Note: if the name below is familiar to you it is because of this article from Monday. This will be a sticky post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one– Anthony
Guest essay by Jonathan Abbott
Please allow me to recount the details of my personal path to CAGW scepticism. I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream and at times it feels quite odd. Perhaps others here have similar experiences? I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.
My own story begins at school in England in the early 80s. Between playing with Bunsen burners and iron filings, I remember being told that some scientists predicted that we would soon enter a new ice age. This sounded quite exciting but I never really thought it would happen; I was too young then to have seen any significant change in the world around me and it all seemed rather far-fetched. A nuclear war seemed far more likely. Soon enough the whole scare melted away.
I grew up into a graduate engineer with an interest in most branches of science but especially physics. I read the usual books by Sagan, Feynman and later Dawkins (whose The Ancestor’s Tale I simply can’t recommend highly enough). I also dipped into philosophy via Bertrand Russell. I like to think this reading helped build upon the basic capabilities for critical thinking my education had provided.
I suppose it was in the early 90s that I first noticed predictions of global warming and the associated dire warnings of calamities to come. Some of these emanated from the Met Office and so I knew should be treated with a pinch of salt but other sources included NASA, which I then personally still very much respected; despite the space shuttle evidently being the wrong concept poorly executed, their basic scientific expertise seemed unquestionable. In general I was looking forward to the warmer climate predicted for the UK, and assumed that the overall effects for the globe wouldn’t necessarily all be bad.
Now, being English I knew all about the vagaries of the weather, but the warnings about CAGW always seemed to be made in the most certain terms. Was it really possible to predict the climate so assuredly? The global climate must be an extremely complex system, and very chaotic. I had recently heard about financial institutions that were spending vast sums of money and picking the very best maths and programming graduates, but still were unable to predict the movements of financial markets with any confidence. Predicting changes to the climate must be at least as difficult, surely? I bet myself climate scientists weren’t being recruited with the sort of signing-on bonuses dangled by Wall Street. I also thought back to the ice age scare, which was not presented as an absolute certainty. Why the unequivocal certainty now that we would only see warming, and to dangerous levels? It all started to sound implausible.
The whole thing also seemed uncertain on the simple grounds of common sense. Could mankind really force such a fundamental change in our environment, and so quickly? I understood that ice ages could come and go with extreme rapidity, and that following the scare of my childhood, no one seriously claimed to be able to predict them. So in terms of previous natural variability, CAGW was demonstrably minor in scale. It seemed obvious that if natural variability suddenly switched to a period of cooling, there would be no CAGW no matter what the effect of mankind on the atmosphere. Even more fundamentally, how could anyone really be certain that the warming then taking place wasn’t just natural variability anyway? The reports I read assured me it wasn’t, but rarely in enough detail to allow me to decide whether I agreed with the data or not.
The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.
Now don’t get me wrong: a scientific theory is correct or not regardless of who supports it. But recognising the most vocal proponents of CAGW for what they were set alarm bells ringing, and made me want to investigate further. I had always been somewhat sympathetic towards Friends of the Earth but much less so towards Greenpeace, by that time obviously a front for luddite socialism and basically shamanistic in outlook. I had deep personal concerns about the environment, having seen reports of terrible industrial pollution in developing countries and the former Eastern Bloc. I had also sailed across the Atlantic twice in a small yacht, and seen for myself floating plastic debris hundreds of miles from land. (I also saw an ‘eco warrior’ yacht in Antigua, lived on by a crusading hippy and daubed with environmental slogans. It was poorly maintained and leaked far more oil into the water than any other boat present.)
So I was quite passionate about the environment, but my focus was on keeping it clean and safe for all life to live in. I wanted people to stop overfishing and manage fish stocks sensibly, I wanted agricultural land to produce the best long-term yields possible, to provide enough food without encroaching on wilderness and wild spaces. I wanted people everywhere to have clean air to breathe and water to drink. I had hoped that the CAGW crusade would somehow also lead to more urgent progress in fighting pollution, and the other environmental issues I cared about. If anything it did the reverse. Why the absolute fixation on reducing CO2 emissions, why was it taken for granted that this was the only way to proceed? Where was the public debate about the balance between prevention and mitigation? The CAGW protagonists always came up with solutions that were anti-industrial, anti-development and always, always required more public money. Where was the encouragement for inventors and entrepreneurs to discover and develop new technologies? And most of all, why oh why not spend some of the huge sums of money thrown at CO2 instead on getting effective pollution controls enacted in developing countries?
It had become quite clear to me that the BBC and similar media organisations would never even discuss whether the science underpinning CAGW was really robust. It had simply become a truism. An occasional doubting voice would be offered a sliver of airtime in the interests of supposed impartiality, but a proponent of CAGW would always be allowed the (much longer) last word. But, if NASA kept having to adjust their course calculations as the Voyager probes entered the outer reaches of the solar system (an utterly trivial problem compared to the complexities of the global climate), how could the science possibly be settled as claimed? Surely the great joy of science is in admitting ignorance, in taking a finely honed theory and sharpening it still further, or even better in realising a fundamental mistake and stepping aside onto a new path? The claimed certainty itself seemed unscientific.
Then in 2007 I saw a trailer on television for the forthcoming documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. I watched it excitedly, for here finally were people publicly addressing the science and the data, but drawing alternative conclusions to the mainstream. There was none of the usual hand-waving and appeals to trust the experts, who magically seemed to be the only doubt-free scientists in recorded history. The backlash against the program told its own story too, being mainly outraged appeals to authority and conscience.
Having recently become a regular user of the internet, I started digging around looking for more information and so, soon after he started it, I found Warren Meyer’s excellent web site climate-skeptic.com. Oh, the joy! Here were links to data I could see and evaluate myself; here was critical dissection of reports and papers accepted elsewhere without demur. From there, I moved onto WUWT, Bishop Hill, Climate Audit and all the other sites that have become part of my daily round of the internet whenever I have access. However late to the party compared with many regulars at WUWT, I could now see fully both sides of the argument.
When the Climategate emails were released, some further scales fell from my eyes. I had hitherto assumed that most of the most prominent scientists supporting CAGW were well intentioned but wrong, akin to those opposing the theory of continental drift. I have taken part in many lengthy email exchanges concerning technically complex projects, and instantly recognised familiar methods used by those playing the political and bureaucratic game, for whom the data is infinitely malleable in order to reach a pre-determined goal. I had fought against this kind of factual distortion myself.
Now at this point, I am sure some (perhaps many?) readers are thinking, ‘Great, an inside view of how someone becomes a believer in a conspiracy theory, perhaps I’ll base a research paper on this idiot’. My response is that like most people I have at times stumbled upon the real conspiracy theory nuts lurking on the internet. But on WUWT and other CAGW-sceptic sites criticism of the position of the website founder isn’t just tolerated but often encouraged. ‘Prove us wrong! Please! It would be fascinating!’ There are many articles and views published on WUWT that I treat with suspicion, or even downright disagree with, but it is all stimulating and usually well argued. Plus, I am an experienced professional engineer and know what real science looks like, and when people are misusing it as a smokescreen. Neil Armstrong was a great man, and most certainly did land on the moon. Right or wrong, WUWT is a site that considers real scientific issues.
So I now find myself wondering where we go from here. The global climate will continue to change, as it has always done, and although I tend to expect some cooling I am pretty agnostic about it. Nature will assuredly do its own thing. The CAGW scare is in the process of burning out, but I do not expect an outright or imminent collapse. I hope to see the deliberate manipulators of data punished, but doubt very much it will ever come to that. Whatever happens next, it will undoubtedly be interesting, and stimulate much discussion and widely varying viewpoints. This is good news, because it means that we are back to doing science.
Mr. Abbott, thank you for sharing your story of CAGW skepticism.
My story is at the link below.
http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/from-man-made-global-warmist-to-skeptic.html
I was down the pub one night having a beer with a friend who asked me if I took this global warming seriously. I said: “Of course I did”.
It was in the text books at school and mainstream science wasn’t it?
I went home and started checking. The John Daly website was my first port of call.
The next night I was down the pub having a beer with the same friend. “By the way”. I said. “That Anthropogenic Global Warming is a complete load of bollocks”.
“My round” he said.
“The idea is to try to give all the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.
Richard P. Feynman ”
Thank you, Mr. Abbott, and you, Anthony, for your efforts to give us “…all the information…”.
Here’s to hoping that more and more people will look at the facts and come to the same conclusion as you. So many people have no clue!
It’s amazing how facts counter consensus.
You’ve rather succinctly nailed it there. Well done.
I think in the next 5 years many more will share our journey to skepticism.
I hope your good news pans out. I am so tired of the argumentum ad auctoritatem. Which is all they have left.
I recall the first talk I ever saw on the subject of AGW, in the 1990s. The speaker presented the observational temperature data and had fitted an exponential curve to the warming from the 1970s to the 1990s.
I was disturbed by the fitting of such a curve to data that might well be linear, but the most salient aspect of the graph was that his curve could just as well have been fitted to the temperature rise of the first half of the 20th century.
When I asked a question about that, I received basically a weasely ‘non-answer’, and an immediate call for the next question, which shut my queries down.
I’ve remained unconvinced ever since of hypotheses that fail to explain why the 1910-1940 warming did not continue (among other deficiencies).
Skeptic from the beginning. 1. too much certainty by some very vocal scientists and enviro activists 2. the physics did not make sense to me, too much attribution to a very small CO2 change. 3. got even more suspicious when the medieval warming period’s existence was denied 4. and through it all I kept wondering why won’t they talk about that big hot yellow thing in the sky.
Skeptical about the negative hype about cholesterol. Skeptical about the positive hype of vegetable oils, wheat, low fat diets, and calorie control. Skeptical about Islam as the “religion of peace”. Skeptical about Keynesian economics. Skeptical that nearly every white person that has a negative comment about our government is supposedly a racist. Just a born skeptic I guess. Can’t possibly be attributable to rational thought based on research.
Mr Abbott. Thank you. To save time and space, I was also educated in the 1980s and came to climate scepticism in an almost identical way.
In my case, back in 2006 a good friend of mine told me with some certainty that CAGW was rubbish. I did not know and had barely looked into it in any depth. I remember the ice age scares of the 1970s and wondered if the current warming was just natural variation with some human influence, or what,so to counter what he was saying I started researching all I could find out and approached it from a neutral perspective. I wrote to blogs on both sides of a debate that I was told from only one side, did not exist. In fact the more I tried to find objective truth, and the more I engaged a scientific curiosity and asked detailed and often awkward questoions, the more ine side helped me, and the other became insulting and closed down.
One side was happy to provide evidence and was always looking for more evidence, the other side was always hiding evidence and expecting me to accept their word on blind faith.
The sceptical side was much more scientific and the alarmist side was much more religious. Since those early days in 2006-07,the climategate emails happened, the scale of how the alarmist side had been hiding evidence, bullying journals and editors, perverting the peer review system entirely,reduced my trust in the alarmists, but I was still listening to the data. I was still prepared to accept the reality of CAGW if the data supported it. Being from a computing and engineering background, I instinctively distrusted climate models as they are only as good as the data that they are built from and the data is very much incomplete, so I watch the charts of temperature which underpin the whole theory.
None of the models projected the current pause. None of the scientists predicted or warned of the pause. None of the scientists can still explain the pause with any data showing how the mechanism of the pause works. The models failed. the theory upon which those models were built, has been falsified.
The rude, unscientific behaviour of the alarmist scientists is what put me off them personally and raised alarm bells and made me begin to distrust their arguments.
But It is the actual real hard data which convinces me of the sceptical side of the debate. A debate which alarmists spend so much of their time arguing in whilst claiming it is a debate which does not exist.
Thank you for sharing, Mr. Abbot. I have been HOPING for a thread on just this topic. I hope others will share their “path to truth” stories.
I have no “story.” Seeing that the devotees of AGW were the same socialists (quaintly styling themselves “Democrats”) who drove around in old Volvos with “No Nukes!” bumper stickers on the back and pushed “organic” produce, I was skeptical from the get-go and actively pursued evidence to refute them. Soon, comparing their “science” with real science, it became clear who was right.
I came to WUWT about 4 months ago thanks to a link on Mark Steyn’s site — and boy am I glad I did! I LOVE THIS SITE!
Ditto. But I never did accept the agw hypophesis. It never made sense to me even as a 6th former. I read HHLamb and every other climate / weather book I could afford or borrow from the library but I started from a position of non-acceptance. I get extremely annoyed with the likes of the UK Met Off people who really MUST know better but refuse to say so. It’s people like them I want to put in prison.
I’m another proffessional engineer. Your road of discovery matches mine, exactly.
Thank you for sharing it.
Like Dave the Engineer above, skeptic from the beginning. I was raised in Ontario where evidence of recent (10K years) is everywhere, so sure climate had changed… a lot. Also, I remember the 1970s breathless warnings of imminent global cooling. Strangely enough, the cure was the same as for global warming… de-industrialization on a large scale. I suspect that for many in the climate alarmist camp, de-industrialization has always been the underlying goal. Climate change (cooling then, and warming now) is a means to an end.
Dear Mr. AbboTT — please forgive my misspelling your name.
oops.. that should read “evidence of recent glaciation”
Stephen Richards!
Here’s my chance to say, “Thank you so much” for your encouraging remark awhile back (maybe I already told you — LOL, I can’t remember!). As a result, (whisper: I have been praying all along that all is well with you — just as a “thanks.”).
Hope all is well!
Janice
Well I for one know it is buried deep in the ocean. I mean how else did the center of the earth get so hot. Just as Heidi and she will explain it so even a senator can understand. Of course she was educated by the president himself.
My academic standard only reaches Geology A’level. From what I had learnt though, I was pretty sure that the global temperature had previously been much higher than present. That seemed to torpedo the warmist’s claim that feedbacks were catastrophically positive. My first contact with sceptics came from Chris Bookers column in the Sunday Telegraph who guided me to WUWT and the rest as they say is history.
eco-geek says:
July 25, 2013 at 11:19 am
Just goes to show you meet a better sort of bloke down the pub
I was already a severe skeptic of anything promoted by powerful interests who would also profit from the recommended response to their new “problem”. Nancy Pelosi, for example, when speaking on this subject said:
“We’re trying to save the world!”
Having endured the endless terror of the Cold War (ended), of various Malthusian predictions of the end of oil (not ended), the end of food (not ended), and the end of warmth (not ended), other endless terrors of pig flu (came to naught), bird flu (came to naught), ebola (came to naught), terrorism (basically a crime in search of a war) – well, by the time the global warming scam came along I couldn’t easily be convinced that the end of the world was that simple.
After looking at the people promoting the idea I became even more skeptical.
After looking at the available evidence, I concluded my tentative conclusion didnt need changing.
My story starts in the 1950s. My father took me to see the remains of Lynmouth Devon after a catastrophic flood. I must have been 4 or 5 years old and my response was that if rain could do that then I ought to pay attention to the weather.
For the next 60 years I observed and studied weather and climate obsessively. I joined the Royal Meteorological Society as a student member in 1968 and have maintained my membership to date.
I formed certain views about the ebb and flow of energy in the atmosphere in the light of basic physical principles and thought my mental constructs were part of the mainstream (as per Hubert Lamb, Marcel Leroux and Gordon Manley amongst many others) until the AGW panic started in the late 90s.
At first I went along with it as an interesting proposition but then around 2000 I noted that the previous tendency of the jets and climate zones to drift poleward had stopped and subsequently they appeared to be retreating back equatorward again.
That was inconsistent with AGW theory in light of our accelerating emissions and after 7 years of considering the discrepancy I embarked on blogging about climate.
As a result of the to and fro of vigorous debate I tested my ideas against many other minds and gradually filtered out the nonsense.
I now have a workable New Climate Model which fits observations and basic physical principles. It will shortly be promulgated in a new website and I will be providing links to the many sources that have helped me to refine my views over the past 6 years.
The discomfiture of arguing with the likes of Leif and Willis has been invaluable and the data provided by Bob Tisdale and Tonyb amongst others has been very helpful.
From a lay person: I see various posts/articles, including this one, about CAGW being a theory. Is it really? Is it not just a hypothesis with no empirical foundation to “promote” it to a theory? Thanks .
I too grew up at a time when scientists were claiming that an ice age was coming and often wondered for years whatever became of those claims.
In the last few years a friend would email me articles proclaiming global warming. I didn’t pay much attention to them until climate-gate. Then I searched through the internet and found references to WUWT. I had researched evolution and Malthusian population explosion before and found that they were a bunch of bullock. Here I find Man Made Global Warming advocates using logical fallacies, built theories on unvalidated or unverifiable assumptions, made great use of story-telling, ignored facts, brow-beat people who questioned their assumptions, won’t give straight answers, answer in a dogmatic manner as persons of authority rather than with data and logic as expected of scientists. In other words their approach is no different than Evolutionists and Malthusian doomsdayers. That’s when I added Man Made Global Warming to my bullock list of evolution and Malthusian population explosion. The same people often believe in all three.
Well put. My journey toward climate skepticism began with reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. I was so intrigued that I checked the data, listened to skeptical speakers on you tube, and visited the sites you mentioned on line. I was flabbergasted by Gore’s movie. A 32foot graph that when read by anyone with any scientific background clearly refuted the speaker Nobel recipient and ex vice president. When will the public become enlightened? I look foreword to those described above and refered to as watermelons by Delingpole get what’s coming to them.
Insightful article! It does seem like a kind of support group(ish) writeup though.
The Global Warming Swindle of 2007 is so full of lies and disinformation that even now it is being distanced by the skeptic community because it is so completely unscientific. For example, they provide the Greenland temperature data to show that the medieval warm period was much warmer than today, which is a common myth promoted by anti-global warming propagandists who pretend that Greenland is the entire world and that Greenland ice cores are the only way to derive temperature from the paleo record. Another example is that they failed to show how the IPCC had determined it was a combination of volcanic and man made aerosols that caused the post WWII cooling and that the “recession” of the 1970s had nothing to do with the resurgence of warming but rather it was the response to acid rain (removing sulfate emission in U.S. and Europe) that caused the resurgence of warming. These subtle efforts to hide truth show that this movie was simply a form of propaganda.
It turns out that, when looking at reliable historic temperatures we are already above the global level of both the medieval warming and the roman warming period and are basically tied with the Holocene Optimum. For the most reliable temperature record for the earlier interglacial (the Eemian) the Antarctic ice core data shows we are within 1C of the peak temperature found during the Eemian optimum. After that point we will reach an average temperature level that hasn’t been seen on planet earth for the last 1.5 million years and (likely) will reach a point not seen on this planet for nearly 50 million years. –all within the next 100-200 years.
The characterization of the “climategate” emails was a complete fabrication by the websites you listed. Comprehensive analysis of the emails showed that there was no impropriety involved. They simply picked out emails that were supposedly incriminating by misquoting them and implying things that were not happening. to say that they were implying those things is to promote lies and does yourself a disservice.
It is inherently clear in all sociological studies of global warming perceptions that the overwhelming majority of “skeptics” are white males over the age of 35 with above average incomes who come from a politically right ideology. Are you sure that your scientific understanding isn’t actually derived from your ideological opposition to collective responses to AGW and/or fear of the potential regulatory framework that will be implemented (i.e. government restrictions on personal freedoms)?
I do not have those fears, because my understanding of the scientific reality is much different from yours, though honest and intense (and recent!) investigation.
My personal experience with becoming aware of the extreme danger posed to society from AGW came from personal inquiry after being challenged on the subject 2 years ago. Prior to that point I thought that AGW was going to be a potential issue *maybe* in about 100 years due to sea level rise.
As I began to review the documentation, actual peer reviewed articles and then book after book, I began to find out things that were in direct opposition to what I had previously known to be true, like the fact that 2007 arctic melt was a significant outlier to all modeled arctic ice responses, that the uncertainty of modeling projections for global temperatures indicated that it was likely that the projections for warming over the next 75 years would be double what we were being told. I also found that there was also significant uncertainties on the feedback mechanisms regarding boreal forest, Amazon basin forests and arctic methane feedbacks indicating that the models were inherently conservative in their estimations by leaving out these potentially catastrophic factors.
Then I found that the paleoclimate analyses for climate sensitivity to CO2 were based on studies of the glacial phases in the climate record not the interglacials, like we are in today. I then found out that climate sensitivities determined during historic interglacials indicated a MUCH higher climate sensitivity but were thrown out of the calculation because runaway climate change didn’t happen. But that they didn’t consider that the only other time that we had a non-Milankovich driven interglacial (one driven by CO2) actually DID produce runaway warming (the PETM).
Then I found out that our current CO2 emissions path is actually higher than the worst case scenario, that wasn’t actually considered as likely at the time (A1Fl) and that the rapid collapse of arctic ice was going to radically shift the northern hemisphere weather patterns before any other processes were going to take place.
Then, most recently I found out that the weather pattern shift predicted after the ice melt of 2012 was actually happening and then, in the beginning of this summer, a split in the northern hemisphere polar jet stream began producing long-lived cut off lows in the midlattitude regions and now, for the last 2 months there has been an ever-present cut-off low in the north pacific (and sometimes two or three!) that are persisting much longer than the 4-6 days that they usually live) and the wrong-way low that started in July 10th and moved into texas, has only now moved back to the east coast after 2 weeks in an unprecedented shift in northern hemisphere weather.
The effects of AGW have now shown themselves in extremely unstable weather events. We will see what kind of a wild ride we are in for now. One can only hope that the current predictions are not true, but one thing is absolutely true, and without a doubt, AGW is real, the scientists were not part of some grand socialist conspiracy and we are now in the fight for the lives of our future generations.
My conversion from believer to skeptic came only after I came to rude awakenings in other disciplines. It started during the housing crisis (which is still ongoing, btw) – my occupation was residential construction and despite all the “experts” on TV and in newspapers saying it would keep going up I knew they were wrong and I was subsequently proven correct. That episode bitchslapped me into awareness – if everyone was wrong about something as fundamental as housing prices, what else are we wrong about? Well the answer to that turns out to be just about everything, as long as there is a financial interest in maintaining the errant status quo.
My next investigation was into health and nutrition and I doubt many will believe me but everything you think you know about eating correctly and the cause of chronic disease like CHD, diabetes, cancer and autoimmune disease is dead wrong. Low fat and “healthy whole grains” are the true killers, not saturated fat and cholesterol. The information is out there, it’s just that conventional wisdom is just so damn hard for the public to go against and scientists and doctors who have spent their lives promoting a low fat diet are so caught up in cognitive dissonance it takes an incredible leap of faith to consider different alternatives.
