By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In the closing minutes of the final plenary of the U.N.’s Doha climate summit, when no one else had anything further to add, I spent a few seconds telling the delegates something that the bad scientists and the malicious media have done their level best to conceal. There has been no global warming for 16 years.
In the real world, this surely welcome news would have been greeted with cheers of relief and delight. Since the beginning of 1997, despite the wailing and gnashing of dentures among the classe politique, despite the regulations, the taxations, the carbon trades, the windmills, the interminable, earnestly flatulent U.N. conferences, the CO2 concentration that they had declared to be Public Enemy No. 1 has not stabilized. It has grown by one-twelfth.
Yet this startling growth has not produced so much as a twentieth of a Celsius degree of global warming. Any warming below the measurement uncertainty of 0.05 Cº in the global-temperature datasets is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
The much-vaunted “consensus” of the much-touted “ensembles” of the much-heralded “models” has been proven wrong. The much-feted “modelers” had written in 2008 that their much-cited “simulations” ruled out, to 95% confidence, intervals of 15 years or more without global warming. To them, 16 years without warming were as near impossible as makes no difference.
Yet those impossible years happened. However, you would never have known that surely not uninteresting piece of good news from reading the newspapers or watching ABC, BBC, CBC, NBC, et hoc genus omne. The media are not in the business of giving the facts or telling the truth any more.
Precisely because journalists no longer bother to provide the inconvenient truth to their audiences, and because they are no longer willing even to provide the people with the straightforward facts without which democracy itself cannot function, the depressingly ill-informed and scientifically-illiterate delegates in Doha can be forgiven for not having known that global warming stopped a long while back.
That is why they should have been excited and delighted when they heard the news – nearly all of them for the very first time.
But this was the alternative reality that is the corrupt, self-serving U.N. Howls, hoots and hollers of dismay and fury greeted my short, polite announcement. This absurdly inappropriate reaction raises a fascinating question.
How are we to dig a rat-hole wide enough to allow the useful idiots and true-believers to escape as each passing year makes it more and more obvious that their fatuous credo has all the plausibility of the now somewhat discredited notion that the world was to be snuffed out at this year’s winter solstice?
Every student of the arts of diplomacy in the civil-service and staff colleges of the U.K. hears much about the rat-hole problem. How does one let the other side off some hook on which they have imprudently impaled themselves, while minimizing their loss of face?
A cornered rat will fight savagely, even against overwhelming odds, because it has no alternative. Give the rat a way out and it will instinctively take it.
The first step in digging a diplomatic rat-hole is to show that one understands how one’s opponents came to make their mistake. One might make a point of agreeing with their premise – in the present instance, the long-proven fact that adding a greenhouse gas to an atmosphere such as ours can be expected, ceteris paribus, to cause some warming.
Then one tries to find justifications for their standpoint. There are five good reasons why the global warming that they – and we – might have expected has not occurred for 16 years: natural variability in general; the appreciable decline in solar activity since the Grand Maximum that peaked in 1960; the current 30-year cooling phase of the ocean oscillations, which began late in 2001 with the transition from the warming phase that had begun in 1976; the recent double-dip la Niña; and the frequency with which supra-decadal periods without warming have occurred in the instrumental record since 1850.
The next trick is to help them, sympathetically, to focus the blame for their error on as few of their number as possible. Here, the target is obvious. The models are to blame for the mess the true-believers are in.
We must help them to understand why the models got it so very wrong. This will not be easy, because nearly all of our opponents have no science or math at all.
We can start our deconstruction of the models by pointing out that – given the five good reasons why global warming might not occur for 15 years or more at a time – the modelers’ ruling out periods of 15 years or more without warming shows they have given insufficient weight to the influence of natural variability. We can poke gentle fun at their description of CO2 as “ the tuning-knob of the climate”, and help them to put things into perspective by reminding them that Man has so far altered only 1/10,000 of the atmosphere, and may alter 1/3000 of it by 2100.
We cannot altogether avoid the math. But we can put it all in plain English, and we can use logic, which is more accessible to the layman than climatological physics. Here goes.
