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.
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One Cosmic Custard Pie Coming up!
(Courtesy of the Pranksters on Olympus)
icarus62 says:
December 26, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Ok. Not bad for a start.
Now:
a) Plant more.
b) Protect your trees from ever being used for firewood or any other use, and from getting eaten by fungi. Remember that the big coal deposits developed before fungi found a way to crack the lignin.
Oh, BTW, why was there never a thermal runaway in the history of the Earth?
John West says: @ur momisugly December 25, 2012 at 11:28 pm
…..If only we could somehow familiarize the general public with carbon….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I would love to have several leading skeptics challenge the leading CAGW catastorphists as Petr Beckmann challenged the nuclear phobes (He would eat a gram of plutonium if they ate a gram of caffeine)
The challenge would be skeptics would spend a day in a sealed room at 2000ppm CO2 while catastrophists stayed in a sealed room with a CO2 absorbent ( Sodalime) at 0.0 ppm CO2. (Ambulance at the ready for the catastrophists)
[snip]
LazyTeenager says: @ur momisugly December 25, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Rather apt since Christopher is encouraging people to squander their inheritance….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
ROTFLMAO, that is rich coming from someone who wants to steal the inheritance of western culture from the ENTIRE WORLD!
No amount of statistical manipulation and averaging can remove SYSTEMATIC error. Only the RANDOM error portion can be so removed. So a systematic error of, say, 1/2 C from “adjusting” badly will NEVER be removed. A systematic error from treating a bogus warming via paint aging on Stevenson screens as a ‘cooling bias’ in the MMTS that replaced them can never be removed by statistical averaging of the means.
That you put any faith at all in 1/10 Celsius data out of whole degree F data (and the early data were collected in F, especially in the USA, in whole degrees) demonstrates a profound failure of understanding what can actually be done with the original data while remaining honest to science and accuracy.
Here’s what you must do to achieve that 1/10 C precision: prove that there is exactly zero systematic error in all the data collected. As it is trivially demonstrated that the stuff is chock full of systematic errors, that is an impossible task.
No, the temperature records are “warming”. We get to watch it every couple of years as they cool the past data…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/v1vsv3/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/ghcn-v1-vs-v3-special-alignments/
This graph is especially fun:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/ghcn-v1-vs-v3-1990-all-data-alignment.png
Remember, this is supposedly the same data set. Just different ages. It is aligned on the same ‘end date’ so this is NOT an effect from the newer data in V3, this is just how the old data was made more, um, “trendy”…
So the OTHER thing you must do to say reality is warming, is you must prove it is not just an artifact of such “data manipulation games’…
(BTW, I’m going to go after that “the earth is warming” tag line every time I see it. You might want to consider how much of a platform you wish to offer me…)
@DIrkH:
Yup! Or even just bamboo. It sucks out more CO2 than in all the air above it. That’s WHY we ended up at near starvation levels of CO2 for plants.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/got-wood/
Even a single corn stalk sucks dry the square foot above it.
Frankly, given that phone books in a dry landfill don’t decay, we could all just go back to giant paper phone books, each year to be landfilled, and do it to “save the planet”….
@icarus62:
You’ve got the basic facts wrong. Antarctic ice is INCREASING, not decreasing. Sea level rise has stagnated too. It certainly isn’t accelerating (well, other than if you call decelerating a negative acceleration). As the ocean temps at the arctic have about an 18 year lag from the equator, the peak from 1998 will be reflected there about 2016, then it’s ever more frozen ever faster for the next 18 years. (Perhaps even sooner, given what freeze rates are doing this year).
Could you please just do some basic “fact checks” before spouting that kind of crud? There’s a “Sea Ice” page on the right with the (government supplied) graphs of just about anything you need. It really makes you look, um, “inexperienced” when you can’t even get clarity on the basics.
OH, and right NOW what I have is an open pit BBQ: It smokes plenty. In the future I’m going to build a ‘rocket stove’ but while I have the parts, I’ve not built it yet. Yes, they make LESS smoke, but if you think burning wood sticks in a pipe makes no smoke, well, I suggest some quality time with a pile of sticks and a, pipe… Especially at first ignition and at shutdown they can be mighty smoky. Oh, and when the chicken fat drips down the pipe from the grill too…. (Of course, for the best smoke, I have to fire up the smoker as it is designed to make smoke. Bought it as part of the “abandon electricity” motivation too. Works really well… Smoke, it’s what’s for dinner 😉
Oh, and do see the “got wood” posting to see just how completely wrong you are about needing an un-invented sequestration technology. Eucalyptus trees can suck down about 50 tons / acre wet, or about 25 tons / acre dry. Now convert that to CO2 and bury it in an old coal mine. (Or just build log houses out of it and in 100 years decide if it really needs the burying.) Here’s a hint for you: The CO2 over a patch of dirt is far far less than the mass of the air. The WOOD over a patch of dirt, is far far heavier than the mass of the air in total.
See if you can do the math. BTW, algae can grow at 10 x that rate. They are limited by the rate at which CO2 can be sucked into their pond… they rapidly deplete the CO2 available in the air and it helps to bubble new air into them… I can’t imagine a more efficient CO2 scrubber. Solar powered too…
So please: Are you a high school kid, new to all this? Fresh recruit to Greenpeace with a Social Studies major at the local college? Perhaps you ought to try taking an agronomy class or even a history class… Anything would help your ‘game’, which, as it stands, is mostly parroting things that are demonstrably false, and being too out of touch to realize it. It just doesn’t look good for your side.
E.M.Smith says:
December 26, 2012 at 12:18 pm
@ur momisuglyGail Combs:
Good points…
BTW, the result will not be as the Green Fanatics expect.
