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 to the left was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Suddenly the international peace movement had a lot less to do. Pro-Soviet groups in the West were discredited. Many of their members moved into the environmental movement bringing with them their eco-Marxism and pro-Sandinista sentiments.
These factors have contributed to a new variant of the environmental movement that is so extreme that many people, including myself, believe its agenda is a greater threat to the global environment than that posed by mainstream society. Some of the features of eco-extremism are:
• It is anti-human. The human species is characterized as a “cancer” on the face of the earth. The extremists perpetuate the belief that all human activity is negative whereas the rest of nature is good. This results in alienation from nature and subverts the most important lesson of ecology; that we are all part of nature and interdependent with it. This aspect of environmental extremism leads to disdain and disrespect for fellow humans and the belief that it would be “good” if a disease such as AIDS were to wipe out most of the population.
• It is anti-technology and anti-science. Eco-extremists dream of returning to some kind of technologically primitive society. Horse-logging is the only kind of forestry they can fully support. All large machines are seen as inherently destructive and “unnatural’. The Sierra Club’s recent book, “Clearcut: the Tradgedy of Industrial Forestry”, is an excellent example of this perspective. “Western industrial society” is rejected in its entirety as is nearly every known forestry system including shelterwood, seed tree and small group selection. The word “Nature” is capitalized every time it is used and we are encouraged to “find our place” in the world through “shamanic journeying” and “swaying with the trees”. Science is invoked only as a means of justifying the adoption of beliefs that have no basis in science to begin with.
• It is anti-organization. Environmental extremists tend to expect the whole world to adopt anarchism as the model for individual behavior. This is expressed in their dislike of national governments, multinational corporations, and large institutions of all kinds. It would seem that this critique applies to all organizations except the environmental movement itself. Corporations are critisized for taking profits made in one country and investing them in other countries, this being proof that they have no “allegiance” to local communities. Where is the international environmental movements allegiance to local communities? How much of the money raised in the name of aboriginal peoples has been distributed to them? How much is dedicated to helping loggers thrown out of work by environmental campaigns? How much to research silvicultural systems that are environmentally and economically superior?
• It is anti-trade. Eco-extremists are not only opposed to “free trade” but to international trade in general. This is based on the belief that each “bioregion” should be self-sufficient in all its material needs. If it’s too cold to grow bananas – – too bad. Certainly anyone who studies ecology comes to realize the importance of natural geographic units such as watersheds, islands, and estuaries. As foolish as it is to ignore ecosystems it is adsurd to put fences around them as if they were independent of their neighbours. In its extreme version, bioregionalism is just another form of ultra-nationalism and gives rise to the same excesses of intolerance and xenophobia.
• It is anti-free enterprise. Despite the fact that communism and state socialism has failed, eco-extremists are basically anti-business. They dislike “competition” and are definitely opposed to profits. Anyone engaging in private business, particularly if they are sucessful, is characterized as greedy and lacking in morality. The extremists do not seem to find it necessary to put forward an alternative system of organization that would prove efficient at meeting the material needs of society. They are content to set themselves up as the critics of international free enterprise while offering nothing but idealistic platitudes in its place.
• It is anti-democratic. This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of radical environmentalism. The very foundation of our society, liberal representative democracy, is rejected as being too “human-centered”. In the name of “speaking for the trees and other species” we are faced with a movement that would usher in an era of eco-fascism. The “planetary police” would “answer to no one but Mother Earth herself”.
• It is basically anti-civilization. In its essence, eco-extremism rejects virtually everything about modern life. We are told that nothing short of returning to primitive tribal society can save the earth from ecological collapse. No more cities, no more airplanes, no more polyester suits. It is a naive vision of a return to the Garden of Eden.
My story is very similar to many of you. As an engineer I am naturally scientifically conservative as my backside in on the line if I make some proclamation, but I considered myself kinda green (Still am) and generally sided with the view that it couldn’t hurt to plant some trees to sop up some excess CO2. (This was the days of offset programs) Then came the attempts to set up an ETS. Well this was serious, this was going to hurt so I thought to my self, I’m an Engineer I know math I can do some checks of my own. I did some research and unearthed some articles by Professor Carter and others showing 1. The State of saturation of CO2 and got some info on the warming since the Little Ice Age. Armed with a little data I set up two little math experiments.
Given the saturation level of C02 what would be the maximum warming possible for a 100% CO2 Atmosphere (this is a “Boundary Test”) – result 5.2 Degrees C – Australian government Forecast for this situation 70 deg C = Implausible EPIC FAIL.
If the warming for 100PPM Rise from the little ice age to 380PPM was 0.7 degrees what would the likely rise for the next 100PPM be if all warming from the little ice age was due to CO2. (That’s easy, log law means it must be < 0.7 deg) Australia government says 6 deg for a doubling, Now 280PPM to 380PPM was about a third of a doubling, but of course because its a log most of that occurs up front, I didn't calculate it but I originally just used a linear approximation. I could say accurately that the government was suggesting that more than a third of the 6 degrees, That is more than 2 Deg would occur for the next 100PPM per million. This was clearly ABSURD, the log law meant that the next 100PPM MUST BE STRICTLY LESS THAN THE PREVIOUS 100PPM.
A Sceptic was born!.
Neither of these tests has even been successfully refuted by ANYONE it remains for me a truism. Climate sensitivity for 280PPM to 380PPM was ln (1+100/280) x C = 0.7) C=2.27 So what is ln(2) x 2.27 =1.58. (IF I recaclulate for today (400PPM) C is actually lower at 1.96 so the demonstrated climate sensitivity from the Little ice age to 2013 is ln (2) * 1.96 = 1.36 degrees per doubling
So Observation tells us CO2 Sensitivity from the little ice age to now must be < 1.36 to 1.58 and there is a ceiling on warming of something less than 5.3 Degrees
I don't believe for a single minute this is catastrophic.
I continue to believe that until someone proves to me mathematically otherwise
Gareth Phillips makes an interesting and fair point. In the context of the essay I didn’t make my position fully clear. What concerned me was the politicisation of the science. If the proponents of CAGW had been fascists and other right wing groups I would have been just as suspicious, and my language towards them would have been far more caustic than I used above. The corruption of science under fascism in the 30s and 40s was far more sinister than anything happening today.
