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.
These replies have rather gone off track. However I can only repeat what others have said much earlier. The only way to persuade the AGW believers back into the fold of normal science is via the pocket. But I think it needs to be their pockets not ours.
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.
* How do you know how much research I’ve done into the question? How much research is really necessary to conclude that however lovely some carefully cherrypicked parts of Christianity are (parts that of course are equally lovely when cherrypicked and/or promoted in, say, Hinduism or any other religion or not-really-a-religion such as Buddhism), the set of assertions are fundamentally unbelievable and almost certainly false? I also suggest that you reconsider the issue with slightly more modern sources — I suggest starting with Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman is your exact opposite — he started out as a born-again Christian, went to graduate school to study the Bible in order to learn the word of God, and learned that there is no such thing (or if there is, we don’t know what that word is). He is now an agnostic/atheist. It would be very interesting to see you butt heads with him regarding “research into the question” as I doubt there are very many people alive who are more expert on the textual history of the Bible.
* You, like nearly all Christians alive today, would have been punished or killed in various horrible ways (like being burned alive) for asserting that books such as Genesis were not literally true. For example, you might read Saint Cardinal Bellarmine’s letter to Galileo, and meditate on his fate, or on the fate of Giordano Bruno, who in fact was burned at the stake on February 17th, 1600 — oh, wait, Mr. Monckton has enlightened me as to the resetting of the Julian calendar (which only occurred in 1752 in England, long after Newton had died) and imagines that such an event is retroactive so he should consider himself free to manage the eleven day offset as he pleases. The church suppressed heresy from Constantine right up to Martin Luther, usually violently, and of course you are a heretic, choosing what to believe and disbelieve as it pleases you instead of believing what you are told to believe. Many Christians do as you do — they worship the Jesus of their imagination, by picking verses and quotes and so on that represent the idea that they have of “the good”. But the verses you don’t like, the ones that don’t make sense, the ones that — if you stop to think about them at all — sound, well, evil or at least not terribly/perfectly good, they are all still there.
* If you are at all interested in a proper critical study of the Bible that does not begin with the presumption of truth or wisdom, you might visit:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/index.htm
and start reading anywhere you like. Maintain an open mind. Judge what you read quite seriously. For example, pulling a favorite example out of my poorly researched hat, dig into Acts 5, and the sad tale of Ananais and his wife Sapphira. Then fill in the following questionaire.
1) Based on your knowledge of the world, God, and human behavior, it is most likely that:
a) Luke (presumed author of Acts) is telling a story again — this never happened because God doesn’t actually strike people down, and Luke is lying about it to get people to donate more money to the church out of fear.
b) Peter spied on Ananais and — with the help of “the young men” — murdered him when he failed to donate all of the value of his land, and then murdered Sapphira in turn when she came in. This made it very clear to early followers of the Church who might have wanted to hold out some portion of their wealth because maybe they weren’t quite convinced that there was an apocalypse on the way or that all of this stuff they were told is true that if they did, they’d end up dead.
c) Peter and Sapphira just happened to die one after another out of sheer guilt and stress. Note well that this is basically an atheist answer (however unlikely) as if God exists there are no accidents.
d) God really-oh, truly-oh struck them both down dead. Welcome to free-will, early Christian style.
2) This (whatever answer you put down in question 1) isn’t morally reprehensible behavior because:
a) The ends justify the means.
b) Ananais and Sapphira’s sin was really, really great. Oh my, it was great. They absolutely deserved to die. They were obviously terrible people. They were even worse than apostatic rgb, who doesn’t give anything at all to any church ever, if he can help it, although sadly he cannot help but “donate” in the form of extra taxes he pays to compensate for the fact that religions own property, engage in commerce, have employees, and pay no taxes at all. So even if they WERE murdered by Peter or struck down by God, they should have known better.
c) I answered c), no moral consequence to a random act!
d) This is morally reprehensible. Ananais and Sapphira did not deserve to die, and we would not hesitate to infer that Peter in fact murdered them were they to similarly die under identical circumstances in some cult that relied on donations in a similar fashion today.
You can actually continue this game throughout the Bible, and play on with the Quran or my all-time favorite, the original American work of science fiction, The Book of Mormon. The annotations flag every verse for contradictions (with other verses elsewhere, violence on the part of God or disciples or holy men in this “peaceful” religion, absurdities, items that contradict matters of fact, and more. And to be quite fair, the commentator flag verses that contain ethically good content with a thumbs up, a place where something good is actually said, a moral principle is actually well-expressed.
There aren’t many.
rgb
@RGBatDuke:
I’m pretty sure that you took my statements as you did because they were not clear enough, so it’s on me to make them clearer.
(My spouse and friends have chided me for being ‘wordy’ and one boss, a lawyer, called me ‘prolix’, for my tendency to want things perfectly clear and precise… so I’ve been working on fewer words and a bit more folksy… perhaps a bit too far some times 😉 So still searching for the magic mean…)
I’m also pretty sure we agree on a heck of a lot more than the nits where we may not quite line up.