… The future is waiting for you now… and it looks a lot like the 1800s…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It certainly does. The EU is talking about cutting CO2 by 80% without nuclear that puts us back to ~ 1700’s. I did the analysis a while back. People do not realize just how much energy was used in the 1800’s
Just for starters
The average for the USA is 335.9 million BTUs per person. http://www.nuicc.info/?page_id=1467
(Total population: 246,081,000)
In 1949, U.S. energy use per person stood at 215 million Btu. http://epb.lbl.gov
The U.S. in 1800 had a per-capita energy consumption of about 90 million Btu. http://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2010/11/12-PP-Nov2010.pdf
(Total population: 5,308,483)
If the USA reduces its energy consumption by 80% it equals 45.18 million Btu. per person IF THE POPULATION WAS THE SAME. And in 1840 Farmers made up 69% of labor force
I doubt John Brookes, Icarus, Mike, LazyTeenager or JoBrighton would really enjoy following the north end of a south facing mule while trying to keep a plow digging in and the &*#(@ur momisugly% mule moving in a straight line. It is the reason a friend of mine got his Phd. That and the wood stove and outhouse in good ole West Virginee.
Alexandriu Doru says:
December 26, 2012 at 12:23 pm
Werner Brozek says:
“There is zero trend on GISS temperatures if you start on 2001.33″
Yes, but if you start only 2 years earlier, in1999 , you get 1.2celsius /century.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/gistemp/from:1999/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001.33/trend
This shows that your approach is not robust….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are missing the point.
NOAA stated:
And Santer, Mears, Doutriaux, Caldwell, Gleckler, Wigley, S. Solomon, Gillett, Ivanova, Karl, Lanzante, Meehl, Stott, Taylor, Thorne, Wehner,and Wentz stated:
So the determination of what will show CAGW to be disproved was set by NOAA and the named Climate Scientists and not by skeptics.
Don’t blame us for picking the interval since we did not.
Gail Combs:
With partial accuracy you state that “the determination of what will show CAGW to be disproved was set by NOAA and the named Climate Scientists and not by skeptics” but those “scientists” are pseudo-scientists and CAGW is a pseudo-scientific theory. Should we place pseudo-scientists in charge of the determination of whether a pseudo-scientific theory is falsified by the evidence when this theory is insusceptible to falsification under the pseudo-scientific methodology of the study that has been designed by the pseudo-scientists? Obviously not.
A far more pertinent question is how we sceptics give ourselves a way out. Yes, we were and are right, but the reality is that no religion ever ended because someone proved it was wrong. So, how do we extract ourselves from a fight we have clearly won … when the other side refuses to give up?
How can we do better than being right? How can going on and on and on highlighting the same basic facts … global warming is a load of codswallop … achieve anything?
There will always be people who believe in flying saucers in holistic medicine, that talking to flowers makes them grow and in global warming. It cannot be our role in life to stop idiots being idiots! And yes … many of those idiots who believe in global warming are and will continue to be academics. It’s a religion .., you can’t stop religion by giving them the facts. No Christian ever stopped being a Christian by pointing out that you can’t walk on water!
“How can we do better than being right? How can going on and on and on highlighting the same basic facts … global warming is a load of codswallop … achieve anything?”
We just chalk up the small victories over those parts of the cargo cult which affect us directly; much the same as we would do with any other religion that sought to impose itself upon us.
Farmerbraun is very proud of his new certificate:
CONFIRMATION: Emission Trading Scheme Participant Deregistration
20 December 2012
Dear**********,
Deregistration as a participant from the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) under the Climate Change Response Act 2002
Thank you for confirming that ******* Limited will satisfy the exemption criteria for dairy processing of milk or colostrum (introduced by the recent amendments to the Climate Change Response Act 2002). As such, the Environmental Protection Authority notifies you that they have been deregistered as a participant from the ETS for the activity of dairy processing of milk or colostrum.
These are the details that have been removed from the participant register:
Participant name
*******
Sector
Schedule 3 – Subpart 3 of Part 5 Agriculture
Activity description
Dairy processing of milk or colostrum
The holding account NZ-9240 in the NZEUR will remain open. If you wish to close this account or have any questions, please call 0800 CLIMATE (0800 254 628) within New Zealand, or +64 3 962 6257 internationally.
If the account holder’s circumstances change and they no longer meet the exemption criteria attached in any calendar year, they will need to register again as a participant in the ETS.
On behalf of the Registrar
New Zealand Emission Unit Register
rgbatduke said:
“We cannot assign a meaningful value to an “expected” temperature ten years, twenty years, fifty years, or a hundred years into the future, regardless of the claims of the modelers. Those models cannot explain the variability observed over the last 2000 years..”
Well really you should not make predictions then if you have nothing to base them on:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/03/on-certainty-truth-is-the-daughter-of-time/#comment-1171207
p.s. Christ, according to Jewish records was born close to the third conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter that year, which occurred ~5th December 7 BC (that’s with no zero year).
Ulric Lyons,
This may interest you:
http://www.american.com/archive/2012/december/the-politically-correct-calendar
@ur momisugly E.M. Smith
You make some excellent points on climate. I think this part especially bears repeating: “Millankovich no longer has to carry the whole burden. Now he just “sets the table” for what is able to happen; then ocean changes / oscillations “serve the meal” when the timing is right.”
That dynamic heat sink that is the ocean is a huge wildcard in the grand scheme of climate.
OT: You’ve won a box of cigars, on a technicallity. After I hit post I noticed I forgot to put (human) after language, since I had put (by man) after creation that was absolutely necessary. Yes, language evolved but it was also created by each species that uses it. The same relationship arises for any species that uses a language of sorts like whales, dogs, cats, birds, etc. The challenge I meant is to separate the creation of any particular species’ language from being created by that species and the languages’ evolution. Note that the intelligence of the species correlates to the rate of change of its language. The broader point being that if one can’t separate creation from evolution of language then perhaps it’s not mutually exclusive that something be a product of either evolution or creation but may be the result of both.
I say the reason we are infested with rats is the societies we see as vibrant and strong are actually gangrenous wrecks, stumbling their last few steps before the final collapse. It is we, the decent, productive people of the world, who need the ratholes – then, with their source of food removed, let the starving rats feast on each other.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/climategate/id386480628
Gail Combs says:
December 26, 2012 at 5:41 pm
“I doubt John Brookes, Icarus, Mike, LazyTeenager or JoBrighton would really enjoy following the north end of a south facing mule [..]”