The important point is that once my suspicions were aroused, it was still the science that decided me one way or the other, not the mouthpieces involved.
I’d like to put a good word in for John Brignell and his Number Watch site (www.numberwatch.co.uk) which he has been running for some 13 years now. It sure got me started on the road to AGW skepticism. The late great Michael Chrichton, too.
I too am one of those who when at school was told that the Earth was cooling and that we might be heading for an ice age. I was therefore surprised that a few years later, global warming was being promoted and that it was all manmade and would be catastrophic. I was sceptical of this for 4 main reasons.
First, there is no way that we would be here on planet Earth some 4.5 billion years after its creation given the hell fire and brimstone that it has gone through unless the planet was very resilient and feedbacks were negative. The processes at work would always strive to find some habitable equilibrium and that is why the planet fluctuates between glacial and inter-glacial periods but is neither entirely covered in ice or ice free (at least not once the continents began to split).
Second, we underestimate how big the Earth is and how small we actually are. One only has to compare ourseelfs with volcanoes to see what a pin prick we are. Short of a full blown nuclear holocaust life on Earth as we know it cannot be materially influenced by our activities.
Third, man only contributes a miniscule quantity of global CO2 emissions. heck even termites produce about 10 times as much GHGs as do man.
Fourth, if DWLWIR was capable of performing sensible work, there would be much scientific research in developing an energy system exploiting this source of energy. We would not be concentrating on solar but would instead be concentrating on extracting the energy in DWLWIR which is a 24/7 source of energy come wind, rain or shine. I could not find that there was any on going research into expoloiting this energy source and that suggested to me that no real physist considered that it was a source of energy capable of performing sensible work.
Fifth, history and nature confirms that warm is good and cold is bad. Biodieversity is maximised in warm wet areas and is at its least in cold arid areas. The history of civilisation can be traced around the globe largely in relation to temperature. Warmer climates have always been more advanced (earlier bronze age, iron age etc), and civilisation such as the Egyptians, Minoans, Greek, romans etc follow a similar warm pattern. Here in the UK we were erecting Stonehenge at atime when the egyptians were building the Pyramids and wonderful temples. Even today we would struggle to build a large structure to the precision of the Great Pyramid. As I saw it there was nothing to fear about a warmer world. heck it would be a god send for food production and general well being (for the main part in developed nations people have a longer life expectancy and are older beforfe they succumb to serious illness the warmer the country).
Of course there were many other reasons, but cAGW sounded so obviously over hyped, and even AGW sounded rather unlikely. The more research I carry out and the more knoweldge I have of the subject the weaker and more tenuous it becomes.
Please explain this and this. Also note that, so far, this summer the Arctic “Daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel, plotted with daily climate values calculated from the period 1958-2002” is the coldest since 1958 according to DMI.
It seems to me that over the last few years there has been a concerted attempt to get rid of the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Roman Warm Period. This can only be done through brazen dishonesty. They have tried it with the Medieval Warm Period. When these dishonest folks are done they will try it with the Eemian.
jai, you might be seeing natural climate cycles and not man-made co2 warming of air temperature in the Arctic – which is not evident. I have already shown you that your runaway amplification in the Arctic is crap.
Born in 1947 I remember the “Coming Ice-Age” and the “Nuclear Winter” hype in the 1960s and 1970s and I was scared! Then they changed their minds to anthropogenic global warming and I naively believed what I read in the papers. I was scared all over again! Then in March 2007 I saw The Great Global Warming Swindle and seeing those sane and sensible men expounding the other point of view piqued my curiosity in a big way and I started to read the science they were talking about on-line. I think Zbigniew Jaworowski was one of the first I remember looking at. Then John Daly. Then Climate Audit and Niels Axel Morner, then eventually I found WUWT. I was appalled at the level of abuse hurled at Martin Durkin and his interviewees and of the general hyper-hostility towards to sceptics which is absolutely weird and “unprecedented” when you come to think about it!
I have never stopped since 2007 reading about the climate, usually for several hours every day. Some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t! It is the most fascinating puzzle that anyone could hope to unravel and I am glad that I am beginning to see the false hype wither away under the glare of observational evidence. I have a degree in sociology from LSE 1972 and by far the most important knowledge I acquired during my studies there was of statistics and sampling – invaluable when critiquing the crazy, ever changing samples and revisions of surface station temperature we are expected to swallow. At LSE I also learned something of the highly politicised nature of what some claim to be social “science” and how the temptations to “fix” the data are just too tempting for some!
I know the difference between grass and concrete when the sun is beating down on it. I have stood next to an air conditioning outlet. I know it gets cooler FAST when a cloud passes in front of the sun. I have plenty common sense and think I am a good judge of the quality of arguments and of character. All this has made me quite a vocal denier. I have no problem being called a denier. Every sane person is obligated to deny arrant nonsense.
As a good liberal, who believes government does have a role in people’s lives and increase the quality of life for everyone I was brought to global warming as part of that agenda. I read the news stories and believed, and argued that skeptics were neanderthals. Then I read the IPCC 4. As a Ph.D. I found the text to be unscientific, I found the references to be biased, I looked at the peer reviewed articles and found the same. I then did some of my own research and found that in order for the models to work the effect of the sun had to be minimized. I found sea levels were not rising (or actually are at the imperceptible rate of 3.2 mm/yr), I found Antarctic sea ice at record highs, I found the number one global warming pusher in charge of our national temperature record. How could I as a scientist support this? I now follow sea ice and the sun daily, and find that we are more likely to be in a dropping temp scenario than a rising one. It truly upsets when any reputable news organization starts a story with an assumption that global warming is real and then states some outcome, instead of studying if it is real first.
I am a well informed skeptic, I will never buy the global warming meme until the data supports it and the models actually predict something correctly. You shouldn’t either.
At 4:57 AM on 26 July, Brad had written:
But wait, there’s more!
If these “Liberal” liars were diddling you with “global warming as part of [their] agenda,” what gives you to think about your religious belief “As a good liberal” with regard to government thuggery having a proper “role in people’s lives” and your acceptance of the leftie-luzer blather about how their power-grasping normative numb-nuttery is supposed to “increase the quality of life for everyone”?