At this point I was getting quite a bit perturbed about all the disinformation that is out there and I took an interest in global warming; something I had believed in before but now wasn’t so sure owing to my experience with nutrition. I stumbled upon Anthony’s site in 2009 and immediately read his Surface Stations project and it became instantly clear there was no way we could be sure about CAGW if we couldn’t even accurately measure the temperature today, let alone guess about what it was in the past. I followed that with “The Hockey Stick Illusion” and any doubts were removed entirely; perhaps CAGW is happening but we don’t have the slightest ability to prove it so these outspoken members of The Team could only be engaging in quackery (or outright fraud), not science.
It’s been an interesting stretch, I feel as if I can finally see after a lifetime of blindness. There’s no going back and I will do my best from here on out to fight the fraud and obvious self interest that seems to drive most of our conventional wisdom.
As an Engineer who was also messing about with Bunsen burners in the early ’80’s your story is a carbon copy of mine. Like you I initially fell for the CAGW story. My mistake was to believe the PR machine that the warmists had built. In 2008 an article in The Telegraph by Christopher Booker prompted me to investigate. Since then I have become a fully signed up member to the ‘skeptic’ club.
Thanks to the freedom of the Internet and freedom fighters like Booker, Watts, Lomborg, North, McIntyre et al, we will all soon be free of the evil ideals that the catastrophists are promoting. In a few short years they, and their thoughts, will become a laughing stock and stories like yours and mine will be the norm rather than the exception.
Your path very closely matches mine. Graduated in 1989 in earth sciences (UK university) and shave spent over 20 years working in the oil and gas industry. My interest in AGW started with Al Gores movie which seemed compelling but when I started to get more interested analytically and ask some pretty basic questions, I was amazed to find the reluctance to admit uncertainty and downright antagonism when making simple queries. To a scientific mind ths just makes one dig deeper with the ultimate result in my skepticism and realisation that AGW theory is a house of cards.
About Climategate email; when will there be updates regarding the third chunk of emails? It has been months but no info have been released so far.
I had a similar path to the author. I had lots of questions, but seeing breathless propaganda about “settled science” made me suspicious.
“The Great Global Warming Swindle” prompted me to seek answers on the internet, and I stumbled upon Jo Nova’s website, and from there, others.
Having had classic scientific education, I can judge facts for myself, and what I saw made me really angry. And I saw a fraudulent attempt to use the name of science to install global control, raise unjustified taxes and impose bogus regulations.
I still believe that CAGW ideology is more dangerous than any other totalitarian ideology or religion, as it has such popular support, yet outright wrong and will inevitably result in utter misery and death to many.
It also makes me wonder whether we learned anything from the XX century, having believed in Communism, Nazism and Eugenics in quick succession. We still dare to believe and follow leaders who are the most shameless and the most abrupt, without actually checking any facts.
This scares me, it really does.
Saw who was promoting it and was immediately skeptical.
I became sceptical as soon as I learned that CO2 levels have been 12 times higher than today in the past, and that the earth entered into ice ages despite high CO2 levels. Then I learned that warming releases more CO2 into the air. None of the Believers seems to be able to explain why runaway warming didn’t happen millions of years ago. Warming leads to more CO2 which leads to more warming….
Climate gate settled the issue for me.
With regard to Eric Elsam quoting Feynman, I recalled the youtube talk at Stanford U by Stephen Schneider “Climate Change: Is the Science Settled”. He says that as with a lawyer, he is not obligated to cite evidence to the contrary. btw, he is a MacArthur “genius” fellow. My doubts also grew out of the near certainty cited for the multiple of elements of anthropogenic global warming due to CO2. A long time ago, I did numerical simulations for semiconductors. It was a bitch trying to chase down what effects were real versus an artifact of the numerical model. There were many incautious investigators who reported “discoveries” that were later shown to be the result of the model and not real. I guess nothing changes in 30 years.
“The other thing that really got me thinking was seeing the sort of people that would appear on television, proselyting about the coming tragedy that it would imminently become too late to prevent. Whether from charities, pressure groups or the UN, I knew I had heard their strident and political use of language, and their determination to be part of the Great Crusade to Save the World before. These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause. The suggested remedies I heard them espouse were always socialist in approach, requiring the installation of supra-national bodies, always taking a top-down approach and furiously spending other peoples’ money. They were clearly eager participants in an endless bureaucratic jamboree.”
>>>>>>>>
Yup, it was always about the politics (and funding) not the science.
This thread’s a bit like a Confessional.
My conversion from believer to skeptic was rapid.
Climategate.
If the UEA/CRU crew was convinced AGW was happening, why did they lie to try to ‘prove’ it was happening?
Another engineer with a very similar path to similar stance. It appears that Roy S. has a very good grasp of the uncertainties, so he currently has the most credence in the debate, IMO.
Like Scuzza Man said, you can tell it’s a scam by the people behind it. Dad told me it was hogwash decades ago, but I would have figured it out on my own watching the socialists try so hard to scare the pants off of people.
Cool story. Mine is similar. I thought that if there was a lot of scientists with a position it should be a correct one or at least the most likely. Fortunately for me I love to play devil’s advocate. I usually can read an opposing side and dismember their arguments in seconds. Not so with AGW. As I read more I came up with 4 simple questions I started asking all the pro-AGW organizations and people I could. Most did not respond or brushed it off as irrelevant and “just believe” appeal to authority type answers. Now if you’re like me not getting a straight answer to simple questions will really put you on high alert with the BS meter!
1) What is the most powerful and plentiful GHG?
2) What percentage of the GH can be attributed to water vapor?
3) How much CO2 from all sources goes into the atmosphere?
4) How much CO2 goes into the atmosphere from humans?
The answer to number 2 was 65% to 95% depending on who you ask. With that huge of a range the rest of the numbers don’t really matter because you start off with such a huge unknown. I would run the numbers for high, low and medium and just come back to “it can’t be human caused”. Of course I ran into the “CO2 gives water vapor a huge feedback” but when asked for proof (silly me) I’d get dead silence.
Since then I have continued reading both sides of the debate but have found nothing (so far) to alter my current position that human releases of CO2 are not the primary cause of the warming we saw post 1980.
The current pause has me more concerned that Livingston & Penn (and others) are correct and we are heading for another cold spell / ice age. I still hope they are wrong but so far their predictions match reality better (I know, silly me again wanting predictions that can be tested before the events occur).
Cheers
Part of me ‘wants to believe’ in CAGW, perhaps as some kind of emotional reaction, feeling that we’re not particularly good at looking after our planet … but at my core I am rational and logical … and data is a stubborn thing, so I get branded as a skeptic. So be it.
Thanks for your great story. The tide is turning. I am much older (79) and remember many warnings of catastrophes which never came. I remember the experts (mostly in government) who were certain the world would be out of natural gas by 2015 and out of oil by 2030 or thereabout. I am driven most by logic, and there’s not much of that in the CAGW machine.
Another man’s journey….
http://littleskepticpress.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/geologists-were-right-conversations.html
My personal experience is different as my father first identified cAGW as the next big politically-motivated, environmental scare in the mid-1980s. So I was sceptical before most people knew there was anything to be sceptical of.
But the UK media experience is familiar. For me, the BBC bias worked in reverse.
I lost my trust of the BBC because of my understanding of the science. I wasn’t sceptical because of BBC bias.
If I had no understanding of the science, would I have become sceptical of the established science as well as the BBC?
Who knows? Although as a Christian my faith in scientism was quashed by Dawkins not sustained.
Still, in the end the refusal to debate was the key to my scepticism. Real scientists, if they had a 97% consensus and physical evidence, would relish the chance to crush their opponents I public.
But they were afraid.
Hypocritical pseudo-scientists!
Believers in CAGW are astonished when the y find that engineers don’t believe in scientists. They accept and use Euclidean geometry because its propositions stand demonstrated, not because they believe in Euclid. There is a gulf of understanding between believers and those who practice science.
lt was my interest in weather that told me that AGW was utter rubbish.
The weather in the UK since 2007 with the jet stream tracking south and moving into a more waving pattern told me AGW would be wrong. The weather was pointing to the risk of returning to a climate type like the LIA not to the Med climate moving north to the UK.
As soon as they tried to pin the reason to the jet stream making large swings to AGW. l knew they were full of it and lacked a real deep understanding about the weather.
lf there was one single weather event that told me that ever rising global temps as forecast by AGW was wrong. Then it was in Feb 2012 when a saw a weather pattern that l would of expected to have turned up in the middle of a ice age. lf we were heading towards ever rising temps, then what the hell is this doing turning up.
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
When I found out somebody with a scientific background said that, I was amazed. When I found out it was Phil Jones and that he was a major player in mainstream AGW science, I needed to sit down and have a drink.
I will start off by saying that I never really believed in man-made global warming. I was more of a “I don’t care” person about the issue; I didn’t believe or disbelieve. But it was Steve McIntyre and James Spann who convinced me CAGW was bogus.
I love studying the weather. I’m not meteorologist good, but I still like the weather. One summer many years ago, I noticed that the Weather Channel had no idea what the weather was going to be like. I saw a forecast change dramatically in a short period of time. From that moment, I began to actively mock the Weather Channel. And they make it easier to this day. A few years later I saw that someone at the Weather Channel (Heidi Cullen?) wanted to deny AMS certification to any meteorologist who didn’t believe in CAGW. I forgot how I was made aware of James Spann’s blog about this (Link to the blog entry), but James said “I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype.”
That is when I asked myself: “Why is it that meteorologists, who are only paid when they are right, do not believe in man-made global warming but scientists, who are paid whether they are right or wrong, do?”
Soon after that, I learned about Steve McIntyre and how he disproved the hockey stick. And soon after that, I found WUWT; specifically, this link which showed how GISS changed the temperatures. I asked myself another question: “Why was 1930 hotter in 1999 than today?” (P.S. I have visited WUWT every day since then.)
Around this same time I read about how James Hansen cried censorship by George W. Bush when, in fact, W. Bush just told Hansen to do his job. I also read about the Medieval Warm Period, back before the eco-loons took over Wikipedia. There was many things that made me a disbeliever (I don’t call myself a skeptic.)
I now proselytize my disbelief in CAGW by talking about weather history. That is how I do it. I told many people for years that New York City was long overdue for a hurricane, then Hurricane Sandy hit last year and I started telling people the last major hurricane to hit New York City was in 1938. And so on. Joe Bastardi helps me with the weather history part, history the CAGW promoters want to keep hidden. I’ve made many people CAGW disbelievers.
Very well written. My own story has many similar elements, but it actually started with a family argument over the dinner table at Christmas. Simply, i was challenged to look at the actual data, and so began the journey to skepticism.
We regularly hear from scientific illiterates here. This site doesn’t censor their opinions, no matter how much pseudo-science they contain. But occasionally we hear from someone who is so filled with psychological projection [imputing his own faults onto others] and false information that he appears to be peddling clown science. The post above by jai mitchell is a case in point. mitchell asserts:
…when looking at reliable historic temperatures we are already above the global level of both the medieval warming and the roman warming period and are basically tied with the Holocene Optimum.
Even climate alarmists like Richard Alley show that the MWP, the RWP, the Minoan Optimum, etc., were significantly warmer than now. Where does jai mitchell get his nonsense? He doesn’t say. No doubt he simply retains the most preposterous estimate and presumes that to be his baseline belief. mitchell continues:
The characterization of the ‘climategate’ emails was a complete fabrication… there was no impropriety involved.
Everyone who has followed the Climategate email dump has seen the documented evidence of fraud and malfeasance, from threatening journals for publishing scientific papers that disputed the runaway global warming narrative, to the outright fabrication of published papers for the purpose of propagandizing climate science, to actually getting scientists fired for disputing their ideology. Much of this is well documented in Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion [available on the right sidebar]. None of that documented Climategate evidence matters to jai mitchell. He is a True Believer, and his mind is made up and shut tighter than a drumskin. mitchell writes:
…the overwhelming majority of ‘skeptics’ are white males over the age of 35 with above average incomes who come from a politically right ideology.
Note the ad hominem attack, which takes the place of mitchell’s non-existent science. Also note that if most skeptics are politically conservative [an assertion that is constantly disputed by many liberal scientists here on WUWT], then it follows that most wild-eyed runaway global warming prophets like mitchell must therefore be from the far left. jai mitchell cannot even make a coherent argument.
jai mitchell explains his putative climate knowledge:
…my understanding of the scientific reality is much different from yours, through honest and intense (and recent!) investigation… 2 years ago.
Many of us here have been closely following the global warming scare for twenty years or more, and most regular readers have backgrounds and education in the hard sciences and engineering. But mitchell started reading his pseudo-science blogs only 2 years ago, so now he presumes to lecture everyone with his predictions:
The 2007 arctic melt… projections for warming over the next 75 years would be double what we were being told.
Again, told by whom? The Arctic is going through its natural cycle, and it is countered by increasing Antarctic ice. The net result when both hemispheres are added together is about the same global ice cover as the past 30-year average. Scientific know-nothings like jai mitchell refuse to show what is happening in the Antarctic, because their purpose is to disseminate propaganda.
And note that 30 years is a very short time scale. At various times during the Holocene, the Arctic had no ice cover. During those times CO2 was much lower than now, therefore CO2 could not be a significant cause of declining Arctic ice. The actual causes are changing wind, ocean currents, and precipitation.
mitchell tells us what he found out [but he doesn’t say where]:
I then found out that climate sensitivities determined during historic interglacials indicated a MUCH higher climate sensitivity but were thrown out of the calculation because runaway climate change didn’t happen.
The ‘high climate sensitivity’ number has been so totally debunked here and elsewhere that only someone who just stumbled across the global warming scare 2 years ago would be unaware of it. At current concentrations, the effect of CO2 is not even measurable. Most of the warming due to CO2 happened in the first 20 ppm. Adding more to current levels makes such a small difference that for all practical purposes it can be completyely disregarded.
mitchell writes another non-sequitur:
…our current CO2 emissions path is actually higher than the worst case scenario…
But mitchell does not define “our”. Most of the increased [harmless and beneficial] CO2 is emitted by China, India, Russia, and a hundred smaller countries. U.S. CO2 emissions are declining. But since mitchell is propagandizing, he will not attack the countries that are doing what he believes damages the environment. Where are his polemics against China? I have never seen one. So maybe jai mitchell can post a reference to a comment he made at WUWT criticizing China. Finally, without one iota of testable, verifiable, measurable scientific evidence, jai mitchell asserts:
The effects of AGW have now shown themselves in extremely unstable weather events… without a doubt, AGW is real…
Without a doubt, there are no verifiable, testable measurements showing that AGW even exists. Global warming is natural, and has progressed along the same long term trend line since the LIA. But like everything else he asserts, jai mitchell is either wrong or self-serving when he tries to blame global warming on human CO2 emissions. There is simply no measurable, testable scientific evidence for that repeatedly debunked false alarm.
I feel like I just stood up at an AA meeting.
Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick’s dismantling of the Hockey Stick opened my eyes to climate science. Before that I basically ignored the whole field and was agnostic on CACC. A link at Steve’s site took me to Revkin’s Dot Earth and the assorted comments therein cemented my suspicions that climate change science has been political theater and a funding raison d’etre since the late 1980’s.
It has become a pimple on the ass of science.
I’m also a professional engineer, with origins a little earlier. I was there in the 70s when Global Cooling was the scare, and also when the Nuclear Winter hypothesis was being advanced by Carl Sagan, et al. You may recall that this was probably the first high-profile public policy debate supported by an atmos-pheric physics model. Of course, the Nuclear Winter hypothesis was conclusively falsified by the events of the Gulf War I, so I marked that as a data point. My schooling was in applied physics, so my graduate years involved the problem of setting up and solving the radiative transfer equation. My later work in advanced weapons brought me around to that subject in connection with target effects by high-energy lasers. Given the Global Cooling and Nuclear Winter duds, I approached the whole subject of Global Warming with a wary eye, also being warned by the manner and identity of the proponents. But it was somewhere in 2006-2007 when the game was revealed. My union had arranged a showing of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” which at one juncture showed a vast matrix of pictures of climate-induced, untimely-extinct animal life, calculated to inspire audience awe and somberness. I couldn’t restrain a loud bark of laughter, for among the purported victims was the coelacanth, a notorious SURVIVAL, not an extinction. Look, Al Gore is well-connected; this could have been caught. There is no credible excuse for this sort of flagrant error, nor any excuse for the Warmist crowd to welcome such a scientific boob to their vanguard. So, it immediately meant to me that truth was incidental to policy, and policy is all that mattered. It is really not complex if you simply connect the dots.
The basic physics continue to rule. (1) Our equilibrium temperature is controlled by the ratio of the ter-restrial absorption and emission coefficients integrated across the solar spectrum. (2) If there was only a positive feedback dynamic, we would be already roasting like Thanksgiving turkeys; nature doesn’t know how to go nuts in a gradual way. (3) The CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is determined by the equilibrium balance between the atmosphere and the seawater; it literally doesn’t matter what mankind does (not only it doesn’t, but it can’t). Seawater will outgas or absorb in accordance with what is needed to maintain the Equilibrium (Le Chatlier’s Principle). (4) Not to mention that all the quantitative predictions are plainly at variance with reality. These people are both mentally unhinged and very dangerous to civilization. We fail to recognize this “inconvenient truth” at our peril.
alan neil ditchfield says:
Yes. I’ve always suspected that engineers feel this way because it’s our professional butts that are on the line when we’re wrong, and believing things we can’t prove generally doesn’t seem to be a justification in our fields for incompetence.
But what do I know.
The stridor of political promotion, the vulgar speed of institutionalisation with which the Ministry-of- -We-Know-Best seized the socioploitical and pseudo-moral leverage to impose taxation, the endless encouragement of guilt, the global temperature rise at the beck and call of a trace gas, the “science,” the paleoscience, the models, Climategate, the funding, the hate (tobacco, conspriacy, big oil, big corp etc etc etc), UN Agenda 21…all these made the sensitivities imposed by a Jesuit education reverberate deafeningly.
One of the key red flags was the outrageous speed with which the normally staid and turgid institutions galloped to embrace the meme in a manner hugely out of character. That alone – surely – would have most independently minded people frantically digging for the truth.
My turn came about 2008 after watchiing a “”debate” with Richard Lindzen and Gavin Schmidt on opposing panels. I was SHOCKED that RL presented data, facts, and GS presented ad hominems!
Well written, and a delight to read.
“Everyone who has followed the Climategate email dump has seen the documented evidence of fraud and malfeasance, from threatening journals for publishing scientific papers that disputed the runaway global warming narrative, to the outright fabrication of published papers for the purpose of propagandizing climate science, to actually getting scientists fired for disputing theis ideology. ”
Sadly the first person to read all the mails ( 1, 2 and working on 3) and publish a book on them(CG1), disagrees with your assessment. Folks ought to be more skeptical about what they think they know about climate scientists. Last I looked the science on what is in men’s hearts is not settled.
WRT the article. I dont see a single scientific argument in it. There are many scientific arguments to be a skeptic. None were presented. Finally, never trust a personal account of how someone came to believe or disbelieve.
There’s that word “(im)plausible” popping up again. So what are we discussing?
The theory of man-made implausibility put forward by implausibilists expecting us to, implausibly, buy the implausibleness?
I didn’t buy the implausibleness of man-made Global Cooling as a teenager during the 1970’s.
I was a believer in global warming, I even argued for it. Then I read IPCC 4 – and as a dual Ph.D. the thing read like a National Geographic article, and the citations were to WWF rags and peer reviewed lit. Then I started to look for the real data, stumbleb on climate4you and WUWT and the rest is history.
The emperor has no clothes.
Michael Craig says at July 25, 2013 at 12:50 pm
Yeah. I forgot that. It really offended me.
There was a moral imperative to engage in the debate since that point. That was the spur that pushed me off my bottom.
The contempt for any ultimate truth pulled me on to the blogs.
I’ve never been skeptical of Global cooling or Global warming, I had a very intelligent form teacher who was also a geologists and astronomer who informed (us) his students immediately on hearing reports that the earth was going to warm, he let us know about the Ice age scare of the 70’s and taught us how these cycles of warming and cooling are all natural events.
What I am skeptical of is the claim that global warming and global cooling events are artificial and man made, It’s an absurdity that natural climatic events have morphed into Anthropogenic Global Warming, Climate Change, Global weirding, Anthropogenic weather disappointment. etc..
What truth is there in the science has been hijacked and exaggerated, morphed and twisted into purified concentrated alarmist nonsense. Regardless of political persuasions or beliefs it takes a special kind of moron to use these deceitful distortions of science as a social/political tool and it takes a complete fool to believe them.
… instantly recognised familiar methods used by those playing the political and bureaucratic game, for whom the data is infinitely malleable in order to reach a pre-determined goal
I once, early in my career, asked a PhD statistician ..
“What the “golden position,”the dream job for a statistician was ?
He immediately replied … “working for the Tobacco Institute”
Every time I see one of these papers where they tortured tha data to get the “proper” results
I have to wonder if these folks ever worked at the Tobacco Institute.
Magic.
A bit older than you, educated in England in the 1960s and earliest ’70s, before going to sea. forty years in shipping, now. Coming Ice Ages – yeah – and the Jethro Tull album ‘Stormwatch’ – look at the lyrics of ‘Something’s On the Move’ –
http://www.metrolyrics.com/somethings-on-the-move-lyrics-jethro-tull.html
Had done a lot with weather at primary and secondary school – and at sea. As a Brit, like you, Jonathan, I am aware that weather can be j o l l y variable. Still seek to encourage my ships to become Voluntary Observing Ships.
You have written my story beautifully – albeit I have a remembrance of the winter of ’63, and perhaps more foreign travel.
Once you saw the practitioners of CAGW, the BS detectors inflated to a post-Cretaceous maximum.
Many thanks,
Auto
Thank you Mr Abbott. I was vaguely aware of the CAGW theory, and mildly worried until I saw the graph that showed that CO2 warming is strongly logarithmic. All of the warming is done well within the first 100 parts per million. CO2 could go to 800 ppm or higher and there would be no further warming, just thriving agriculture. It was all a scam.
I find it endlessly fascinating. It has made me look at everything, religion, cholesterol, statins, water consumption even, with a sceptical eye. I see the pattern of blind belief repeated elsewhere, acceptance without question of given statements. I now read the fine print to try to work out the real story.
I hope that given the state of the sun we aren’t heading for another Little Ice Age. I have no confidence that the subsequent crisis in food and energy supplies would be handled well.
..it never passed the sniff test
It simply isn’t possible to be a an honest graduate or Doktor in Math, Science or Engineering and believe in the Alarmist Cr.., from Sagan’s bad radiative physics, to data munging, familiar to us all wh did science practicum, to the lies and daft computer code of Climate Gate you have a huge pre-cooked counter-argument.
