part of the record (your choice 1890s or 1960s). And
If you look at personal weather centers located just a tiny bit further away from concrete in that general vicinity, they generally record temperatures around 1C cooler than RDU. It was almost cow pasture and forest back in the 1960s, after all. And there goes all of the land-use based warming, along with it.
rgb
Way to go! Looks like the truth is finally gaining traction.
I spent quite a few years on the talk.origins newsgroup and web site, where the creation vs. evolution battle went on, keeping it from wasting time and space in the .science newsgroups. Without fail, the creationists were allowed, nay, encouraged, to offer their arguments, again and again, to be patiently shot down by the newsgroup regulars
If one had to make an equivalence between creation/evolution and CAGW/sceptic, one would be correct to place the CAGW side with the creationists. When you really have the science on your side, “shut up and go away” is not a necessary argument.
[MODERATOR’S NOTE: The posting of this comment does NOT mean that we can start discussing the merits of creationism vs. evolution. Any attempts in that direction will be snipped. -REP]
Go easy on Rasmus if only for the sake of the fact that he shares a splendid name with my eldest son. Rasmus is the god of the Baltic sea. When you’ve sold the catch, scrubbed the desks and battened down the hatches, pour two schnapps. One goes in the sea to thank Rasmus for bringing you home safely, the other down the throat to take the morning chill off…
“…one may wonder what the point would be in having a debate about climate change, and why certain organisations would put so much efforts into denial…”
This is debate? Somebody failed Debate class, or forgot to sign up. I cry “FALLACY!”
RC did themselves in with their dishonesty. They were never interested in scientific debate only propaganda that furthered their cause. An early commenter, Richard M says: “RC was in a basic catch-22 situation. If they did not censor skeptics they would have been eviserated. However, by censoring they gave the impression they were afraid to debate the issues.”
They put themselves in that situation by trying to to spout propaganda as science. They knew it would not stand up to real review because it is not science, it is propaganda and nothing more. Real science invites discussion and critique and is better for it.
Reality still has not won though because our dumbass government and lapdog LSM are still carrying the AGW banner and we are paying through the nose for it. http://www.climatedepot.com/a/15741/Pentagon-Goes-Full-Stupid-Defense-Sec-Leon-Panetta-Climate-change-has-a-dramatic-impact-on-national-security
Monty says:
May 3, 2012 at 12:47 pm
“…why don’t you publish original science that shows that (for example) C02 isn’t a GHG or that the GE doesn’t exist, or that sensitivity is low, or that you can explain glacial-interglacial cycles without C02?”
More proof that Monty is no scientist. He doesn’t understand the scientific method: skeptics have nothing to prove. The onus is entirely and exclusively on those who put forth the CAGW/AGW conjectures.
So, to help educate Monty:
First, Monty should read The Hockey Stick Illusion by A.W. Montford, available on the right sidebar. Monty will see how thoroughly corrupt the climate Pal Review system is. It is rotten to the core. The alarmist clique has gamed the system and intimidated the spineless journals. Montford thoroughly documents the corruption in detail. But somehow I think Monty will prefer his blissful ignorance to turning over that particular rock.
Next, the mis-named ‘GHG’ CO2 acts to slightly delay heat loss. But it is only a delay, akin to insulation. Real world evidence shows that the effect is so small it is unmeasurable; probably ≈1ºC per 2xCO2, ±0.5ºC. And feedbacks? Empirical evidence is completely lacking. Feedbacks are supposed to amplify the effect of CO2 by up to 4X. But from all the evidence, feedbacks are on balance negative. Positive feedbacks exist only in computer models, not in the real world. That is why sensitivity is low. If it were higher, temperatures would track rising CO2. They don’t. The more observations that are taken, the more apparent it is that there is very little connection between CO2 and temperature. The effect is minuscule and not worthy of all the wild eyed arm-waving from folks like Monty.
Finally, there are other explanations for glacial cycles that do not require the extraneous CO2 molecule. Saying that stadials and inter-stadials cannot be explained without CO2 is the usual Argumentum ad Ignorantium: [“Since I can’t think of any other explanation, then it must be due to CO2.” The argument from ignorance fallacy.] Furthermore, ΔCO2 follows ΔT on all time scales, from months to hundreds of millennia. CO2 is the effect, not the cause, of rising temperature.
The more Monty comments, the more obvious it is that he is winging it. He really doesn’t understand the subject at all, he is just repeating the same old talking points that have been repeatedly deconstructed here.
*BLINK* *BLINK* What!!??
The Titanic actually existed, struck a ‘berg and SANK … what is this ‘legend’ business?
Have they (RC), many of whom have worked to erase the MWP, set their sights on erasing the factual event known as the Titanic’s sinking as well?
What’s next, the Andrea Doria? LBJ did-in JFK using hired marksmen on the grassy knoll? We never walked on the moon? Wheaties are not the breakfast of champions? The Axis powers won WWII?
(Perilously close to: “Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”)
.
The ship needs photoshopped so it says FAIL
I blog [ debate ] about AGW CAGW on a religious site.
Faced with an hmmmm… not so nice a debater – who got all their arguments from RC – even at times inviting RC posters to come to the site to gang up on me.
They kept demanding, “I go to RC and get Real Scientists to set me right.” 🙂
I told them, “for some reason my posts at RC didn’t ever get posted,” sooooo 🙂 they started copying and pasting my debate arguments to RC – AND RC’s responses to me at the religious site.
It was one of my most brilliant moves. Worthy of my GOLD STAR AWARD from WUWT.
You see, their [ RC ] and my arguments showed up on a board which the RC staff couldn’t censor or change…..Which also showed up in search engines. Where they exist to this day. When my not so nice debater and staff of RC found out what was happening….. …..silence.
Flights of beauteous passenger pigeons once darkened the midwestern skies. In quite short order, the very last breeding pair was identified and its nesting place destroyed (a matter of Minnesota historical record).
While we regret the 19th Century’s cavalier extinction of this wondrous creature, we greatly look forward to hearing that the very last iatrogenic Warmist scamster has gone plucked to his great AGW Stewpot in the sky..
The places which actually provide information are having a quite healthy debate. Those which aren’t providing information or suppress debate are having trouble. RC, for a place which claims to have scholars, is an extraordinarily slow learner.