Falsus in unum, doc, falsus in omnibus.
It is the coldest summer in the Arctic since 1958. See the current 2013 graph compared to 1979 (DMI screenshots), its colder in 2013! 1979 was the maximum sea ice extent on the record. How is it jai mitchell? You really need to look at other factors aside from hot air. 🙂
http://notrickszone.com/2013/07/22/winter-to-make-an-early-return-to-the-arctic-forecast-shows/
P.S. I have to give credit to the Chiefio for al the effort he put into analysing surface station data round the world. It was a revelation to me. I particularly remember one thread entitled “Andes? What Andes?” He really has been an inspiration. I hope he is OK. He has gone quiet lately.
Very interesting thread. I’d suggest having a permanent link to it from the main site.
This has been done before, at Jeff Id’s Air Vent blog (click on “Reader Background”) and at Judith Curry’s (click on “Denizens”). But those are both from 2010 so it’s good to have an update for new recruits.
My story:- knew little about it but thought most of it was correct until about 2007 when I started looking into it. Shocked by aggressive unscientific approach, obvious political agenda, bias and groupthink, and exaggeration from climate scientists. From my own research I knew about the perils of over-reliance on computer models of such complex systems, and that the results of such models usually just reflected the assumptions built into them by the model builders. I also knew about natural irregular oscillations in chaotic systems, so the climate science idea of everything being a response to a forcing sounded wrong. And I grew up during the 70s ice age scare. Views haven’t changed much since then. Climategate just made me more confident that I was right, and I switched to using my real name after that.
Up until late in 2007, I simply assumed it was true, and was only vaguely aware that there was another side to the story by virtue of the occasional letter to the editor, by what I assumed to be a crank. So, I thought I would respond to one of those letters, and thus was forced to go digging for more information. That was my downfall. The more I dug, the more I found, to my horror, that there were serious flaws in the CAGW argument, and that much of what was being reported in the news was based on hype and disinformation. This put me at odds with family and friends, who were (and still are) firm Believers. Since I only ever assumed, and never argued in favor of CAGW, I was never an actual Believer. Believers have a psychological need which is fulfilled by their belief, and thus are able to discount any and all facts or srguments which might undermine it.
You all went to school in the 50’s? Heh, lots of oldies here, eh? When I left school about 9 years ago, I didn’t even know about global warming – it wasn’t covered in any of my subjects at St Augustine’s Catholic College in Trowbridge England – either it was considered pseudoscience by my physics teachers or it hadn’t yet penetrated public consciousness and school curriculum, I don’t know. I first became aware of global warming I think about 4 years after leaving school and I became a sceptic immediately when realising back then that it only comprised 0.003% of the atmosphere and that CO2 was accumulating in the atmosphere at the rate of 2ppmv/year (one molecule in every 500,000 non-CO2 molecules spread evenly though out the atmosphere). Upon that revelation, no other discourse or research was needed, as the idea that an increase one molecule in 500,000 could be responsible for increasingly hot summers was obviously ludicrous, and the product of deranged thinking. Besides the whole charade has ‘Political Scam’ written all over it.
You all went to school in the 50’s? Heh, lots of oldies here, eh? When I left school about 9 years ago, I didn’t even know about global warming – it wasn’t covered in any of my subjects at St Augustine’s Catholic College in Trowbridge England – either it was considered pseudoscience by my physics teachers or it hadn’t yet penetrated public consciousness and school curriculum, I don’t know. I first became aware of global warming I think about 4 years after leaving school and I became a sceptic immediately when realising back then that it only comprised 0.0038% of the atmosphere and that CO2 was accumulating in the atmosphere at the rate of 2ppmv/year (one molecule in every 500,000 non-CO2 molecules spread evenly though out the atmosphere). Upon that revelation, no other discourse or research was needed, as the idea that an increase one molecule in 500,000 could be responsible for increasingly hot summers was obviously ludicrous, and the product of deranged thinking. Besides, the whole charade had ‘Political Scam’ written all over it.
Gees, lots of engineers. Another one here, university degrees in both Science (maths major) and Engineering (Civil, Hons-1).
Admission time. (embarrassment)
A while ago, I was with a group called Climate Action Newcastle. We even did a big “people” sign on the beach. I have also given a presentation at NCCARF http://www.nccarf.edu.au
I vaguely remember asking a couple of questions of one of the NCCARF guys and getting some not very good answers.
Then a friend (a well know sceptic who shall remain nameless), asked if I believed in the CO2 stuff, and suggested I visit a couple of sites, (this one among them) and actually do some research instead of just going with the consensus.
The rest is obvious, as it should be to anyone who opens their mind to reality. (take the hint, jai !)
And it still annoys me that I was initially taken in by the lie.
jai mitchell,
Below is a paper out earlier this year showing Greenland warmer in the 1930s and 1400s (I had shown you others in an earlier comment).
Below that are past and current aerial photos showing faster glacier melt in Greenland in the 1930s than now. There is nothing unusual going on in Greenland right now, stop thrashing about jai.
2013 paper shows Greenland was warmer during the 1930’s and 1400’s than the present
http://www.clim-past.net/9/583/2013/cp-9-583-2013.html
Paper published in Nature Geoscience
2013: OLD PHOTOS: Greenland’s glacial ice was melting faster 80 years ago than today
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2152004/Lost-photos-prove-Greenlands-ice-melting-FASTER-80-years-ago-today.html
I was a huge admirer of Greenpeace and passionately believed that we were running out of oil in the 70s. I can understand the fervour of today’s Greens. Michael Crichton was an influence, although I bore in mind that he was novelist and not a scientist. Fred Hoyle was also an influence, especially ironically his novel The Black Cloud which contains the great exchange that in science the only test is prediction. I was puzzled therefore by all these references to peer-review. What did that prove? Like some of the above, Phil Jones’ response to a request for data appalled me, as did Climategate. Nobody who defends those scientists can expect to be taken seriously. I am a layman, who tries to understand the science arguments. I am much more convinced by evidence and reasoned argument than by bluster and passion, and by scientists who act in an ethical manner. (I find Greenpeace merely tiresome nowadays.)
marchesarosa says:
“ Every sane person is obligated to deny arrant nonsense.”