A quick look at the proponents shows it as all a Marxist conspiracy from day one. Europe and the US must find the major protagonists criminally liable for the unprecented squandering of Human resources.
MFG, omb
Jonathan, like you and many other skeptics, I was employed as an engineer when first exposed to the CAGW theory. It was James Hansen’s Scientific American article published about 20 years ago. Knowing a little about the atmospheric greenhouse effect at the time, I knew something was wrong when Hansen never even mentioned water vapor and blamed everything on CO2. Additionally, even the graphical representation of the correlation between temperature and CO2 indicated that temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes. This was particularly evident about 110,000 years ago when the temperature dropped thousands of years prior to the drop in atmospheric CO2. I promptly let my subscription to this magazine expire a month or so later as, in my opinion, the editors of this magazine are blind and don’t belong in any reputable scientific publication.
After retirement a few years back, I purchased my own copy of AR4 to look at the evidence for AGW. Although, on the surface it appeared to be a nicely done document, there were so many holes in the logic, I didn’t see how it could be considered a reputable scientific document. To make matters worse, every time I wanted to check out a referenced statement that appeared suspicious, I would have to pay for a copy of the referenced article – typically around $35. There are more than 600 documents referenced in the chapter on paleoclimate alone.
I searched the internet for as much info as I could find and eventually came upon WUWT and found that I am most certainly not alone in my skepticism. A whole new world of sensible people (along with a few seemingly nut cases) suddenly opened up.
I find the fact that many skeptics seem to be both engineers and political conservatives very interesting and have long suspected that conservative and liberal minds learn by different processes. Liberals seem to be good at the rote memorization of things and seem to believe anything written by someone they perceive to be an expert. Most lawyers and medical doctors seem exceptionally good at this process. Conversely, many conservatives have difficulty in purely rote memorization but readily learn anything that has a rational and logical argument behind it because they typically see beauty in it that makes an impression in their mind. Later, if they forget what they learned, they are able to derive it by repeating the logical process needed to get to it. This logical approach to learning seems to be a particularly valuable trait for a creative engineer.
Steven Mosher,
As usual, in your comment above you are being far too vague. I bought your book. We have had a conversation about it. I also bought Montford’s book, and like many others here I have read reams of documents about Climategate, and about the shenanigans that go on behind the scenes WRT inflating Phil Jones’ CV, and Mann threatening journals, etc. A WUWT keyword search for “climategate” will produce a mountain of documentation.
Rather than comb through the thousands of emails to prove a point, here is a good place to start for anyone interested. There are many other Climategate resources available. My main point was to refute what jai mitchell had written when he claimed that the Climategate emails did not show any underhanded behavior. They certainly did, as you should know better than most.
I have studied Science from the age of 7 or so (60 years now). I became a skeptic when I read the first sentence declaring man generated CO2 as the cause of global warming. Everyone except the greatest of fools knows there are hundreds of H2O molecules for every one CO2… sometimes thousands…
I was educated in the days when education was real. We learned about Eric the Red setting a settlement in Greenland. So when Mann and his friends said there was no medieval warming period I started researching.
Sadly my community is one where policy is being planned on the basis of AGW is true – we have some fanatical converts to the true religion unfortunately.
Top Ten Reasons I became a Skeptic of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change:
1) The scale of the purported effects is out of proportion with the claimed cause.
The science tells us that doubling CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the GHE (Greenhouse Effect) by 3.7 Watts per square meter, considering the GHE is on average about 333 Watts per square meter and delivers about a 30 degree Celsius temperature gain on average such that they’re claiming that about a 1% change in GHE causes a 10% change in temperature gain. Add to that the knowledge of the relationship between CO2 concentration and heat flux; being non-linear such that each additional portion of CO2 added to the atmosphere will result in a smaller increase in heat flux than the previous portion. Therefore an over simplified linear estimate of 33 degrees Celsius / 333 Watts per square meter x 3.7 Watts per square meter = 0.37 degrees Celsius should be an overestimation of the warming but is in comparison to the claimed response an order of magnitude less than the catastrophists central estimate of 3 degrees Celsius.
2) Lack of Evidence.
Instrumental record is too short and proxies too inaccurate to draw conclusions at the certainty level being claimed.
3) What evidence there is for CAGW is coincidental.
Correlation does not imply causation.
“Consistent with”, “may”, “might” and “possibly” doesn’t exactly instill confidence in the necessity of the proscribed solutions.
4) Lack of predictive value of the model (as in way of thinking).
The model predicts pronounced tropical tropospheric hot spot. (Little found.)
The model predicts stratospheric cooling. (Stopped circa 1995.)
The model predicts global average temperature rise of 0.2 degrees per decade. (Didn’t happen this decade, maybe next.)
5) Lack of the model explaining the complete set of available data.
Sure the temp/CO2 correlation looks pretty convincing if you just look at a particular set of years, but if you start looking at 100,000 or 1,000,000 or longer timeframes it doesn’t look so convincing.
6) Lack of overall understanding. Ocean? Clouds?
Our scientific understanding of the specific roles and responses of various climate components is woefully incomplete.
7) History
There’s a substantial body of evidence to suggest the LIA and MWP among other climate swings are more pronounced and extensive than some admit.
8) Engagement in Zohnerism.
Even supposedly impartial agencies will show temperature graphs starting in 1800’s without disclosing the widespread cool LIA climate event or show picture of glaciers circa 1979 vs. circa 2000 without disclosing the cool 1970’s decade which had many scientists warning of a coming ice age due to the burning of fossil fuels.
9) Groupthink / Thug management (h/t: Pointman)
Scientists at the core of the consensus avoid debate, sabotage critics from behind the scenes, and engage in censorship.
10) Behavior inconsistent with reasonable conclusions based on solid evidence.
Advocates behavior inconsistent with actually believing there’s a problem
Top Ten (insufficient and logically fallacious) reasons given to convince me to be a believer in CAGW:
1. Well understood science predicts warming from the addition of CO2 into the atmosphere and burning fossil fuels definitely emits CO2 into the atmosphere.
2. CO2 has been increasing in the atmosphere simultaneously with temperature.
3. CO2 and temperature correlate over geologic timescales.
4. There has been noticeable warming around the globe evidenced by retreating glaciers and the like.
5. Many climatologists claim they cannot think of any other cause for the warming other than anthropogenic CO2.
6. Many climatologists claim there is a consensus of opinion that recent warming is anthropogenic and potentially dangerous going forward with current fossil fuel usage generated emission rates.
7. Many government agencies such as the EPA, NASA, and NOAA seem to have adopted the consensus view.
8. Scientific organizations have adopted the consensus view.
9. Polar bears are cute and endangered by Global Warming.
10. People are the scourge of the planet.
As long as the Polar jet is making swings to the north and south then neither will there be runaway warming or a ice age in the NH. lf one word would sum up the type of climate we are likely to get.
Then that word would be “Changeable”,
For most living in the NH it will mean we will end up getting alittle bit of everything.
Reblogged this on pdx transport.
Jonathan Abbott says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:54 pm
I feel like I just stood up at an AA meeting.
That made me laugh hard. Thanks.
With me I think it was when my dad taught me the decimal system when I was about 8 or 9 yrs old. Dividing 1×3 taught me about infinity and how small I was in the grand scheme of things.
You forgot that along with the ice age we were meant to run out of oil by 1970, 1980, 1990…
For years the college-educated guys I worked with argued politics & current events at our lunch table. Our guiding principle was claimed facts had to be verifiable (example: % of Israeli population that is not Jewish).
Then we inadvertently stumbled into global warming. The liberals and (British) socialists in the group loved the “fact” that college professors, the UN and Prince Charles had determined we’re all going to die from CO2-induced global warming. The “verifiable evidence” was (1) the UN said so; and (2) 97% of scientists believed it.
We were all pretty stunned to discover that Mikey Mann and the boys claimed to have lost the original climate records and would not disclose computer transforms they’d used to “correct” the original data.
Based upon my Ga Tech physics education, this was just laughable. Hiding data is bad enough; compound it with obviously inaccurate modeling and a flood of non-science “scientists”, and you got yourself the very definition of FUBAR.
Sadly, at no point in time have any of my arguments (or years of no actual warming) even dented the belief of the liberals and socialists (let alone Prince Charles).
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t sceptical. I think I must have a BS detector gene somewhere! I was very relieved to discover WUWT and JoNova and know I wasn’t alone.
I had a degree in Electronics and a degree in History. Well placed to see and judge things in the round.
In 2000 I was on a plane from the UK to the US and I read an article about dendro. ‘Hey, look at this . This is absolutely stunning. These blokes can tell something about something that happened at a time when we have no other evidence’ the missus was impressed. ‘Briliant’ she said
A few years later, 2005, I read something else about dendro. These people were not making statements about something affecting something, they were saying that x ppm co2 would lead to one hundredth of a degree temperature rise globally over y number of years.
Whaaattt ? this is lunacy. way too specific for mild evidence to make conclusions about a complex reactive system. Surely the climate community would slap this down ??
no. they embraced it
Went for a walk on my coffee break with a couple of co-workers about 5 years back. One guy piped up “What do you think of all this global warming stuff”. I said, “i don’t really know. It’s in the news almost every day, there must be something to it”. I went home later and after 2 hours surfing the net, came to the conclusion that it was political nonsense. The alarmists were loud, abrasive, shrill and very short on actual real science and other relevant information, while the sceptics, including WUWT, were steady, self assured and full of specific information and arguments. The contrast was amazing.
Reminded me of my days in politics when certain people made decisions in backrooms based on what they wanted (their agendas) and you weren’t expected to question them or bother them with alternate points of view or any inconvenient facts. Red flags everywhere.
Jonathan Abbott, thanks for telling the story of your intellectual journey.
You asked, “Perhaps others here have similar experiences? I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.”
I find the stories of many commenters truly enlightening.
My story begins as a 13 year old when I started having thoughts toward a general principle of not trusting anything from intellectuals (were I considered scientists a subset of them) without some reasonable level of verification. So, in my late 40’s when I stumbled across the intellectuals who were making an ideology around claims of alarming AGW from burning fossil fuels, my sense of being my own intellectual protector (which was rather fully developed and tested by then) automatically kicked into gear.
It came to me over time, via the blogosphere, that there were virtually no ‘non-red’ flags in the arguments of the intellectuals claiming the truth of the ideology of alarming AGW from burning fossil fuels.
Note: by education and 40 years work experience I was (retired now) an engineer focused on a wide range of nuclear power generation aspects mostly in the Asian and European markets.
John
Al Gore.
I never even had to look at a graph, or polar bear poo. Nothing.
Al Gore is solid gold.
I was at school in the sixties, and a passionate naturalist. I was a member of Friends of the Earth within weeks of it starting and in the mid-sixties read about the threat of Global warming in the ecology magazines of the time. I believed it then, and was waiting for it to happen. I never noticed the scare about another ice age, my life was too busy, but I never lost this thought in my head about global warming. Then we had the warm summer of 1976, which I linked in my mind to global warming, so I was a natural believer.
I became convinced it was happening when I saw the hockey stick graph on the BBC, it was totally convincing evidence that CO2 was really causing the long warm summers we were having at that time in London.
I have always hated the politics surrounding the building of the EU superstate; The way I saw the EU was that it was an anti-people anti-democracy organisation, so I wrote letters to newspapers and blogged a lot on Richard North’s EUreferendum.. One day Richard North was writing about how the AGW thing was a total scam. I thought he had gone totally mad, and began to doubt the company I was keeping, perhaps my political instincts were all wrong. Another blogger posted a graph, and I traced the origin of the graph back to this blog. It took me only a few minutes to understand I had been taken for a complete fool. Ever since I have been passionately against both the politics surrounding AGW and the EU ever since, because I see the two events as symptomatic of a certain kind of anti-people thinking that is dangerous and cruel, bordering on evil at times.
I sincerely believe that every person has personal responsibility to be true to themselves, and to change their views when they are wrong. It bothers me when people continue to dig holes, and get more and more deeply embedded in a culture of deception because they cannot admit to the outside world that they misunderstood something. Ultimately dishonesty to yourself causes the pure souls of good people to turn sour, if it is not checked the soul turns evil. Being unable to be honest to the public is a disease of the mind and the only cure is straight talking and civility.
This website, and Richard North’s too, are the way forward. Without straight people the world would be doomed, that is why you people who stand up on this blog are to me the heroes that bring hope back into the world. You will triumph.
State of Fear piqued my interest. My science background is weak, I was an economics major and am stronger in statistics and data analysis. Found CAGW didn’t hold up in these areas. Career in marketing so I understand how public perception can be influenced.
Jai and Mosh can’t both be wrong, can they? Mosh tossed out a veiled appeal to authority in citing the significance of she/he who was the first to read, analyze, and understand the scientists whose words we’ve all done the same with, so my best bet at this point is he’s the nutter. Jai seems more like an AI autoresponder like many others who have posted here over the years, and manages to wedge in all the usual sound bites that drive the CAGW hysteria.
So guys – how are those models doing compared to observed? As a practical matter, how much white space must we allow between plots before going to log paper to keep them all on the same page?
The obvious conclusion is that when the CAGW movement/religion/meme dies out, something else will emerge to take its place. The replacement will need to meet some criteria though. Whatever the issue is will require deindustrialisation, more public expenditure and so on.
Read three pages of the real global warming disaster by booker.make no mistake we are losing this fight..carbon tax.wind mills on mountains in new england……..
i learned AGW must be true because ‘man had entered the forest’
—-Bambi (about a hundred years ago or some such)
Mr. Abbot, If I may:
I have been accused on the site where I argue, of linking to ‘ultra-conservative’ sites in my climate arguments- as though that actually meant anything.
I had been thinking upon that line all day today, and was planning to ask anyone who didn’t mind answering: Where do you stand, in your thinking?
For myself: I figure myself to be pretty much a centrist, having both conservative and liberal viewpoints. Perhaps the answer to such a question is too complicated to put a person in one category or another, but there it is: May I ask which way you lean? *g*
And I pose that same question to any who wishes to ask. Conversely, if this question is not appropriate to this conversation, the mods may do with it what they wish.
My first acquaintance with Greenhouse Gases was via a radio program. GHGs were to be the next big thing because they affected heat from the sun – but they did not know at the time whether things would warm or cool as a result.
Then I met models. England would be a desert in the future we were assured. The presenter, cleverly (he’d be sacked now) asked what the model said England was like now. A desert was the reply!
Eventually I decided that I really must find out about GW so I scoured the Internet. All I wanted was a description that held water. I could’t find one. There were just lots of disconnected facts. Deeper investigation revealed that nothing seemed to be known accurately, there were no “famous experiments” like the good old days of physics, none of the theories seemed to even have a formula that could be checked or used as a basis for any investigation.
Then I discovered Bishop Hill, WUWT, ClimateAudit, Donna Laframboise, Jo Nova, Tallbloke, GWPF and Climate Depot – quickly followed by The Hockey Stick Illusion and various Climategates, etc etc. No going back now.
Maybe I’m wrong here but my guess is that most commenters here started out as Warmists, I was one. After closer inspection many started asking questions and doubting the catastrophic warnings. What really divides Warmists and sceptics is climate sensitivity. The rest is hype and the weather is being largely driven by natural climate variations. It’s not only man’s co2 that might have a tiny beneficial effect on climate (& a great boost for greening) but land use changes, soot, deforestation too. Heck, even wind turbines are known to affect the micro climate.
I was born with a BS detector and educated, through school, under grad, and post grad studies, how to use it effectively. When “scientist” or “academics” “declare” anything, my BS detector immediately switches on. First place I look to is … what is the motivation ? Always MONEY and PRESTIGE.
I’m a socially liberal (I.e pro welfare state, pro nhs etc etc ) late 20s left leaning in my voting liberal who regardless of all this distrusts the authoritive voice. And for this reason something always seemed off about global warming to me, just because of the way the message was presented. I’ve read skeptic and alarmist blogs for some years now just sort of taking these non-expert bloggers at their word, all the while with these doubts. However it was not until recently I’ve been able to call myself a full skeptic. And it was as a result of a discussion on Phil plaits blog where I simply asked “am I a deniar?” And laid out what I accept I.e co2 is a greenhouse amongst other things and what I distrust I.e alarmist proprositions.
The answer of course was that yes I’m not being a responsible individual by not taking non-experts at their word and asking difficult questions about climate sensitivity, predictions not panning out and wondering why I should trust predictions for 20 YEARS time when as soon as they stopped hindcasting things started not quite working no matter what adjustments they tried. Whether too hot or too cold, it wasnt what was expected and this invalidated what they were saying in my mind.
Extra ice melt, not enough melt. Neither of these things validate any one theory. Your prediction has to at least close to being right.
Apologies for spelling/grammar this was written on a phone.
@Otter
“I have been accused on the site where I argue, of linking to ‘ultra-conservative’ sites in my climate arguments.”
The accusation of being ‘ultra-conservative’ and “right-wing” will be leveled at anybody who strays from “the path”. It is an absolute straw-man.
The left has now moved so far to the left that even those left-of-centre are now made to look like “knuckle dragging right wing conservatives”.
A mild disagreement or (God forbid) even a question about any of the “causes’ will get you branded as a “racist”, a “homophobe” or a “denier”.
There sure are a lot of engineers isn here. Me too.
Jai Mitchell is a treasure. He (I guess?) continually reinforces the reliance of the CAGW crowd on double-speak, pseudo-science, and The Big Lie.
Jai, (may I call you Jai?), the GISP ice cores have been analyzed for the ratios of isotopes of the H2O molecules in the ice. Thinking this through as you always do, you must have already realized that snow on Greenland comes from Water Vapor, which comes from the Atmosphere, so the Greenland ice cores do not only reveal the temperature history of Greenland, but of the Oceans! Ohh, oops, you had not realized that? Do you now?
“white males over the age of 35” and PROUD of that, thank you very much…
Steven Mosher says:
July 25, 2013 at 1:06 pm
[…]
WRT the article. I dont see a single scientific argument in it. There are many scientific arguments to be a skeptic. None were presented. Finally, never trust a personal account of how someone came to believe or disbelieve.
Trust the “science” then?
I too have a CAGW story. I’m not ready to take it out of the closet.
Where to go from here?
My advice, borrowing from the Vulcans: Live long and prosper.
My dad (also an engineer) may god rest his soul, always told me it was important to persevere, and when times got tough, that this too shall come to pass.
I say, be honest and kind to your fellow man, and try not to let the jerks, liars, and thieves get the best of you. That can be frustrating at times, but a clear conscience is the best medicine for a good night sleep.
My best and thanks to you Jonathan, and Anthony, and all honest skeptics. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.
According to the science Toronto Blue Jays are World champions.
I distinctly remember the day. They anounced on the radio as I drove to work that Australia was going to tax carbon. Before that I didn’t care weather it was true or not. I accepted that it could be, but I also didn’t expect that it would matter too much.
I got to work and opend up 4 climate blogs. After reading through, I focused on three. Real Climate, Climate Audit and Watts Up. I noted the sceptical blogs did deep analysis of the data and presented all their findings exhaustively. The pro-warming blog didn’t present any data, no analysis, and was stunningly rude toward anybody who asked questions. I was instantly convinced the sceptics understood the situation far better.
My story mirrors Roger’s. As a child of the 70s and 80s, I too fully remember the global cooling and ice age talk. The not one but TWO snowfalls we received in Georgetown, SC (just north of Charleston) did little to dissuade us from thinking it was coming. Soon enough the snows stopped and the talk turned to warming. I admit I was nearly pulled fully on board after Katrina. Then I discovered on some website the logarithmic warming decline of increasing CO2 concentration, did some quick back-of-the-envelope math and said “we’ve actually warmed a good bit more than we should have for only 100ppm of CO2. There has to be something else.” The True Believers(tm) cited “positive feedback of water vapor”. I said “Horses#!t”, mainly because they had ZERO data to back that up. And so my journey began…
I am an academic and have been around for a while. While the specifics of climate science are outside my field of interest, I have seen this kind of the unethical behavior several times before. That was the trigger for me.
My story appears to be a common one. I am a science graduate, reading Natural Sciences (mostly Earth Sciences with some physics) in the mid 1990s. At that time there was increasing concern that human burning of fossil fuel was causing the atmospheric proportion of CO2 to rise and that this would trap heat and warm the climate. At the time it was not a source of great concern in the Earth Sciences department of a world-class university, more of curiosity.
When the whole idea started to develop exponentially in politics and news media I was busy in my career, but generally accepted that there was an issue and that it was worth using fuels with caution. However as the advocates used more and more hyperbole I started to take notice. Not because I was worried, but because of the obvious over-excitement.
We were constantly told that the evidence showed CAGW, that the debate was over. Every time I heard that I thought “what debate?” but could see none having taken place; I would think “what evidence?” but none was ever actually described, let alone made available.
I dug further and realised the gaping flaws. The whole edifice was built on the sands of models, with no discernible empirical evidence. Furthermore the “scientists” would not publish either models or raw data, so what they were doing is not science. If another person cannot repeat your calculations, follow your method to confirm results and check that the method is sound then what you are doing is not science. I learnt in the first year of secondary education that an experiment should be documented to include method and all data before any conclusion.
The models were shown false by radiosonde data. UHI was assumed negligible. Warming was anything but unprecidented. The IPCC publish summaries edited by politicians and NGOs after the scientists had been consulted.
Most importantly the whole panic relied on strong net positive feedback. Not only is this unlikely (stable systems rarely have much positive feedback) and an unwarranted assumption (there appears to be no empirical evidence for this) but most importantly of all this is never mentioned by the warmists. They talk all the time about the simple physics, proven greenhouse effect of CO2, dishonestly implying that this is what they are suggesting as likely to lead to CAGW. This dishonesty is the crucial blow to the warmist cult: if you have to lie, even implicitly, to further your argument then you have no argument,
I was always a sceptic (at my university that was still considered a positive thing when I was studying). By the beginning of 2009 I was a sceptic who was did not believe a word the catastrophists were saying; the CRU emails gave specific details but revealed nothing unexpected to me. This was just the evidence supporting my hypothesis. Since then I have asked every true believer whom I have debated to just describe to me the empirical evidence
in addition,
claiming the GISP2 data from Richard Alley claims the medieveal warm period is higher than today is a complete fabrication.
as shown here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/08/marcott-et-al-claim-of-unprecedented-warming-compared-to-gisp-ice-core-data/
where they attach the marcott curve to the GISP curve where it ended (about 110 years ago now)
As though Greenland temperatures are global temperatures, a common lie produced on this site.