The fundamental equation of climate sensitivity says temperature change is the product of a forcing and a climate-sensitivity parameter.
The modellers’ definition of forcing is illogical; their assumptions about the value of the climate-sensitivity parameter are not Popper-falsifiable; and their claims of reliability for their long-term predictions are empirically disproven and theoretically insupportable. Let us explain.
The IPCC defines a forcing as the net down-minus-up flux of radiation at the tropopause, holding surface temperature fixed. Yet forcings change that temperature. A proposition and its converse cannot simultaneously be true. That is the fundamental postulate of logic, and the models’ definition of forcing manifestly offends against it.
No surprise, then, that since 1995 the IPCC has had to cut its estimate of the CO2 forcing by 15%. The “consensus” disagrees with itself. Note in passing that the CO2 forcing function is logarithmic: each further molecule causes less warming than those before it. Diminishing returns apply.
We can remind our opponents that direct warming is little more than 1 Cº per doubling of CO2 concentration, well within natural variability. It is not a crisis. We can explain that the modelers have imaginatively introduced amplifying or “positive” temperature feedbacks, which, they hope, will triple the direct warming from CO2.
Yet this dubious hypothesis, not being Popper-falsifiable, is not logic and, therefore, not science. If a hypothesis cannot be checked by any empirical or theoretical method, it is not – stricto sensu – a hypothesis at all. It is of no interest to science.
Not one of the imagined feedbacks is empirically measurable or theoretically determinable to a sufficient precision by any method. As an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, I have described its strongly net-positive feedback interval as guesswork – and that, in logic and therefore in science, is exactly what it is.
There is a powerful theoretical reason for suspecting that the modellers’ guess that feedbacks triple direct warming is erroneous. The climatic closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity estimate of 3.3[2.0, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling falls on the interval 0.62[0.42, 0.74], though you will find no mention of the crucial concept of loop gain either in the IPCC’s documents or – as far as I can discover – in any of the few papers that discuss the mathematics of temperature feedbacks in the climate object.
Process engineers building electronic circuits, who invented feedback mathematics, tell us any loop gain much above zero is too near the singularity – at a loop gain of 1 – in the feedback-amplification equation. At a gain as high as is implicit in the models’ climate-sensitivity estimates, the geological record would show violent oscillations between extremes of warming and cooling.
Yet for 64 million years the Earth’s surface temperature has fluctuated by only 3%, or 8 Cº, either side of the long-run mean. These fluctuations can give us an ice-planet at one moment and a hothouse Earth the next, but they are altogether too small to be consistent with a feedback loop gain anywhere near as close to the singularity as official estimates imply, for homeostatic conditions prevail.
The atmosphere’s lower bound, the ocean, is a vast heat-sink 1100 times denser than the air. Since 3000 bathythermographs were deployed in 2006 no significant ocean warming has been found.
The upper bound of the atmosphere is outer space, to which any excess heat radiates harmlessly away.
Homeostasis, then, is what we should expect, and it is what we get. Accordingly, the climatic loop gain – far from being as impossibly high as the IPCC’s central estimate of 0.62 – cannot much exceed zero, so the warming at CO2 doubling will scarcely exceed 1 Cº.
It is also worth explaining to our opponents the fundamental reason why models cannot do what the modelers claim for them. The overriding difficulty in attempting to model the climate is that it behaves as a chaotic object. We can never know the values of its millions of defining parameters at any chosen moment to a sufficient precision to permit reliable projection of the bifurcations, or Sandy-like departures from an apparently steady state, that are inherent in all objects that behave chaotically. Therefore, reliable, very-long-term prediction of future climate states is known a priori to be unavailable by any method.
The modelers have tried to overcome this constraint by saying that the models are all we have, so we must make the best of them. But it is self-evidently illogical to use models when reliable, very-long-term weather forecasting is not available by any method.
This fundamental limitation on the reliability of long-term predictions by the models – known as the Lorenz constraint, after the father of computerized or “numerical” weather forecasting, whose 1963 paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow founded chaos theory by examining the behavior of a five-variable mini-model of the climate constructed as a heuristic – tells us something more, and very important, about the climate.
