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:
Perhaps, just like the Titanic, the captain and ship builder will go down with her.
One can hope…
In seriousness, I don’t know why they are surprised. All they do 24/7 is try to convince everyone how bad mankind is while doing irrepairable harm to the planet. That is a message very very few people want to hear for very long…
“Captain, cloud dead ahead!”
“Hard to port!”
@ur momisugly MattN – “That is a message very very few people want to hear for very long…”
How we emotionally process the science isn’t a good indication as to the importance or merit of the science itself Matt.
Thanks for giving us a link out to RC.
Always enjoyable to see their traffic jump….with referrals from WUWT!
Gavin “It burns….it burns!”
The belief the Titanic couldn’t sink was a theory just as AGW is a theory. Both theories have not compared well against their corresponding NULL hypothesis which is all boats can sink and climate has always changed.
In the early days of questioning the supposed consensus, I was loftily told to go to RC where THE climate scientists do science. I went, observed, checked the science, and watched while other climate scientists tried to challenge their rock solid pronouncements with polite questions on relevant aspects. I was astounded at the way those questions were treated by Gavin and his sock puppet Dhogoza, the gloating, the one sided put downs, turned me off that site.
They shot themselves in the foot, and became the most quoted reason scientists gave for taking the time to have a closer look at the underlying science and not liking what they saw. Then to cap it off, the revelation of the unethical behaviour of the Climate team, as revealed in the CRU emails. No amount of spin will wipe away that stain.
All I can say to Gavin is that the team that was RC is, “THE climate scientists”, who messed their own nest, by their own arrogant behaviour.
Worse, those central to the damage wrought by the activities of the team, have never, ever apologised for bringing such disrepute to climate science.
Monty says:
May 3, 2012 at 2:26 pm
In the end, EVERY major scientific body and EVERY National Academy of Sciences of ALL the industrial nations agrees with me. And NONE agrees with you. Makes you think doesn’t it!
========================================
…is this printed on flash cards?
Maybe Fenton communications’ playbook doesn’t work so well in the age of the New Media anymore.
It wasn’t an ad hom, but a refutation of your claim that “Real Climate is not funded with taxpayer money.” (It isn’t directly funded, but it’s funded underhandedly.)
RC isn’t that far behind in Thailand. Better watch your back over there!
Tom:
Science “is” or “is not”. Emotion is not really part of it. And *that* is exactly what is eventually going to undermine “the cause”.
Monty says:
May 3, 2012 at 12:47 pm
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…
=========================================================
Everything we need has been already published. Let us see.
1.How CO2 is called does not matter. However, the term “greenhouse gas” implies a strong warming effect, but in reality the effect is neither strong (http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html) nor has the NET warming effect ever been physically proven, the latter is important, because the “greenhouse gases” block some IR radiation coming from the Sun, too.
2.The calculation of the “climate sensitivity” of the “greenhouse gases” is, according to my information, a pure hoax, based on the unproven claim, that the “greenhouse gases” cause 33 degrees warming, from which the CO2 causes like 7 degrees, as they claim. From these 7 degrees the “scientists” derive the “CO2 radiative forcing”, that they use again to calculate the warming the CO2 causes. To me, it is a clear case of a logical fallacy called “circular reasoning”.
The problem with calling the other side deniers and stating the over science, is the subject of discussion is planetary climate. How does one cover up a cooling planet?
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
Planetary clouds resist forcing changes. The planetary feedback response to a forcing in change is negative (resist forcing change) as opposed to positive (amplify the forcing change).
A reduction in the solar magnetic cycle results in an increase in GCR which after an unexplained 10 to 12 year delay (the delay is fundamental to explaining how the sun can cause the very large, very abrupt Heinrich type climate change events and is interestingly the reason why dinosaurs could be so large, why solar cycle changes can cause an increase in volcanic eruptions and can cause changes to the geomagnetic field.) will cause the planet to cool.
It is difficult to imagine the back peddling excuses by the extreme AGW supports if the planet cools. I would expect that RealClimate will close, rather than try to explain obvious observational data which unequivocally disproved the extreme AGW hypothesis.