Well said , sir ! :-)))
“jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:02 pm
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.”
Garbage! We didn’t have properly reliable temperature records before the satellite era.
Dbstealey forgot to add a section about your projection. Since the traits you try to accuse others of are the sins of you and your cabal.
But notice how you changed the subject as well. Ever so slightly. But very significantly. The difference between the religious faithful (and their newly converted acolytes of a mere 2 years) and the heretical scientists is not “Global Warming”. It is AGW – the A standing for the influence of Man (capital M, one N).
With a thermometer and lots of time, you can measure the temperature of the planet, and even plot it on a graph. But you cannot determine why the temperature is what it is. That requires the scientific method. A testable hypothesis, and the disproving of the null hypothesis.
Jai, Children believe because they have no knowledge. As they age, they acquire knowledge and this leads to wisdom (in about 50-70 years). Adults are supposed to be acquiring knowledge, and leaving their childhood faith at home. So why are you acting like a child? You are now stomping your foot and getting upset that adults do not believe like children, like you do. Why is it so important to you that everyone shares a faith in the unknown, instead of acting like rational thinking humans and searching out answers to the unknowns?
Yes, yours is a pathetic existence. You are not Peter Pan, but you strive to be like him. But you lost your childhood innocence a long time ago.
It seems there are some common themes in these testimonies. Generally, the people here can be split into one or more of these types:
1) A science or engineering background that led to the confidence to research the science itself and found that there wasn’t any evidence at all. Just wiggle fitting of unvalidated computer models.
2) People who could tell that honest-brokers don’t act like Michael Mann or Phil Jones. The rudeness of the alarmist blogs has been picked out, especially Real Climate.
3) Old-timers who’ve seen apocalyptic warnings before (“the ice age is coming” as the Clash sang) and need a very high level of proof before accepting this one.
4) People who just doubted for no apparent reason because they just doubt every new claim. These people are very rare but are featured on this thread.
5) Right-wingers who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of AGW.
The problem for me is with option 5. Just because the solutions being promoted are disliked by you, me or anyone has no effect on the Global Climate.
Also, I quite like the left-wing solutions such as the idea of free bus travel for everyone.
It’s the right-wing solutions like privately owned windmills on the moneyed class’s land that offends me.
A clip from Al Gore’s comedic film was shown on BBC and immediately I knew it was wrong, just intuitively. From memory I read Robert Carter’s piece he did for The Telegraph and I subsequently read a paper which his report was based on. From there John Daly, Watts Climate Audit and the rest is history.
I did read the UN Real Climate Blog and not only were they rude they spoke like a know it all from the sixth form talking to a new boy?
Thank you Sir for your story. And thank goodness Al Gore invented the internet, otherwise we would be none the wiser 🙂
I used to be a vocal climate alarmist. In 2007 the UN IPCC released the AR4 Report to much media fanfare, there were 200 journalists from all over the world attending the release. The IPCC claimed that AGW was unequivocal and the time for discussion was over, it was time for action. I cheered! Then I downloaded the report and read it myself. I was stunned. Their conclusions were not unequivocal at all; it was a series of one equivocation after another. The conclusions were distorted, the science was weak and to conclude that humans were responsible for climate change represented a huge leap of faith. I concluded that they had lied to the world’s journalists, and they had lied to me. Then I realized that the report that I had downloaded was only the Summary Report, the real report would not be finished for another 6 months. I could not help but ask, how could they release the summary for a report that had not yet been completed?
It took me at least 6 months of research and wrestling with my conscience before I realized I had crossed to the dark side, the skeptic side. When one gives up ones own religious belief I suppose it usually takes more than 6 months, but that’s what I required in this case. Thank God for that AR4 report, otherwise I would be an alarmist to this day.
marchesarosa says:
“ Every sane person is obligated to deny arrant nonsense.”
Well said , sir ! :-)))
——–
It’s “madam”, AndyG55! There are SOME female sceptics, you know.
When I read about the “faint young sun” paradox, one argument why the earth wasn’t a frozen iceball 3 billion years ago was that the atmosphere was about twice as dense as it is now. I wanted some quantitave formula so I could actually do some ballpark computations, like one can do with falling baseballs in physics calculatoins, trajectories between planets using Kepler’s
T^2 = k R^3, etc.
I did google searches on global climate, and like eco-geek, Jon, and marchesarosa,, I finally
arrived at
http://www.john-daly.com/miniwarm.htm
at John Daly’s site. The 387 watts is a little off for exactly 15C , but the general argument still holds.
From links at John Daly’s site, I ultimately found links to “Climate Audit” and Anthony Watts’ site.
Jai and other AGW alarmists are very selective with their proxies to infer temps are warmer now. They love to use tree rings, Hey Jai, walk up the mountain a bit and tell use what the tree line says instead. The tree line shows stumps from the medival days where trees grew that can’t grow now because it is still too cold. Look at Greenland, you use ice cores and other proxies, but fail to notice that ancient villages and farm steads are there in the permafrost where it is too cold today for agriculture, but 1,000 years ago they were farming. Look at the Alps where as glaciers are finally melting to the point where they reveal ancient mines and farmsteads that prove it was warmer 1,000 and 2,000 years ago because it is still too clod and glacier covered today to farm.
You take as fact a scientists interpretation of a proxy from 1,000 years ago, but you totally close your eyes to the archeological record right in front of you that proves that the intrepretation of those proxies is wrong. Interesting! In this caseI would term you unscientific.
C.M. Carmichael says: 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.”
I had no idea Earth Day was Lenin’s birthday. Wikipedia says “subbotnik instituted by Lenin in 1920 as days on which people would have to do community service, which typically consisted in removing rubbish from public property and collecting recyclable material. Subbotniks were also imposed on other countries within the compass of Soviet power, including Eastern Europe, and at the height of its power the Soviet Union established a nation-wide subbotnik to be celebrated on Lenin’s birthday, April 22, which had been proclaimed a national holiday celebrating communism by Nikita Khrushchev in 1955.”
Wow, I’d say Lenin started Earth Day.
“M Courtney says:
July 26, 2013 at 5:50 am
Also, I quite like the left-wing solutions such as the idea of free bus travel for everyone.”