The Greenland temperatures are currently 3 degrees C higher than the end of the GISP2 series, much higher than the medieval warming period and as warm as the Minoan warming period (which wasn’t global by the way.
again, confusing Greenland temperatures with global temperatures because you don’t like what the global temperatures say isn’t science it is cherry picking and lies.
here is the actual GISP currently updated curve values.
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/12/30/dorothy-behind-the-curtain-part-2/
I can see how you are all following the path of Goebbels , “it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you say it again. . .and again and again.
where adults who don’t have the time and/or energy capability to research the lies you promote over and over again will then teach it to their children. Trying to convince them that they have nothing to fear.
That global warming isn’t a threat.
simply a pathetic existence if you ask me.
I’m sorry to say that my personal journey has been far less interesting and much less considered…… I watched an interview with the Hockeystick Mann and thought to myself, “what an unpleasant, conceited, self opinionated arsehole”. That was that. How anyone can take the idiot seriously is quite beyond me.
I became a skeptic at the earliest stages of the CAGW craze. In 1992, I was working on a Masters Degree in Space Studies at the Univ of N Dakota. I took two classes back to back – Planetary Geology with Dr. Grady Blount and Global Human Imapcts with Chuck Woods. Grady’s class made the following arguments for global cooling: 1) the Milankovitch cycles of 10,000 year long inter-glacial cycles followed by 100,000 year plus ice ages. Our current interglacial period is a bit past 10,000 years which problably isn’t a good thing for mankind. 2) A simple thought experiment – is the atmosphere more or less humid as global temperature changes. Is winter dryer than summer? If the atmosphere becomes dryer as a planet cools, then you’d expect deserts to grow and rain forests to shrink – both things which have been happening over the last 5,000 years. Chuck Woods class, by contrast, tried to show how human activities caused 1) desertification, 2) mass extinctions in the Americas and 3) rising global temperatures. I found the evidence for nearly every argument absolutely bogus or worse purposefully manipulated. The worse examples were 1) a graph showing population declines of whales. The chart showed a dip to zero during WWII and precipitous decline since the 1970’s. When queried about the WWII, it came out the graph was based on commercial whaling catches. Therefore, the decline after 1972 was based on the banning of whaling. 2) charts showing fossil finds of large new world mammals (giant sloths, mammoths, saber tooth tigers) and how they disminished with Mongols coming over the Siberian land bridge. The charts looked like vertical voice prints – the reason, the data points were doubled. Worse, each data point was huge – with some chart have an N of 12.
I came to respect the evidence for global cooling over the fear of CAGW. Try having that conviction (faith, not knowledge) since the early nineties – needless to say I endured a bit of ridicule. One other point concerning the 97% of scientist agreeing. We’ve been measuring climate accurately for the last two hundred years – which is what percentage of time since the beginning of this inter-glacial period? Even worse, no scientist can say what causes the Milankovitch cycles. How can we draw any conclusions with any degree of certainty – much less 97%!
I find it interesting that many in the cAGW camp claim that skeptics are on the right side of the political spectrum. There is no question that the poor are hurt the most with the policies that have been implemented and proposed by the proponents of cAGW. This would suggest that the skeptics are on the left side of the political spectrum in their defense of the poor.
Jai Mitchell
How do you account for the multiple, often co-ordinated instances of dishonesty among the people informing your view of climate science?
Peter Gleick; “Hide the Decline”; the conspiracies to corrupt peer review, both by preventing publication of sound papers and having poor papers published; supporting papers (such as Mann’s original hockey stick) in public while privately proving it is an artefact; Mann’s own lies about other hockey sticks supporting his, and his dishonest claims that fossil fuel companies organise and pay sceptics; the use of data by Mann and others that the originator says may not be used; cherry picking of tree-ring data by Mann and others (get the idea that Mann is the most dishonest? perhaps); the fraudulent paper Jones co-authored using Chinese data to rule out UHI effect; the dropping of thousands of temperature sites from official records; the “adjustment” of old temperature data in the USA, Australia, NZ, Iceland and the Netherlands (that we know of), always downward to exaggerate the trend; the dropping of some Russian stations to produce a trend where the mass do not; the whitewash reports on the CRU emails; the conspiracy to break FOI legislation and EDRs; the dishonest insistence the CO2 is a greenhouse gas which no-one disputes while failing ever to mention feedback which is the core of the debate; the lie that he debate is over; the continued claims about 97% based on utter misrepresentation; the lies about increasing extreme weather; the current claims that the pause in warming is not real because the heat is going into deep oceans, stated as fact when in reality it is pure speculation.
Those are just the ones that spring to mind. Why are the people you think are right so dishonest?
In a similar vein, why do they still live profligate lives, as if burning carbon-based fuel was convenient and uncontroversial? They all burn far more than I can afford to, yet they demand taxes to force me to use even less while they enjoy as much as they will at the expense of us taxpayers. Why do they cheer when invited to conferences on distant tropical islands? Why not castigate Gore for his use of private jets (I have a friend who chartered him one, a big one to cross the Atlantic)?
Mosh, I no longer believe in giving “scientific” credence to this..there’s nothing scientific about it
Oh, and Jai, one more thing, what is the empirical evidence for strong positive feedback in temperature? How was the temperature stable for Mann’s famous 1000 years despite this positive feedback? Natural systems don’t often demonstrate positive feedback, stable ones very rarely indeed as tuning must be very fine. You mention yourself runaway with non-Milankovich warming, but how does the climate system know that it is warmer because of Milankovich?
“I am curious to know how fellow-readers came to their current views. ”
First, I too recall the “Ice Age coming” scare. Coincided with the “Nuclear Holocaust” scare. Ok the latter was worse, but didn’t materialise, except for the participants managing to nuke themselves and the rest of the world to some extent.
Also, I had a “classical” education. Some awful old tyrants handing it out, but they were certainly consistent in teaching one thing: HOW to think, not WHAT to think.
I have some expertise in energy efficiency, climate-responsive design (mostly related to the tropics), mathematical modelling and process simulation.
This was/is largely project based, eg if you get it wrong, the customers don’t come back …
I have years of regulatory responsibility as well as design experience regarding extreme weather events. I confess to having categorised this as “response to climate change”, but have now switched to using the term “climate sameness”.
A few milestones:
First realisation came as a result of looking at the nuts and bolts in GCMs (climate modelling). As a recent (presumed dangerous) post-graduate in the early 1970s, I had managed to avoid making the howling errors being made by the climate modellers.
Realisation that what was being “allowed for” regarding urban heat island/land use change did not fit what I knew from my own observations from 1998 on.
Realisation that if the “tropical hot spot” and “back radiation” stuff was correct, we would have noticed it here.
Climategate: the Team caught with their fingers in the till, trying to coordinate their defence etc.
Last straw?
Cate Blanchett standing in front of a backdrop of Battersea Power Station as I clearly remember it pre 1958, trying to convince everyone that a carbon tax was a good idea.
http://people.aapt.net.au/jclark19/climatealarmism.pdf
I was skeptical from the start. It just plain didn’t make sense to me. It DID make sense to me that the Earth self-regulates, that there have been huge natural temperature fluxes in the past, and that human influence is much, MUCH small than we like to think it is.
I thought the scientists pushing the CAGW notion were misguided. I could not believe how big the whole thing became – it was like everybody had lost the plot, everyone had caught the disease. Was no one thinking straight? Of course Climategate blew the door off the hinges and proved to me it was all very deliberately done, these people are not/were not misguided at all.
To be honest, I didn’t want to check out the Internet, I didn’t want to drown in CAGW nonsense, I couldn’t bear reading about it or hearing about it. It seemed to be everywhere. Then I came across a book by Iain Plimer titled “How to get expelled from school” and I read that with great relief that there was at least one person out there who had grasped the truth and was willing to speak it.
That started an interest in seeing the truth fighting back. More bold than I, my husband got onto the Net first and said he found some good sites. He suggested I check out WUWT at the very least.
Well, WUWT is now my home page and has been for a couple of years now. I visit (at regular intervals) daily. I have a bunch of other favourite sites, too. I like WUWT best because there is a LOT of stuff here, heaps of links to scientific papers and data, but most of all, there’s plenty of good old fashion discussion. I’m with like-minded people here. I feel very comfortable here.
By the way, thanks again, Anthony. 🙂
Thanks for sharing your story, Jonathan. I think what got me started on the road to scepticism was growing irritation at the continual mantras of impending doom, always “even worse than we thought”, and the attribution of every newsworthy weather event to man-made climate change as if these phenomena were unknown in earth history until years after I was born. I was still reluctant to engage with climate scepticism, though, assuming it was emanating from a group of eccentrics or conspiracy theorists with some kind of free-market political agenda. After I retired from work 3 years ago, I promised myself I would bone up on basic climate science and read the books and blogs from both sides of the debate. To my astonishment, I found that evidence and logic favoured the sceptics rather than the warmists/alarmists. Unlike many here, my political views are liberal-left on most issues, and I find myself in strange company in the sceptic community, most of whom seem to be on the right of the political spectrum. But so be it – the truth is what it is. Like you, Climategate was an eye-opener for me: by that time I was already veering towards scepticism, but I had no idea that the elite of ‘consensus’ climate science were so mean, petty-minded, vindictive and arrogant – and so determined to keep their data and methodology secret, so that nobody could confirm or disconfirm their hypotheses. I’m grateful to Anthony and all the other bloggers who continue to sling stones at the AGW Goliath – your efforts haven’t been in vain!
I only disagree with one point that you made. You said, “This is good news, because it means that we are back to doing science.” Unfortunately, I predict that the same people will just find another bandwagon to jump on, and the whole process will repeat ad nauseum. You even said it yourself, the current lot are just the same lot from the Cold War with a new agenda.
For years, I have been telling my friends AGW is a crock. At the risk of being laughed off the board, I feel compelled to explain why I never trusted it.
(A) I have read the Bible through entirely. Twice. AGW goes contrary to the first divine general instruction to man: Be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth. If we accept AGW as true and follow it to its logical end, then we should wipe ourselves off the face of the earth. Anyone who pushes the AGW agenda has bats in their belfry, to put it mildly. Now mind you, I’m not saying that mankind has reached environmental nirvana, but I’m old enough to remember the days when cars and trucks all emitted noxious fumes and pollution was an evil everyone could recognize. In contrast, modern vehicles (heck! even my 20+ year old ride) emit minimal amounts of pollution.
(B) I worked in advertising for 5 years. One of the basic principles advertisers operate by is the axiom “Sizzle sells.” In other words, appeal to people’s emotions and you will bypass their cognitive processes and motivate them to buy whatever it is you’re selling. All the AGW propaganda I ever subjected myself to always came off as supremely “slick” and designed to be swallowed at face value. It asks, no DEMANDS, that people abandon all the things that protect us from the elements, and all the things that protect us from our government, and do — what? Jump off a precipice? AGW seems to demand that we give up everything to gain — frankly, nothing! What’s up with that?
(C) The sheer hypocrisy of its proponents was mind-blowing. Most readers here are well able to fill in the blanks on this item.
(D) AGW smacked too much of a primitive strategy for claiming that the only way to prevent the world from ending was to kill off all the things that extend our influence in the world. I keep having the image come to mind of a tribal people executing someone on top of a pyramid, just because someone said that will prevent the world from ending.
(E) It was based on a concept that ordinary people cannot test for themselves. I mean, who has equipment to test the amount of carbon dioxide their activities generate? (as if it even mattered) If ordinary people cannot test for a problem themselves, then they are forced to “trust” the authorities and/or pay “indulgences” based on what the authorities said, whether it’s based on truth, or not. IMHO, there’s just too much of that sort of thing going on nowadays. Other posters have mentioned cholesterol as another thing that we have been brainwashed into believing is an evil poison. Do you know what the primary symptom of so-called “high cholesterol” is? It’s feeling good! I’m just not willing to sacrifice that in the pursuit of a number on a blood test.
I guess that’s enough for now. I know these arguments are not scientifically rigorous as many of the ones others have mentioned, but they matter to me.
Loads of interesting stuff here, and I’m enjoying comparing it with my own views and experience.
Unlike most of you, I can readily recall some of the interesting weather of the early 1930s in the UK, and of course the really nasty war-years winters. Also the variable summers, with rain, heat and disappointing “coolth”. My professional life was spent as an “industrial scientist”. In industry you either get things right or you are very likely to be looking for a new job. (I tended to get things right, so now have been comfortably retired for 30 years). This clearly isn’t the case in academia, which is where the “warmists” seem to reside, since they seem to be able to continue to produce stuff that doesn’t stand up to the realities of the world with impunity. It is my great hope to still be around when the doom-mongers are finally exposed and their arguments and influence are relegated to the dustbin of history.
I became interested in climate, especially temperature, in 1991, I think, having been enlisted by my engineer son to examine the Greenwich/Kew monthly temperature data to help with his calculations on heating/air-conditioning for a major construction project. Analysing this data I soon found with the help of people from Kew that despite careful observations, immaculately recorded, temperatures – allowing for the natural seasonal effect – showed distinct signs of changing abruptly from one “regime” to another. After about 20 years of examining climate data of many types this step effect seems to me to be virtually ubiquitous, but tends to have been neglected by the climate establishment up to quite recently.
So, I have come to believe that most climate (temperature) changes tend to occur very rapidly from one relatively stable state to another, with no prior indication that a change is imminent. For this reason I fear that predicting climate is a doomed enterprise until a fundamental understanding of the apparently chaotic state of affairs is chanced upon. The odds of being able to apportion blame for these climate changes still seem to be very low to vanishing, and they are self-evidently not caused by CO2 in the atmosphere, which has been increasing very steadily for many years.
Due to the self-preservation instinct of politicians I fear that there will be no “revelation” experience in our governing classes. Things are likely to change gradually, with much effort being expended on blaming others for distorting the realities, such as amending climate data retrospectively, hiding important information and collusion amongst their currently trusted climate advisers. I should state here that in about 1991 I was greatly helped by (the then Dr) Phil Jones, who provided me with about 15 climate time series on a floppy disc, that he had personally extracted from an expensive (£700, I believe) CD that CRU were publishing. These series convinced me the step changes were widespread. Thank you, Professor Jones.
Actually, CAGW is still in the throes of the metaphorical menopause/male midlife crisis. I think we all know that both males and females often go off on a last intense search to consummate their rapidly ticking fertility clock. In CAGW terms, this equates to a yet more aggressive, yet more strident set of articles, propaganda pieces and new distortions which have to be dissected and unpicked by the rationalists. I don’t see the fanatics backing off until at least 2015.
What will happen then??
Well, I think that what we are seeing in the UK (and maybe too in the US also) is a radical change in the public perception of officials, authority and the Establishment. People have lost faith in their trustworthiness, their honesty, their loyalty and, quite simply their actual representation of those they purport to represent. I think there will come a radical demand for a small number of things to be done properly by society, since those few small things, done well, make the difference between stable societies and unstable ones.
1. People want homes to be designed properly, to be affordable and to be well suited to bringing up children in. They don’t need King’s palaces, but they do need buildings which are designed with living in mind, not with a builder’s profit in mind. A happy family home is still the bulwark of stable and prosperous societies.
2. People want energy to be affordable, they want it to be accessible and they want it at the times of day and times of the year when they need it. There is going to be one monumental conflagration when the people realise quite how shafted they’ve been by politicians since 1995. Also, people are going to demand that minerals are extracted for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of modern shareholders. It’s possible for massive energy production in a country not to benefit the majority, since it is sold to rich foreigners by a foreign owned company whose taxation arrangements mean that the Exchequer gets almost nothing in corporation tax. People won’t wear that any more.
3. People want healthy food and a healthy lifestyle. They are becoming more and more demanding in terms of how their food is produced, how it is distributed and who benefits. There is going to be a demand for less profit for supermarkets and more profit for farmers. Growing the food is more important than the packaging and branding. I’m sorry, but it is. People are sick of a bunch of retailers impoverishing everyone, including the people who keep us alive by growing food for god’s sake. There’s going to be increasing demand to disintermediate, to grow locally and to grow all year round under glass.
4. The effect of all that knowledge will be, in my opinion, a greater ability to discern the truth about climate. Climate affects how farmers grow food, it affects how many people die in the winter and the summer due to excessive cold or heat.
It’s a similar evolution to that of how to deal with aggressive feminism. Most folks I know, me included, of my generation were brought up seeing girls offered the same opportunities as boys. Our parents were the pioneers in breaking the taboos and we grew up wondering what all this nonsense was about. I’ve never seen a workplace discriminate against women in 25 years, but all we hear about is wimmin this, wimmin that, wimmin the other. It’s all propaganda in the middle classes in the UK. Girls now outnumber boys at University, schooling has been feminised and boys education is in crisis. The female journalists will lose their jobs when they are rumbled which is why they can’t back down. Anyone who tries to challenge them in UK blogs is censored in a way which is far, far worse than in climatology. At least there you just get Australian twat scientists telling me that ‘because you’re not a climate scientists, what could you possibly contribute to the debate?’ With the feminists, it’s akin to being gay in the 1950s.
There is going to be a hard fight between evidence based evaluation and propaganda-based religion. By religion I mean assertions without evidence, not God, Jesus and Mohammed etc etc.
The crux will come in whether people really want a politician who tells them the truth and when they come to realise that they do. Until they do, CAGW will hang on, because the politicians will pander for votes rather than lead by example. The communities of activists will lead the agenda but won’t be in power. WUWT now leads the world in driving the climatology agenda – trust me, it’s light years ahead of every single UK daily newspaper. It’s readership is global, it’s contributors increasingly so. It puts Nature and Science magazines to shame but has none of the supposed reputation of those tarnished brands.
It’s a fine judgement as to when each country will take the plunge to vote for such leadership. It’s dependent on the nature of the media ownership, the nature of education, the role of science in the economy and the history of science and scientific thought in that nation. It’s also dependent on the size of the country because big countries are like oil tankers – very difficult to change direction quickly. The UK will likely acquire such leadership before the USA, but may lag behind other small enlightened nations. The UK has a reactionary, oligarchic media, mostly foreign owned and a highly undemocratic electoral system which institutionalise unrepresentative duopolies. It’s population has been brainwashed for years and it is only really since 2008 that lost of trust has become irreversible. That makes climate skepticism increasingly possible, since no-one trusts anything that authority tells them now without examining it. Too many scandals, too much abuse, too much corruption, too much financial larceny: trust is gone. God is still around for an evangelical minority, however.
In addition, this will be impacted by how rapidly the global non-governmental agencies enter the crisis of credibility deficit. There is a lot of cynicism about the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, the IPCC, the WHO and OPEC out there. Reforming such organisations is fraught with difficulty for activists, since they are funded by national governments and answer to them, not the people. Learning how to engineer change in such an environment is a key determinant in how CAGW attitudes will evolve.
My judgement is that the current hysteria will wane by 2020 and then, it all depends on what happens up to 2050. My judgement is that 30 years of halt/cooler temperatures will provide the impetus for climate measurement to become central to global humanity. Ensuring that the organisations tasked with such crucial work are honest, dispassionate and funded by the entire world is critical. A 21st century CERN for climate data acquisition, a global database repository, the basis for worldwide data analysis insights is the most healthy course for the world to take, in my judgement.
What happens in the nearer term, most relevant to us over the age of 45, is more unclear.
But the momentum currently is for skeptical debate and rational, reasoned science.
I for one hope that that momentum is not stalled.
It is really not that hard, all you have to do is predict the evolution of conditions, as shown in this water vapor loop (refresh as needed).
http://www.weather.unisys.com/satellite/sat_wv_hem_loop-12.gif
It won’t lock-up your computer, it loads fast.
Yes, it is weather, and well named.
Has it changed ?
In the early ’80s, I heard the Warmista arguments for the first time, but was always puzzled by the historical record – Vikings farming in Greenland … ice fairs on the Thames in London. I was perturbed by the fact that CO2 levels were rising.
But, then it became clear that temperature, climate and CO2 records had large errors bars.
Clinching it, the Warmistas have never demonstrated the null hypothesis, that the current changes are not natural.
Thank you so much to everyone that has taken the time to post a reply. For the first time ever I have read every word of every comment on a WUWT thread.
I’m elated but not surprised by the number of fellow engineers here. After all, engineering is just applied science. If we make mistakes ‘Nature cannot be fooled’. Scientists have the luxury of error but it is rarely accorded to engineers, and the good ones tend to develop highly attuned sniff tests as a result. I have had my share of screw ups but also have designed equipment routinely flying on commercial airliners and a current space program, and have lost a lot of sleep in the process.
Especial thanks to dbstealy for refuting Jai Mitchell in the kind of detail I would find it hard to bother with. On a final note, Mr Mosher seems not to have noticed that firstly my essay makes no claim to be an actual scientific paper, and secondly I touch often on the principles of the Scientific Method, but as I didn’t mention it directly perhaps he didn’t notice. He is most welcome to sit down with me at any time, share a bottle of wine, and decide for himself whether my story is accurate as described.
Mr. Robin Edwards, what an inspiration you are.
The Great Depression came……….and went — and little Robin whistled as he skipped down the cobblestones to school.
Hitler and the horrors of WWII came…………….. and went — and a serious, bright, young man persevered, got a fine education, and began his career.
Stalin and Kruschev et. al. shook their fists at the free world and said, “We will bury you!”……. and, they too……………..went — and a hardworking, honest, father did his best to take care of his family.
The Envirostalinists and neo-Marxists came along and spit on decency and truth and then, most of them grew up…………… — meanwhile, Mr. Robin Edwards quietly continued to do his careful, precise, work and, then, retired.
The CAGW (the hippies that never grew up) gang bellowed and snarled and, now, they, too………………. are nearly done —- and here you are, today! Still typing away, optimistic that, “this, too, shall pass.”
Your optimism is evidence that deserves great weight.
Thank you for speaking up!
****************************************
Power Grab (at 3:56PM) — your points were excellent and NOT laughable at all. Mr. Mosher was wrong to criticize above based on lack of science content; this thread is simply about how people came to disbelieve the Cult of Climatology. There are no wrong answers (so long as one is telling the truth).
So you need not feel alone in asserting your faith as one of your reasons, I’ll join you and cite the part Genesis that most reassures me:
“For as long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.”
Genesis 8:22.
Jonathan Abbott says:
“Especial thanks to dbstealy for refuting Jai Mitchell…”
It was easy-peasy. ☺
I don’t think the author’s goal here was to retry the case in yet another thread when there are so many all over the climatescape already. Your expectations for his account of his personal journey are what is actually mistaken, not his personal beliefs.