Bifurcations (or, in our opponents’ intellectual baby-talk, “tipping-points”) in the evolution of the climate object over time are not a whit more likely to occur in a rapidly-warming climate than in a climate which – like our own – is not warming at all.
Sandy and Bopha, and the hot summer in the U.S., could not have been caused by global warming, for the blindingly obvious reason that for 16 years there has not been any.
However, there are many variables in the climate object other than CO2 concentration and surface temperature. Even the tiniest perturbation in any one of these millions of parameters is enough, in an object that behaves chaotically, to induce a bifurcation.
Nothing in the mathematics of chaos leads one to conclude that “tipping-points” are any more likely to occur in response to a large change in the value of one of the parameters (such as surface temperature) that describe an object than in response to an infinitesimal change.
The clincher, in most diplomatic discussions, is money. Once we have led our opponents to understand that there is simply no reason to place any credence whatsoever in the exaggerations that are now painfully self-evident in the models, we can turn their attention to climate economics.
Pretend, ad argumentum, that the IPCC’s central estimate of 2.8 Cº warming by 2100 is true, and that Stern was right to say that the GDP cost of failing to prevent 3 Cº warming this century will be around 1.5% of GDP. Then, at the minimum 5% market inter-temporal discount rate, the cost of trying to abate this decade’s predicted warming of 0.15 Cº by topical, typical CO2-mitigation measures as cost-ineffective as, say, Australia’s carbon tax would be 48 times greater than the cost of later adaptation. At a zero discount rate, the cost of action will exceed the cost arising from inaction 36 times over.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2% of Man’s CO2, of which Ms. Gillard aims to cut 5% this decade. So Australia’s scheme, even if it worked, would cutting just 0.06% of global emissions by 2020. In turn, that would cut CO2 concentration from a predicted 410 μatm to 409.988 μatm. It is this infinitesimal change in CO2 concentration, characteristic of all measures intended – however piously – to mitigate future warming that is the chief reason why there is no economic case for spending any money at all on mitigation today.
The tiny drop in CO2 concentration would cut predicted temperature by 0.00006 Cº. This pathetic result would be achieved at a cost of $130 billion, which works out at $2 quadrillion/Cº. Abating the 0.15 Cº warming predicted for this decade would thus cost $317 trillion, or $45,000/head worldwide, or 59% of global GDP.
Mitigation measures inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: measures expensive enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Since the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure. That is a precautionary principle worthy of the name.
When the child born in Bethlehem ~2012 years ago grew up, He told His audience the parable of the prodigal son, who had squandered his inheritance but was nevertheless welcomed by his father with a fatted calf when he returned and said he was sorry.
However vicious and cruel the true-believers in the global-warming fantasy have been to those few of us who have dared publicly to question their credo that has now been so thoroughly discredited by events, we should make sure that the rat-hole we dig for their escape from their lavish folly is as commodious as possible.
If all else fails, we can pray for them as He prayed looking down from the Cross on the world He had created.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 25, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Perhaps Mr. Brozek and I should get together to produce monthly updates to show just how long a period without warming there has now been.
Thank you for your response! I have actually done this on both WUWT and on Dr. Spencer’s site whenever the latest monthly UAH anomaly appears on each site.
Here is the latest:
On all data sets, the different times for a slope that is at least very slightly negative ranges from 8 years and 2 months to 15 years and 11 months.
1. UAH: since October 2004 or 8 years, 2 months (goes to November)
2. GISS: since May 2001 or 11 years, 7 months (goes to November)
3. Combination of 4 global temperatures: since December 2000 or 11 years, 9 months (goes to August)
4. HadCrut3: since May 1997 or 15 years, 7 months (goes to November)
5. Sea surface temperatures: since March 1997 or 15 years, 8 months (goes to October)
6. RSS: since January 1997 or 15 years, 11 months (goes to November) But see * below.
RSS is 192/204 or 94% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.