Beautifully phrased! Thanks, Gail!
john west-
animals perform semiotics, not language.
organs have evolved for this purpose- the tail of the peacock, for example- signifies things to other peacocks but it is not language.
language is composed of words. the distinguishing characteristic of a word is that it has a definition.
therein lies the distinction.
the great virtue of language is that it can be used to perform logic – which, indeed, has adaptive significance only to the human for whom reason is his means of survival.
Chiefio is correct that animals communicate with signs but they do not use words and therefore not language. Your box of cigars has not been won yet.
The pseudonymous “Ratduke” gets picky about the date of birth of the Lord of Life, but – as I had already pointed out – I am no expert on that. He worries that the Gospels are “not reliable witnesses”: yet the considerable quantity of independent, verifying documentation from other sources gives us an excellent idea of the stunning power of what Anglican theologians splendidly call the “Christ-Event”. Ratduke may like to read “Jesus, an Experiment in Christology” by Father Schillebeeckx for further details of what can be discerned of His life, death, resurrection and electrifying effect on the known world without relying upon any religious texts at all.
It isn’t a “pseudonym” — it is protection of my email address which is already one of the most hammered ones on the planet because (if you google up rgb at phy dot duke dot edu) I have a rather extensive and visible network presence that spam scrapers have been mining for years. Even with spamassassin and blacklisting, I get several hundred email messages a day, with a noise to signal level of roughly ten to one. rgbatduke is sufficient that you can find me easily and directly while not openly broadcasting my address to the spambot network, even though this is a barn door left open decades ago and unlikely to shut anytime soon on its own. And yes, the million or so hits on “rgb duke” are almost entirely me. I’m up to a respectable 81,000 hits on “rgb wuwt” as well at this point — not bad given that I hardly ever top post (although a number of my replies in thread have been promoted to top posts).
But either way, if you are having difficulty discerning my identity, it is “Robert G. Brown”, which is rather a lot to type as a user id, and with a last name as undistinguished as “Brown”, things like rbrown, in addition to usually being taken, are singularly uninformative. As you can see from my personal website (which is on track to get 11 million hits this year) I am a physicist, although I am also an entrepreneur with a patent pending on the application of Bayesian methods to permit the building of useful predictive models across databases with field overlap and external e.g. privacy constraints. I am something of an expert in beowulf-style parallel computing, teach or have taught physics at all levels from intro undergrad through graduate level E&M and Quantum, teach independent study courses in statistics and programming to selected students, am the primary author of the world’s only completely open source random number generator tester (and hence know more than a bit about both randomness and hypothesis testing). I write novels and poetry and am working on a book on the philosophical basis of knowledge, an early draft of which is very popular on my website (Axioms). I was a major in both physics and philosophy as an undergraduate (and actually completed enough upper level math that it would have counted as a major if I hadn’t skipped all of the required courses in between the two intro courses I took initially and the graduate level courses I took scattered across both undergrad and graduate school).
Climate “science” is more of a hobby than a profession for me — I have no dog in any race, and no current grant support of any kind. On WUWT, I tend to police the physics and to a lesser extent the statistical validity of the discussion, probably hammering skeptical ignoramuses slightly more often than I hammer warmists (probably because WUWT has a disproportionate sampling of the former compared to the latter). Based on what I’ve been able to learn so far, the best that can be said for climate science is that it is in its infancy and that it has been taken over completely by political and economic interests that almost completely obscure the science that is known to some extent. Indeed, my analysis of the science is rather congruent to yours — a well-founded and expected GHE from CO_2 only on the order of a degree kelvin ignoring all feedbacks, that could be anywhere from nearly completely cancelled to just about doubled by feedbacks, but IMO the current data makes greater than doubling (to as much as 2 to 2.4 kelvin) very unlikely.
It is almost certainly a mistake to assert that “there is no such thing as the GHE” or to make egregious claims for how small a role the GHE (or as one of my friends who actually does climate science puts it, the total “atmospheric warming effect” since components of the atmosphere warm, cool, and are neutral in a dazzling nonlinear coupled system of heat absorption, distribution and radiation) plays in making the planet habitable, at the same time that the reliable satellite record over the last 33 years at this point can fairly definitely rule out a climate sensitivity of three to five.
This by way of introduction. I’m pleased to meet you.
Regarding my being “anti-Christian” — I am a physicist. The only way to honestly be a Christian and a physicist is — well, there isn’t one. So yes, you would have to view me as being an apostatic ex-Christian. It isn’t particularly easy to be a scientist and honestly be religious at all, certainly not religious in any of the scriptural antique mythologies. I grew up in India. I would assume that you reject Hindu mythology, or Pagan mythology, or Norse mythology, without thinking about it for more than a second. They are, after all, all openly absurd, making non-falsifiable and contradictory claims for the origins of the Universe, the nature of God, a variety of “historical” events in which the hand of God (or hands of Gods) can be seen, and put forth as God-given truth ethical systems that are openly wicked and evil in countless places. You are — to the extent that you are a good Christian — atheistic with regard to those religions because you were not brainwashed into accepting them when you were too young to be able to think critically and of course it is easy to find reasons to reject them as plausible truth otherwise.
I am simply atheistic with respect to one more religion than you are.
Do not imagine for a moment that my active disbelief in Christianity or the entire Judeo-Christian-Moslem spectrum of Abrahamic faiths is ill-educated or casual. I have read the entire Bible, critically cover to cover not once, but many times at this point. I have similarly read the Q’uran cover to cover many times at this point. Some chapters/books/suras weren’t worthy of more than a skim; others I’ve read repeatedly. I have also read some very good historical analyses of the Bible — I would strongly suggest that you read (for example) Misquoting Jesus or any of Bart Ehrman’s other works. I think that they leave one with absolutely no way to defend any part of the New Testament as being a reliable witness to first century events. any more than the Old Testament (apparently accepted as “true” by Jesus, major fail for preternatural knowledge) is a reliable account of events prior to the sixth century BCE or the origins of the Universe.