Per ‘headed for a glacial’: I think we can make pretty good statements about it, but only due to ‘existence proofs’ and ‘bounds’. The prior half dozen interglacials rocket up, whack into a hard lid, and head back down. This one is a bit flatted in comparison. I think the other ones pretty much show where huge ‘inertial’ to warmer on a ‘hard tipping point from cold’ whacks into the other end of the hysteresis… that I’m also pretty sure we can lay at the foot of the water cycle / thunderstorms. (At least for the ‘big bits’). Yeah, go back to the prior Ice Ages (not just glacials in this Ice Age) and you get more range; but that’s from different continents and likely very much different air quantities. So I likely ought to have added a “in the last million years” or some such range qualifier to the 2 C “lid”. (but then I’d also have to start listing things like: if we don’t have massive bombardment by comets and if we don’t…)
I think it’s also pretty clear that the bounds on the hysteresis are set by water. Evaporation / precipitation at the hot side; frozen dry air at the cold side. Maybe you could get 1/2 C of more range out of that with CO2, but it just doesn’t matter. It’s either frozen or it’s doing tropical storms…
But in the middle, we have instability and all the ‘you can’t predict squat’ comes into the fore. That paper / link about the shifting ocean currents and the stable Holocene vs stable Glacial vs metastable middle is, IMHO, well worth the read. It explains the ‘jerks’ back and forth at the entry and exit steps from Glacials / Optimums. As we’re now at an insolation level that does not support forced exit from a glacial, we are now in, or very very near, that unstable ‘flip / flop state’. That has some rather strong implications for our weather risks….
But what we do know is non-zero.
We know that the exit from a glacial to a stable “Holocene Like” regime is hard to have happen. It only happens when conditions are ‘just so’ and can melt the north polar ice. So all of the Milankovich things have to line up (and even then we sometimes ‘skip one’…)
We know that any ‘overshoot’ from cold to warm only happens at the very beginning of the (recent) interglacials, when the conditions are much more favorable than now.
We know that we’re below the W/m^2 that can turn back a glacial, and very comfortably at a level that is compatible with a stable glacial (after the entrance).
Connecting those, we know that a “cold whack” can put us into the start of the next glacial.
Yet we also know from looking at that map of orbital parameters that we skate just down the middle this time. Orbital stuff doesn’t give us a ‘cold whack’. Which means it must come from the sun, or volcanoes, or rocks from space or… all those non-predictable things. (Yet they have a statistical rate…)
So we’re one Big Cold Whack away from an entry to a glacial. And ‘odds are’ that will happen inside a few hundred to a 1000 years. (though it might not… we could get lucky…)
But my favorite thing, really, is just that a glacial arrival is so slow, we could be in it and not know. The cold can have rapid onset (like the L.I.A.) but the snow takes most of the glacial to pile up. You can literally outwalk the glacier leading edge on one weekend a year, and without much effort. Add that we’ve HAD a LIA event and similar, then the ‘rapid onset’ of cold is not distinguishable from ‘regular weather cycles’… (albeit the longer ones). And that gets back to your point: Flip a coin and you know as much… (Nobody knows why D.O. events happen, or Heinrich Events, or Bond Events… though there’s some decent speculation…)
Frankly, any ‘climate horror’ that has a 10,000 year ice build up with 1500 year cycles of back to warmer then colder is just not relevant at the human lifetime scale. So being able to say “It will be started inside 3000 years” (as some ‘cold whack’ statistically will happen – rock fall or volcano or…) is at most a mild entertainment and not very valuable. Even “Lunar Tidal forcing has a good chance at it in 300 years” isn’t very useful. Will there even BE a USA in 300 years? Or an EU? Or “Europeans”? (People are mixing at an amazing rate already. And compare English from 1700 to now. iPhone? Jump the shark? Dazzle me? Rippin? Jumbo Jet and radar? Whoever is speaking whatever in 300 years may not be able to read this… and certainly won’t care.
So what we do know, that matters, is that things are just not going to change much in my lifetime. Certainly not outside of historical norms. (That doesn’t limit it much though. LIA vs MWP was a pretty good swing…) And dumping or not dumping CO2 into the air won’t change that “not much” by very much either. (But the economic destruction of western civilization and the rise of radical powers are very likely to lead to a nuclear W.W.III and that would be a horror and likely not survivable by the global civilizations. (See “The Dark Ages” as a model, then realize we MUST have global trade or folks starve and die… we can not go back to local subsistence farming.)
I guess that’s what bothers me most. We have so much “stupid” being done, that is ‘exactly wrong’ from a ‘thrive without collapse and war’ goal state. It is as though our ‘leaders’ have a cultural death wish and want Billions to die. I can’t believe that there is that much ‘stupid’ in the world, but ‘malice’ knows no bounds too….
Ah, well, I’m starting to ramble. Probably time to end…
Oh, one point on the religion thing:
Yes, much of the Bible is bits of left overs stitched together. Yet it does have some good wisdom in it. It is worth the effort to dig out the good bits. Also, there have been many great scientists who were quite religious. The two need not be in conflict. From Newton to Einstein to even Darwin (who’s first copy had a dedication to God in it…) Yes, dogmatic literalism is in conflict, but isn’t it in conflict even within the Sciences?…
With that, I’d recommend a couple of good books.