7. Hadcrut4: since December 2000 or an even 12 years (goes to November.)
See the graph below to show it all.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.33/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001.33/trend/plot/rss/from:1997.0/trend/plot/wti/from:2000.9/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000.9/trend/plot/uah/from:2004.75/trend
*However in view of the significance of the 16 years lately, I would like to elaborate on RSS. The slope for 15 years and 11 months from January 1997 on RSS is -4.1 x 10^-4. But the slope for 16 years and 0 months from December 1996 is +1.3 x 10^-4. So since the magnitude of the negative slope since January 1997 is 3 times than the magnitude of the positive slope since December 1996, I believe I can say that since a quarter of the way through December 1996, in other words from December 8, 1996 to December 7, 2012, the slope is 0. This is 16 years.
Nobody will probably read this far, but rats display a curious feature in underground gold mines-they leave and head for the surface when they sense that things are wrong (such as danger of a cave in). They seemed to sense this before the old miners did, so miners in the old underground gold mines used to pay careful attention to the rats, because if they were heading up hill and towards the surface, it was time to down their tools and do the same thing. The rats also knew the fastest and best way out, so the miners used to just follow the rats.
Alarmists are fond of quoting ‘the canary in the coal mine’, who were sensitive to subtle changes in gases which might indicate trouble, but they don’t seem to quote ‘the rats in the gold mine’, who were sensitive to changes in ground and water conditions which might indicate trouble. Perhaps it is too close to their current situation.
JoBrighton says: “Actually, the NOAA makes a point of noting the last 3 decades on record are the warmest on record (with each subsequent one warmer than the previous one), because that’s indisputable evidence of a warming trend.”
Actually, that is disputable. Raw temperature records do not show any warming.
rgb recommends Richard Cox’s short treatise “The Algebra of Probable Reason” above.
It’s an excellent reference (which he probably gave from memory, the actual title is The Algebra of Probable Inference) and is available as a pdf at http://www.yaroslavvb.com/papers/cox-algebra.pdf .
JoBrighton says:
December 25, 2012 at 5:18 pm
If the next 3 decades on record are increasingly cooler, I’d say that was clear evidence of a cooling trend, but we both know that’s not going to happen.
I would suggest that you view the hour long video:
More WUWT.TV: Interview and presentation with Dr. Sebastian Lüning
He wrote “Die Kalte Sonne” (The cold sun) with Dr. Franz Vahrenholt
Then you may wish to comment on that thread and set Dr. Sebastian Lüning straight.
Group think always digresses to the lowest common denominator….and here we are. First,a civil statement, then a rebuttle, then a counter rebuttle, then the personal attack, followed by the counter rebuttle and consequent digression. ho hum…so goes the marraige of division.
When I see comments about how warm it is and expressed in a manner suggesting I should feel guilty about this because of my lifestyle, I bring up a report stored on my computer and re-read it. This report shows the northern Canadian treeline, or more specifically the extent of northward movement of the Canadian Boreal forest-tundra ecotone. After reading for a few minutes I remember why I do not feel guilty and why I intend to drive my car and heat my home. Others might like to try this exercise.
http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic29-1-38.pdf
The title and author:
Historical Aspects of the Northern Canadian Treeline
HARVEY NICHOLS [no date listed on this site]
It would indeed be a shame if Christopher Monckton and Robert Brown were at odds against each other. While Monckton is sometimes treated with disrespect, he almost always (always?) remains courteous himself. Accordingly, we should likely assume Monckton’s use of “ratduke” instead of “rgbatduke”, derived from Brown’s email address (hardly anonymous), was inadvertent. Further, Brown’s comments on WUWT, on both scientific and philosophic issues, are always well-argued, sincere, and kindly intended.
JoBrighton says: “I refer to the NOAA, which is the world’s leading global climate body as regards data gathering …”
If NOAA is the world’s leader, I would hate to see the world’s non-leaders.