The Old Testament, of course, fails from the first chapter on. There isn’t one word in the Book of Genesis that one can reasonably believe is true. There is almost certainly not a single word of Exodus that is true and describes actual events or people — at least there is absolutely no external corroboratory evidence that anything in Exodus actually took place, and the entire book is impossibly inconsistent in its dating and geneologies. Indeed, a sober study of the Old Testament such as the one discussed here:
http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320Hist&Civ/chapters/11OT.htm
reveals that the Old Testament itself is nothing like original scripture — it is a collage of fragments of a handful of texts that survived (quite possibly survived only in the memories and a short-term oral tradition within the priesthood) the first fall of the Temple in the sixth century BCE, stitched together by not one but several distinct and stylistically identifiable people in a series of rewrites before being copied and recopied in manuscript for hundreds of years before the oldest surviving fragments of any actual manuscript were written. There is the same substantial “drift” visible in the fragments of manuscript copies of copies of copies of manuscripts that have survived over centuries until the earliest complete intact manuscripts of the Old or New Testaments that we have today, and more drift still up to to the modern versions, generously laced with translation errors as the original languages in which these texts were written did not themselves survive the centuries.
The Pentateuch, the part of the Old Testament that for all practical purposes defines Judaism, is most definitely such a collage. I wrote an entire novel, The Book of Lilith, that addresses a 12th century midrash intended to explain one of the many contradictions in Genesis that occur as a result of the crudeness of the stitching and its back reference to earlier Sumerian and Mesopotamian mythologies. No God Incarnate with perfect knowledge could possibly take Genesis seriously and tell their followers to believe it (unless they were a liar with perfect knowledge, of course, or unless they were misquoted in the surviving manuscripts, both of which are de facto evidence against deity). You do not take Genesis seriously, not if you accept the network of physical science and observation that lay out the most probable natural history from the Big Bang through the birth of the Sun, formation of the Solar System, and evolution of life on Earth, a scientific narrative that is crucial to the objective analysis of the claims of current climate science among many other things.
Genesis describes a flat Earth, bounded above by a solid firmament hung with stars that can fall, floating on an ocean that preceded light itself in a stated order of creation that has flowering plants and bees preceding the Sun. It describes an absolutely absurd creation of humans — inconsistently and twice — leading to an “original sin”, temptation, and fall from grace that never happened. It is at best a metaphor — but if it is a metaphor, is it a good metaphor or a rather evil one?
Original sin portrays mankind as fallen from grace and hence in need of salvation, corrupted by willful acts on the part of our remote ancestors being punished by a Jealous and Angry God who thinks nothing of punishing people for generations for some real or imagined slight. Without original sin, our need for “salvation” vanishes, although of course our need to use reason and observation to improve our knowledge of the world and the empirical engineering of a functional social morality does not.
Evolution, in contrast portrays humanity as rising up from a series of inferior intellectual and physical forms, an animal among animals. Our lack of a perfect intrinsic moral sense is not in any conceivable sense our “fault” if evolution is correct, because our physical evolution has limited our moral co-evolution — we are not finished beings, “creation” is not done with us and never will be. Our moral evolution is itself memetic and limited by insight and experience and our lack of sound systems of semantics and reason. Only as they co-evolve with our languages, our mathematics, and our brains does our knowledge and morality improve. Humans don’t require a deliverer to intercede with a pissed-off God on our behalf if we evolved — not unless the God in question is even more insane than the Judeo-Christian-Muslim God — although they can always use more genius, more good ideas, more inspiration, more poetry, more capable brains, more secure and peaceful existence in which to pursue happiness as best they can in the brief period we all have before we die and our brains cease to function.
Whence “original sin” in this scenario? Whence sin in this scenario, where we fundamentally lack anything like a perfect ethos (something that in all probability has no objective existence in the first place, being a sociological semantic construct that is still co-evolving with our society, not a “God given” set of rules guaranteed by fiat to be the one perfect and eternal ruleset? According to the Bible we are cast down sinners needing salvation and it is All Our Fault, so God is justified in creating a Universe filled with pain and terminated by an absurd hell for unbelievers. According to nature, there is no evidence for the existence of a God, we are a species in the process of evolving both genetically and memetically up, into a state with less pain and suffering to the precise extent that we use our reason to ameliorate both (because nature, like Honey Badger, just don’t care). In an indifferent Universe, an impersonal God (at best) helps those that help themselves.
The rest of the Pentateuch gives one little reason to think that it contains any sort of God-given morality. By modern moral standards, the God-given rules are cruel, unethical, absurd, inconsistent, and often openly evil. The Old Testament endorses the treatment of one half of the human race as chattel at all times (sorry, ladies), the beating of slaves almost to death because they are your property, marriage by rape (plus a payment of fifty shekels to the father of the rapee, to compensate him for the lost labor of his chattel, the daughter), the enslavement of anyone you can get away with who isn’t Hebrew. It contains horror stories of genocidal femicidal infanticidal murder and open robbery and rape that at a level completely consistent with Hitler’s acts of genocide and robbery in World War II — carried out by Moses (see Numbers 31, for example, and sadly not even the only example). It describes the wholesale ritual slaughter of animals, the splattering of their blood on a hideous altar constructed for that purpose, and the burning of the animal remains, or the even more absurd “wave offerings” where the animal would be dismembered and its parts waved vaguely at the sky (where God lurked beyond the firmament overhead in this non-spherical world) to please God. How very, very bizarre, wouldn’t you say? It describes the causes of disease as being pretty much pissing God off, and the cure for disease as being the making of the aforementioned wholesale offerings and praying a lot.
It describes a world-spanning flood in page-spanning detail in which a rain that lasted forty days and forty nights covered the Earth to the top of the highest mountain (that would be roughly 9000 meters of rain in that period, or a rain of 5+ inches every minute on every square meter of the planet for the entire period) while all of the world’s species that would die in such an event — which is nearly all of them, millions of them in the ocean and on the land — were preserved in a wooden boat the size of a Wal-Mart ventilated through a single window less than one square meter in area (plus, presumably, a door, although no boat ever built would stay afloat in an inch of rain every ten to twelve seconds if there were any openings).
Nobody rational and educated could take the slightest bit of this seriously — unless they were taught to believe it without question before they were ever taught reason or fact otherwise.