You disagree with his “assessment”, I think he understated it. There are clear cut conspiracies to thwart skeptical papers, you should know since you say you have read the emails. Even as we speak there is more outright insane alarmism occurring daily than anytime since the dark ages, and even though Steve Goddard routinely turns up example after example of historical examples of published alarmism, even you would have to admit that this current crop of psychos have exceeded anything yet seen. They have blasted right past the previous standard-bearer Paul Ehrlich, making him look like a tame, quiet conservative by comparison. Goddard has also demonstrated the corruption of the past temperature record to make the present warmer. I would like to know why it wasn’t you who came up with that blink graph showing this fraud.
It is a real shame that you are one of the blessed few with the password for ClimateGate III ( I believe you just admitted to it ). One can only hope that FOIA reconsiders and lets the password out into the open because it is senseless to leave it in the hands of self-described “lukewarmers” and AGW true-believers who cannot see the alarmism right in front of their faces each and every day.
Steve, have you looked at the vast amount of MIME encoded attachments in ALL.7z? There is likely quite a bit of data in that stash. I don’t have the password but can easily deduce that since the largest 392 files range from 100,089 bytes (100 KB) all the way to the 2,854,527 bytes (2.85 MB) for a total of 128.57 MB just for those alone, there are likely spreadsheets and tables of ASCII data that need to be compared to commonly available data to see what other fraudulent adjustments they have perpetrated. Are you doing this? Somebody out to be.
For me, it was because the “hippies” were so sure about CAGW it was reflexive to doubt. Then Lenin’s birthday became Earth Day, no more doubt.
My own journey started around 2003 when I got tired of reading all the accusatory rhetoric about AGW, and decided to read the primary literature to find out for myself, what’s going on. The definitive moment for me was reading the 2001 paper by Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, Sherwood Idso, Kirill Kondratyev, abd Eric Posmentier, Modeling climatic effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions: unknowns and uncertainties Climate Research 18(3) 259-275; abstract here
Soon, et al., showed that climate models (GCMs) made huge errors in the way they partitioned the available energy among the various climate modes. The errors were orders of magnitude larger than any energy introduced or transduced by greenhouse gases. When I read that, it was immediately obvious that the effects of GHGs could not be resolved, and were in fact totally unknown and presently unknowable.
It was a small step from there to realizing that the physical scientists who were so assiduously touting the AGW alarm were either incompetent or dishonest. Nothing I’ve read or experienced ever since has supported modifying that view.
dbstealey says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:53 pm
I’m still waiting for someone to demonstrate in a physical chemistry lab that adding CO2 to a volume of air will make that volume of air warmer. Solely by the addition of the CO2 and no other manipulation.
Things are really bad today compared to the past. We are doomed.
dbstealey says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:53 pm
Thanks, it’s good of you to take Jai Mitchell’s inane assertions down.
A very interesting article and succeeding comments by readers, many of whose stories have much in common. I find it quite encouraging, and I’m sure there are many more out there.
rtj1211 says:
July 25, 2013 at 4:03 pm
“Actually, CAGW is still in the throes of the metaphorical menopause/male midlife crisis. I think we all know that both males and females often go off on a last intense search to consummate their rapidly ticking fertility clock. In CAGW terms, this equates to a yet more aggressive, yet more strident set of articles, propaganda pieces and new distortions which have to be dissected and unpicked by the rationalists. I don’t see the fanatics backing off until at least 2015.”
His analogy is both witty and apt, and I think his 2015 prediction may be closer than one I proposed a year ago – I said to some pro-AGW friends it would be 2017. I still have no empirical data for that, so it’s just an opinion. But I have noticed the rhetoric becoming more strident, or sometimes plaintive, and increasingly moralistic.
Now a brief anecdote: I recently attended two book launches at the same bookshop in Canberra (that little town that hosts our Federal Parliament in Australia). The first was the launch of “Madlands: A Journey to Change the Mind of a Climate Sceptic” by Anna Rose, her account of our ABC’s documentary of a global journey by herself and a former federal Finance Minister and noted sceptic (Nick Minchin). The documentary was titled “I can change your mind about climate change”. At that launch, I asked Anna whether she and Nick had determined in advance what credible information each would need in order to accept the other’s position. She replied that they had not defined any such criteria. I then asked what would be necessary for her to change her own views; she replied that were the mainstream scientific community to change its stance, she would accept that opposite position. In other words, she relies upon authority, rather than examining the arguments on each side. Those attending the book launch ranged in age from the younger university student age, to the retiree.
Last night I attended the launch of “Taxing Air” by Professor Bob Carter et al. This book contains much information that as a layman I find very useful. So does Professor Tony Eggleton’s “A Short Introduction to Climate Change”. However, while the latter provides a lot of useful basic climate-related science, well-written and well-presented, in presenting the orthodox view it fails to examine that view critically. It portrays a ready acceptance of the standard IPCC view. Carter’s book by contrast is carefully analytical, and equally well-written. It can be understood by the layman, and challenged or extended by scientists of many different fields. Both books would be of value to any readers who are seeking to further their knowledge about climate, and especially to those who want to make up their own mind about “climate change” (which has become a euphemism for the sometimes embarrassing acronym CAGW).
A small side note: there seemed to be two or three times as many attending Carter’s launch compared to Rose’s, despite our being in the middle of our winter. Also, most of them seemed to be of retiree age, and certainly vigorous. Do we become more sceptical as we get older, or is it just that we now carry so many scars?
D. B. Stealey (a.k.a. Smokey) — I wanted to say this, but, thought, “Oh, brother, so far down in this thread, he’ll never see it… .” And there you are! (or were)
WAY TO GO refuting Jai M. (think mo-der-ation kicks in if you use his full name)! I didn’t even READ what he wrote, just muttered, “Oh, brother, I’m NOT going to read THIS,” and scrolled by. That you took the time and did such a FINE job are so wonderful! You must be a really cool dad, the dad that poor ol’ Jai probably never had may be the sad truth.
Even if J doesn’t read a word, what you wrote WILL help many silent WUWT readers.
And, BTW, your re-posting of graphs or scientific truth is NEVER boring to me. Yes, I realize you were concerned (on another thread recently) about the scientists being bored, but they are likely just happy that you spared them having to make the effort to make the Truth in Science case yet again. It NEEDS to be made over and over, both for non-scientists like I who want to learn and remember all the tons of great information on this site AND for new readers.
****************
BLADE! WAY-TO-GO with all that super-fantastic citing of evidence. BTW, I may be mis-remembering, but, I believe the Climategate e mails were first seen by a mo-der-ator (whom I shall refrain from naming in case he would prefer to just remain in the background, now — his name is known, here, though), then, upon that mod’s request, Mr. Mosher read them. I don’t know if he read them all. From what he said above, he has read parts I and II and is working on III.
Why does A-th-y not give more access to them? I have no idea why, but, given A-th-y’s impeccable character, I’m going to assume it is for a very good reason. WISH HE WOULD DROP A CLUE AS TO WHY, though!
And WAY TO GO, JIMBO!! (5:30PM)
Some observations and questions.
Engineers can’t afford to take other people’s word for it, cut corners or massage the data. Otherwise buildings, bridges and entire cities would collapse. Where’s the accountability in climate science?
Like medicine, there are hundreds of branches of science each with different training requirements and areas of expertise but global warming proponents speak as if there is only one. Would you trust a dermatologist to remove your brain tumour? So why trust an anthropologist to interpret climate data?
As a qualified researcher myself. with experience in database management, social impact assessment and strategic planning I am appalled by the deliberate manipulation and interpretation of climate data to support the warmist cause.I would love to see a panel of mathematicians and statisticians publicly analyse and critique the methodology used by the various climate bodies and spokesmen.Perhaps a debate between two of the top universities with a major prize?
PS I am female and not a rich right winger or professional suit wearer.
Did someone mention engineers?
My enlightenment came from a different angle. I was responsible for environmental compliance for a chemical plant. An odious task, I hated my job, but I was well paid for my pain. Some time around 2000, EPA began to ask for total CO2 emissions in addition to the myriad other chemicals we put out. I wondered what they were up to. CO2 was not a pollutant, and as an engineer I knew that cutting it much would be devastating economically and would necessitate drastic changes in the way we lived our lives. So, I began looking into it and found they were concerned about warming, but a little more investigation indicated their claims were without basis. A letter to EPA asking for justification for the extra paperwork was answered with a list of consequences of CO2 emissions, all of which were negative of course. We were about to drown as we roasted in a hurricane in the middle of a flood of drought. I realized they had a hidden agenda.
I wish I still had the letter (email actually), but I have retired and no longer have access.
Thanks for this article Jonathon Abbott.
My personal journey to skepticsm of what I call ”Herd-think” started in my first year at school.
My best friend then was the local minister’s son. He and his elder brother were often bullied for no reason other than what their Dad was. The day the whole school, of mixed classes of around 40 pupils bullied my friend and his brother I was given a choice by one pupil- join in or face being whacked.
I went and stood with my friend. We got whacked. Ouch.
Since then the choice of sticking with the herd or doing what is right has been easy.
Growing up, my ‘radar’ alerted me to question the ”Herd-think” – today read 97%- and stand apart: if the herd is right they don’t need me. If the herd is wrong, I don’t need them.
The 97% have been so often wrong on critical issues; Ice Age in the 70’s perpetuated by a media that climbed aboard a few scientific reports. WMD in Second Gulf War.
I walked out of corporate management 34 years ago and started my own small business and this individualism has been my providor.
When a line manager swore offensively at a young girl who reported to me and then physically threatened me for asking him to apologise, I asked our manager to take action against the other line manager.
No action was taken. Next day I was called into the General Manager’s office and he told me it was my fault for allowing myself to be in that situation!
Not my way to walk away from a bully!
With no back up, I was unable to resolve the situation so I handed in my resignation.
After word got around, the girl concerned walked up and thanked me, sorry to see me leaving. My reward, never forotten.
So that’s why I am forever skeptical when the herd thinks a certain way, because so often the core leaders may be wrong, but others unable or too afraid to speak up.
Interest in the climate issues started in 2006 over a conversation in Shimla with an Indian gentleman who was born in a wee village in India but raised in England. He told me of his visit back to his ancestral village and that people there were so poor they used to live on one small meal of rice and dahl a day. But now cannot afford dahl. He went on to talk about how rice prices had climbed.
I went home and began Googling and found, as we well know, the effect the biofuel targets had of diverting food to fuel in our rich nations while world grain prices zoomed and food riots broke out. Very little of those riots, and the root cause, was aired over the media.
I began to question why the media were reporting only the positive spin on renewables.
I investigated biofuels from palm oil, deforestation, habitat loss, species decimation, etc
Much of this goes unreported in main media. Or it will be reported as caused by the demand for palm oil for food, with very little mention of EU biofuel programs.
The negative consequences are not linked to the renewables programs. Environmentalis scream about its use in food, but seem to overlook its use in renewables.
That’s just one example of environmentalists overlooking the downsides of their push to save the planet.
These days I promote the principle that because governments and environmentalists are so focussed upon saving the planet, they are ignoring the more immediate issues around us now that we can address if only policy, funding, and political was so re-directed.
It’s not a popular stance with my environmentalist friends and groups. One should not go against the popular ‘consensus’ of saving the planet by reminding them that species need saving now, and no more wind turbines please!
I am also an ‘engineer’, but in quite a different field: uncertified, BTW.
Custom shoemaking: designing and building footwear that is functional, durable comfortable and good looking requires a mind that can look forward and backwards through the complete process, evaluate various factors of materials and their characteristics and balance off often conflicting factors to arrive at the optimum of all to achieve the end goal. Each being a one-off requires flexibility of thought, ability to accept new factors and discard old beliefs easily.
This is quite a different attitude, or ability of mind, than the mainstream herd-thinker which is often very narrow in field and focussed on a a pre-conceived ideal.
Most skeptics I talk with seem to have a similar ability to step outside mainstream thought and think for themselves.
Shano says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Re. Nobel Prize:
Regrettably, there’s no Nobel for Earth Science or even Life Science, although “Physiology or Medicine” & Chemistry sometimes sneak some biologists in, if not geologists or atmospheric or oceanic scientists.
So if Steve McIntyre & Anthony Watts, et al. are ever to be awarded a Nobel & the respect they deserve (although Nobels have surely been devalued of late), it will have to be for Peace (most devalued of all). How can a Mann-atee man like Prince Albert win a prize for peace when he wants to subject the wretched of the earth to continuing abject poverty, suffering & early death, in the name of global control by fat bureaucrats & corrupt politicians?
Three laureates are allowed per prize, so I nominate Watts & his volunteer team for trying to gather good climate observations & improve the quality of the surface temperature data set, & McIntyre & his colleagues for trying properly to analyze the data (if such it be) & “analysis” thereof. Solid science needs both valid observations & sound analysis thereof.
I’m open to suggestions for the third co-recipient.
PS: It was too late to comment on an earlier post by my esteemed EO compatriot Pamela Gray, who urged that the heirs of great X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin be awarded her deserved share of Watson, Crick & Wilkin’s 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the structure of the DNA molecule. While Dr. Franklin certainly did suffer from sexism during her life & after it, the fact is that she had tragically died aged only 37 in 1958. Nobel rules don’t allow posthumous awards, so Wilkins had to be her in effect stand-in. Had she survived & been denied, then the case for Nobel sexism would have been made.
When I first heard about global warming in the early 1990s, I thought, “Wow. Humans can control the climate.” But after doing some simple calculations, I grew skeptical. I grew more skeptical seeing all the papers that tried to calculate the CO2-free temperature of the earth using the Steffan-Boltzmann equation, using that very rounded off (and very wrong) number as a basis of saying, “this is how much CO2 has warmed the earth.” Then, when I first started seeing papers that started, correctly, with the Beers-Lambert equation, they would stop short of calculating the direct warming effect of CO2 changes, and instead, lump the direct effect with all the assumed feedbacks, to give an empirically derived number. (someone needs to take HITRAN data and develop a model to only give the direct effect of doubling CO2, which will be embarrassingly small) Then I’d observe “adjustment” after “adjustment” and “homogenization technique” after “homogenization technique” that magically corrected any apparent cooling or non-warming trend, shortly after it came into focus. I noticed the temperatures from the late 1800s and early 1900s for my hometown changed often, and were made lower and lower with various progressive algorithms (up to 1 and 2C lower), thereby building in a warming trend and making it so that annual averages for new years were likely to be in the top X warmest years.
Then I look at the money and politics and realize the real alarm is there.
I never had to make a journey – I was already there . Somehow I always knew it was a complete load of bollocks.
Similar for me, although I had no real scientific training in the matter, although I have a scientific education. I am certainly pretty good at logical deduction (I have to be for my job).
I believed it, as most do (or at least did). A good friend called BS on it all, and I argued. He agreed he had no evidence, but just a gut feel. He asked me to get some evidence to convince him, and I did.
That’s when the trouble started…..
All the evidence is slightly flaky. Too much hand-waving. Then I looked at the counter-evidence, and realized the CAGW argument was less than robust than the arguments against.
I looked more. Oh dear! What a mess it really was.
Then ClimateGate 1.0 came about, and I was convinced. There were actually a very small number of people shamelessly manipulating the media, the peer-review process, and most of all, the data, to make us believe it was all real. That, above all, convinced me it was not.
They are still doing it.
BTW, regarding my personal journey, the problem is that I now reject almost all environmental organizations. I am sure I am not alone. The damage this has done to real environmentalism is incalculable and catastrophic.
My story starts growing up in the 1960’s in Green Bay Wisconsin. In the 60’s and 70’s pollution was a huge problem. Because of heavy industry the Fox River and adjoining bay of Green Bay was a sewer.
While a student at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay in 1980’s I was introduced to a wealth redistribution scheme that was called “Pollution Credits”. Pollution credits were a plan to punish wealthy industrialized countries by forcing them to pay poor countries for the right to pollute.
Upon graduation I watched through the 80’s and 90’s as technology advances resulted in drastic improvement in the local environment. In the 90’s people actually returned to fishing in the Fox River. You could easily see the vast improvement in terms of the environment.
In 1999 I heard the term “Carbon Credits” and realized it was simply an effort to recycle the old “Pollution Credits” wealth redistribution scheme. Advances in technology had virtually made pollution credits obsolete and what do you know, all of a sudden we have this shinny new crisis to take its place. That seemed just a little too convenient and a CAGW skeptic was born.
Power Grab says: July 25, 2013 at 3:56 pm
” … who has equipment to test the amount of carbon dioxide their activities generate? ”
I do. (If I can, then anyone can.) Indoors and outdoors. Several items. The first, non-data logging, was originally obtained for monitoring indoor air quality, useful in confined construction workplaces, especially where people are using gas torches for capillary joints in copper pipe. Set to scream at 2000pmm, it was very useful for giving ’em a wake-up call 🙂
I also have USB data logging devices that can be used indoors and (with a form of Stevenson screen) outdoors. I have been able to quantify the diurnal increase in CO2 levels after sunset due to photosynthesis shutting down, and detected what I believe to be occasional out-gassing spikes coming off the South Pacific Ocean on summer afternoons. Also detected up-wind bushfires and controlled burn-offs. The outdoor device will pick up me passing underneath it with a petrol lawnmower, and has picked up a large diesel engine idling 10m away.
These devices are now mandatory in many jurisdictions where there is risk, eg cold rooms, storage silos etc. They are ubiquitous and cheap.
Sources? http://www.co2meter.com or google it.
Maybe $150? Can be cheaper in quantity from suppliers such as CO2meter, manufacturers such as Tongddy, much cheaper if you can handle the circuitry and interface and just buy the modules.
Not yet available at weathershop.com ??
I too was educated in the old english system, before the socialists destroyed it and now I know why! we will have book burning next! It was history that clued me in, the Viking loss of Greenland to ice, and the Romans growing vines and making wine by Hadrians wall. This told me it was a lot warmer back in those two times! Then there was the great Thames ice fairs, I grew up in london near the Thames, in 63 the edges bareley froze (unlike me on my bike!) and I can rationalise that to go from the Viking freeze to the summer of 76 it had to be warming and as this started in pre industrial times my BS detector went fsd! then the court case in the UK about mr sleazey Gores work of fiction, if the judicial lap dogs found fault to the extent that by law if shown in schools a disclaimer had to be shown first saying it is scientifically incorrect then to me the whole thing was a crock! I would like to thank Mr Watts and all the enquiring minds that have investigated and exposed this shamefull scam, we owe you guys a huge debt!
I would be cautious about mentioning class warfare agitators and the Great Global Warming Swindle. In at least one version of the Great Global Warming Swindle, I saw a mention of human contribution of CO2 understated by stating only the carbon tonnage (which is 12 grams per mole), while atmospheric CO2 gain was stated in CO2 tonnage (at 44 grams per mole.) Also, they made absolutely untrue claims about how much CO2 volcanoes produce.
And they make it sound like the intermittently sourced CO2 from the biosphere and hydrosphere make these huge net sources. However, the biosphere (including deforestation, biomass burning, and other land use changes) is less of a *net* source than fossil fuel burning, often a net sink. And the oceans are definitely a major net sink. A “carbon budget” analysis is here (at 12 grams per mole):
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/global-carbon-budget-2010
As for mentioning class warfare agitators: That can push a lot of sore spots. In USA, income disparity and wealth disparity have been increasing. The “job creator class” has gained lots of wealth and has record amounts of it lately, but has been slow to create jobs.
Other than the above, I largely agree with Jonathan Abbott. I am a “lukewarmer”. My main basis: The surface temperature anomaly index that correlates best with the UAH and RSS satellite-based indices of the lower troposphere is HadCRUT3. HadCRUT3 has a noticeable periodic component that explains about 40% of the warming from the early 1970s to its 2004-2005 peak (in its smoothed version). Smoothed HadCRUT3 has cooled since 2005.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
Also, about 15-20% of the portion of the warming caused by manmade increase of greenhouse gases was from ones other than CO2, whose increase was largely stalled in the 1990s. And, HadCRUT3 and all other surface indices seem to me to have incomplete correction for growth of urban heat island effects. Overall, I seem to think that AGW is for real, but the temperature rise this century will be about 40% of that claimed by proponents of the existence of CAGW.
JerOme wrote;
“BTW, regarding my personal journey, the problem is that I now reject almost all environmental organizations. I am sure I am not alone. The damage this has done to real environmentalism is incalculable and catastrophic.”
Me too, I supported WWF, the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy for several decades, In fact, My Beautiful Wife and I Honeymooned on a fantastic WWF sponsored cruise to the Galapagos Islands. Quite the lifetime experience.
Once they joined the the CAGW bandwagon I dropped my support. I have told them in person on several occasions when they called asking for more money that “NO WAY IN H—L” would I give my dollars to a group that peddled this BS. Sad really, I would be glad to support a non-profit group that actually practices good science, but, on the other hand it means more money for me and mine to enjoy.
Cheers, Kevin.
I don’t doubt that others have sickened of my own story, but I first got wind of this preposterous bogosity by way of a letter from Prof. (Emeritus) Petr Beckmann back in 1981, when he sent along information that’d been pushed to him by a few of his other regular correspondents.
It regarded putatively “scientific” publications in the peer-reviewed literature claiming that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) increases as the result of purposeful petrochemicals fuels combustion had had a “greenhouse gas” effect upon global surface temperatures and If This Goes On we were going to face a variety of climate-related catastrophes in the near future.
Dr. Beckmann had long been a vociferous advocate of nuclear fission as the best possible option – wisest, safest, and best – for the provision of the electrical power needed by increasingly metropolitan industrialized civilization. He’d published a superb popular book on the subject, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear (1976), and his other correspondents had presumed that he’d be delighted to learn about another potential source of “ammunition” to use against the coal cycle, which Prof. Beckmann despised as dangerous to human life from beginning to end.
But Dr. Beckmann thought that the papers with which he’d been copied reeked of error at the very least, and deliberate mendacity could not be ruled out. He asked me to run an eye over them, and even though I’m just a physician (and not a “real” scientist) I obliged him.
My response went something like “I think they’re exaggerating the greenhouse gas effects of CO2 by at least three orders of magnitude. Is anybody taking this seriously?”
The rest has been something that would’ve been too wild a fraud for depiction in a movie like The Flim-Flam Man (1967).
And decidedly un-funny.
I was looking around for a Josh cartoon to dedicate to the weepy and hysterical Jai Mitchell.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/josh_biggs_fibber.jpg
As to my own story, I never bought into the CAGW scam. Propaganda like “the debate is over” just made me dig in my heels more.