The question is not if the planet will cool but rather how much it will cool at this point in time.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenmeyer/2012/02/09/understanding-the-global-warming-debate/
“The problem for global warming supporters is they actually need for past warming from CO2 to be higher than 0.7C. If the IPCC is correct that based on their high-feedback models we should expect to see 3C of warming per doubling of CO2, looking backwards this means we should already have seen about 1.5C of CO2-driven warming based on past CO2 increases. But no matter how uncertain our measurements, it’s clear we have seen nothing like this kind of temperature rise. Past warming has in fact been more consistent with low or even negative feedback assumptions.”
Richard Lindzen,
“It has long been observed that global warming offers opportunities for a huge number of interests to exploit and that the eagerness to exploit the issue has led to a remarkable corruption of institutions – public, private, and academic. In a set of cogent and well-written contributions, Climate Coup documents what is happening intelligently and in depth. There is no need for indignation in the contributions: the situation speaks for itself. One can only hope that the ordinary citizens of both the developed and developing worlds, who are the primary victims of all the Canute-like efforts to control climate, will take notice.
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. The present analysis accounts for the 72 day precession period for the ERBE satellite in a more appropriate manner than in the earlier paper. We develop a method to distinguish noise in the outgoing radiation as well as radiation changes that are forcing SST changes from those radiation changes that constitute feedbacks to changes in SST. We demonstrate that our new method does moderately well in distinguishing positive from negative feedbacks and in quantifying negative feedbacks. In contrast, we show that simple regression methods used by several existing papers generally exaggerate positive feedbacks and even show positive feedbacks when actual feedbacks are negative. We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity. ….
….However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1oC (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of wellmixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5oC to 5oC and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling. Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth….
After years of yelling Fire! Fire! Fire! it is not unexpected that some politicians and green scam artist will take advantage of the situation. The food to biofuel scam has estimated to result in the addition of 100 million malnutrition people. That is a great accomplishment for Greenpeace, Worldwide life foundation, and the Realclimate cohorts. Billions of dollars have been wasted on green scams which will make no appreciable difference on CO2 emissions.
Of course those how live on anti industry and anti development propaganda, do not care if Western governments face bankruptcy. I am curious how far the “green” backlash will reach.
http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/bioenergy/NewsReleases/Biodiesel%20Energy%20Balance_v2a.pdf
Vast amounts of agricultural land are being diverted from crops for human consumption to biofuel The immediate consequence of this is a dramatic increase in the cost of basic food such as a 140% increase in the price of corn. Due to limited amounts of agricultural land vast regions of virgin forest are being cut down for biofuel production. The problems associate with this practice will become acute as all major Western governments have mandate a percentage of biofuel.
Analysis of the total energy input to produce ethanol from corn show that 29% more fossil fuel input energy is require to produce one energy unit of ethanol. If the fuel input to harvest the corn, to produce the fertilizer, and to boil the water off to distill ethanol/water from 8% ethanol to 99.5% ethanol (three distillation processes) to produce 99.5% ethanol for use in an automobile, produces more green house gas than is produced than the production consumption of conventional gasoline. The cost of corn based ethanol is more than five times the production cost of gasoline, excluding taxes and subsides. Rather than subsiding the production of corn based ethanol the same money can be used to preserve and increase rainforest. The loss of rainforest is the largest cause of the increase in CO2.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html
The Clean Energy Scam
The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2008-04-14/biofuel-production-a-crime-against-humanity/2403402
Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’
Massive production of biofuels is “a crime against humanity” because of its impact on global food prices, a UN official has told German radio. “Producing biofuels today is a crime against humanity,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler told Bayerischer Runfunk radio. Many observers have warned that using arable land to produce crops for biofuels has reduced surfaces available to grow food. Mr Ziegler called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change its policies on agricultural subsidies and to stop supporting only programs aimed at debt reduction. He says agriculture should also be subsidised in regions where it ensures the survival of local populations. Meanwhile, in response to a call by the IMF and World Bank over the weekend to a food crisis that is stoking violence and political instability, German Foreign Minister Peer Steinbrueck gave his tacit backing.