But Jesus (apparently) did take it seriously. Repeatedly. He (reportedly) believed this nonsense. He references the flood and Noah as a real event and real person. He is supposed to have hung out on the mountaintop with Moses during the transfiguration. Right. Why not hang out with Hitler while he was at it? Moses didn’t bother with “abortion”, he just killed all the Midianite women (pregnant or not) and children, except for the rapable and enslavable virgin young girls, whom he gave to his soldiers as playtoys. Good message to the world, peace on Earth and all that, let me endorse a man who by modern standards would be a war criminal as a “saint” or “patriarch” beloved of God.
If, of course, you take the Gospels seriously, which you shouldn’t. If you read about their history, you quickly realize that we really don’t know what they originally said as all that we have are copies of copies of copies and there are more differences between these copies than there are words in the New Testament itself. If you subject then to a proper analysis of authorship along the way, you separate out the synoptics from John, and source the synoptics back to Mark (plus perhaps “Q” plus perhaps other verbal traditions) and date Mark to maybe 70-80 CE (no earlier than the fall of the temple) and Matthew and Luke to early second century.
Finally, you assert in your reply to me that there is all sort of “contemporary” evidence outside of Biblical and Church sources for the existence of Jesus. There is not. There is none.
The only first century non-biblical reference to Jesus is a single line in Josephus, written around 90-95 CE if it is authentic and not a second or third century insertion as seems rather likely to be the case from the way Josephus, a devout Jew reporting on the Jewish Rebellion, refers to him. The oldest credit-card sized fragment of one of the Gospels (from John) is second century. The oldest complete copies of some of the books of the New Testament come from the beginning of the third century. The oldest complete New Testament is fourth century. There are a handful of references to Christians existing by the second century, but the existence of Christians (especially Christians a hundred years later) by no means proves (or is particularly strong evidence for, under the circumstances) the existence of a human corresponding to Christ, nor does it prove that human to have been divine even if they did in fact exist.
We have no contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus, not Biblical, not non-Biblical. None of the evidence we have would be admitted in a court of law; it is hearsay, not eyewitness, it is copies of copies of accounts with no reliable chain of evidence in between, not the accounts themselves. The preponderance of evidence is — perhaps — enough to support the assertion that it is “likely” that there is a historical human that corresponded to Jesus, that we know nothing whatsoever if this person’s origins, we haven’t the foggiest clue as to where he went, what he did, and when he did it. The Gospels themselves do not even particularly well agree here, in spite of two of them being derived from one of them. Our knowledge is entirely hearsay, and could as easily be a synthesis of legends and myths drawn from many contemporary apocalyptic preachers of the era with no single individual that can be identified as “Jesus”. This is made rather more likely by the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels that were long suppressed and which shatter the illusion of a uniform first and second century set of “authentically Christian” beliefs.
To some extent this is also made more likely by the very name Jesus, the Latin version of Yeshua, which means “Deliverer”. Christ, of course, is Greek for Messiah, which is Hebrew for Anointed, where for centuries Jews had used the term Messiah to refer to their expected (anointed) deliverer. So Jesus Christ the Messiah is redundant, and stands for Deliverer, the anointed deliverer anointed deliverer. Is this a name or assertion? I think there is little doubt that it is the latter. All that is certain is that Jesus was never called Emmanuel, and that Isaiah did not predict that a messiah named Emmanuel would be born of a virgin (as asserted by a mistranslation of Matthew) which of course never happened so that’s all right. (What Isaiah did predict in the chapter in question is actually a bit humorous, the more so when his one explicit prediction was explicitly falsified in Chronicles).
In skeptical discussions of Climate Science, we often refer to individuals who “believe” in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming as holding a religious belief, one that ignores evidence and refuses to listen to any arguments that contradict the accepted conclusion that it is all true, that human have ruined/are ruining the Earth with carbon dioxide. This is not said in a good way, as if religious belief is a good thing — it is said because religious belief is blind in critical ways, religious belief is founded upon an ongoing state of cognitive dissonance that makes up any story necessary to avoid looking at contrary evidence or the suggestion that perhaps our state of ignorance is high enough that we still just don’t know.
A scientific, objective analysis of the evidence associated with Christianity begins with Bayes theorem, and one of my favorite quotations of pure, scientific Bayesian reasoning applied to God and miracles comes from Thomas Paine:
“Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course. But we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time. It is therefore at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.”
In other words, if we use our certain knowledge that people lie all the time when it suits them (and are often mistaken in what they assert even when they are not deliberately lying) as a Bayesian prior, that prior should have the effect of substantially reducing our willingness to believe anything we are told, let alone a reported “miracle” that violates natural laws that we rather firmly believe in. This is the sort of everyday common sense that prevents people from buying the Brooklyn Bridge from a stranger, sending people from Nigeria who claim to want to send you millions of nearly-legal dollars your personal information and the account numbers of your bank accounts, or taking it for granted that just because Al Gore (or any other contemporary reporter of “climate events”) says that the number and violence of storms has increased in recent years that is necessarily the case that they have.
E. T. Jaynes makes almost precisely the same argument in his discussion of actual Bayesian reasoning in both science and everyday life in Probability Theory, the Logic of Science, a book I heartily recommend (especially to a Popperite). When we hear contemporary rumors of somebody that has “come back from the dead” or “healed someone of blindness by spitting into some mud and rubbing it into that person’s eyes” we don’t think twice about it — we reject this sort of thing as almost certainly false. We only seem to accept this sort of thing when it is reported in authoritative divinely inspired religious texts, as we learn to suspend our common sense when we examine such things critically, at least in the case of the faith we were raised in.
In the everyday/contemporary case we do so because we have a vast store of prior knowledge concerning actual biology and death — we understand things like the second law of thermodynamics, which would have to overwhelmingly “go out of its course” in order for the irreversible biological damage that accompanies actual death to be reversed.
We have never seen the second law of thermodynamics be violated in a macroscopic way, and we understand why we will — almost certainly — never observe such a violation. You are more likely to be the sole winner of the Powerball lottery ten times in a row than observe a macroscopic violation of the second law. At least in the former case one can actually compute the (small) probability and write it down.