Although a nice idea there is a problem with that, and that is it is only free to the USER! Busses need to be bought, serviced, fuelled and last but not least driven by someone. If we look at Brisbane, Australia, bus routes have had massive, dedicated, transport corridors built, they are really impressive and work. But at what cost and to whom? I don’t have information on Brisbane, but we can safely assume taxpayers are in the mix there for funding! These all have elastic costs associated with them especially fuel and labour costs. I can’t quote buss costs to the city here in Sydney, Australia, but I can quote rail. The price of a ticket is subsidised to the tune of ~75% by state tax/rate payers.
There is no such thing as a free lunch!
My trip was much shorter than most. Living in one of the most moderate climate zones on the planet, coastal southern California, I noticed the temperature was consistently plus/minus 15 degrees F day to day depending on whether the sun was up. If 100% sun made 30 degrees difference I figured I could be generous with assumptions. A 0.1% change in irradiance half of the day is a 0.05% change in TSI. 0.05% of 30 degrees is 0.015 degrees per day or 5 degrees per year. Even climate buffering the change 20:1 (on top of previous assumptions) and a list of climate drivers can be made:
1. The Sun
2. Miscellaneous within error and variation
Having left school at 16 with zero knowledge in sciences , I was trusting the “experts” and the msm thinking these must be balanced in their reporting. I saw the inconvenient truth and believed everything. In 2007, a friend told me that he had seen a debate on the French tv involving skeptics versus “experts” and that the skeptical explanation seemed more believable to him, I looked at him like something was seriously wrong with him.
Being involved with logging in the Amazon forest, I was very frustrated with the amount of disinformation that circulates and trying to do something about it I came across Dr Patrick Moore web site and book. It felt good to see that a so called “expert” would not be on the alarmist side for once. That encouraged me to look for myself about the “global warming” theory and here I am, wuwt and others have opened my mind and are part of my daily routine now and I learn about sciences so much through the posts and comments.
When the weather models begin to provide accurate weather forecasts, I’ll begin to believe some of the climate models could be correct. So far, I’m not impressed with the accuracy of weather models ashore or afloat that have infinitely more accurate data to work with.
klem, you didnt’ cross “to the dark side” as you assert–you have been enlightened. It is the nefarious Warmistas with their political agenda that are the “dark side”. Insidiously dark.
Truth illuminates.
Sounds like me, except I never believed in either the ice age nor the warming.
Great article, with many parallels to my own “awakening” (Climate Audit first, and from there into the remaining usual suspects). What’s perhaps missing from the story is the sense of rage and horror that boils up when you now consider the expenditure that’s gone out “for the greater good”…
What the world needs among the information explosion of the internet is a new breed of historian that compiles dire warnings and classifies them into stages, processes of influence and policy manipulation, unwinding, and lessons lost from them. A Robert Caro or Ken Burns level of inspection would do. I suspect there would be a lot of resistance to a documentary of global cooling because it would cast an unwelcome light on the current events and methods of the CAGW cult and multinational governance and leadership.
“..it never passed the sniff test”
Yes. My parents came to Australia from a communist country when I was a child. I had the same feeling of AGW being nothing more than an excuse to grab power and control over people’s lives. Some of the true believers may not realise it even yet, but it was and is a deliberate attempt to reduce both freedom and the standard of living. Vaclav Klaus, who comes from a similar background and recognises tyranny when he see it, describes the true agenda very well.
I notice Gareth Phillips is hiding behind Margaret Thatcher’s skirts. While she may originally have taken AGW seriously, possibly partly for political reasons or simply by taking bad advice, she came to see it for exactly what it was and said so quite clearly in her last book.
It is also interesting that while generally it is the socialist left pushing this cart, often saying that even if the science turns out to be wrong their course should still be followed for the sake of fairness and equity, the net effect seems to be a gigantic transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The poor freeze or starve from artificially rising prices while the rich gorge on state subsidies.
Ditto chris’s comments; The close inspection (verily, an audit!) by McIntyre of Mann’s (HS) work sewed it up for me … was more or less agnostic before that on account of no time (busy with life, work, etc; electrical engineering in the wireless field by itself can be a wholly time-consuming occupation!) to examine the issue in detail, then found WUWT via CA and WUWT turned out to be a better ‘fit’ for me.
Re: CAGW (or anything else for that matter): Show me the hard, objectifiable data or please, sit down …
.
Having had some climate science familiarity in the seventies (NEW ICE AGE!), I was always a little skeptical–it’s essential for any responsible intellectual activity, not just science, (I studied history.)
But when the alarmism got extreme, I looked at Real Climate and WUWT sites to educate myself. The snarky and authoritarian responses by REAL climate scientists struck me as really unscientific, while posts at WUWT were respectful and open minded: the characteristics of real science of any kind. It was Anthony’s example which lent credibility to the skeptical claims. (Thank you Anthony!)
Climategate was the nail in the coffin for me as concerned the theory, I mean, “privileged hypothesis” of CAGW. But it also showed that the idea was not science of any kind but a pseudo-scientific cultural warfare against any intellectual integrity and truth telling: an annexation of the very institutions that should be protecting our right to the truth.
I’m sure the climate will not obey the alarmists, and CAGW will be abandoned as theory, but I’m afraid the truth of its propagandist nature will be obscured with the next alarmist squirrel of gigantic proportions!
To all you good scientists out there: it is not enough to be a good scientist, you need to be a cultural warrior against the usurpation of science as a propagandist tool of the state. State sponsored pseudo science is the greatest threat a free people face for it is really irrational authoritarian religion in drag disguise.
Jacob Neilson said:
Me too. I happened upon John Brignell’s blog in my investigations of another world-wide fraud perpetrated on the public: the efficacy of speed cameras as a means of enhancing road safety. The fact that the devices turn out to counter-productive; which doesn’t bother those who:
* make money selling them
* collect revenue by deploying them
* rely on them to discourage people from driving
Parallels between that fraud and the CAGW fraud are evident: Good science swept under the carpet and discounted as (old research); new research tailored to fulfill political messages (speed kills); really terrible research lauded widely as ground-breaking; ample funding for those willing to produce results to order; widespread abuse of statistics and arguments from authority; the establishemnt of “safety councils” with appointees from special right-thinking interest groups; a “trade press” avidly perpetuating the false beliefs.