Analysis of GHCN data maintained by NOAA has shown cherry-picking and lemon-picking of Weather station data. Weather stations in colder locations have been dropped from GHCN database in favor of Weather stations in warmer locations. The GHCN adjusted data, which AGW Alarmist use, was adjusted upward over the raw data. The exact opposite of what should happen when correcting for Urban Heat Island effect on Weather stations that were original located outside populated areas. Finally, NOAA GHCN data is not comparing Apples to Apples, in that over past three decades they have drastically reduced the number of Weather stations being recorded. Going from 5,996 in 1970 down to 211 by 2006. Except in 2010, when 367 Weather stations were added in for the record year of 2009. Thus when the GHCN data didn’t fit the AGW Alarmism, Weather stations were Lemon picked to fit the meme.
I am well aware of NOAA’s data records. I am also aware that you have no clue what you are talking about based on your responses to comments above. Please see Werner Brozek’s comment at December 25, 2012 at 6:26 pm above those are the temperature records you are actually talking about. even if you do not realize it.
Larry
Good article by Lord Monckton (though I would add to the article itself a link to data for any who have not seen it before, such as RSS satellite temperature measurements since the 1998 El Nino at
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/trend ).
Taking the opportunity to comment:
The tiny drop in CO2 concentration would cut predicted temperature by 0.00006 Cº. This pathetic result would be achieved at a cost of $130 billion, which works out at $2 quadrillion/Cº.
That is a very illustrative example.*
And the impact of mathematical illiteracy extends to far more than CAGW alarmism alone. For instance, I could give some really good examples with radiation matters…
Lord Monckton wrote:
“Every student of the arts of diplomacy in the civil-service and staff colleges of the U.K. hears much about the rat-hole problem. How does one let the other side off some hook on which they have imprudently impaled themselves, while minimizing their loss of face?
A cornered rat will fight savagely, even against overwhelming odds, because it has no alternative. Give the rat a way out and it will instinctively take it.”
As a diplomatic insight in many circumstances, in many negotiations, that is often a superb observation, a very important and productive strategy no doubt.
But I can’t say I hope for such an out for the CAGW movement.
The best thing for the future of mankind is if they can’t retreat, if they end up continuing to claim warmest-ever temperatures right through much of a transition to a Little Ice Age perhaps later this century, if many core members get increasingly detached from the pulse of the public meanwhile in isolated self-reinforcing groupthink, if the final result is not smooth backpedaling but a severe crash ending in epic absurdities, mocking, and backlash. That is what is needed to indirectly tar a wide range of associated ideologies, political groups, and media outlets who had practically no qualms whatsoever about supporting the dishonesty, who are far too habitually dishonest on many other matters as well.
(As a distant loose analogy, what really most destroyed racism and forced eugenics in the Western world was probably the horror and crash of the Nazi regime, which had a rippling effect for decades afterwards, with few wanting to be associated with them afterwards).
That would not be bad for the credibility of real science and of science pursued in order to increase (not decrease) mankind’s material capabilities, but it would often take away the blinders of uncritically believing anything slapped by one or more anonymous guys with the label “peer reviewed” and of the false belief that environmentalist groups (with 100% of their finances and success directly dependent on selling memes) are generally any more trustworthy than producers in industry (who sell products of physical value, being only partially rather than predominately meme-sellers, and, due to their association with real-world engineering which has to actually work, often at least have people with a habit of mathematical literacy).
“the appreciable decline in solar activity since the Grand Maximum that peaked in 1960”
The picture of solar activity and temperatures can be seen in http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg (click to enlarge). I understand your wording there was just a tiny excerpt of a larger article in context. However, without being misleading to a hypothetical uninformed reader, the earliest one could meaningfully say the Grand Maximum ended (or started to end) would be the 1990s, as solar cycles 21-22 (1976-1996) were quite intense.