“Is God a Mathematician?” Makes in interesting set of numerical observations about what things have to be ‘just so’ for the universe to work…
http://www.amazon.com/Is-God-Mathematician-Mario-Livio/dp/074329405X
Then there is a rather interesting book that takes Genesis and basically says “If we use a relativistic clock calibrated to the moment of the Big Bang, how does Genesis stack up” and finds a remarkable alignment of the events in Genesis and our scientific schedule of events. Basically, don’t use a ‘day’ today, use a ‘day’ as measured from a universe exploding into existence out of a white hole… I’ve read it, and it does line up fairly well.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553354132
So perhaps a bit more allowance for folks a couple of thousand years ago not being all that swift at getting the idea of ‘relativity’ down in their copy and one could still find some truth in the old book… (Much of the Bible does read like someone trying to put into words things they were being taught that were beyond their understanding. My speculation is that they garbled their ‘Cliff Notes’ from what was being taught… but much of the original knowledge was correct.)
The author has a Ph.D from MIT, btw, so it’s readable, but not a lightweight book / idea.
Religion has it’s issues (a big one being religious folks who think they have read it right as literal when they have not…) but being in fundamental conflict with science isn’t one of them, IMHO. Who’s to say that evolution isn’t the WAY a creator God would choose to create life? Heck, were I doing it, I’d create a bacteria programmed to evolve and turn it loose in a primordial soup… it would be much more interesting that way… (And we are nearing the point where I could, in fact, do that… “Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from Magic.”… or, perhaps, religion…
FWIW, I’m not trying to convince anyone or ‘convert’ anyone. ( I’m still not sure exactly what I believe anyway…) I just found them very interesting and thought provoking books…
RGB
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There is a vast difference between theological understanding and true (mystical) understanding of the real message of religion.
Only when a religious aspirant understands that the reality of God/Tao/Nirvana/Brahman/etc.,is non-dual from the ‘perspective of Itself, will the delusion of imagining human mind dualistic conceptualization can apprehend that reality fall away effortlessly,
Atheists and Theists are just another pair of complementary opposite perspectives on absolute reality, which like the Tao, remains forever at peace while the differentiated complementary opposite aspects of ying and yang perform their eternal dance to maintain that transcendent balance.
The Tao that is conceived of, is not the Eternal Tao. The human brain mind can never apprehend the reality represented by the concept of God. Understand that and the path to self realization presents itself. Thought must eventually cease, as mental constructs representing reality is maya/delusion,in the context of true religious aspiration, only the direct apprehension of non-duality brings about the ending of a dualistic universe conceptually divided into two,…me and the Universe
Please note, my comments re non-duality are only in the context of religion, conceptual thinking is essential for science and everyday life.
Gail Coombs says
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.
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You are right about that. Its why I am arguing with you.
I hope someone reads this far down – I’m afraid it’s taken me this long to mull over the general tenor of Lord M’s thoughtful piece, get through all the side issues people have raised, and back onto the main track.
I think we should create an institution which measures the performance of scientists. The metrics would be public and as objective as possible, ie not opinion or consensus based (unlike the nuclear scientists ‘minutes to midnight’ risk of Armageddon clock). They would examine the output of individuals, teams or institutions and be combined to produce overall ratings which could be reduced to traffic-light RAG as used and widely understood throughout corporate institutions. The ratings would propagate to any future output from those individuals, groups or institutions and serve as ‘health warnings’ easily understood by journalists and the public. Scientists would look up their quality index and if unsatisfied could do something about it.
There are all sorts of practical and theoretical difficulties with this, I’m sure, but I think it would be worth trying to sort them out, for the sake of an easily propagated indicator whose basis of validation was in the public domain. I would like to hear people’s ideas on measures that could be included in the aggregated scoring, but the biggest fly in the ointment that I can see is – who could be trusted by all (most) parties to do the assessment – and I do have one suggestion about the process. Since the peer review system has come under some criticism lately as being susceptible to various influences which can reduce its effectiveness, why not use an amended version to assess ratings?
Instead of reviewing scientific output directly, why not apply the peer review process instead to criticisms of that output? In the context of a scientific paper, instead of focussing on the paper itself, assess its critical responses in terms of their falsifiability / falsification status.
It has always been an open issue for me whether the internet propagates lies faster/better than it propagates truth. This would be a first attempt to ‘tag’ openly propagated assertions and their proponents with a quality metric, while avoiding the complementary evils of crony-ism on the one hand, and mob rule on the other.
Gail Coombs says
ROTFLMAO, that is rich coming from someone who wants to steal the inheritance of western culture from the ENTIRE WORLD!
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Wow!!! another WUWT-er whose omniscience extends to mind reading. You got me dead to right there Gail. My entire evil purpose is to obliterate western civilization. Hee-hee-hee he says raising his little pinkey to the side of his grinning lips.
Now if only you had warned us all about the GFC so we could have avoided that. But you kept it secret. Shame in you.
AlecM says
A sensor signal is a different beast. this is because sensors work by blocking off radiation for the other direction.
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No sensors do not work that way. Restricting their acceptance angle is incidental to their principles of operation.
A sensor that behaves by absorbing IR radiation, converting the energy into heat and thereby producing an electrical signal can absorb IR radiation from any direction, if for some reason non-directionality was required.
Richard Verney says
Again there is a problem since ocean overturning is a mechanical process measured in many many hours
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I would not have thought so since surface wave action is supposed to be associated with circulate motion of the water. So the time scales to move surface water 10s of metres down are 10s of seconds.