For all the other Engineers and those admire Engineering, I posted a copy of Henry Lawson’s “Australian Engineers” on my blog, to put a perspective on the “achievements” being celebrated at the centenary of my “alma mater”. My favourite stanza is:
It identifies the essence of good Engineering.
The poem is far from politically correct; but when the poem was composed, most people had better things to do than to find offence.
It was a quote from Bill Nye the Science Guy that piqued my interest. He graduated from Cornell 4 or 5 years after me (him Mechanical Engineering I think, me Electrical, minor Computer Science.)
I hadn’t really given global warming much thought until I heard a quote that I recall as being from Bill Nye that “global warming” doesn’t sound so terrible, but it should really be described as “global cooking”. Well, that got my attention, even if it was someone other than Bill that I heard if from. I mentioned my concern to my family, but my mother said straight out “I don’t believe any of it. Its not hotter now than when I grew up” meaning the 1930’s, and I thought “well that’s odd if true”. I decided to research it, and I promised my Mom I’d let her know what I found. If true, it was certainly a terribly complex and costly problem to overcome.
I started slowly, reading all the mass-media stuff, as “global warming” items now caught my eye as they hadn’t before. The more I read, the more I got concerned. I was stunned by comparisons of present warming to the past and projections of startling temps to come already in the pipeline; the hockey stick.
One weekend I started googling and reading everything I could trying to understand the gory details of this devilish problem – and late at night stumbled upon Steve McIntyre’s earliest blogs. I was stunned. Authoritative papers with no data provided? Methods that would have flunked freshman lab courses? I think I read for about 30 hours straight, couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop all week either. But most of all, Steve’s stuff rang true to my engineering mind. I couldn’t fathom the sloppiness of design, data collection, processing/statistics/math, and conclusions in what turns out to be pivotal/foundational papers of the AGW argument. And why did so much of the argument not cross check well to the real world? Treelines in the arctic, Otzi the iceman, Vikings in Greenland – Earth has been warmer and had much higher levels of CO2 with mostly better conditions for life, and never a tipping point to runaway warming or a Fireball Earth.
AGW got its own Firefox Bookmarks folder. After Steve Mc I found Anthony and Lucia (and Real Climate and others on both sides). I went from seriously doubting a solution existed to maintain our modern western life and we were to be toast or cavemen again (or both), to skeptical of nearly all alarmist disaster scenarios. And the “consensus” and “the science is settled” arguments infuriate me.
That said I’m all for eliminating real pollution where possible, improving energy efficiency and embracing new technologies. But with proper science, engineering, and market economics, not by the playbook of the AGW political agenda.
ANTHONY ( mods, please be sure Anthony sees this). You MUST be sure this post will be a sticky post for days. Please. I have never asked you for a boon as a long time reader and commenter. I am asking NOW. YOU must make this a sticky post, period.
For Mr Abbott: Your children are lucky you are their father. I suspect that simple statement will mean more to you than any flowery praise I can write.
REPLY: I’ll give it some thought, Anthony
I’m another engineer, aeronautical and mechanical, with a career in the aerospace and engineering/construction industries. I’ve always tended to approach new theories with skepticism. I think it may have started by my reading Martin Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science”, back when I was still a young man. He also had a regular column in Scientific American, back when it was still a respected magazine. Later on, I became a reader of Skeptical Inquirer, before they too joined the dark side. I then Stumbled on Steven Milloy’s Junk Science blog, He covered a lot of science issues, including among other things, the issues of DDT safety, dangers of passive smoke, and last but not least, the issue of man-caused global warming. His site covered, and probably still does, all the temperature data published by the usual sources. But I picked up on the controversy brewing over the Hockey Stick Issue and that led me to start reading Climate Audit, where I first encountered Lucia Liljegren and Judith Curry as very informed commenters, and who are among my favorite bloggers today. I also found WUWT, and was particularly interested in the temperature station project. I made some attempt at balance, going to Real Climate and Open Mind at times.
So there really wasn’t a turning point regarding CAGW for me, I was skeptic from the moment I heard of it. I’ve always accepted the CO2 must produce some atmospheric warming, but have never been convinced that it was likely to reach a serious level, and the belief has been reinforced as temperature data has confirmed that the IPCC predictions were seriously biased high, as suggested by my coffee mug from Lucia’s Blackboard site a few years ago.
I always start at Bishop Hill’s site each morning, because he’s had a head start, and then I progress through WUWT, the Blackboard, Climate Etc., and Climate Audit.
Just for the record, I’m also skeptical of:
Benefits of organically grown food
Intelligent design
Speeds faster than light
Alien abductions or visits (but not about life elsewhere in the universe)
The Cubs or the Astros prospects for contending again.
As a retired particle physicist living in Greece I had the tendency to attribute to “scientific” claims from other disciplines the dignity of being as true as possible with their existing methods and data. Up until the appearance of Al Gore’s and Hansen’s much publicized enormous changes in sea level I had no existential problems with AGW one way or another.
When the six meters claim in sea level rise was taken up by the media, I was caught. This is because my summer cottage is about 10 meters high from the shore and there exist properties and houses about two meters height from the shore in front of mine. I became curious whether I would suddenly have a shore front property. Mind you this is at a sea lake which had been used by the Corinthians as a naval harbor and part of the quays they had built are still seen more or less at the same sea level, even though there have been devastating earthquakes over these 2400 years.
So I started reading the physics justification in AR4 , the IPCC bible. Only this chapter was 800 pages or so in pdf. The result was that I was walking around pulling my hair at all the shortcuts, assumptions, wrong use of models as data etc. (I had been working with fitting models to data all through my active working life).
Then started my internet search for more information and data, finding the small lighthouses in the wilderness that were trying to introduce science to magical thinking.
@dbstealey says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:53 pm
Well said!
I can’t imagine where you find the patience to respond to the trolls, but thanks for doing so, and doing it well.
Steven Mosher says:
July 25, 2013 at 1:06 pm
“Everyone who has followed the Climategate email dump has seen the documented evidence of fraud and malfeasance, from threatening journals for publishing scientific papers that disputed the runaway global warming narrative, to the outright fabrication of published papers for the purpose of propagandizing climate science, to actually getting scientists fired for disputing theis ideology. ”
Sadly the first person to read all the mails ( 1, 2 and working on 3) and publish a book on them(CG1), disagrees with your assessment.
—
But then, Mr. Mosher, you have proven to us often enough that you really don’t understand science. This is the reason that you also don’t understand how egregiously Jones, Mann and the entire cabal have damaged the ethos and the profession.
Ideally science should be neutral, dispassionate, calm, and carried out by responsible, socially and ethically aware individuals in pursuit of knowledge and general goodwill. In theory, anyway.
However two early formative experiences caused me to come to the view that this doesn’t always occur. One was within religion, the other within science itself. I started out with the ambition in life to firstly to become a minister of religion, fell out with religion by the age of 18, and then after a stint in social welfare fell into science, trained as scientist but then fell out with the science establishment, and went into industry by the age of 23. To cut to the chase and not bore you with details, both experiences in religion and science showed me quite conclusively and deeply that there are individuals who are attracted to both religion and science not because of a pursuit of knowledge and what is likely to be true, but in order to advance their own self interests, and who also aren’t capable of determining and judging what is true and proper, nor are they socially and ethically aware and responsible enough to deal with the issues they are involved with. They are not able to examine or confront their internal deep prejudices, nor do they divorce these from their social context or vocation; rather, they use their vocation largely to advance their own personal political and social prejudices. Some are not the slightest bit able or interested in what is likely to be externally true, they are only able to adjust their ideas, beliefs, and data to match their particular social context, interests and agendas.
These early experiences caused me to become somewhat distrustful firstly, of general human nature, and its ability to remain objective, especially in the context of a social group and where moral arguments are used to advance a cause, which also sometimes includes from within the realm of science, especially where such science is uncertain and has political and social ramifications. Science is carried out by flawed human beings, and there will be always be those who are attracted to social causes for personal political reasons and self interest, and who aren’t ethically and socially aware enough to be able to deal with the uncertainties and their own responsibilities.
Science has a good track record in the long run, but it does go off-course occasionally, sometimes for decades, and usually where the subject matter gets politics involved. Because of its close association with politics and its need for funding and its high social standing, it sometimes gets too close to the opportunistic politics of the day and compromised.
(The best example I can think of is ‘social darwinism’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where bogus science was used to advanced petty political agendas, racism, and other social prejudices which had little to nothing to do with reality. Social darwinism had some influence for example on the development and progress of World War 1, and also World War 2, where many within European academia and politics viewed the conquest of other nations as a ‘right’ thing to do by nature, with the ‘strong’ races taking their place over the ‘weak’, and so on. Laws of ‘progress through destruction’, ‘providence’, ‘extermination of the weak’, and so on. Hitler, for example, was an avowed, dedicated Social Darwinist (although he preferred to call it the science of ‘racial hygiene’, and such like), and so were many of the generals (particularly german generals, where Social Darwinism had taken a strong hold) who were also accused of amplifying and causing World War 1. And this sort of thing went on within academia and politics for decades, and led many within the social sciences to view Darwinism in general with deep distrust and suspicion in the mid-late 20th century, with some justification, since it was used and perverted for personal self interest at great social cost. And I might add, that it was the politicisation and perversion of Darwinism to ‘Social Darwinism’, that was the issue here, not ‘Darwinism’ itself, much like the perversion of climate science for political purposes, not climate science itself, which is the issue.
The second best example I can think of, is how climate change and environmentalism in general has also become politicised and compromised, which seems to be a major social bane of the 21st century, as social Darwinism also was in the early 20th. It took 2 world wars to get rid of the perverted ‘social darwinism’, and shows just how strong this human tendency to use apparently moral and ‘scientifically justified’ social causes to advance personal political agendas, can be. And it took thousands of years to deal with the perversion of religion, which still of course, goes on, but that is another, long, long story).
Just a few thoughts, but science has been wrong before, my hope is that it will eventually come round, it has in the past anyway.
OK. Maybe it matters what tipped us off. People love personal stories. History & perhaps even science are best explicated as gossip.
Paul Ehrlich & his fellow travelers were my college profs. At age 19 I thought I knew what science was & felt that what they were purveying wasn’t. I was not alone in this. My fellow undergrads of both sexes & most ethnicities instinctively knew that the prophets of doom were political advocates wrapping themselves in the flag of their scientific credentials in order to advance their ideological agendas. Population bomb advocates, peak oil adherents, Earth Day organizers celebrating Lenin’s birthday, were of a piece with creationists & their later running dog ID advocates.
I graduated in Human Biology & History, then pursued graduate study at Oxford in the History of Science, so to the extent that geology & climate are historical sciences, I had some relevant background to form opinions both on the imminent return of the glaciers warned about in the ’70s & their supposed catastrophic melting in the ’90s. In between, in the ’80s, as a natural science & national defense journalist, I was exposed yet again to the old academic Marxism drug in the new bottle of Nuclear Winter.
To these academic experiences, I added my own personal exposure to the climate of Northeast Oregon in the 1950s to ’80s, as felt it as a farm boy & adult. Well did I recall the astonishingly bitter winters of 1968 for its cold & 1977 for its dryness. When the PDO was discovered by a Pacific NW fisheries researcher in 1997, the truth of his work came home with at least a nodding acquaintance of recognition. I was struck with the force not only of clear scientific fact, but personal knowledge explained.
So naturally I was skeptical of the initial claims of man-made global warming, when rising CO2 just happened accidentally to correspond with (probably) rising average planetary temperature from roughly 1977-95. Of course before & after that period, the correlation was negative.
Still, I gave “consensus science” a fair shake. Show me the evidence. There wasn’t any. The “settled science” was based upon, “What else could it be but CO2?” This anti-scientifc punt was no different from ID advocates arguing “What else could it be?” but God in the case of some bacterial flagella?
I could go on, but have already IMO become too personal. Valuable though this confessional thread may be, this is a valuable science blog & though it frequently has posted autobiography, IMO it’s best when it sticks to science.
Sudden images and music fills the brain; whether from “Robin and the Seven Hoods” or from “Guys and Dolls”, the effect is still amusing. Speaking of “Guys and Dolls”, TCM has it scheduled for 3:15PM EST Friday.
Gonna testify, testify…
I’m just plain rebellious. Son of depression era parents, meaning I got to hear about the thirties and forties whenever found wanting. Yeah, my Father learned a lot by the time I was 25. Father was a chemist and whenever challenged or in doubt, he resorted to facts; hard provable facts. Any hope of succeeding in a discussion meant that one had bring hard provable facts and evidence.
A proper rebel stands the ground they choose to stand, not because any others choose it, but for their own reasons. Intuition is workable, but requires verification and/or validation once data is available.
Yes, I remember the ice age flare up. Duh! Unless we return to the climate of the dinosaurs, we’re in a cycle that returns to ice age conditions. Belief? Nah. However since I’m on the furry side, I played to the audience as I’m ready for the cooling. I also prefer cool weather.
Somewhen back then I read an article (I think Science News, but it could have been Scientific American) about CO2 and where was it’s influence. I do not remember the author; all I do remember is the author complaining about how so much CO2 was being released and the temperature should be climbing, but wasn’t. Where did all of the CO2 go? As I remember the article, they claimed the ocean must be absorbing it.
Back in the seventies I was considered a tree hugger as I was a fully-fledged outdoor nut. Basically an environmentalist in that I collected refuse or detritus when I could while fishing, camping, backpacking, hunting, rock collecting, or whatever. Naturalist was the term back then. Somewhere in the nineteen nineties, the environmentalists moved to my left; not only to my left but far to my left. The bizarre point is that almost none of them understand nature. Being part Native American, I grit my teeth whenever I hear the eco-loons talking about returning to nature like the original Americans. Most of these same people blench or get aggressive when they find out that I hunt. So much for back to nature, so long as nature conveniently kills, cleans, cuts and wraps their food for them. Backtracking for a minute, I stopped contributing to Sierra Club when I got their ‘camping cook book’ one year in the mid-seventies. Many of the recipes are somewhat bizarre for campers and absolutely absurd for backpacking. For example; recipes that require fresh lobster, bottled red or white wine, truffles and many other elitist foods.
One by one I stopped contributing to environmentalist organizations as they went over to the dark side in that they mostly want funding for self-support, lobbying or pillorying.
Along came the CO2 warming alarms and I read what came my way, mostly Science News as I’d long since dropped NatGeo and SciAm. Nothing that I read seemed to provide any credible information or evidence. I came to a very simple point of view; what is the cure? At that time and still to this day, no one has proposed a genuine cure for their proposed problem.
Think about it. If the ‘cure’ is to ‘reduce’ CO2 emissions, it is not a cure. If the cure is to end CO2 emissions, it is not a cure. Instead almost all of the proposed cures seek to fund someone’s particular chosen industry with a ‘minimal’ pass at CO2 redemption. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is a truism in science. Another related truism is “A solution looking for a problem”; meaning funding, mostly public, is being given to solutions and then people are trying to apply those existing solutions to a new problem. If CO2 warming was/is such a severe problem, necessity would drive the solution; until CO2 warming is such a problem, there will not be sufficient necessity to drive innovation.
Another way of saying this harks back to Shakespeare;
Meaning if they’re well fed and content they’re not truly worried or urgently seeking answers.
Late nineties, early two thousands:
I’m one of those nuts who has far more hobbies and interests than a person should. As I sit typing, I am surrounded by; optics (for constructing telescopes), fly tying equipment and supplies, orchids to be de-flasked and potted, tools including a digital caliper (does that say engineer type?), watches and watch parts, rocks (most are self-collected, some polished, most are rough), wood carving tools, electronic gear (as in diodes, soldering iron, resistors, chips…), microscope (I had three, but my son took two a few weeks back), books on guitars, lutherie, geology, orchids, optics, fly fishing and tying and reloading. What do I mean by surrounded? Everything I just described is within three feet, most within two feet.
My interests are far and wide and lead wherever my curiosity wanders. Somewhere around 2005-2007, someone on a geology forum I belong to came in whining about the impending CAGW disasters. One of the forum’s basic rules are that topics can be brought up so long as they are geology related and can be physically proved, preferably with supporting documentation. So the panic attack was shut down and one person suggested several sites for any panicky people to visit. Yes, one of them was WUWT. Most geologists that I know don’t buy the CAGW myth of impending disaster from warmth. There is far too much geological and fossil data to fall for warm is bad, CO2 is evil memo from the alarmists.
When I first showed up at WUWT it was as a visitor and for several years I was a lurker. I ranged from WUWT to visit many of the other sites and eventually went from lurking through the sites once a week to visiting daily and offering comments.
Normally, I avoid offering genuinely technical comments as there are very few topics discussed here where my technical knowledge offers advantage.
I have, in my career, served time as a Manager of Budget and Financial Analysis of a fairly large organization. Nearly three quarters of a $B budget expenses plus revenue per year, 88,000 employees, several hundred retail outlets, blah blah… Budget Managers get to read, hear and often see just about every claim in or out of the book. Doubletalk, snow jobs, BS, lies, whatever set my teeth grinding. I still flinch if someone offer’s a compliment, buttering never means good things to the one buttered. I am good at taking apart supposed arguments; but even there, WUWT has a great many commenters far better at it than I.
Testify, testify…
PS: Many of the same usual suspects implicated in the Nuclear Winter fraud resurfaced in CACCA. No surprise, when you interviewed them in person or on the phone, they were far more circumspect than in their public pronunciamentos.
It has been interesting reading the stories above. I am no engineer, merely a “semi-pro” meteorologist (meaning I can understand and interpret weather data and cause/effect but without the official educational background). I started keeping weather observations at age 9. I remember the Time Magazine cover in the summer of 1988 showing a blazing sun over a parched, cracked landscape. I was introduced to Hansen and a couple years later, hockey sticks. I never thought anything that drastic would occur…it may warm a little but not that much and not continually. For every summer of 1988 there was a December 1989 to offset it. It all evens out. As the years passed and I heard things about there will be winters without snow one day, I experienced 1995-96 and 2002-03 which certainly were NOT snowless. Why is that? But I supported efforts to reduce pollution as a nature lover and I guess at worst could be called a passive supporter of “muted global warming” though I thought early on the sun drove most of temperature changes, not CO2. About 7-8 years ago I started finding sites like this which stated there was no warming and my views became neutral.
I remember swinging to the skeptical side. I am a finance/business guy and in the spring of 2007 I was looking at monthly weather summaries at a US weather station with a comparison to normal and thought “those numbers don’t look right.” When I added the 30 year raw data for what was then 1971-2000 comparison, I discovered that what was stated was “normal” was not the arithmetic average, each month was understated by 1 degree F, more or less. Why is that? I asked around and couldn’t get a good answer and left it alone for a year or two before coming back. By now I knew about poorly placed stations, UHI impacts, and the fact that many scientific grants are written not for the science but for the audience – those who were in charge of doling out the cash to academics whose careers depended on it (I was once working in academic administration). Politics and the green industry. It all started to come together in my head cementing the inevitable conclusion that “all this global warming stuff is BS”.
Climategate. The past 17 years of a cooling trend despite ever rising CO2 levels. Main stream media faults, not reporting any of the unusual to unprecedented wintry conditions in the southern hemisphere but endlessly harping about a string of low 90F temperatures here as 100% global warming caused by my car exhaust. The evidence keeps piling up like the snowstorms in my backyard. So now I am an ardent skeptic (I like to call it realist) and there’s no going back unless I actually see those snowless winters, coastal cities being inundated by rising sea levels, and the last polar bear dying.
There is no settled science. If it was then the earth is flat, Christopher Columbus would have sailed off the edge of it, and all of us “round earthers” would have been burned to the stake as heretics.
PPS: Stanford, now a hotbed of CACCA, was at the turn of the last century a bastion of eugenics. “Nuff said.
“Time Magazine cover” ….may have been Newsweek, I can’t remember that for sure. It was 25 yrs ago and I was 13!
Anthony,
I support that request to make this a sticky post. Why? Because it shows how similar are the journeys many of us have made, at different times with different starting points and triggers for investigating further. More importantly, these stories are significant for the future, to illustrate how people can mislead inadvertently or intentionally, how we need to remain vigilant to insist on truth and accuracy, always remaining both positive and sceptical. We need to learn from this CAGW global farce, and we need to ensure the next generation understands how it started, where it has gone, what it is costing us still, the damage it is still doing, and the opportunities for pulling more people out of poverty and early death, that have been so wasted.
Long before Climategate, there was Deming’s convincing testimony about “getting rid of the Medieval Warm Period”, which as a history student I knew to be a real phenomenon. That didn’t clinch it for me because at that point I had already decided, again based upon history & paleoclimatology, such as my knowledge of the Eemian interglacial & Holocene Optimum, that CACCA was BS.
Climategate merely confirmed my worst suspicions.
My apologies for adding another useless bit of info about myself.
Back in my mid twenties when many of my age were talking about going back to simpler times, I sought and received permission to plant an acre of wheat. When ripe, I harvested the wheat with a scythe, by hand. Afterwards I sought to thresh and winnow the wheat, also by hand.
I can’t call it successful, as I was doing it to see how much effort was really required and I did not seek quantity information. I suspect that it might have been similar to earlier hand harvest efforts; as I learned it is a very wasteful process to bang seed heads knocking the seeds out and then rubbing the seeds to break up the chaff shell. Following that with tossing the wheat into the air with a woven tray to try and use the wind in blowing off the chaff. A very unsuccessful choking exercise on a hot humid windless SE Pennsylvania July day/week.
I don’t recommend returning to simpler times.
At least I wasn’t stupid enough to try preparing the ground by hand, instead I used a tractor to plow and disc the soil in preparation; (plus I couldn’t find, let alone borrow a plow and horse).
I’ve got a technical background. As far as I was concerned, Stefan-Boltzmann Law combined with the fact that CO2’s effects are logarithmic are sufficient between the two of them to set aside CAGW alarmism as gross exaggeration. I’m more convinced of that now than I ever was, but I have an additional reason for being a skeptic.
I’ve spent 30 years in sales and marketing of highly technical products. When a vendor has a weak product, they write their documentation to obscure the deficiencies. The techniques are pretty standard, and one gets pretty good at spotting them. If you don’t you wind up recommending sub-standard products to your clients, and soon you’re out of clients. One of the first documents on climate that I read in depth was IPCC AR4 WG1 (the scientific basis). I wasn’t very far into the document when I concluded that it was written using the same standard marketing techniques to hide the deficiencies in the product, in this case the science that underpins the UN recommendations. The more I dug into what they said, and the actual science, the more I was convinced that the documents was a charade to spin a story to the unsuspecting.
When I discuss with a warmist the facts, I tend to stick to the science. But the techniques of obfuscation and misdirection are obvious to anyone who comes from a technical marketing background, and for those of us who do, they scream loudly that there is something to hide, and it takes very little digging to see that the science simply doesn’t support the hype.