After warming up through the mid 20th century which was particularly strong, there was then a downturn in solar activity with cycle 20, which coincided with the global cooling scare. The cooling was quite substantial in the data and articles of the time, such as http://tinyurl.com/cxo4d3l , before history was rewritten much later (to make next to nil temperature downturn in revisionist temperature data, as if the global cooling scare occurred for no reason without a cause!). Then there were high-activity cycles 21 and 22 (1976-1996), during which time the world’s troposphere
warmed up until and through the 1998 El Nino. The 1998 El Nino was an echo effect presumably, releasing into the atmosphere some of the heat previously absorbed by the oceans. There is a partial lag time, a little like a pot of water does not reach maximum temperature the moment the stove’s dial is first on max. From the late 1990s onwards, both solar activity and temperatures have been more declining than not.
Overall, the 20th century had much higher solar activity than the prior century. There are propagandist attempts to hide that, but, to use an example of a metric which can’t readily be fudged, if one understands that shorter cycles tend to be more intense, the average solar cycle length over 1901 to 1996 was 10.5 years, compared to the slower weaker cycles averaging 11.5 years each over the prior century from 1798 to 1901 ( ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/docs/maxmin.new ).
Also see http://s13.postimage.org/ka0rmuwgn/gcrclouds.gif as well as the http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg illustration.
Anyway, the CAGW movement deserves no credit for natural influences stopping the claimed temperature rises. Although the giant IPCC document itself has a few partial admissions of solar influence (quantitatively wrong) mixed in, the real message which the core of the CAGW movement aims to convey to the public is and always has been that solar variation has no effect, conveyed through the traditional propagandist strategy of the Big L** — sheer shameless repetition — famous in other contexts since WWII and before.
The history of the CAGW movement and its spread teaches an enormous amount about the average honesty and intelligence levels of huge segments of the population, of how easily GIGO style over substance tactics allow abusing the mantle of science & “peer review” in media portrayal, and of what kind of people (the worst kind of no-lifers & enviroreligionists) tend to gravitate towards and rise within bodies ranging from Wikipedia to environmental studies institutions to most democratic governments.
Most of those observations are highly negative, but that is reality (not to detract from happier thoughts on this pleasant day on other things).
That does not always necessarily mean there is any better alternative available to present institutional structures. For instance, regarding governments, Churchill’s famous quote on how “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried” can often apply.
But it can be kept in mind. (For example, in principle, a future version of something like Wikipedia could be created in a manner less vulnerable to small teams of ideologues and less susceptible to deletionists rising to power; a system in which admins tend to be people who make thousands of edits leads to problems, since people don’t tend to make that many edits predominately through major constructive additions).
The lessons which can be drawn from the most almost-fully global dishonesty movement in human history must not be swept under the rug. To do so and miss the lessons of history would be no more appropriate than to delete mention of all 20th-century genocides and related regimes from history books. (There has already been too much of that with the first powerful watermelon, the envirocommie Pol Pot).
I hope many save examples of CAGW false predictions, of “97% consensus” claims (based on misleading trick questions including if any temperature rise since the LIA but them not reporting that), and much else.
While there are some hangers-on just motivated by money (an ordinary corruption not quite as potentially destructive as ideology) and many naive casuals just misled, the ideology of the core of the CAGW movement will remain after it: a pseudoreligion with an emotional heart which believes mankind’s energy usage is inherently excessive (as if human energy waste really compared to trillions of terawatts dissipated into empty space by each star), that mankind’s destiny both is and should be to stay on this planet until dying out, and which seeks to shackle mankind, giving feelings of penitence for man’s enviro-sins while transferring the penance to involuntary recipients (like harming hated SUV owners) to leave a personal feeling of self-righteousness. Some believe in CAGW while not being part of that pseudoreligion, like those who do so while wanting massive expansion of nuclear power plants; but those are more likely to be misled casuals as opposed to the core group immune to conventional rational counterargument.
In prior history, at least almost all regimes did not have reducing the energy and material consumption (prosperity) of their subjects as an intentional ideological goal in itself. This new evil, very dangerous if the safeguard of competition between nations was successfully stopped by international regimes, is not to be underestimated as a potential threat, even though there appears a high chance of enough future global cooling to destroy at least the CAGW head of its hydra (and maybe, maybe set part of the rest of it back decades).