The whole film theory idea also seems to neglect thermal conduction. Although the temperature gradient at the surface is in the wrong direction as you’ve said, the heating effect of the IR radiation reduces that temperature gradient and so reduces the rate of heat transfer from the bulk water to the atmosphere.
“to stop the warming and buy us time to work on alternative, zero-carbon technologies. Instead of disputing the evidence, wouldn’t it be smart to start proposing mechanisms to actually achieve that?”
I propose as a start that you cease exhaling CO2. I suggest that all those who believe CO2 is a problem do the same. As an initial move towards that end wearing a gas mask that absorbs CO2 would be a good beginning.
sorry, Chiefio – words are symbols which have definitions.
the word ‘definition’ also has a definition – you should look that up.
it has nothing to do with deafness, as i am typing to you.
and you will find yourself in a quagmire if you attempt to refute my words with nothing more than grunts.
snickers, sneers, grunts and groans may carry meaning but they are not words and do not perform the function of logic.
messy tools make for a messy job.
precise thinking requires precise cognitive tools.
if you have a problem with the dictionary but wish to communicate reliably you’ll have to define your idiosyncratic terms – otherwise you can claim no more meaning than an animal grunt.
Mike Haseler says:
December 26, 2012 at 6:07 pm
….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!….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
ERRRrrr, Talking to flowers does make them grow.
According to WIKI -RespiratorySystem in an average resting adult, the lungs take up about 250ml of oxygen every minute while excreting about 200ml of carbon dioxide and the plants just eat it right up. According to another Source
So talking to plants baths the leaves in an airflow rich in CO2. Also a person introduces eddies and currents that stir up stagnant air. Since the earth is a carbon starved environment this will have a positive effect on the plants. If all other requirements are met CO2 becomes the limiting factor on plant growth and anyone who talks to their plants will make sure those requirements are met.
Another Reference:
Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California
Per ‘headed for a glacial’: I think we can make pretty good statements about it, but only due to ‘existence proofs’ and ‘bounds’. The prior half dozen interglacials rocket up, whack into a hard lid, and head back down. This one is a bit flatted in comparison. I think the other ones pretty much show where huge ‘inertial’ to warmer on a ‘hard tipping point from cold’ whacks into the other end of the hysteresis…
Good point. In fact, excellent point and one that did not occur to me. I tend to think in terms of something called a “fluctuation-dissipation theorem” if you know what that is. It is basically a consistency relation associated with Langevin equations. Langevin equations, in turn, are stochastic differential equations of the sort that describe (for example) Brownian motion, things like directed diffusion or random walks, but — and this is crucial — Langevin-type equations also arise in the context of bistability in physics, for example absorptive optical bistability.
If you look up/google:
“Lecture 3: Brownian Motion and The Langevin Equation 3.1”
it has a lovely summary of the topic, as well as a classical statement of the theorem itself:
Fluctuation-Dissipation (Langevin) Theorem: The equilibrium is brought about by a dissipation force (“friction”) between the particle and the reservoir. Whatever the mechanism of the dissipation, it is the same process that produces the random, fluctuating force on the particle. Moreover, both processes are uniquely determined by the statistical nature of the microscopic forces (by “statistical nature” is meant such things as the probability distribution and so on. The relevant statistical function which determines the fluctuation and dissipation will be discussed later).
I don’t think Climate Scientists appreciate how strongly this theorem constrains climate science, or how it is an instrument from which both insight and quantitative information can be obtained. Basically, it tells you that by watching the spectrum of the fluctuations around the mean, you can determine a whole lot of information about the processes that equilibrate a system to the mean. Spencer used a weak version of the theorem as an argument in his book on climate blunders to suggest bounds on the climate sensitivity. IIRC I suggested to him a long time ago that he consider using the theorem straight up for that purpose as it would provide more information than a slightly handwaving argument.
Your argument is, again, tightly linked to this theorem. If one thinks very crudely of the “dynamic equilibrium” of the climate as being the bottom of a wide differentially sloping gully that gets gradually inclined by long term drivers such as Mil. cycles and “state” as being a soccer ball rolling around in the gully that periodically gets “kicked” by a demented child in some random direction, you get one possible picture. If the child kicks the ball towards the side walls, it goes some ways up and then rolls down. From the way it rolls down, one can infer a number of things about the walls, from the way it overshoots and oscillates back and forth until it approaches the bottom of the gully one can learn more. From the way it rolls back when kicked along the gully there
is still more to be learned. If the gully is more like a river delta with multiple relatively shallow stream bottoms that lie roughly parallel but at different heights on the gradually sloping bottom up towards the wall you can get really complex behavior — a gentle kick might cause oscillation around one stream bottom that slowly damps down again but a stronger kick might kick you over into the NEXT stream bottom and you’d oscillate/damp down into IT.
Only a hard kick teaches you much about the walls. We have both independently noted that the bistable glaciation cycle (all things being equal, last 2.5 million or so years) places strong limits on the width of the gully itself and indeed on the shape of the gully bottom(s), which (as we also both agree) is split, with one whole streambed lying well below the other, connected by multiple points where the main streambed bifurcates and separated by a hill in between. Every hundred thousand years or so, the long axis tips to where a good hard kick will carry you over the barrier from the lower bed to the upper one, often overshooting the mark and getting knocked back from the wall. Every now and then the demented kid will deliver such a kick, or series of kicks in rapid succession, and knock the ball all the way to the wall as well.