Similarly, we understand something of the actual causes of real blindness, and know that rubbing spit and mud into a blind person’s eyes might be some sort of scam or cruel joke but that it is far more likely to cause blindness than cure it, given the fact that the human mouth is the dirtiest part of the human body from a bacteriological point of view and the filthy roadside dirt of animal rich, bathroom poor first century Palestine was very likely some of the dirtiest mud one could have utilized for the purpose as well. We know that madness is not caused by devils, and we know that one cannot cast the devils out of a person and into a herd of pigs. This sort of thing is all cheap magic, the stagecraft of a scam artist creating belief in himself as part of the scam. Real “miracles” involve things like antibiotics and sterile surgery and are not so cheaply won.
I would be skeptical of any such “miracles” as are reported in the Bible if they were performed on a modern stage under controlled circumstances. To say that I, or any rational person, should be far more skeptical of second-century hearsay concerning alleged first century miracles associated with a religious figure when those claims violate both our scientific knowledge and our mere common sense is a vast understatement. To accuse CAGW “warmists” of religious belief in the same article where one openly espouses an actual religious belief such as this as truth is hypocrisy — or cognitive dissonance, self-delusion — beyond all reason.
The hypothesis that increased carbon dioxide will lead to substantially warmer global temperatures is, like it or not, a scientific hypothesis. There is a clear causal mechanism stated, and this mechanism is physically plausible. If the world indeed warms by 3 to 5 degrees kelvin over the next 88 years it is very doubtful that any laws of physics will be violated along the way — it will simply be strong evidence in favor of one (or possibly a set of several) out of many possible causal theories, quite probably ones involving carbon dioxide as a primary driver. This hypothesis can easily be falsified by the simple failure to observe the expected warming, or be falsified (more likely) much earlier by a convergence between theory and observation on a shorter time scale.
What possible proof can there be that Jesus is Lord? The second coming? Events that we can never verify that are supposed to occur after we die (where nobody alive can know for sure that they actually happen at all) and that make no possible ethical sense? Inconsistent and self-contradictory second and third and fourth century manuscript copies of copies of copies of hearsay and oral traditions concerning events that might have happened sometime in the first century? Really?
If you are, Mr. Monckton, fond of Popper’s criterion for meaning, then I suggest you apply it to the absolute all time number one non-falsifiable hypothesis, the religion(s) of your choice. While you do so, bear in mind that you haven’t the slightest difficulty applying reason to all of the other religions, the ones you were not by blind chance born into and brainwashed by for most of your developmental years. Or, by all means persist in your delusion if that suits you, just do not pretend then to being somehow better equipped to apply reason to complex scientific issues than “warmists”, accusing them of a religious belief in a scientific issue while you yourself persist in a religious belief in a religion, something that surely makes less sense than any scientific hypothesis, even an incorrect one.
Most Sincerely,
rgb, a.k.a. Robert G. Brown
p.s. Christ, according to Jewish records was born close to the third conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter that year, which occurred ~5th December 7 BC (that’s with no zero year).
According to “Jewish records”? Which records would those be? And while sure, if true (and you’ll have to give me a pretty solid reference on that one as this is the first time I’ve heard of it) that agrees better with Matthew, all that does is prove that Luke is mistaken, and hence the Gospels can be mistaken, and hence they are not divinely inspired truth, and hence have to be judged the same way any similar record is judged — as being very likely chock full of errors, lies, stories, fables.
But that is adequately proven regardless of whether Matthew, Luke, or neither one is correct, because it is already absolutely impossible for both of them to be correct.
rgb
While Bayes’s theorem is logically flawless, the approach to drawing inferences that is called “Bayesian” is generally logically flawed.
Well, as(IIRC) we’ve discussed previously, I somewhat disagree, although of course the devil is in the details of which particular “approach to drawing inferences that is called “Bayesian”” you mean. Personally I doubt that we fundamentally disagree here, as I think that we would both agree that positive evidence should both increase our degree of belief in theories for which it is positive and simultaneously decrease our degree of belief in theories that contradict or are logically distinct from those supported theories (and vice versa, in cases where the set of theories is closed and exhaustive). It is this “the more I believe in gravity as the cause of things falling the less I believe in invisible fairies as the cause of things falling” that maintains the consistency of the Bayesian network of beliefs that form science. What is a no-no is to observe an actual invisible fairy (don’t ask me how:-) and increase your degree of belief thereby that maybe they do make things fall without slightly decreasing your belief in non-fairy theories of gravitation.
Conservation of belief, as it were, is akin to the normalization of probabilities — one cannot think A is more probable without also thinking that all B that are exclusive of A are less probable. Or “plausible”, if you prefer a Jaynesian sort of log/decibel scale for plausibility.
As for the problem of priors — there really isn’t any fundamental solution. It requires non-falsifiable prior beliefs to falsify any scientific hypothesis. Hume was, after all, fundamentally correct — you cannot prove or disprove reason itself. The need for axioms is inescapable, and if they could be falsified, they wouldn’t be axioms. The best one can hope for is a kind of reasonable consistency between the axioms of inference, the data, and the inferences made from the data and each other.
This is why both logical positivism and falsifiability as a criterion for knowledge are rotten at the core. LP cannot be proven and hence is self-inconsistent. Falsifiability as a criterion for knowledge cannot be falsified (and hence is self-inconsistent too). Bayesian optimization of a network of evidence supported belief may be just as rotten (in the sense that it still requires unprovable assertions to bootstrap the process) but at least it is self aware in its rottenness, and doesn’t conceal them with a hand quicker than the eye or end up as self-inconsistent out of the gate. One can then discuss reasonable ways of arriving at posterior probabilities, joint and conditional probabilities, and use the network of these probabilities to make probable/plausible inferences in the context of science.
In the end, of course, it makes little difference as far as real conclusions are concerned, because real scientific reasoning is much sloppier than any theoretical metaphysical epistemology. It has to be lest it get sucked into the Pit of Existential Despair represented by the poles such as Solipsism and/or Brain in a Boxism (the Matrix) or Materialism or Idealism. It is filled with unstated things like “Assuming that my sensory perception of the Universe is in decent correspondence with the way things really are” which are not in and of themselves verifiable or falsifiable even in principle but without which nothing else much works…
rgb
A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of giving Lord Monckton a lift from his hotel in the capital of Perth to his presentation at the University of Western Australia, which I also enjoyed.