* (though even that, by being generous for the sake of argument by using their figures for CO2’s effect, even itself does not fully convey the sheer absurdity, versus such as the extreme lack of CO2-temperature correlation seen in http://tinyurl.com/3d4mrbt for the past 200-11000 years and explained in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/11/does-co2-correlate-with-temperature-history-a-look-at-multiple-timescales-in-the-context-of-the-shakun-et-al-paper/ — and the major relative net harm to
plants from not having as much CO2).
icarus62 says:
December 25, 2012 at 4:42 pm
It’s not obvious to me that a scheme for sequestering billions of tons of CO₂ and/or other greenhouse gases directly from the atmosphere would necessarily be more expensive than, say, moving hundreds of coastal cities inland as sea level rises.
Therefore in a full-blown panic, you’d move “hundreds” of whole cities for a stable x 100+ yr., 3.1 mm SLR/yr.? What cities have been moved so far or even impacted at all? Your words do not align with reality. Your thinking is in the realm of pure fantasy. Stop being victimized by the unhinged verbiage and fear-mongering of the AGW scam!
JoBrighton says:December 25, 2012 at 4:01 pm
“…We’re now 333 months where every single month globally has recorded a temperature above the global 20th Century average. Every single month….”
While not disputing that the world is warming slightly, I’d be interested to see how many of those months recorded a temperature below the global 20th Century average……
JoBrighton says: December 25, 2012 at 5:18 pm
“if the next 3 decades on record are increasingly cooler, I’d say that was clear evidence of a cooling trend”
=======================================
Well, now JoBrighton, let us examine that statement. If you add thirty years of cooling to the last ten years of cooling, you will have a forty year cooling trend. Forty years of cooling would be the longest trend on record and you say that would be “evidence” of cooling? You are jesting, I think.
As far as quoting Jane Lubchenco, she is a political appointee and is known here and elsewhere as Jane Lysenko. The data sources that she cites show the opposite of what she claims, i.e., the last sixteen years show no warming by any index. If you had any sense, you would not quote such rubbish. If you had any sense.
ocker says: December 25, 2012 at 5:12 pm
“…There is a Sun Tzu quote along the lines of (paraphrase), “always leave your enemy a line of retreat, otherwise you will have to massacre everyone of your enemy”….”
Ah. Sorry; outdated philosophy. In those days it was all manual labour, arm strength, swords and spears, etc.
Now that the process is fully mechanized and largely automated that policy can safely be changed.
Thank you Lord M, for that gracious Christmas message. I agree with you as well. When I became aware of the lack of evidence behind the global warming I’d been scared of, I was at first, disbelieving, then angry, then determined to discover the “truth” of the issue. As many posters here have said before me, the truth is out there, but we don’t have it all here yet! I understand where people like Icarus are coming from. From their viewpoint, this is a terrible plague upon us and we need to do something NOW! How can you just stand there and say we don’t know enough?
Even poor old Icarus is forced to paint his evidence in the most impressive way to make the point. Checking out his posts in sodahead which seem to inform him for his comments here.
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/global-warming-proceeding-as-fast-as-predicted-global-sea-level-rise-faster-than-predicted/question-3362387/
Foster and Rahmstof results which attempts to adjust for ENSO rather than one of the standard temperature records. Sea level graphs that stop before 2010 when the sea levels dropped with the La Nina. and the seriously dodgy 0-2000m heat content numbers (hint: check the graph with error bars).
People like Icarus need a welcome to come out of the cold. They need to be able to look at all the data in the WUWT Reference pages, check the sources themselves rather than just taking the food they’re given by the likes of Skeptical Science and desmogblog.
If Icarus had a look at the reference pages here, he could find unbiased information to choose from, he could see that the temperatures have been lower these last few years, that sea level are decelerating if anything. But while they think we’re evil, and we think they’re evil it won’t happen. We are all human, we all care for the planet and our continued life on it.
Merry Christmas and thank you to the Lord M, Anthony, and all contributors and mods. Merry Christmas to all, including Icarus.
I hear them gentle voices calling….
poor old Jo!