I hadn’t thought about the wall. The rapidity of the return to the warm phase equilibrium after such a kick in the earlier interglacials does indeed place a strong limit on the forces that restore equilibrium and the feedbacks associated with those forces. I had thought about the fact that the return itself (plus the longer term climate data) does provide very strong evidence that there is no third gully bottom on the warm side to which our current bottom is a locally stable intermediary, which is basically the assertion of Hansen and the tipping point extremists. Rather than simply shifting one or two stream bottoms (so to speak) to the warm side and then resume fluctuating around more or less normally, the tipping point catastrophists are asserting that a completely new state develops uphill that completely closes off all downhill pathways and becomes “permanently” stable, stable on the sequestration time for CO_2, which according to the Bern model is basically forever, geological time.
But they are neglecting the evidence that not only has the system never even so much as sampled such a state in around three million years, but that there is a hard wall on the uphill side that some damn strong kicks in the past have helplessly bounced off of.
Very good point indeed. A lot of this metaphor can actually be made quantitative, I think, withing the context of a generalized Langevin (or master) equation approach to the dynamical equilibrium. I’ll have to think about it some more.
rgb
rgbatduke asks:
“How do you know how much research I’ve done into the question?”
I don’t “know”, but you seem to be throwing out the same arguments I had about a quarter the way into the issue.
“1) Based on your knowledge of the world, God, and human behavior, it is most likely that:”
e) The story is a parable about dishonesty for glory, their “sin” was not about whether or not they gave to the church but we’re attempting to gain accolades dishonestly. If they would have said we’re selling this land and giving 1/1000th to the church then that’d been ok.
“2) This (whatever answer you put down in question 1) isn’t morally reprehensible behavior because:”
e) It’s a parable.
I actually agree quite a bit with Bart Ehrman, but unlike him I realize we have the advantage of science to help us determine the proper way to read any particular part of the Bible and determine what are insertions, parables, and opinions. For example whenever a story ends with “and that’s why we have XYZ” its probably a myth, whether it’s in the Bible or not. Also, one should look out for gnostic phrasing in the Gospels, especially John.
BTW, I have read the skeptics annotated Bible. If you really know the Bible and it’s history and aren’t determined to read the Bible like it’s a science book then it’s good for nearly endless belly roll laughs.
Realize that most of what we have left today has come to us through the Catholic Church, the dead sea scrolls being a notable exception. Before the Catholic Church assimulated (yes, in Borg like fashion) most everything there was a great deal of Christian diversity of thought.
Well, I must say I’ve enjoyed this foray into way OT, I think the Mods have given us a lot of slack on this thread and I’d like to thank them and our host. I promise to get back on topic.
Terry Oldberg says:
December 26, 2012 at 6:58 pm
….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.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is THEIR crappy theory so if they setup a method of falsifying it then skeptics should take advantage of it.
This is a propaganda war and always has been. It was never about science which is why skeptics are right but keep losing. Why, since they handed us a weapon should we not use it?
The IPCC mandate states:
Humans were tried and found guilty BEFORE the IPCC ever looked at a scientific fact. The IPCC mandate is not to figure out what factors effect the climate but to dig up the facts needed to hang the human race. The IPCC assumes the role of prosecution and and the skeptics defence but the judge (aka the media) refuses to allow the defence council into the court room.
At this point we have moved to the point where authorities are making sure that no appeal is ever made possible.
In other words we lost because the whole set up was rigged from the get go.
Gail Combs says:
“If all other requirements are met CO2 becomes the limiting factor on plant growth and anyone who talks to their plants will make sure those requirements are met.”
Now Gail, surely you must know that only temperature affects tree growth. /sarc
LOL.
The paper Combining the Sources of Temperature Change ties natural and manmade events and processes to temperature change. This is a curve relationship study. I am using existing data: the numbers gathered by accountants, and scientists that work in diverse fields. I combine these diverse data to ‘reflect’ the shape of the temperature anomaly curve. With time and additional data, I hope they will be shown to ‘drive’ the temperature curve.
http://www.modelsw.com/papers/gwarm/CombiningTheSources.html
E.M.Smith says: @ur momisugly December 26, 2012 at 3:46 pm
@ur momisuglyJohn West:
Language evolved. Listen to animals. They speak….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If animals did not have the ability to communicate we would never be able to train them. A trainer who can not understand the animals language will never be any good. A trainer who can not ‘speak’ the animal’s language will never be any good.
I am delighted to make Professor Brown’s acquaintance, and I very much hope that he and others here who lurk behind pseudonyms will in future have the courage and forthrightness to use the simple facility in WordPress to give their names. It takes only a few seconds. Thereafter, all subsequent postings will show their names (however long) automatically. Pseudonyms, though, are fair game, indicating an unwillingness – for whatever reason – to back up one’s opinions with one’s own name. From time to time, therefore, I am tempted to play with them a little. Now that I know who he is, I shall not need to call him “Ratduke” again.