Monty says:
May 3, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Smokey says the following: “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”. I disagree…there is well established science that shows you are wrong.
It doesn’t work the way Monty hopes. He cannot simply make a baseless statement like that with no examples, and then credibly decree that someone else is wrong based on his mistaken beliefs. That is simply more proof that Monty is no scientist. He still does not understand the scientific method: Skeptics have nothing to prove. The onus is entirely on those who put forth their CO2=CAGW conjecture. It is a misunderstanding of the scientific method common to the alarmist crowd: the onus is upon him who asserts, not upon him who questions.
Monty asserts that CO2 causes glaical cycles. Nonsense. As I have shown with the graphs linked above, rises in CO2 follow rises in temperature on all time scales. There is an 800 ±200 year delay, which means that much of the recent rise in CO2 is the result of the Medieval Warm Period [MWP]. This empirical evidence is derived from ice cores taken from both hemispheres.
Monty is clearly in over his head here. At one point he asserts that CO2 must be the cause of stadial cycles, wondering what other explanation there could be [asking: “Such as?”]. Later he refers to Milankovitch, answering his own question. Monty is confused.
Regarding A.W. Montford, Monty appeals to authority by demanding that Montford must possess a PhD in order to speak on the subject, saying: “So you think science written by accountants (or whatever Mr Montford is) without a PhD is the way to go?” Wrong question. Montford was not doing science, he was doing investigative journalism, writing a well researched, heavily footnoted book showing the corruption of climate pal review. And because Monty is no scientist, he will not post his own CV. [Now is a good opportunity to show that I’m arriving at a wrong conclusion: post any CV you might have, “Monty”.]
Next, I commented that ΔCO2 follows ΔT on all time scales, from months to hundreds of millennia. I provided verifiable links showing that to be the case. CO2 is the effect, not the cause, of rising temperature [just like a warming Coke outgases CO2, a warming ocean outgases CO2]. Monty’s lame response: “No it doesn’t…warming now is following CO2 rise.”
Wrong, as I have repeatedly shown. That is simply Monty’s mistaken belief, as P Walker’s link above makes clear.
Monty needs to get up to speed on the subject. I suggest reading the WUWT archives, keyword: CO2. Based on his misguided opinions, Monty certainly needs the education.
They are losing because they made the gross mistake of hyping the truth. They are being laughed out of court.
kim2ooo says:
May 3, 2012 at 1:35 pm
—————————–
LOL!
Kim, I must confess it took me a couple of reads to get exactly what you did and when I finally clued, well, I’m still laughing. That’s brilliant. Elegant, too. Folks, check this young lady’s post, it’s worth it; I bet no ne else thought to pull that one on an Alarmist site.
I should mention, Kim, that one of my colleagues has a 12 year-old son who complained to him that his textbooks are peppered with repetitious references to global warming and that his teachers are annoyingly dictatorial over the topic. Apparently he’s becoming pretty knowledgable about the issues. When I see him this weekend, I’ll ask him if he’s interested in citing some examples and sending them over to your site for you to do as you see fit. My daughter, who just turned eleven is beginning to venture out of the pony and princess world, straight into serious matters of all sorts. Last week I told her about you and how you casually blew away my beautiful Gleick document analysis and got a gold star from Anthony, and she asked me to set up a link on her profile to your new site. Bang, just like that; you kids can move back and forth between pink fairy castles and the rough climate debates as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. One day, when you have kids, you’ll understand how stuff like this can make us parents both deeply sad and intensely proud at the same time.
Greg House might be interested in conducting some ‘field work’ observing how a ‘humid’ (high RH/much H2O GHG in the atmosphere albeit in the boundary layer) evening cools compared to a ‘dry’ (lower RH) evening (given all other factors being equal) … seems so few skeptics (and warmists as well) have taken the time (or maybe they don’t live where these ‘extremes’ can occur/be observed in the same place albeit at different times) to perform and observe this ‘field work’; note also while performing this experiment the conditions under which dew does, or does not, form …
Alternatively, meteorology (as a science) can shed light on this, for those inclined to ‘hit the textbooks’ either first or instead of (or in lieu of) their own field work, after all, someone else has already made some of these observations. Page numbers with pertinent material for books by authors Aguado/Burt or Ahrens supplied upon request.