The killer; literally, the inevitable outcome contrary to ostensible target with e.g. increasing fatalities after increasing policing of speed limits and the resulting increase in speed limit compliance induced by draconian penalties for harmless activity.
This mirrors my own “conversion”. I was a rabid believer. I was aghast that anyone could be so obtuse as to oppose it. I have siblings that are so “green” they’d make your Haight-Asbury stereotype look tame. They’ve been long-time attendees of the Tom Brown school. One is a rather senior EPA scientist, the other is – well, a flaky career student. My brother-in-law has “greenengr” as his email name. That’s to give you some idea of my early influences. I am a life-long Republican that had become horribly disillusioned by my party with the senseless war in Iraq. Afghanistan? Fine, that’s justified. Iraq? No way. I am, and have always been, a political animal. I’ve been weened since I could first read on SciFi. Particularly political SciFi.
I too began my conversion by coming to blogs like this. A dive through WUWT post archives could turn up my earliest posts where I defend the orthodoxy. But, like you, what got my “spider sense tingling” was that any post that questioned the gospel on the blogs of the climate acolytes was either bruskly responded to or deleted. Here, I got answers. Not always politely phrased. But an honest question got an honest answer.
This prompted me to really study and examine the question. The resultant position is obvious to anyone approaching it with an open mind.
marchesarosa says:
It’s “madam”, AndyG55! There are SOME female sceptics, you know.
Profoundest apology .. I look at your name.. I should have realised.. :-((
– – – – – – – –
M Courtney,
Thanks for your analysis on types of stories by the commenters on this thread. Appreciate you efforts.
I think there is a core characteristic in human beings that helps explain the variety of stories we see. The characteristic is the drive to belong to a group and/or movement. In most individuals the drive is strong enough to enable compromising some independent critical thought associated with the particulars of the conceptual systems of a group and / or movement.
However, there are individuals who control the drive to belong sufficiently to achieve effective intellectual independence from the group and / or movement. I see this in the stories.
John
“Iren says:
July 26, 2013 at 6:45 am
…the net effect seems to be a gigantic transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. The poor freeze or starve from artificially rising prices while the rich gorge on state subsidies.”
Indeed. What then when the “rich” run out of the “poor”? Look to Africa, India and China?
marchesarosa says:
M’Lady,
“madam” is such a nuanced term. It sounds like you could be in charge of some climate institute or similar, disreputable establishment. 🙂
The trigger for my skepticism about CAGW was Michael Crichton’s CalTech lecture: Aliens Cause Global Warming.
For the rest I’m pretty much the same as many people over here, including engineering background
Well written personal essay and comments. Nice to see some youngster that are not brainwashed by political agendas.
s/b “…youngsters…”
To date, I like how ALL those LW ideas have worked out as seen (if you’ve paid attention) in the last 100 years: (a) armed guards (tax agents?) seizing the property they deem to be “the community’s” (2) along with fencing and more armed guards (or penalties *) to keep those same people in … there’s your LW run full-circle!
Detroit is as “living” an example as you will see today of socialism’s ill-results where it includes an income tax on residents in the city passed in the 1960’s (with an accompanying ‘work’ income tax for those commuting into, but not living in, the city!); this fostered additional capital flight to the adjoining suburbs BUT there were also extenuating circumstances such as a series of mayors (and one 20 yr mayor) who was openly hostile to anyone of ‘means’ (as well as other things which we won’t get into) … Don’t get me wrong, I like your ideas (I love free lunches as much as the next guy) but the result is always “wrack and ruin” for the majority involved (like you and me who exist at the base of that pyramid) when we run out of those “other people’s money” …
.
* New Jersey Tax for Moving Out of State
http://www.ehow.com/info_8676886_new-tax-moving-out-state.html
.
Patrick says at July 26, 2013 at 6:22 am
Look, I know that free bus travel is paid for by someone. And I meant it would be paid for by the taxpayer.
It is a left-wing idea. It transfers money from the rich to, disproportionately, the poor. As, if the poor don’t need to have a car to commute, they can save money. But I wouldn’t ban cars.
If the rich want to use a car and they can afford to, my left-wing policy would provide them with less congested roads…
This is now way off topic but I wanted to illustrate that scepticism is not synonymous with right-wing politics.
At 7:35 AM on 26 July, M Courtney had written:
Would you care to apply some of your illustrative effort to the way in which climate catastrophism is to a nosebleed-high level synonymous with left-wing politics?
I suggest that you consider how skepticism in this area of inquiry is rather better correlated with libertarian politics – the non-aggression principle and the unalienable individual human rights protected thereby – than with political authoritarianism on either side of the spurious “left/right spectrum.”
… start running candidates (for election) in the 1st world countries (exc sub “middle class” for the poor and sub “the Pol. elite” for ‘rich’)?
/only mild, very tepid, sarc
(the following is not sarc)
Only I think via EPA ‘rulings’ this is being accomplished presently, and ‘crony capitalism’ (think: political contributors, bundlers, beneficiaries of govt-awarded projects, et al) is the means. Just an observation based on present happenings and not-so-distant-past events (e.g. solar “Solyndra” investments) …
.
You asked for it, you go it!
When I first heard of “Global Warming” due to adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, my first thought was, “Is that so?”, so I guess you could say I was a skeptic from the beginning. But my next thought amounted to, “Either it is or it isn’t, but either way, there’s not much we could do about it. If we are affecting the climate, it took us 100 years or so of industrial development to get here, we’re not going to turn that around in just a couple years. So the best we can do is get used to it.” So I guess I was still a skeptic.
Now a little part of me is willing to concede there could still be “man-made global warming” (notice I didn’t capitalize that). All that coal, oil, natural gas and whatever we pull out of the ground, that’s potential energy. When we burn it, it has converted to heat energy. So if we assume the surface of the earth has been getting a constant influx of energy from the sun over time, plants have taken that and converted it to plant food and plant solids and stored it. Over the eons it has converted to the products we get out of the ground now, but it still is energy converted to matter, or potential energy. If we now start converting that potential energy to heat, at the same time continuing to receive the same influx of energy from the sun, then that would indeed be a positive imbalance that will warm the place up. Well, I haven’t done the arithmetic here, but I think we’re not burning it fast enough to make a difference in that (notably simplified) equation. At least not yet.