I am fascinated by the time the Professor has devoted to the study of religion – which, however, is off topic here except to the extent that, in a few lines at the end of a long posting, I had rooted my suggestion of giving the usual suspects an escape-route from their error in the seasonal spirit of Christmas goodwill. The Professor may like to recall the distinction between the allegorical tone of much of the Old Testament (in particular) and the down-to-earth, businesslike, demotic language of the three synoptic Gospels. The discrepancies between the accounts are much what one would expect: matters would indeed be suspicious if they tallied at all points.
I say again that the difference between my religious belief in Christianity and the climate-extremists’ quasi-religious immersion in catastrophic anthropogenic climate alarm (CACA) is that, ,unlike the extremists, I acknowledge that my belief in Christianity, not being Popper-falsifiable, is not science. The laws of physics as we have them now did not obtain at or before the instant of the Big Bang, so they cannot tell us what (or Who) caused the moment of creation, or how it was caused. Therefore, Christian belief that an all-knowing, all-powerful deity was directly or indirectly responsible for the Big Bang is not contrary to the laws of physics. Eminent physicists from Newton to Kelvin were Christians: unlike Professor Brown, they found nothing incompatible with Christianity in its laws.
However, the climate extremists, though for the reasons outlined in the head posting their belief in CACA is no more Popper-falsifiable than my belief in Christianity, pretend that their belief in Thermageddon is founded in science rather than in religion. They are not honest enough to admit that their New Religion is not scientific. Instead, they tell us, over and over again, that their belief is rooted in a “scientific consensus”, as though their deployment of that long-condemned logical fallacy were some sort of scientific argument rather than a pusillanimous and illogical demonstration of a willfully anti-scientific approach. On that much, if not on the value of the Christian religion, I am sure the Professor and I can agree.
rgbatduke says:
December 27, 2012 at 6:34 am
Very good point indeed. A lot of this metaphor can actually be made quantitative, I think, withing the context of a generalized Langevin (or master) equation approach to the dynamical equilibrium. I’ll have to think about it some more.
And that, my dear sir, is why we are here. To provide you a “blank whiteboard” available to discuss things in the open market. Though always subject to the eraser in the talented hands of the moderators, of course. 8<)
Gail Combs says:
“The IPCC assumes the role of prosecution and and the skeptics defence but the judge (aka the media) refuses to allow the defence council into the court room.”
Nicely put! Just for those that haven’t been in this long:
John Christy says:
“Widely publicized consensus reports by “thousands” of scientists are misrepresentative
of climate science, containing overstated confidence in their assertions of high climate
sensitivity. They rarely represent the range of scientific opinion that attends our
relatively murky field of climate research. Funding resources are recommended for “Red
Teams” of credentialed, independent investigators, who already study low climate
sensitivity and the role of natural variability. Policymakers need to be aware of the full
range of scientific views, especially when it appears that one-sided-science is the basis
for promoting significant increases to the cost of energy for the citizens.”
http://nsstc.uah.edu/essc/docs/ChristyJR_SenateEPW_120801.pdf
BTW: I speak dog quite well, I never intended to imply that language was exclusive of humans just that with respect to current human language one cannot say it wasn’t created by humans nor can one say that it didn’t evolve.
Yes, much of the Bible is bits of left overs stitched together. Yet it does have some good wisdom in it. It is worth the effort to dig out the good bits. Also, there have been many great scientists who were quite religious. The two need not be in conflict. From Newton to Einstein to even Darwin (who’s first copy had a dedication to God in it…) Yes, dogmatic literalism is in conflict, but isn’t it in conflict even within the Sciences?…
I completely agree with the former, and commend:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/good/long.html
as an itemized list. This skeptical reviewer, at least, finds 505 verses — in the entire Bible, old and new Testament, and many of these are rather short, saying things like “God is love” (which to me is as much an absurdity as a fond hope or “good” claim, given the problem of theodicy). The signal to noise ratio is extreme, but it is worse than this because he also lists things like:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/science/long.html
(404 verses in direct conflict with scientific truth).
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html
(1310 verses that portray God and virtue as being the direct, naked application of violence) or
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/abs/long.htm
(a whopping 2211 verses that portray absurdities, claims for miracles or things that just plain make no sense).
I would gently remind you that humans have a natural tendency to practice cognitive dissonance and gloss over the negative evidence to concentrate on the positive, or to twist things around so that a system of beliefs can persist, unthreatened. It is a form of confirmation bias. There is a lovely book on Cognitive Dissonance by Joel Cooper that I found well worth the buying and the read, filled with specific examples of how it has been observed and studied in clinical settings and how it “works” in everyday human affairs to defend belief systems. It is worthwhile understanding it if only to see how it is in play in climate science, actually.
But if one can open one’s mind, one can treat the Bible with the same objectivity that one can treat the Bhagvad-Geeta, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Puranas, the Eddas, the Q’uran, or other “sacred” texts. In that case it isn’t a matter of “dogmatic literalism” that forces the rejection of the Bible’s core assertions, it is that one could reduce the entire moral content of the Bible to a few pages of prose text, one can immediately reject almost all of its religious arguments as absurd and illogical even as theories of God, and if it weren’t for the fear induced by the threats of violence that permeate the Bible, outweighing the “good stuff” by far more than two to one, nobody that wasn’t brainwashed into believe as a child would believe any of this stuff. And they don’t — personally I find a lot more worthwhile moral content and wisdom in both Buddhism and Hinduism than one can find in the entire Bible, and in the case of Buddhism it is relatively accessible and concentrated and laid out in a fairly short, simple, and compelling argument.