It was around ’98 when I first heard about GW. It was by a pool analogy with a spigot & a drain with humans turning on an extra spigot to raise the water level which represented atmospheric CO2 levels. This did not sound right to me, because that would mean that any temperary extra CO2 put into the atmosphere in the past would raise the CO2 level permanately. Nature must have a way to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels if they get to high. How could scientists know about a natural process that is not currently active since CO2 levels are still low? This was my first though about CAGW without understanding anything.
Next I heard about the projections to 2100. How could they know what the climate would be like in 100 years when there could be natural processes that are not active yet? I still had not done any research into CAGW by this point. Most people I knew just believed what they heard.
It was after the AL Gore movie came out that I had decided that I needed to look into this crap. It took me a few years of stumbling around before I started to be able to sort through all the junk out there to find a few sites that had better information. Armed with more knowledge I then went looking for more views only to find out I didn’t know nearly enough yet. When Climategate hit I finally had a better group of sites to look at then I had first found & enough knowledge to be able to keep up with what was being said.
I have never believed everything I read, but I think I have a better informed opinion now then I did 15 years ago when I first heard about CAGW. You can’t form your own opinion overnight & there is always more to learn. Although I do think CAGW is wrong I no longer care as much about proving its wrong. That will only happen over time as all the alarmist predictions keep failing to come true. I am now more interested in stopping them from destroying the world economy through carbon taxes.
The largest driver of my skepticism was the astonishing arrogance, rudeness and unscientific attitudes displayed at various warmist sites and the kind of Catch22 these same folks created around the few viable alternatives to fossil fuels. Lomborg’s first book helped as did Wildavsky’s earlier questions about Climate and other Environmental scares in “But Is It True”. I would add that the near hysterical reactions to Lomborg’s book also made me question the motives of his critics. Steve McIntyre’s site was incredibly helpful in showing that many authors were simply overstating their results or not allowing their results to be replicated. Then I started reading original articles that highlighted some supposed global warming effect and asking polite questions of the authors. I was always amazed at how confident they were about results that could just as easily be explained by chance.
At 9:36 PM on 25 July, bernie1815 had written:
Yeah, I noticed that happening long before the Web began to function as a venue. On Usenet, the AGW people went bugnuts whenever their contentions were challenged.
As an undergraduate, as a medical student, in clinical training and in medical practice, I’d encountered a plethora of people who stood in their professions on the basis of solid fact, and none of them displayed “arrogance” of any kind.
That was reserved for the Liberal Arts professoriate in college, and the “squishy sciences” types throughout.
Instructors in the science met the criticisms of the callow with equanimity. Their attitude seemed always to go something like: “Well, that’s the way it is. If you find out any different, you’ll let me know, won’tcha?”
Their ego investment was entirely confined to what they knew they could prove, and then only to the extent that instrumental accuracy had been appropriately qualified. They lived to find uncertainties, the teensy crannies between the solid rocks of well-tested fact.
From the beginning, I got none of this from the credentialed klutzes peddling the catastrophic man-made global warming myth. They were so obviously guys who knew that they’d built their careers and reputations on errors and illusions.
Think of Hans Cristian Anderson’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” but with the honest little boy getting shouted down by the Imperial court, all the guilds in the capitol (especially the Academy of Wizardry), the town crier, the clergy, the army, and – of course! – all the tax collectors.
For me it was pretty simple. I didn’t pay any attention to the whole AGW theory. Then one day I took a look at the data wanting to see how fast oceans were raising. When I saw that the sea level was raising at pretty much the same speed now as in 100 years ago, I started studying the other claims in a skeptic way as well. Climategate was the final nail in the coffin.
Jonathan Abbott said, “it means that we are back to doing science.”
As we are LIKELY entering a cool down soon we need real science.
It is arguable that the most damaging effect of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd is the damage they have done and are doing to the reputation and public view of Science.
It will take decades for science to recover.
Welcome to the rebels side.
Steve Van Dorne (aka Ox AO .. i don’t know why i used my game name for this site.)
It was the run up to Kyoto that made me realize something was seriously wrong. All these people running around saying CC will be a catastrophe, yet their solution wouldn’t make a measurable improvement, and in all likelyhood make the problem worse. A prediction that proved correct.
Prior to that point I thought the theory likely correct, although the consequences exagerrated. Since then I have got to the point that I think the Forcings theory is wrong, and factors that affect the phase changes of water and their effect, primarily on albedo, is the major driver of climate change, at least at decade to millennia scales over the Holocene.
The journey from gullibility to scepticism can take a long time. But it only takes one step.
This is the piece I would have written. It resonates so strongly! Thanks, Jonathan.
Two engineering degrees related to the Earth Sciences.
Got involved in the early environmental movement in 1970. We just wanted to clean up the water, air and soil. We and our successors largely succeeded in the Developed World.
Manager of Oilsands, responsible for our share of Syncrude and two other projects, 1984-1991.
Chairman of the Syncrude Technical Committee, member of the Management Committee, etc.
Heard about the alleged global warming crisis in 1984 or 1985 and felt a responsibility to learn more – have followed it ever since.
Skeptic since the very beginning, based on the absence of a credible scientific argument. Also, far too much bluster by the warmists – all smoke and no fire.
Stated in an APEGA article published in 2002 at http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm that
1. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
So far, so good.
Wrote articles for the National Post, Globe and Mail , La Presse, Calgary Herald, etc. circa 2002, deriding global warming alarmism.
Got one threat from a guy who blamed me for the flooding of Prague. Agreed with him. Told him to FO or I’d do it again. 🙂
Predicted imminent global cooling, starting by 2020 to 2030, in an article in the Calgary Herald, also published in 2002. Hope NOT.
Discovered the close relationship between dCO2/dt and temperature in late 2007 and in January 2008 published a paper at:
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/carbon_dioxide_in_not_the_primary_cause_of_global_warming_the_future_can_no/
Concluded that dCO2/dt varies ~contemporaneously with Lower Tropospheric (LT) temperature and its integral CO2 lags LT temperature by ~9 months.
Summarized as follows:
“The IPCC’s position that increased CO2 is the primary cause of global warming is not supported by the temperature data. In fact, strong evidence exists that disproves the IPCC’s scientific position. This UPDATED paper and Excel spreadsheet show that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lag (occur after) variations in Earth’s Surface Temperature by ~9 months. The IPCC states that increasing atmospheric CO2 is the primary cause of global warming – in effect, the IPCC states that the future is causing the past. The IPCC’s core scientific conclusion is illogical and false.”
See Murry Salby’s work since about 2011, which is similar.
Current concerns: Global cooling, crop failures, energy shortfalls and excessive costs, the global economy, runaway money printing.
For me it was very simple
Stefan-Boltzmann Law is obviously omitted it. Some friends and myself calculated it many years back from their own figures. That was the start then it took me a few years after that to realize we are still in the Quaternary ice age and at extremely low levels of CO2 for the earth. At that point I went from laughing at the hoax to realizing their actions are criminal.
CAGW is very similar to the Dihydrogen Monoxide scare. It is directed at people that doesn’t know much about science.
I had never had the time to give the man made global warming issue any thought until I saw “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, in which my fellow ex-physics student Piers Corbyn appeared. I started to research the issue for myself and reaslised what a swindle it really was. It was politics, not science.
It was Al Gore’s movie that first made me sceptical, surely it isn’t all that bad I thought.
Then on subsequent research I stumbled upon ” Real Climate” a site by real climate scientists. After enthusiastically thinking this is just what I need, all it took was 20 minutes to relalise they had no idea about uncertainty like a good scientist and were obviously an activist site. After leaving in disgust it was another 12 months before our partisan national broadcaster let slip there was a luke warm website called “Climate Debate Daily”. This was the portal I needed to discover the amazing diversity of climate bloggs. Now I relish that my sceptical concerns are held by a growing number of scientists and citizens.
jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 3:14 pm The Greenland temperatures are currently 3 degrees C higher than the end of the GISP2 series, much higher than the medieval warming period…
That seems unlikely Jai.
In excavations on Greenland, archaeologists have found ample evidence of banquets where beef and mutton were consumed. ….. and remains of stables that housed up to 100 cattle each.
In 2008, Greenland recorded a population of 49 cattle, up from 5 in the year 2000.
Nowadays they rely on seasonally replanted ryegrass pastures, and the growing season is still too short for the ryegrass to seed. Ie – the spring replanting is essential to provide feed.
Something the Vikings could not do.
Jonathan Abbott
Enjoyed reading it.
Thank you
My introduction to the CAGW arguments came several years ago when while channel surfing, I watched a program on CSPAN. It was a Congressional hearing about global warming. Involved were an obnoxious prick, and a couple of fuddy-duddy guys with beards. I learned that the prick was Michael Mann, and the dull, bearded guys were Steve McIntyre and Wegman ( I think).
It was the total lack of respect and manners of Michael Mann that lead me to research the CAGW subject. It appears that Mann runs from the facts. What a clown!
Great story, Mr Abbott.
My story is very short: I’m a geologist–a real geologist, not one of those Mann-made types, thank God (literally).
I will admit I’ve always been pretty skeptical of most everything. Back around 2005, when the stories started ramping up about CAGW, I decided to look for some sources on the Internet. One of the first I looked at was realclimate.org. There was an article attacking someone (probably Roger Pielke) for a paper on adjusting satellite temperate readings due to orbital decay. Fortunately they quoted from the paper, so I could form my own judgement when they declaimed, “Is this how a scientist operates?”. In fact, it seemed to me that the science exhibited in the quotes from the paper was pretty reasonable, while their ad hominem attack on the author was quite the opposite.
As I compared the articles on realclimate.org to other websites, like climateaudit.org, I saw that one was purveying snippy, condescending vituperation, while the other was engaged in thoughtful, detailed analysis of data and processes. No points for identifying which was which.
The kicker was the climategate files, particularly the HARRY_READ_ME file, which was the step by step recording of the ordeal of trying to make sense of (as I recall) the CRUTEM2 world temperature model and turn it into CRUTEM3. This was something I fully understood, having a degree in computer science and (at that time) 37 years experience in the IT field. I agonized along with the author as he tried to make sense of undocumented data files, subroutines with no error handling, index pointers with no limit checking, and endless atrocious coding. And this was the model on which much of the doomsaying was based. It was far worse than the first program I wrote, which was one to find prime numbers. As the Director of the Computing Centre remarked, looking at my printed output, “I don’t think 355 is a prime number”. And after reading that file, I don’t give any credence to anything that involves a computer done by these “scientists”.
A timely and well done post.
Same for me, mostly ignored it until Al Gore tried to erase history with that blatant propaganda movie, sought better evidence for and against until Climategate 1.
Now regard CAGW as an intelligence test, and most of the authoritarians in my government have failed that test.
Am deeply enraged and troubled by the dishonesty and incompetence this “cause” has revealed.
I suspect academia and bureaucracy have fallen so far, that the best fix for their decline is to grab a shovel.Certainly no longer willing to fund these fakes.
jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:02 pm
The Global Warming Swindle of 2007 is so full of lies and disinformation that even now it is being distanced by the skeptic community because it is so completely unscientific. For example, they provide the Greenland temperature data to show that the medieval warm period was much warmer than today, which is a common myth promoted by anti-global warming propagandists who pretend that Greenland is the entire world and that Greenland ice cores are the only way to derive temperature from the paleo record.
Greenland data proves past Greenland conditions. Bur regarding the Roman and Medieval optimums, data is also supported with proxies in Europe and historical records. And that makes a good portion of the northern hemisphere. Please prove: 1) how is it possible that Greenland being 1C or more hotter than now, none of the promised catastrophic scenarios related to warming took place. Please prove how is it compatible that Greenland and most of Europe being more than 1C hotter than now, the arctic would still have more ice than now and therefore the current lack of arctic ice is unprecedented. And, more importantly, please explain what caused that, and how it ended. I think you didn’t even bother to ask the questions.
Another example is that they failed to show how the IPCC had determined it was a combination of volcanic and man made aerosols that caused the post WWII cooling and that the “recession” of the 1970s had nothing to do with the resurgence of warming but rather it was the response to acid rain (removing sulfate emission in U.S. and Europe) that caused the resurgence of warming. These subtle efforts to hide truth show that this movie was simply a form of propaganda.
That’s nothing but theory and models. We don’t have measurements of the aerosol contents at that time, only estimations. And people will estimate whatever fits their theory. Maybe it is true, or maybe there are oceanic cicles like ENSO, PDO and such, accelerating and slowing down the warming. Again, what caused MWP? What caused LIA? We don’t know, and because we don’t know, we cannot claim a thing about what part of the current climate change is natural. The thing is that climate has been warming since the LIA, which is much earlier than we started to massively put CO2 into the atmosphere.
It turns out that, when looking at reliable historic temperatures we are already above the global level of both the medieval warming and the roman warming period and are basically tied with the Holocene Optimum. For the most reliable temperature record for the earlier interglacial (the Eemian) the Antarctic ice core data shows we are within 1C of the peak temperature found during the Eemian optimum. After that point we will reach an average temperature level that hasn’t been seen on planet earth for the last 1.5 million years and (likely) will reach a point not seen on this planet for nearly 50 million years. –all within the next 100-200 years.
Oh really? We will reach? And what is the climate waiting for? And where is the evidence that the +1C warmer climate in the Eemian was actually worse for life on Earth? I’m still waiting for ANY evidence that shows that a warmer climate is a bad thing.
The characterization of the “climategate” emails was a complete fabrication by the websites you listed. Comprehensive analysis of the emails showed that there was no impropriety involved.
Oh my, you definitely need a big blind faith to conclude that. I’m not going to enter there.
It is inherently clear in all sociological studies of global warming perceptions that the overwhelming majority of “skeptics” are white males over the age of 35 with above average incomes who come from a politically right ideology.
Actually, bloggers in general are mostly white males over the age of 35, and if you ckeck which of them promote CAGW, you will find that they come from a certain political ideology as well. Why don’t you use the same statistics to mischaracterize both?
Are you sure that your scientific understanding isn’t actually derived from your ideological opposition to collective responses to AGW and/or fear of the potential regulatory framework that will be implemented (i.e. government restrictions on personal freedoms)?
It is very possible that, in many cases, having different political views caused our original skepticism and made as want to know more. That was definitely my case. But that was at the beginning. After investigating, we know that you have no case, that CAGW is bollocks. We are more skeptics AFTER we have seen the data, that we could have been before. Because in addition to the data that we have been shown again and again by the mainstream, we have seen other data that contradicts the theoty. And it is data that the mainstream has been conveniently hiding from us. The approach has never been that of a scientific discussion. In fact, they have repeatedly told us that there is nothing to discuss. And we know it is a lie. We know that the sensitivity is uncertain, future warming is uncertain, the increase of climatic extremes is blatantly false, not happening, the Earth is greening, and polar bears love to have less ice in the north pole because it brings them more food.
As I began to review the documentation, actual peer reviewed articles and then book after book, I began to find out things that were in direct opposition to what I had previously known to be true, like the fact that 2007 arctic melt was a significant outlier to all modeled arctic ice responses, that the uncertainty of modeling projections for global temperatures indicated that it was likely that the projections for warming over the next 75 years would be double what we were being told. I also found that there was also significant uncertainties on the feedback mechanisms regarding boreal forest, Amazon basin forests and arctic methane feedbacks indicating that the models were inherently conservative in their estimations by leaving out these potentially catastrophic factors.
Have you had a look at the increase rates of atmospheric methane? Anything unusual there? Have you indeed calculated the effect of the increase in methane? Because despite the higher greenhouse effect of a methane molecule compared to a CO2 one, the increase is so little that ALL of the methane increase since the fifties create the same level of warming as the CO2 we emit in half a year. It’s quite hard to believe that methane is going to have any protagonism in this story, even if the methane scares became true. Do the numbers!
Also, if in the MWP most of the northern hemisphere was around 1C hotter, why didn’t we have a runaway methane catastrophe then? And why didn’t all the methane that could potentially escape, already escape at that time? Did we perhaps have warming without permafrost melting? How is that possible?
Then I found that the paleoclimate analyses for climate sensitivity to CO2 were based on studies of the glacial phases in the climate record not the interglacials, like we are in today. I then found out that climate sensitivities determined during historic interglacials indicated a MUCH higher climate sensitivity but were thrown out of the calculation because runaway climate change didn’t happen. But that they didn’t consider that the only other time that we had a non-Milankovich driven interglacial (one driven by CO2) actually DID produce runaway warming (the PETM).
Bollocks. Temperature went up, and CO2 went up, during PETM. We don’t know in which order. We do know that, when temperatures go up, CO2 will closely follow due to oceanic outgassing.
Then I found out that our current CO2 emissions path is actually higher than the worst case scenario, that wasn’t actually considered as likely at the time (A1Fl) and that the rapid collapse of arctic ice was going to radically shift the northern hemisphere weather patterns before any other processes were going to take place.
Our emissions are worse than the worst case scenarios, yet the temperature increase since those scenarios were proomulgated, is lower than the best case scenarios (actually, it is inexistent). Shouldn’t that ring siome kind of alarm bell in your head, regarding the inconsistency of your irrational beliefs?
Then, most recently I found out that the weather pattern shift predicted after the ice melt of 2012 was actually happening and then, in the beginning of this summer, a split in the northern hemisphere polar jet stream began producing long-lived cut off lows in the midlattitude regions and now, for the last 2 months there has been an ever-present cut-off low in the north pacific (and sometimes two or three!) that are persisting much longer than the 4-6 days that they usually live) and the wrong-way low that started in July 10th and moved into texas, has only now moved back to the east coast after 2 weeks in an unprecedented shift in northern hemisphere weather.
Bollocks. All weather specialists have concluded that the persistent highs of 2012 have happened before, will continue to happen in the future, there’s no indication that it has been happening more often lately, and are unrelated to global warming. This has been repeatedly shown even in the most leftist media. And to be able to connect it to the 2012 ice melt you would need to explain why we didn’t have those blocking highs in 2007. The two things are unrelated. Perhaps you could also explain why the 2012 blocking high happened BEFORE the 2012 unusual melt.
The effects of AGW have now shown themselves in extremely unstable weather events. We will see what kind of a wild ride we are in for now. One can only hope that the current predictions are not true, but one thing is absolutely true, and without a doubt, AGW is real, the scientists were not part of some grand socialist conspiracy and we are now in the fight for the lives of our future generations.
AGW is real. CAGW is not, and current climate scares are a farce.
Our greatest Historical climatologist was Hubert Lamb, founder and First Director of CRU. This was one of the last things he wrote as a preface to his updated book ‘climate history and the modern world.’
“The idea of climate change has at last taken on with the public after generations which assumed that climate could be taken as constant. But it is easy to notice the common assumption that mans science and modern industry and technology are now so powerful that any change of climate or the environment must be due to us. It is good for us to be more alert and responsible in our treatment of the environment, but not to have a distorted view of our own importance. Above all, we need more knowledge, education and understanding in these matters.”
Hubert Lamb December 1994
Tonyb
My scepticism of man made global warming is based on a single graph of the global mean temperature data that shows the multi-decadal oscillation shown below:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/detrend:0.8
Thank you Jonathan Abbott for your reflective inspiration and all the many other stories accumulated here of CAGW skepticism discovery. Trying to think of my own, but can’t. The coming ice age came and went rather quickly while being challenged by family recollections of related experiences, a college seminar confidence warning by nuclear fusion researcher/developer Robert Gottlieb, suspicions of lack of CAGW data support. etc.
Thus tempered and suspicious of the crowd-mentality of CAGW believers I never accepted the CAGW mindset. I also recall the first public challenge to CAGW I heard that impressed me when I happened to hear Rush Limbaugh discuss some of his climate mentor Roy Spencer’s discussions on CAGW and ethanol some years ago. My interest piqued, along with my need to keep my now gainfully employed engineering physics/software developer sons and extended family informed I am now a bit of a climate-watch devotee.
Ethanol is still, insanely, being taxpayer subsidized. Coal, nuke, oil and gas energy generation is increasingly being mega-regulated by the powers that be in efforts to raise energy prices high enough to make wind, solar and other unreliable, insufficient, less efficient energy sources prices “competitive” in the market. As political ideologists destabilize the world economies and infrastructures numerous real possibly fatal threats continually seem to attempt to remind us of our overall tenuousness, such as when relative “near” misses by previously unknown (and known) errant planetary bodies that could wreak havoc on/to Earth (I am leaving our religious, cultural and maniacal threats).
Another Golden Age of U.S. energy self-sufficiency and inventive momentum is being greatly squandered just when the world needs strong, good spirited advances preparing against as many of the ill-winds that may possibly blow our way. Many thanks for Fracking in forestalling an U.S. economic collapse!
The misuse of Big Data by the same and more ideologues through over-surveillance, combined with EPA and DOE over-regulation are real threats to the “free” world continuing to realize inventive and creative potentials by maximizing being free. I have always felt that the best defense against domestic attack is having a healthy, vibrant, aware society, especially not one harassed, unwillingly exploited and/or paranoid. We will increasingly need the maximum number of perspectives in all fields in order to even preserve our species, let alone advance it through our solar system allowing it to survive through a widening and far-reaching dispersal.
Through whatever nation(s) the future presents incredible challenges, but at least we don’t have to invent creating and controlling fire! Many great contributions must be made by many great, “normal” and “AB-normal” people so, may we all keep busy and do our “things” in the name of expanding our knowledge of all things (mostly helpful and superfluous) granting us the most options.
As always, a fond, respectful pat on the back (here, at WUWT) for Anthony, the Mods and most post contributors and commenters.
Patriotically, may God have mercy on our Founder’s country, and inclusively on all freedom loving peoples.
It was December of 2006,
I have to admit that it was Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, a Christmas gift from my mother (thanks Mom!), and that film scared the bejeezus out of me! Hook, line and sinker. They had me, I was truly freaked out. Everything made sense and I was a believer.
The biggest affect that film had on me was that it made me hypersensitive to warming. Every time there was a warm breeze I could literally feel the ice sheets melting and the coastal waters rising. Choked for breath as C02 was robbing my body of the much needed oxygen, we have to do something.
I always enjoyed reading and tried to read often and it was in the summer of ’07 that a friend of mine let me read the book he just finished. After listening to me talk….no preach about the doom and gloom of ‘Global Warming’, he tossed me the book and half jokingly said “here you go….the truth”. It was Michael Crichton’s ‘State Of Fear’. I was thrown for a loop.
It was this moment of confusion that started me researching and researching, reading and reading, learning and learning….forming what you might call the skeptic view. You might as well brand me with the official label……’Denier’, What ever that means!