Then over time I had numerous people tell me that it was a fact we were getting warmer and everything was going to be different! When Al Gore released his propaganda film, my wife eventually said to me, “I guess we better watch that.” I didn’t agree, but I can’t recall the exact conversation. Even my mother once said something about polar bears going extinct. But my job, as an engineer, required me to project future cooling requirements; i.e., I was designing air conditioning systems and in order to select the proper equipment size, I needed to do load calculations, that is predict the maximum load. If it truly is a warming world, I need to know that in order to select equipment that will do the job over the life of the building. Then, due to various pressures, I not only had to predict the peaks, I was asked to predict cost of operation, that is total energy consumption on an annual basis. If your environment gets warmer, you will need more energy to cool a space in the summer. But if the climate gets warmer, you need LESS energy to heat your space in the winter time. Which will win out? None-the-less, I continued to use historical data and base my predictions on everything-will-continue-as-it-has-been. But pressure was increasing to actually look into this and figure out what the answer was, because even if I change my predictions based on getting warmer, I had to know how much.
Then in 2008, because of my line of work, I attended an annual conference, this time held in Phoenix, Arizona. It was titled GovEnergy 2008 if anybody wants to check me on this to make sure I’m not making it up. Training events take place over 2½ days, with closing ceremonies beginning about noon on the last day. During those closing events, a speaker (please forgive me, I did not record his name and cannot find it in the conference notes, records or archives) stood up and began his talk by intoning, “You don’t need to Google global warming or take a survey, or anything like that, everything you need to know is right here!” and gave the RealClimate website, but already a little red warning flag had popped up in my brain, why DOESN’T he want me to look into this? Is he afraid I’ll find something he doesn’t want me to see? Then just a few sentences later he said, “The time for debate is over!” The red flag turned into alarm bells.
Now I confess, after I got back, it took me nearly a week to start looking. And I did as he suggested, I went to the RealClimate website. One of the very first articles I read, almost exactly in the middle of the article, began a discussion about: something must be wrong. We know global warming is ongoing, but we don’t see it in the database, or databases. It must be there since we know it’s happening. So, the databases must be wrong! We need to correct (read change) the databases. And we’re working on that right now, even as we speak! Now I have gone back to RealClimate, and looked in their archives at the appropriate time, and even checked out Way-back Machines but I can’t find that article again. It wasn’t the topic of the article, it was sort of a non-sequitur may be why I can’t find it, or maybe it was in the comments/responses rather in the article itself, but I still can’t find it. It may have been an older article than I expected, so when I started my search at the beginning of August, 2008, since the conference was held Aug 6-8, I may have missed it because it was before that. But I know I didn’t make it up, and the warning bells turned into tornado sirens, if I was going to find out about this nonsense (which I already deemed it, I just needed to find the proof) I needed to look fast!
The next thing I did, I Googled (I’m your typical hard-headed engineer, if somebody tells me not to do something I want to know why, and if they can’t tell me I do it to find out, like don’t put metal pots in the microwave), “global warming”. Before I finished typing, one of the suggested topics to search was “global warming scam”. I think I found Climate Audit 1st, from there I think I followed a link to WUWT, which has links to myriad more, and one of the things I discovered was stuff gets discussed. Vehemently. I went back and checked Climate Audit and found the only “discussion” that took place was if a response could be/had already been provided that debunked (read ridiculed) the contrarian comment. Yet on WUWT and CA and etc., it seemed the more technical it was, the more it got discussed. Within a week or so, a reader posted a paper he had written, and headed it to ask for comment, including proving he was off-base. It got comments, all the way up through attempting to duplicate his maths, which I have never seen happen on a “peer review” of a scientific paper. Yes, I have more than once located the peer review comments on a published scientific paper. To me it’s puzzling, what would peer review be for, other than to check that I didn’t multiply when I should have added (as I have been known to do)?
As I continued to research, I gradually formed my own interpretation of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis (it never actually made it up to the level of theory). It is really multiple hypotheses (ideas? esoteric thoughts? brain farts?), all bundled together and packaged as one. Try it like this: 1) man-made CO2 production, ( 2) and nothing else), increases atmospheric CO2, 3) which increases surface temperatures 4) at a known or knowable rate 5) that will exceed natural variability 6) to an unprecedented level and 7) the result will be bad. BAD. BAD. BAD!!! Now you can slice them and dice them in your own manner, but there are still multiple parts to this charade, and it takes all of them to make a cohesive “theory”, and if you pull out any card from this ephemeral house of cards, the whole thing will collapse. This one is already wiggling its trunk. (see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/23/congenital-cyclomania-redux/ ) Needless to say, I rapidly found enough solid evidence to completely dispel the “consensus”.
I have seen repeated “smoking gun” articles that find the raw data at a particular location has been “homogenized” and there appeared to be no rhyme or reason to the modification except to produce or enhance indicated warming in that dataset (am I reading too much into them?). So the sentence I read about “correct”ing the databases was no idle threat! Shortly after I began my quest I found that virtually everyone agreed there had been warming in the last 300 years, and most agreed there had been warming from late ‘70s through late ‘90s. But since finding the “smoking gun” articles, and Mr. Watts’ crowd-sourced Surface Stations Project, I think I’m ready to withdraw my agreement and change to: We just can’t tell. Anecdotally I’m willing to agree, since I have read journals and books from the late 1700’s and early 1800’s (Little House on the Prairie for one) that talk about not cutting ice until it was a foot thick, or taking a bucket of water and throwing it into the air, if it hit the ground as ice it was time to cut ice for the warehouse (most readers can’t comprehend a time before mechanical refrigeration, where we could keep things cold only by the cold that Mother Nature gave us). When was the last time the ice on the Finger Lakes in upstate New York got to be a foot thick? I just picked that off Google maps, I know nothing about any of the lakes in upstate New York, the real answer may be last winter, but I’m pretty certain it hasn’t made it that thick every one of the last ten years. And if you can’t put up ice in the winter, and you have no mechanical refrigeration, it gets to be a long summer.
Another nail in the coffin of the CAGW was the finding that, according to ice cores, fluctuation in CO2 follows changes in temperature. CO2 does NOT drive temperature!