I’ve been a journalist since my teens and although he may not recall our 15 minute chat in the car, I expressed my view that much of the climate and many other critical social debates are governed by an increasingly ignorant and self-absorbed media.
I’m sure that with his literacy skills and resultant knowledge, Lord Monckton had already figured that out. I nevertheless take great pleasure in reading his expression of the point: “The media are not in the business of giving the facts or telling the truth any more”.
This applies to all complicated topics, not just climate news. It’s become lifestyle news with a light peppering of important issues by a small proportion of the media’s overall research and writing staff … i.e. the reporters whose time is mostly consumed by magazine issues. In the print media, sub-editing maintains a vestige of correct grammar and punctuation but that also is slipping.
It mostly harks back to poor literacy, Australia being a standout failure but many western countries suffering similar declines as a result of weak subject knowledge among teachers. Since the early 1990s I’ve been yelling into an empty room that our English teachers can barely read and write.
Reporters, or repeaters as they’ve been more accurately described, are the product of schools like everyone else. They all share an increasing lack of interest or ability to research written text. When they do, their source is often … the media, often television.
We live in an increasingly dumbed down society reliant on what an elite media of attractive presenters, often with poor language skills, filter through as interesting. The problem isn’t what the mainstream media reports, it’s what the media doesn’t report, and that is the vast majority of knowledge. Complexity has been crowded out by trivia.
Media critics shouldn’t just criticise the pitiful news standards of the modern media as a deliberate manipulation of society’s beliefs. They should criticise the teaching profession which for the past generation has produced a society and a media more reliant on emotive pictures than on reading comprehension.
Lord Monckton, please keep pointing out the media failure, reference the literacy cause and, to draw your attention, let me point out a gaff in your quote re the media not “telling the truth any more”. Correct spelling should be “anymore”, as in “I don’t read anymore because I don’t have any more books, thanks to my TV”. I’m being pedantic because that’s what teachers should be.
If you disagree or are now dubious about ever again letting me give you a lift, be aware that I totally agree with your point that the sun has something to do with delayed temperatures. For example, a few days ago I rough charted the solar cycle, global SST, land temps and Australian sea levels (Jan-Nov annuals) from 1992 to 2012 … http://www.waclimate.net/imgs/ipcc-land-temperatures-sst-tides-2012.gif
Nothing noteworthy but an amusing way to visualise trends and I agree with others that were it not for Pinatubo, land temperature anomalies would have averaged about 0.4C from 1991/92 to 1998, which would have flatlined temp trends for almost 20 years and ruled the IPCC models invalid.
Worth brushing up on the dynamics of global temperature via David Stockwell … http://vixra.org/pdf/1108.0004v1.pdf
@John West:
Hey, a win is a win… Now, about that box of cigars: I would ask that you donate them to that cigar smoker whom you know would enjoy them the most (and that may be yourself). As I don’t smoke, they are of little use to me other than the satisfaction of knowing someone else can enjoy them (which is plenty for me… I rather like that kind of thing more than personal consumption… )
FWIW, IMHO, behavioral changes lead to evolutionary changes lead to behavior changes lead … so a pig, stuck on an island, starts to find food in the water. THAT pig had a behavior change. Now that leads to a selective path that has flatter wider hooves and longer legs and snout. Which leads to more success in water that leads to a preference shift… Not a hypothetical, BTW. That actually has started on one island. Some folks discovered a bunch of feral pigs that have become semi-aquatic. They are now being studied. Had the same pigs decided to eat cactus instead, they might well have begun a path to tougher mouths and shorter snouts…
FWIW, I’ve been highly interested in language for about 40 years. Linguistics classes and several languages and all… Bird languages are more “set” and inherited firmware. Mammals are more flexible, but still a lot is in firmware. There’s pretty good evidence for the basic structure of human language being a set inheritance as well, yet we have much more flexibility on context / specifics. Yet, by the time one is looking at “humans”, there’s many millions of years of language evolution in the pre-human ancestors. So one could not really say that ‘language evolved in humans’. It was already evolved in earlier primates. We just extended it… rather a lot 😉
So things like the vocal chord mechanism and the patch of brain that maps nouns onto visual / auditory symbols evolved. SOME sound maps are in the firmware ( like laughs and screams and maybe even imitative sound words like “pop” and “snort”…) but many more were created over more thousands or millions of years. Most of us just learn it, like we learn to like spicy food or cream of wheat… Like walking is in firmware (infants move their legs in a walking pattern if touched) but we ‘create’ running sports and dancing…
The Gospels as divinely inspired truth? Which modern Christian sect holds that view?
Anyway farmerbraun invites you to consider the idea that christianity (small “c’) in the third millenium does not depend on a theistic framework, but is rather , stripped to its bones, essentially no more than a recipe for the peaceful co-existence of humanity, embracing diversity, tolerance and inclusion.
Just as , in earlier times, it was a rejection of conformity, privilege, elitism, exclusivity, and separatism. That rejection of course was heresy for the Judaistic tradition.
FB is simply suggesting that peace on earth and goodwill to all men fits quite comfortably with atheism, as well as being a useful basis for continuing human society in our “globalised” condition.
The major assertion I make about “now” and change, is just that we can’t get significantly warmer. 2 C is all we’ve got (based on prior interglacials and the Holocene Optimum).
There is a minor subtext assertion that the longer term trend is colder (and it is). We’ve rounded over the high point of the Holocene Optimum. We’re cooling “now”. But the rate of cooling is so shallow that the 1500 – 1800 year weather cycles move us up and down more than the slope of the Holocene rollover. So the ‘trend line’ from 8 kya to 110,000 AD is down. Period. Full stop. But, on that trend line, back near ‘now’, is a cycle that goes wider on each side of that trend for the last / next 3000 years than the slope of that trend line. Significantly.
Dearest E.M.S.
Now that you’ve stated it slightly more precisely, I agree, and have asserted both of these (based on looking at the data) myself on list at times. I do think that it is important to note that it isn’t that we can’t get more than 2 C warmer — if one goes back far enough in the climate record we could probably peg 1-2 C on top of that (admittedly with a completely different distribution of continents, but also with a slightly dimmer sun) — it is that it appears empirically unlikely that we can, because if there were runaway positive feedbacks in the system, surely we would never have left the Holocene optimum, or for that matter any of the warm eras over geological time. The Earth isn’t likely to turn into Venus anytime soon, no matter what nonsense Hansen spouts in that general direction. The Earth is nothing like Venus, and there is no plausible path to runaway feedback and boiling oceans or we would have done it long ago!