And that doesn’t mean that their mythology is worth believing either. Our moral sense, the thing that tells us “these words are sweet”, is rather divorced from the question of whether or not God exists, perfect justice exists, God performs miracles or inflicts punishments and so on. The latter, to the extent that they are claims about the actual Universe in which we live, have to be answered using the same process of reason we use to answer any such claims. God doesn’t get a “bye” as an unreasonable proposition we should just accept without evidence, or on the basis of weak, inconsistent, scripture based arguments, or by invoking various versions of the Anthropic Principle. But nobody reads Hume any more, any more than Christians typically study their own Bible or pay it the scant courtesy of actually reading the damn thing cover to cover one time in their entire adult life.
It is indeed true that many great scientists of the past were religious — Newton himself being a moderately heretical case in point. Not that in many cases they had any choice (you need to appreciate the way the threat of imprisonment, torture, social ostracism, and a horrible death can focus the mind), not that we have certain knowledge that many of them were religious. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is still considered by many people to have been a good Christian, although we now know that he wrote The Jefferson Bible:
http://www.beliefnet.com/resourcelib/docs/62/The_Jefferson_Bible_The_Life__Morals_of_Jesus_of_Nazareth_1.html
where it is made rather clear that he was not a Christian, he merely admired Jesus as a philosopher (and then only by literally scissoring out all of the absurdity in the Gospels). So do I, although I would not put him anywhere close to first on the list of Admirable Philosophers past or present.
That does not make arguments in favor of religion, whether conducted by great men or not, correct. To claim such is an argument from authority, which our thread host Mr. Monckton will tell you is a logical fallacy. One has to decide whether or not things like the assertion of an eternal hell in which humans are tortured for the sin of failing to believe in an absurd set of assertions without evidence in the very best of faith make sense to you and are supported by evidence. I have every respect for Wigner, I appreciate his argument for the Strong Anthropic Fallacy, sorry, I meant “Principle”, a.k.a. “Intelligent Design”, or more properly known as the Teleological Argument:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument
The teleological argument is religion, not science, and furthermore is “one big series of logical fallacies contradicted, where one looks closely, by science. In the end, it is a return to the God of the Gaps argument — we’ve squeezed down all of the original gaps in our understanding of the Universe that used to be occupied by God to the point where all that is left are things like why the Universe appears to be mathematically consistent and have natural laws that are mathematically structured and stable in time, why the Universe has fundamental constants that permit life to occur, all things that can be equally well answered by “God” or “Just Because” as long as you leave God out of the Universe in question because if you don’t, you’re always back to “Just Because”.
One essential problem with the ancient arguments concerning God along these lines or worse, the ontological argument, and with most modern arguments as well, is that they ignore what we have learned about logical and mathematical systems in general in the last century and a half. They are “classical” arguments and hence logically flawed in numerous places. They bandy about terms or concepts like “eternal”, “all powerful”, “all-knowing”, “creator of the Universe” without either defining those terms or examining the logical consequences of their arguments. We can do much better now.
You might — or might not — enjoy reading one such argument concerning God here:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosophy/god_theorem.php
This result was discussed extensively on one of the philosophy forums last year, and I’ve got a few people that are nagging me to actually publish it in a real “philosophy journal”. In a nutshell, the application of information theory, representation theory, and clear definitions for terms such as “Universe” that preclude hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye switches in meaning halfway through an argument allow the derivation of an actual theorem concerning God: if an omniscient God exists, then God must equal the Universe. If one adds in Landauer’s Principle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann-Landauer_limit
(generalized to accommodate at least a broad class of potential logical mechanisms for “knowledge”, “thinking” or “sentience” that might describe a self aware pandeity) one ends up with strong constraints on the kind of “infinite Universe/deity” that might be capable of sustaining self-awareness, ones that frankly seem a bit unlikely. The best case that can be made for God, one that is entirely consistent with observation, is that the Universe is God, God is the Universe, and both are utterly impersonal and not in any meaningful sense “volitional” as volition/mentation/free will seems to require the generation of information entropy and entropy contradicts omniscience.
Really it is probably worse than even that — allowing for entropy that somehow didn’t violate omniscience — might restore volition in a sense, but only by making it arbitrarily whimsical, playing dice with itself/the Universe as it were, which also seems to violate both omniscience and sentience.
So forget scripture — the logical problem of God as an abstract proposition is a serious one, and one that is amenable to attack using reason. Applying reason to the question instantly rejects almost all of the scriptural faiths. Not so much Hinduism, though, as Vedantic Hinduism is at heart a monist pandeism, Atman equals Brahman equals all things, the Universe is indeed God playing games with Itself, and we as projective chips off of the old block are the Universe becoming aware of Itself. Heinlein’s Thou Art God was forthrightly stolen from this.