I don’t think they will give up easily and there is no reputation-saving out that they will take.
There are at least 20,000 scientists and 500 million followers who have staked their personal reputations and inner belief system on this theory. $100 billion was spent on Climate Change by the top ten economies in 2011. The 20,000 scientists probably directly received up to $3 billion of these funds.
It is an industry, (egotistical) reputations are on the line and 500 million followers is bigger than almost all religions.
But let’s say temperatures stay flat or even go down for the next 10 years. They will have to reinvent another “aerosols” explanation or come up with some other excuse or re-write all the records once again.
Which is more likely – give up or reinvent.
It takes a long, long time to stamp-out a movement. Terrorist organizations, gangs, cults, any movement does not just go away. A concerted effort over decades is usually required. This is just the way it goes in human history.
Jo Brighton,
I notice that you have ignored Lord Monckton’s dismantling of your original premise that statistically insignificant is somehow significant, and instead keep on repeating the same talking points. There is a description for this mindset: confirmation bias.
[Bolding mine – _Jim]
Geoff, indeed, and I will spot you that more and more of this takes place today on any given internet forum, whether it’s regarding banking/the origin of banking (where con-spiracy theories abound), business and the origins of some of the larger companies (more tall tales of so-called robber-barons when in actuality they economized production through larger-scale operations), or something as seeming innocent as an ‘End of the World’ prediction (according to ‘interpretations’ of a Mayan calendar.)
Well, let’s face it, all of this, on many, many fronts is as Walter E, Williams kinda puts it, vis-a-vis:
We’ve got to keep “… pushing back the frontiers of ignorance …” in order to survive as a civilization rather than making our way back into the caves, believing in a cadre of behind-the-scenes and all-powerful bogey-men, believing ourselves to be utterly helpless …
.
But, Dirk, the thermal energy spectra from that warm ground is a curve, not a discrete spectral line at 10 um … so a correct ‘tally’ of total energy would be integration under the entire Planck curve … of course, you knew that <grin> …
.
Bill Illis says: December 25, 2012 at 8:02 pm
“…There are at least 20,000 scientists and 500 million followers who have staked their personal reputations and inner belief system on this theory. $100 billion was spent on Climate Change by the top ten economies in 2011. The 20,000 scientists probably directly received up to $3 billion of these funds….”
Bill, great data – I have been looking for a summary of this whenever anyone talks about “evil oil funding”. Do you have any citations for us? This is pretty powerful stuff.
Geoff Sherrington says: December 25, 2012 at 4:17 am
“…. cut and paste stolen wisdom into a narrative for the ordinary man and woman.It matters little if opinion is right or wrong, because people become comfortable following a few reporters whose opinions they come to value….”
Very true words. The message is decided first. The facts are then selected and highlighted to sell the concept.
Marketing at its finest.
We’re going to have a bigger problem than this soon everyone. The world shall be Bankrupted by the stupid policies of nearly all governments worldwide! In Australia for instance, between ’96 and 2007 Mr Howard paid off all government debt he inherited from the scumbags before him, got the budget back into Surplus and made a Future fund with, I think, ~$50 billion in it. From there, the Labor party got into Power and, as all Socialists do, they spent the F.F, loosened off the taxes and made some of their pet projects and now, just 5 years later, we have Budget Deficits and Debts of $250 billion!!! Do they think of fixing it, NO they never will. Generally, Socialist-type Guv’s spend more than they tax because they do it from some need to spend our taxes on us so that we’ll re-elect them and to Hell with the Banks and other Countries (if possible) who lend to us to keep the gravy train rolling. 2013 will be very interesting and painful for a lot of investors. It’s not Outlook, it’s Lookout. (old microsoft joke). Get into Gold and Silver People!! HFTC.
JoBrighton says:
December 25, 2012 at 4:01 pm
According to the NOAA, the top 3 hottest decades in the last 16 have been the last 3.
But the slope of the temperature change was no greater for a 30 year period 70 years ago than now. So where does CO2 fit into any of this?
See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1912/to:1942/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1983/to:2013/trend