.
“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.”
Aahhh, tha’s vert sad Rasmus? Soo it turns-out that the public isn’t so easily fooled as you and your fellow CAGW cultists believed them to be, afterall. Drats!! Obviously come as a bit of a shock for you.
But you see Rasmus, most people in fact, have no difficulty in detecting your brand of cargo-cult BS at 1,000 paces, upwind. Most people over time have come to see your cult for the liars, theives, frauds, data fudgers, data creationists, the ‘green’ anti-humanist doom-mongers, and Post Normal Science peddlers that you so very clearly are.
And what’s more, the compliant MSM propagandists only serve to sign-post your ilk in the same way that a swarm of flies sign-posts a freshly-laid turd. The game really is up old chap. And guess what? You lost. It only gets worse from now on.
On RC.
Using whois.com search at http://www.who.is/whois/realclimate.org/ gives the following information:
[+emphasis, and paste abbreviated]
Google search on Environmental Media Services yields this interesting site article:
I note that the Union of Concerned Scientists uses the services of EMS as well.
One may read and draw one’s own conclusions about RC and EMS, but, to me, the “association” with EMS is a bit umm, unsavory.
RE
Monty says:
@ur momisugly May 3, 2012 at 2:26 pm
“In the end, EVERY major scientific body and EVERY National Academy of Sciences of ALL the industrial nations agrees with me. And NONE agrees with you. Makes you think doesn’t it!”
—————-
Makes me think you’re a shameless brown-noser trying to ‘butter-up’ one of those Post Normal Scientists at the RS or NAS – in the hope of a fellowship one day…
Have you been at sleep in your ivory tower for the last decade? Don’t you know the credibility of these organisations now lies in tatters? Yes, ‘fraid so. It was discovered they no longer bother with the stuffy old scientific method, with integrity and honesty and boring old traditional values any more. No siree. They gave those up for a seat at the political table. Not so much respect but the pay is much better apparently. The little emperors now stalking the once-hallowed corridors of the Academies and Societies have been found to be utterly naked with grotesquely shrivelled scientific credibilities.
_Jim says:
May 3, 2012 at 8:10 pm
…‘field work’ … evening… ‘hit the textbooks’ … observations…
=======================================================
Very sound counterarguments, Jim, I am very impressed.
_Jim says: “…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?”
Uh, the jury is still out on that last item as the unelected EU, headquartered in Belgium, daily increases its stranglehold on the UK and its legal system. Neville Chamberlin would be proud of the current UK government.
I’ve always found it curious, and telling, that there is no link to WUWT on RealClimate. It’s not that RC has an obligation to do so, it’s just that WUWT is one of the most popular and influential climate sites in the world. The folks at RC don’t want to recgonize that there are other views, let alone engage them in discussion. Their attitude is very condescending to say the least.
Same goes for RC dis-allowing any adverse comments or searching questions. They can’t stand anything contrary to the party line or against the “settled science”.
As for RC being partly/largely taxpayer funded, I am sure glad that my Australian taxes don’t help support it. Instead mine go into the left-leaning ABC. Gotta do something about that…..
I wouldn’t totally say that all of the effort at RealClimate has been in vain. I feel that it was wildly successful at showing how petty, narrowminded and pathologically groupthink oriented a certain politically motivated subset of the whole ‘climate science’ field really is. Climategate just reconfirmed and expanded that what was in plain view in the comments section.
From their snarky and atrocious treatment of folks who didn’t tow the line such to their ridiculous policy of using editing and ‘the voice of G(od)vin’ to even respected professors, it’s no wonder to me that it’s turned into a vacant echo chamber of self important blowhards.
I can’t trust the content on that site. When I need to read something from the other side of the debate, I generally go to scienceofdoom.com, Judy Curry’s Climate etc or Lucia’s Blackboard. The moderation policies at these sites seems a lot better and there’s a much more respectful engagement from both sides of the debate.