The same problem exists on the downhill trend line. I agree with you completely that we might have gotten close to the glacial tipping point in the LIA, but I have to leave it at might because I don’t have a convincing quantitative model. In the end, all arguments are basically handwaving. Maybe feedback from the growing ice sheet and CO_2 sequestration in the chilling ocean would coincide with increased tropical cloudiness and a quiet sun and the axial tilt and the orbital eccentricity and… bang, maybe we drop down into cold phase. Maybe the CO_2 we’ve added to the atmosphere was miraculously exactly what we needed to precisely prevent this and leave the climate semi-stable in or near the Holocene median state for the next umpty-thousand years, preventing the next glacial era altogether. Maybe the stars and planets are in just the right conjunction for invisible fairies to tap the Earth with their invisible magic wands and make it warmer, or cooler, or just right Goldilocks-Porridge style.
The problem is that projecting the past into the future is a dicey thing to do with complex multivariate systems. Generally, I agree with you that these things are both likely to be true on the grounds of a rather arcane numerological argument, but I’d much prefer to think them true on the grounds of a less arcane physical argument. I just don’t think that we have the right physics yet and am not optimistic that we will have it all for some little time yet. I don’t think we have the instrumentation in place yet, or have used the instrumentation we do have in place for long enough yet, to set critical parameters in any sort of accurate physical model.
I would actually love to tackle the problem far more seriously myself, but sadly I have to eat and don’t feel like dining at the climate trough no matter how bountiful it may be to those that conform to its political requirements and say the magic words. And it is no higher than third or fourth in line should I suddenly end up wealthy and able to dispose of my time however I like.
I doubt we disagree on any of this, and you are right, I probably shouldn’t have commented on your original post to pick nits like this. I attribute it to runaway skepticism — I no longer believe much of anything where the climate is concerned. The more I look, the more I’m convinced that it is a damn bloody hard problem and that ANYONE claiming to have some sort of knowledge of where the climate is going based on any of the prevailing species of applied numerology is likely to be mistaken in their knowledge even if they choose the right direction by chance. The future short-to-medium term climate will go up, or down, or remain the same, and I’m feeling like one might as well roll dice to guess which one as rely on any argument.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
“Gospels can be mistaken, and hence they are not divinely inspired truth”
The Gospels are witness testimony, not supposed to be divinely inspired (not withstanding quotes from Jesus of course at least as far as they are accurate). There are numerous differences between the Gospels. If you heard four witnesses in a courtroom with absolutely identical stories would you not be suspicious? The differenses actual lend to credibility of the broader testimony. Also, Luke is not a single testimony but the result of an investigation, likely the author tried to combine several differing witness accounts into what he thought was the most credible at the time.
The Elohim account of creation would be an example of (supposedly) divine inspiration, a closer match to scientifically derived knowledge you will not find in the creation stories of any other religion (3 major religions share this accout). I’ve looked at all that I could get my hands on from around the world.
For someone who seems very sure of his conclusions you don’t seem to have done much research into the question. Some 20++ years ago as a young engineering student I was an atheist too(although not truely convinced either way). Out of respect for my hardly dumb Christian parents (mathematician and historian/educator) I decided to give it a fair shake after I had been out of school for a while. After researching religion for many years I decided on Christianity of a kind of preterist variety.
@Gnomish:
That same broken line of “thinking” has been used to claim deaf folks did not have language as they did not have words either. It’s a broken thought. A sign or a “mere gesture” is just as much a word and anything printed or spoken verbally.
I can say more, faster, in sign than in “mere words”. The very space is painted with meaning in motion. In fact, IMHO, it is the “merely verbal” folks who are lacking in depth and have a poor language. My spouse and I now occasionally “decorate” our verbal speech with bits of sign to fine tune it and enhance the depth of it.
And if you don’t think bared fangs have meaning, and say “come close and I will bite you”, I’ve got a mad dog for you to pet…
It’s folks with your broken belief who locked deaf folks in asylums and forbid them from using sign and called it ‘mere gestures’ and ‘not a language’. They were wrong, just as you are wrong; Completely, hopelessly, and utterly. (That last sentence can be done in one moving sign montage, with a specific facial expression, though with a better presentation of the ‘contempt’ axis that goes with it. Mere words fail in that regard… words are not a very good language…)
In particular, for my bunnies, I know I used the sound that was defined as “predatory bird” as they all, in unison, did the head tilt look up for predatory bird and then headed for cover. Bunnish is a subtle language and I’ve still not mastered it. It uses stress and tone in ways indo-european languages do not. It is also spoken very very softly Perhaps a native Chinese speaker would be better equipped to decode it. Oh, and do realize that bunnies are more closely related to primates than most of the other animal groups. We were on the same evolutionary path longer than most other non-primate animals.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/glires-and-euarchontoglires/
FWIW, my wife’s dog knew the words “cat” “car” “walk” and “Vet” (and more). Also “jelly bean”. I learned his words for “more / again”, “play”, “walk”, and “I want”. If you said “cat”, he would alert. If you said “get the cat” he would start searching for the cat… even if there was no cat in the house… He would not do that for “get the bat” or “eat the cat” or… Dogs, btw, are also trained in sign language. They typically get a several dozen word vocabulary, but it can be more. Including verbs, nouns, and even some adjectives and adverbs. It can be fairly complex. “Service Dogs” in particular. Even sentences like “open THAT door” and “pick up that pen” and “defend me” and “he is a friend” and so much more.
Elephants communicate in ‘infrasound’ over very long distances. They can call the herd together, warn of danger, or just ‘check in’. Ear position also communicates when in visual range. They have both verbal and sign in their language. They can also be taught the rules of soccer (football) and enjoy playing the game…
That you can’t see that common bond of language in all it’s forms with our animal friends means that you live in a very impoverished world. (hand inversion from face palm toward floor with dismissive facial expression … combining “bad” with dismissive look.)