I should have realized early on….. science is not about alarmism, propaganda, sensationalism, censorship or consensus. Shame on me!
Thanks to Anthony and the rest of the operators of the other mentioned sites, keep up the fabulous work. It is very much appreciated!
In 2008 someone said to me “Global warming. I don’t believe a word of it”. I looked back at them and thought to myself “you’re crazy”.
So back in 2008, please don’t laugh, but it had never occurred to me that the BBC might be biased. I had assumed that everything the BBC produced was the gold standard of broadcasting and journalism. Of course I thought my friend was crazy, he was saying the opposite of what we were informed by the BBC on a daily basis on numerous programs and channels.
Anyhow I was so shocked by my friends “crazy” rejection of global warming I went to check it out for myself. I landed here at Watts Up, have been an avid reader ever since and I’m now a paid up sceptic.
(I am leaving OUT our(<not) religious, cultural and maniacal threats). – sorry!
Psychologist with a b/s detector inbuilt. It smacked of Agamemnon’s slaughter of his daughter to placate the weather goddess to me, right from when some of my leftist colleagues started lecturing me about it.
At 11:43 PM on 25 July, Angela had written of the AGW fraud:
Didn’t quite make the connection with Greek mythology, but I suppose it was sometime around the middle or late ’80s that I recall getting the first “consider-the-source” twitch in the nostrils.
I became aware that people of odiously statist inclinations had become uniformly making noises about how this awful-horrible-bad-nasty “We’re All Gonna Die!” imminent catastrophe more than sufficiently necessitated vastly expanded normatively suppressive government regulation of all economic activities in the Western (“developed”) countries, with all that metastatic malignancy to be put under the command of wise, altruistic, socially-conscious, dedicated “Liberal” politicians and their squittering weenie functionaries.
However, there could never be discussed or allowed any efforts at mitigation of increased atmospheric CO2 (I remember the first “Geritol Solution” experiments with oceanic iron oxide seeding to increase biomass uptake in the form of plankton blooms), and nuclear fission powerplants – which emit no CO2 whatsoever in the process of providing ginormous amounts of highly reliable baseload electric power – still constituted nothing more than a great sin against Mother Gaea.
So why were we only hearing this “settled science” yammer from the same leftie-luzers who’d been demonstrating no ability to grasp the much simpler premises of sound political economic theory and practice?
When one feels one’s leg being warmly spattered upon by a contemptible weasel sneaking his hand into one’s pocket, there’s nothing of “conspiracy theory” in the assumption that it ain’t raining no matter how that thieving bastich claims it is.
Hi,
My personal story is this:
Man I was deeply in – including planting perhaps 20,000 greenhouse trees in mitigation – right up until the Climategate emails. Trenberth’s, “its a travesty”, quote was probably the start. This seemed to beg a closer look, and one of the first documents I came across was D’Aleo and Watts:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
I was interested but skeptical of the document until I read “Case Study 12: NASA: Hide this after Jim Checks it”
I was totally gobsmacked that anyone could be so cavalier with data – If they could just do that manipulation without documentation, then you just couldn’t trust any of their data – and that forced me to go right back to first principles and start checking through everything.
Reasons among others:
John Daly
CAGW was dominated by radicals and supported by leftist
All the solutions end up with bringing back the Western world as it was before Ronald and Margaret
And the aim to establish undemocratic global government that will be based on taking away democracy and political power from local and national levels.
Etc…
Reading agenda driven half truths by people like jai mitchell has convinced me there is no threat of CAGW.
Any science performed with a political slant is suspect from the start, surely.
Skepticism and science SO go together.
Incidentally,
Hi Girma at 11:09
I still update the graph from your 1010 paper every month. – Still looking pretty sound
I see Akasofu has updated his graph too at:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/new-paper-finds-global-warming-since.html
Cheers
Like many here, at first I just believed what I was being told. I thought we were headed for doom because of CAGW. Then I remember hearing somewhere vaguely that there were some scientists who said the contention was all bulldust. Then Climategate! What really roused my suspicions was an article that purported to rebut Climategate in the Age newspaper (Melbourne, Australia). When I read it I found the argument had a shrill, protesteth-too-much quality about it. So I started doing my own research. The rest is history.
After a period of honest inquiry, several things pushed me into the skeptics camp, among which are:
1. The insufferably cult-like, “Pharisaic” demeanor of the warmists. Thoughtful, honest, self-aware, intelligent people do not act that way; True Believers who are in mortal fear of a loss of faith and/or cult standing do. As do charlatans and narcissists.
2. The implausibility of the positive feedback mechanism necessary for high sensitivity.
3. The warmists’ portrayal of anthropogenic CO2 as a magical compound, uniquely able to initiate runaway warming.
4. The intelligence, wit, and open-mindedness generally apparent on the skeptic side. (Exhibit A: rgb@duke)
5. The incessant pathetic fallacious argument from consensus on the part of the warmists. Have they nothing better to present? (“Call that a knife, mate?”)
I have concluded that most CAGW believers (Jai) are psychologically codependent with the CAGW meme as a vital element of a comic book mythos of good and evil, they being green heroes fighting greedy capitalist nature-hating bigoted lying denier-villains. “Super Mandia” is not as tongue-in-cheek as we might think! And what else would explain Gleik’s bizarre behavior vis a vis Heartland?
Yes and one more thing, 12 years ago, about, I downloaded a study that claimed that 25 people died in Oslo every year due to cancer, caused by emissions of tar from cars.
The truth was that somewhere during winter some people in Oslo could reach levels for a week or two that if you where exposed to this level constantly for 70 years you could get 5 cancer sick out of every 100.000 in Oslo. That’s why the number 25 came about since Oslo has 500.000 citizens.
The study was far fetched and creative in claiming that if some in Oslo was exposed with a Health risk all in Oslo was exposed for the same. And if the exposure was a week or two during winter it meant 52 weeks a year for 70 years. That would give 25 cancerwictims every 70 year, not 25 each year as the study claimed. Tried to talk to him but he was the expert and I was just an idiot that could not believe that every year Oslo had 500.000 citizens that had been exposed for 70 years.
In addition I found that 80% of tar came from burning of wood in fireplaces to keep the houses warm in cold winters, inversion that leads to cold weather and air pollution problems. So since we only do this in winter I recon that more than 90 % of the tar came from burning of wood when tar reached health levels a week or two.
I tried to talk with his senior boss, did not work.
Finally I sent an email to the highest level in the public health organization he was working in and 2 hours later the study was drawn back.
After that I never trust any study about environment and climate. I don’t trust the press/media, because they could only print the propaganda lies about it and definitely not the truth. And on newsgroup at that time I was also considered an idiot by some for critiquing the study. And when I was proven right it was like “don’t mention the war”.
Global Cooling stories by the ’90s had morphed into Nuclear Winter stories, and I remember seeing them both running in the media at the same time. I knew something was wrong. When I saw that “Global Warming” was being pushed by left wing politics, I figured it out.
I realised I was being lied to by scientists… lots of them…. that was enough for me to smell smoked haddock in my bouillbaise !
A crooks
Thank you.
Akasofu is correct!
No warming for a couple of decades.
@jai mitchell
The fundamental difference between your post and everyone else on here (which BTW I read them all and liked every post) yours is based on other peoples experiment.
Everyone else here done their own personal research and drew their own conclusions.
Which is independent thought. This doesn’t mean you are wrong it is just an observation.
My own opinion when it comes to the truth in science. There is only absolute truth in science which is we can never be absolutely sure we are correct, we can only be absolutely sure we are wrong.
My question for you jai mitchell is how are you so absolutely you are right?
Im an anarchist in Sweden sinse 35 years…I saw the leftwingers flee to the green movement…stop focusing on environmental issues,becoming green entreprenurs and “journalists”..they hung on to the CAGW like bees to honey…all their totalitarian visions could be fulfilled on a global scale…I studie
d humanecolgy in the uni back then..and saw the misallocation of money and scholarships go to the priests of doom…and serious work like the overfishing and malnutrition issues be forgotten…I knew the crowd and was sceptical before i even looked at their “research” then i was sure…
Many talented people engage across the internet and say deeply sensible things. However, others seem more to play a game of sock-it-to-ya, as though deep thought takes too long; or it is not smarty-pants enough.
I recently posted on WUWT with regard to Australia’s average temperature and while writing that essay, I wondered why people have not grouped together shared their knowledge and skills and written and had published, scientific papers in support of their (collective) science-based views. A contact forum would be useful.
I was apprehensive writing my piece, because I was working at the edge of my statistical skill-zone. I was sure it would come unstuck; but it didn’t.
Data is hard to toss; and it is with data (not opinion) that the climate-ship needs to be righted.
There is data everywhere, but what is missing is the networking that would turn a lot of that into unarguable stories that would pass peer review (both internet peer-review as well as the more formidable journal review).
There is a generation of retired scientists and well-educated people in the world; all connected to the internet – where are their voices?
Cheers,
Bill Johnston
At 2:15 AM on 26 July, Bill Johnston had written:
It’s never been the “data” as such (in the words of S.J. Perelman, “There is nothing like a good painstaking survey full of decimal points and guarded generalizations to put a glaze like a Sung vase on your eyeball”), but rather the reliability of the data claimed to support the abstract concept that an investigation is purported to test.
In all sound scientific inquiry, the limits of accuracy (and therefore reliability) of measurement methods are accorded the most accurate evaluations possible, and these “wiggle room” error potentials are kept in mind throughout analysis. They show up in the conclusions, and definitely color all discussion thereof.
Except – and this came inexorably to my own attention sometime in the early 1990s – in the crap getting through peer review among these “climate catastrophe” clowns. What the hell?
My own experience in “the more formidable journal review” process (both as a writer in the submissions process and when the editors diddled me into vetting other guys’ manuscripts) had formally impressed upon me Heinlein’s observation from Time Enough For Love (1973):
And when you got right down to it, the “decimal places” about which these “climatology” clowns had been blathering simply stank on ice.
Would I have submitted such to a medical journal in the expectation of getting it published? Would I have accepted such assertions in a paper under review?
Nope.
So why should I concede reliability or validity to the garbage these jumped-up conjurers were handwaving?
“The claimed certainty itself seemed unscientific.”
Agree with the whole essay, and this in particular. Having hung around a few cults here and there, when people stop thinking for themselves, you can kiss modernity and civilisation and human rights goodbye. You can also kiss the environment goodbye.
I asked a guy, what if the IPCC one day changes its mind? He replied, “then I’ll know they too have been infiltrated by big oil.”
We’re supposed to trust science because it is self-correcting. If people no longer admit change and correction, if all they say is it that it is “settled, end of story”, then there is no way to correct it anymore, and little reason to trust it.
“These were the CND campaigners, class war agitators and useful fools for communism in a new guise. I suddenly realised that after the end of the Cold War, rather than slinking off in embarrassed fashion to do something useful, they had latched onto a new cause”
This was a reasonably interesting essay until it was fatally undermined by the usual McCarthyist screams of ‘commies and reds under the bed” which tends to hint strongly at a political rather than scientific agenda. Mr.Abbott may recall that rather paradoxically the main driver for mainstreaming climate change action in the late 80’s was that leading lefty and Stalinist agitator Margaret Thatcher. How long will it be before commentators can look objectively at the science instead of seeing everything in terms of left or right wing plots?
I’m another Briton with a somewhat similar story except that I never really believed the CAGW theory. Why? Well by the time it became strident I had moved on from mathematics to become a university computer scientist – and therefore have never ever believed that models give you any answer (except the one you want) if you don’t completely understand the problem. Some time in the early 1990s there was a talk from the Met Office at my University in which the speaker said that their climate model had suddenly gone from predicting a 4C temperature rise to about 1C when they added some code to deal with reflections from clouds, thereby making it the least alarmist of the main internationally known models instead of the most alarmist. Just another example of the weakness of the models
My specific route to this blog and the other excellent sceptic blogs came from reading Christopher Booker’s articles in the Sunday Telegraph. Here was someone actually saying what I thought! He included a pointer to WUWT and, as others have said, I could now actually see real figures for myself instead of just hearing/reading all the dire predictions based on those iffy models..
Great read Jonathan Abbott, being originally from the UK too, my experience is very similar albeit a bit of an earlier start for me. I recall the coming ice age scare in the 70’s, which David Attenborough believed in, the BBC science programs discussing the impacts of an ice age, spending extra time in school and public libraries studying physics and planetary science, the many fights with my parents when I wanted to stay up late to watch Patrick Moore’s “The Sky at Night” (The 70’s were tough when there was power worker strikes of course), being called up to the front of class by the teacher to explain to him and the class what I was doodling (Solar flare) during story time. I have, proudly, been a sceptic ever since.
After 208 responses it becomes challenging to offer one more.
WUWT should be thankful to Steve Mosher and Jai Mitchell: they are the only two respondents dissenting with the original post. And excellent counter-fire is immediately made against their interventions.
So the debate is almost not on-going because of lack of participants. And it is the same in pro-CAGW blogs. Singing with the choir is comforting but not too interesting.
If no debate is possible then it has to be a fight, a political one.
On the warmist side it is excellently organized. They sit in scientific committees, in governmental institutions, their NGOs are very well funded and their lobby is highly effective at national and international level. Their fantastic agit-prop success is that almost all political parties in the developed countries are now aligned to carbon reduction policies, energy transition, and the like. To be a contrarian in these matters has become a sure way not to be re-elected. Who would not like to be seen as savior of the Planet?
How does it look like on the other side? Anthony Watts and other bloggers do a tremendous job; some prominent personalities make excellent interventions in parliamentary hearings in the US, in UK, and elsewhere; but the battlefield is [still] occupied by pro-CAGW.
The industrial energy sector has somehow abandoned it because in realistic terms it is possible to adapt company strategies to a game in which energy will become scarcer and therefore more costly; what may be lost in quantity will be gained in profitability. And other sponsors are no that plenty to organize such battle.
Where does it lead us but to hope that the on-going non-warming 15 years period will last some more time to get better and less scary models and scenario? Or to wait that the BRICS countries will take over a leadership that a weakening Occident is voluntarily giving up? They already began at the Copenhagen Conference and avoided foolish agreements.
“Il ne sert à rien d’être optimiste ou pessimiste par rapport à des choses qui sont hors de son propre contrôle, il faut simplement les subir telles qu’elles adviennent.”
I discounted CAGW from the beginning in the early 90’s. I had already gone through the 70’s “Ice Age” scare and nothing happened so I ignored the ‘warming’ scare. When colleagues told me about supposed sea level rise (yes we had that in the early 90’s) I just retorted that I could go to Lapstone beach. Lapstone is about 60 meters above sea level in the Blue mountains west of Sydney. Anyone with half a brain could figure out that 300 (or 400 or 500 or 600) ppm of CO2 can do zip.
After 209 responses it becomes challenging to offer one more.
WUWT should be thankful to Steve Mosher and Jai Mitchell: they are the only two respondents dissenting with the original post. And excellent counter-fire is immediately made against their interventions.
So the debate is almost not on-going because of lack of participants. And it is the same in pro-CAGW blogs. Singing with the choir is comforting but not too interesting.
If no debate is possible then it has to be a fight, a political one.
On the warmist side it is excellently organized. They sit in scientific committees, in governmental institutions, their NGOs are very well funded and their lobby is highly effective at national and international level. Their fantastic agit-prop success is that almost all political parties in the developed countries are now aligned to carbon reduction policies, energy transition, and the like. To be a contrarian in these matters has become a sure way not to be re-elected. Who would not like to be seen as savior of the Planet?
How does it look like on the other side? Anthony Watts and other bloggers do a tremendous job; some prominent personalities make excellent interventions in parliamentary hearings in the US, in UK, and elsewhere; but the battlefield is [still] occupied by pro-CAGW.
The industrial energy sector has somehow abandoned it because in realistic terms it is possible to adapt company strategies to a game in which energy will become scarcer and therefore more costly; what may be lost in quantity will be gained in profitability. And other sponsors are no that plenty to organize such battle.
Where does it lead us but to hope that the on-going non-warming 15 years period will last some more time to get better and less scary models and scenario? Or to wait that the BRICS countries will take over a leadership that a weakening Occident is voluntarily giving up? They already began at the Copenhagen Conference and avoided foolish agreements.
“Il ne sert à rien d’être optimiste ou pessimiste par rapport à des choses qui sont hors de son propre contrôle, il faut simplement les subir telles qu’elles adviennent.”
At 2:53 AM on 26 July, Michel had written:
I suppose that a pathologist should be “thankful” for a good, big ovarian carcinoma brought down fresh and dripping from the operating room when he’s got a couple of medical students he’s instructing.
That’s about the degree of “thankful” with which any honest man should receive warmist excrescences like Steve Mosher and Jai Mitchell.
Consider that there’s a reason why they’re the only two putzes even half-heartedly pushing CAGW propaganda in this thread, and that’s because the Watermelons have learned that this virtual venue is heavily frequented by people who can (and joyously do!) refute their every burble of bullpuckey.
The politically-motivate pseuoscience of the “We’re All Gonna Die!” climate hysterics can’t survive the antiseptic effects of open debate, and therefore they’ve learned (especially in the wake of Climategate) to avoid online fora which their fellow travelers do not control, and in which they can’t count upon the skeptics getting censored into obliteration.
“So the debate is almost not on-going” in this thread because debate is possible in this thread, and therefore the Watermelon (“Green on the outside, but red to the core!”) True Believers in the gore-ible global warming hype know that they can’t get away with their crap here.
Sure, they’re stupid and evil. But by this time, these particular stupid and evil people have at least sufficient animal cunning to appreciate the fact that – as with the vampires of legend – sunlight isn’t their friend.
Good one John, I was a committed warmist until one night at a house party I got into an argument with a skeptic who kept saying “where’s your evidence, just because you assert something doesn’t mean its true”. “Bring me the evidence” he repeated. So in a bit of a strop I went home determined to find the evidence and present it to him and make him look foolish. 3 Months later I met him again and rather sheepishly had to admit that i now agreed with him! 🙂 The defining moment was running across WUWT and Steve McIntyre’s blog. It made me very angry because I looked like a real gullible fool for swallowing what amounted to thin air for so long. So all thanks to Anthony and Steve for getting me on the right path!
Early in live I learned about en read about a lot of stuff. The Romans the medieval warm period and how good it was. I learned of the climate optimum and also about weather and the way it go’s. Reading science books and articles in papers. I am from 1975 so the new ice age went past me like a fast train.
But Piers Corbyn came in the picture and that for me was the first eye opener because I saw the patterns he told there where.
But then the big debate came on tv. Yes we have greenies in Parliament and those goat socks would us tho pay 100 million per year tho prevent the world from warming.
They claimd that 4% CO2 could be held for a rapid warming of the earth and we soon would en be able to stop this from happening. Runaway heating cause by 4% of all CO2.
They also told me and all other Dutch watching that the warming of all CO2 was 0,39C so how much is 4% off that? Not that much.
So I went on searching and finding and finding even more. Also I found there was a lot of fraud. Wikipedia en google did fraud like it is normal. So I went from being a skeptic whit honest doubt to a clear skeptic to learn that there is no 97% consensus but only 97% of all humans are idiots who believe in danger’s lies because off the fact that they are to stupid to reckon what wrong and good. Most of it is to be found in the lower greats of school.
Many things convinced me that climate science was on dodgy ground, but these are the main ones…
CAGW theory failed to consider negative climate response properly.
Using linear statistics on a complex climate system driven by spatio-temporal chaos is idiotic.
None of the computer models (GCMs) produce scenarios which match reality – few even produce reasonable hind-casts.
The rest of the planets in the solar system have heated over the past few decades faster than Earth has. Could the recent solar grand maximum have something to do with this?
Climategate 1 and 2 clearly illustrated the poor quality of climate data, methodology and Earth energy budget. It also showed how political climatology has become.
I have a similar journey likeJonathan Abbott
I probably typify the reaction of a person with a graduate level physics background and a general interest in science developments.
I had only a superficial interest in Climate Science pre-climategate.
My friends, all from a varied scientific background would occasionally discuss ‘global warming’ .
My attitude then would then have been, let the Climate Scientists get on with it.
The media says 97% of all scientists agree with the IPCC and the science is settled.
I trusted that all scientists worked within the guidelines of the scientific method as outlined by Karl Popper.
Climategate showed that my previous views were gullible.
The subsequent enquiries into Climategate were blatant establishment cover ups.
For instance Lord Oxburgh with extensive financial interests in renewable energy was in charge of one.
Like putting the chairman of Imperial Tobacco in charge of a committee to look into the harmful effects of smoking!
What was more disturbing was the attitude of most Climate Scientists to the shocking revelations.
Complacency and defending wrongdoing instead of ruthlessly rooting out those who had departed from the scientific method.
So I decided as a citizen with a science background to take more of an interest
A scare story of climate would get more funding and it’s all in a good cause seemed to be the attitude.
Bertolt Brecht in his play ‘Galileo’ proposed that scientists should have a form of ‘Hippocratic Oath’ which would prohibit such behavior.
Politically I am of the left and I notice the irony of poor people paying for increased fuel and transport costs to combat so called ‘global warming’
Many thousands of old people in Britain die from hypothermia as a direct result of what may turn out to be climate alarmism.
Many thanks and mirrors my route into being a skeptic.
Your parallel with continental drift/plate tectonics is true. As a young teenager I read Arthur Holmes’ book Principals of Physical Geology which had a chapter on continental drift (1958ish). Looking at a map of the earth it is obvious, though the mechanism is not that came later, but there were still scientists at the time threatening believers with near death.
Nothing changes.
Great essay Mr Abbott. Much of your experience mirrors my own. I suspect there are many millions out there who would feel the same. It’s the breach of faith and abuse of privilege that really riles the most isn’t it?.
Gareth Phillips says: July 26, 2013 at 2:34 am
Gareth, don’t blame it all on Maggie Thatcher.
Here is a history of the rise of eco-extremism, written in 1994 by Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace.
http://www.greenspirit.com/key_issues/the_log.cfm?booknum=12&page=3
The Rise of Eco-Extremism
Two profound events triggered the split between those advocating a pragmatic or “liberal” approach to ecology and the new “zero-tolerance” attitude of the extremists. The first event, mentioned previously, was the widespread adoption of the environmental agenda by the mainstream of business and government. This left environmentalists with the choice of either being drawn into collaboration with their former “enemies” or of taking ever more extreme positions. Many environmentalists chose the latter route. They rejected the concept of “sustainable development” and took a strong “anti-development” stance.
Surprisingly enough the second event that caused the environmental movement to veer t