Not that I’d defend Hinduism either. The point isn’t so much that its core principles could be correct without contradiction of some aspect of the definition of the concept we call “God”, it is we don’t have any evidence that it is correct even as a consistent proposition. Something can be non-contradictory, make sense, and be false, or not be supported by evidence sufficient to conclude that it is (probably) true.
rgb
LazyTeenager; ‘No sensors do not work that way. Restricting their acceptance angle is incidental to their principles of operation.’
I can prove my point very easily: http://www.kippzonen.com/?product/16132/CGR+3.aspx
‘Two CGR 3s can form a net pyrgeometer’ [Near the bottom].
These people, genuine physicists who make pyrgeometers know the truth which is that a single device measures a temperature signal, the artefact of the shield behind the sensor blocking off temperature signal(s) from the other direction.
This temperature signal can do no thermodynamic work unless it combines vectorially with a reverse EM field from another radiator. This reverse EM signal in space is the cosmic microwave background.
The proof is to put two devices back to back in zero temperature gradient – net signal = zero. Then take one device away – the signal suddenly jumps to the S-B level for isolated emission into absolute zero.
This has been a 50 year long experimental error by climate science, originating from meteorology. There is no ‘back radiation’. It does not exist,. It is zilch, zero, nada, a form of scientific mass hysteria by true believers of the Carbon Dioxide religion desperate to clutch at straws so they can take money from taxation by false pretences.and con the public.
Do you gather that I am not very impressed by your comment….:0)
LazyTeenager says:
December 27, 2012 at 2:39 am
“Gail Coombs says
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.
————
You are right about that. Its why I am arguing with you.”
Why don’t you warmists just occupy some wasteland and demonstrate to us how easy it is to build up a civilisation using the solar panels and wind turbines you can build using no raw materials nor fossil fuels. We’ll follow your glorious example as soon as you have managed to maintain a bureaucratic class this way that devours half your output.
LazyTeenager says: @ur momisugly December 27, 2012 at 3:01 am
Gail Coombs says
ROTFLMAO, that is rich coming from someone who wants to steal the inheritance of western culture from the ENTIRE WORLD!
————
Wow!!! another WUWT-er whose omniscience extends to mind reading….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Not mind reading just observing the cold hard facts.
1. You have been on WUWT pedaling CAGW. Plenty of evidence right on this thread.
2. The EU has stated the goal:
3. Australia is falling in line with the EU
4. New Zealand aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2050.
5. The USA falling in line if Obama gets his way.
The only Western Country who has not agreed to or is not working on this suicide pact is Canada
The rest of the world is not so dumb. In China there is 2,000 – The number of coal-fired power plants located in China. (One new power plant goes into operation every 4 to 7 days in China). and India is poised to contend with China as the globe’s top consumer of coal, with 455 power plants preparing to come online
6. More than 1,000 New Coal Plants Planned Worldwide
World Bank Graph
Obama has already made it clear he WILL shut down all the coal plants in the USA. Obama Makes Good on Promise to Bankrupt the Coal Industry and it is already happening In 2000, the country got 52 percent of its electricity from coal. In 2010, that dropped to 45 percent but that does NOT mean that US coal will not be mined and burned. One Tokyo shipping company, Daiichi Chuo Kisen Kaisha, says that U.S. coal exports could double in the next three or four years. In Washington state, coal companies are proposing two large export terminals that would help ship tens of millions of tons of coal from the Powder River Basin to countries like China.
What is worrying is that the coal plants are closing much faster than anticipated by the EPA. EPA calculated that only 9.5 GW of electrical generating capacity would close as a result of its rules. But the reality is that over 35 GW of power generating capacity will likely close—over three times the amount predicted by EPA modeling. Worse, as utilities continue to assess how to comply with EPA’s finalized Utility MACT rule and CSAPR, there will likely be further plant closure announcements in the coming weeks and months. This also means the rate paid for energy is skyrocketing. PJM Interconnection held its Future Capacity Auction for 2014/2015, the first to incorporate Utility MACT requirements. During that Auction, future capacity prices in the RTO increased by an incredible 350 percent.
After the World Trade Agreement and Clinton’s bring China into the WTO, US jobs walked. Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011, with job losses in every state,… over 2.1 million of which (76.9 percent) were in manufacturing. These lost manufacturing jobs account for more than half of all U.S. manufacturing jobs lost or displaced between 2001 and 2011. Competition with third world workers has driven down wages for workers in U.S. The affected population includes essentially all workers with less than a four-year college degree—roughly 70 percent of the workforce,… for a typical full-time median-wage earner, earnings losses due to globalization totaled approximately $1,400 per year as of 2006 (Bivens 2008a). For a typical household with two earners, the annual cost is more than $2,500
Despite the government fudging the numbers, the real US unemployment figures are around 23% and have risen slightly. The top five employers in the USA are the Federal Government, Walmart, Kelly temps, McDonald’s and UPS. In other words, bureaucratic and office drones, clerks and burger flippers NONE of WHOM CREATE WEALTH or TRADE GOODS!
There are only three methods of creating wealth Mining, Forestry/Agriculture or Manufacturing. All three need energy whether it is from the historic methods of slaves and animals or more modern methods such as coal/nuclear/hydro powered electrical plants.
Take away the methods of providing RELIABLE and CHEAP power and you mortally cripple the country in its competition with other countries.
Q.E.D.