Still think we have a problem? Investigations have found dead trees above the tree-line in multiple locations throughout the world. The tree-line is established predominantly by temperature, so this indicates it has been warmer in the past! But we’re still here. How did that happen?
Reading comments, it might have been WUWT or it could have been some other website, I once encountered a “true believer” who repeatedly offered, “you just can’t deny it” type of comments, often with a link. Finally somebody asked him/her directly by name, “Can you show a single proof of global warming that is NOT based on a computer model?” He couldn’t do it. Not one. Not even one.
So that’s my personal journey through the CAGW. Just about every paper produced which claims to provide “irrefutable” proof of CAGW has a paper or papers that refute it, if it’s not picked apart just in comments or letters-to-the-editor. In the end, all you can conclude is that the more things change the more they stay the same. In a future summer you may need another fan that you don’t already have, or in a future winter you may need to buy a parka that you don’t already have, and both may happen within the same year! If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes, it will change. And even if it turns out our climate is changing whether to hotter or to colder, people will buy those extra fans or parkas, install additional equipment to stay comfortable, I personally may one day have to adjust how I select my design conditions when I do a load calculation, if it gets extreme enough people will relocate, but regardless, life will go on!
My path to skepticism was long. I started out of college with a successful track record in scientific analysis and began my professional career in modeling. Noting my enthusiasm to help save the world and my effectiveness in other areas, my government agency soon moved me from modeling to analysis & advocacy. I remember Representatives and Senators being very impressed with my reports on global warming and on the need to advance environmental causes.
While my career took a few turns, I still remained interested in global warming and environmental causes; and for a long time, my key source of information on CAGW was the Real Climate blog and MSM. However, I became increasing frustrated at the evasiveness and non-responsiveness to sincere questions that came to the Real Climate Blog. At times, I could tell that the responses were plain misleading. I decided to dust off my modeling skills and make “inquiries” about such subjects as initial conditions and dummy variables. Sometimes I wondered if I ever would emerge from my review of the aerosol inputs. This review did not take me a couple of hours; and I am not talking about a few days, but actually months of study. My epiphany moment came with the realization that the models’ sensitivity to CO2 and other GHGs was based on aerosol assumptions – which could be to a large degree arbitrarily and capriciously chosen. As a modeler, I have experience in how wishful thinking or pre-determined outcomes can influence a modeler’s choices. However, the more I looked into the issues, the more shocked I became.
While every science has its moments of “oops,” the individuals that MSM regards as climate scientists are given an unbelievable amount of leeway. Despite what Mr. Mosher says, the climategate e-mails are a public revelation of what many have privately experienced in the science world. I would say this to Mr. Mosher: “You often have given me valuable considerations for me to think about. But you poison your own well – undermine your credibility on any subject – when you maintain that climategate was much ado about nothing.” Climategate – as well as other scandals — was an opportunity for CAGW advocates to have a David Duke moment. Remember David Duke? – He was a charismatic individual active in the GOP, but Gerald Ford said you are not welcomed in the Republican Party because of your racial views. There is a good chance that the Republican Party would have gone irreparably downhill if Gerald Ford had not forcefully and emphatically taken that stand. A few individuals in the CAGW community did take such a stand after climategate, but way too many were silent – or worse, they attacked the revelation.
Nicely written.
My story begins having beers with a couple of buddies up at Whistler. I was skeptical, they weren’t. My skepticism was intuitive, not backed by solid studies. Essentially we all knew crap. I decided to truly learn about it. Financial post led me to Junk Science.com That led me to Lubos Motl’s excellent blog. Also made sure I went to Real Climate to read their side of things. They were so ridiculous, I gave up on them after about a year of consistent reading.
My skepticism on global warming was waning for about 10 years because of so many sloppy claims from skeptics as if it didn’t matter what they had to say, as long as it somehow was appealing to part of a subsection of the community that could be persuaded against AGW/climate change. I always found it suspicious that people would make claims that they don’t endorse such as on this site, and any skeptical view seemed to be deemed acceptable e.g. Monckton. I went and read other sites, for instance “http://rankexploits.com/musings/2011/monckton-planck-parameter-no-better-than-pulling-numbers-out-of-a-hat/” and decided that Monckton (imo) is far too artful and not nearly honest enough to be a politician at the best of times. The reason I decided this was multifaceted, including that he was told numerous times about the incorrect use of some of his slides in his seminars that he produced for public consumption; He just kept using them anyway as if disseminating that information was appropriate, and worse I saw a kind of passive acceptance from skeptics of which I was repelled. The problem I face with the ‘skeptic’ view is that it is so easy to find something wrong with particular parts of scientific endeavor, but alternately to build a scientific basis to progress, it takes a certain kind of luck, dilligence, intelligence and nuance to allow assimilation and elucidate physical mechanisms. I decided there was a good case for climate change in part because I found too many skeptical arguments to be inferior. The cohesion of climate change arguments has a lot of credible research and although the skepticism is sometimes valid, it didn’t reach a point for me that underlines climate change as being explained better by a cohesive skeptical mechanism and data. I say this in good faith and just wanted everyone to know I still read this website often.
At 8:00 AM on 26 July, furyforever had written:
Oh, yeah. Such a helluva “lot of credible research.” Wonderfully “credible research.” Authoritative. Unchallengeable. “Settled science.”
“Nothing t’see here, folks. Move along, move along….”
Picture a dialogue between a well-intentioned inquirer and a credentialed climate catastrophe professional (who’s been sucking down megabuck government funding for his research and other activities as he toils selflessly for the advancement of that “settled science”).
Inquirer: “Wonderful stuff you’ve been publishing. Truly frightening. Can’t imagine why anybody could argue against your warnings. Boy, I’d like to see the observational data on which you’ve based your conclusions. Could I get a look at it?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “No! You can’t see my data! You’d only try to prove me wrong!”
Inquirer: “Huh? What the heck? If your conclusions are supported by the data, how could anybody looking at it possibly prove you wrong?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “I’ve had a lot of trouble from people who’ve asked to look at my data. They ask questions about my methodology. They want to see how I work. All of that is proprietary. I plan to publish more extensively, and so I’ve got it legitimately under embargo.”
Inquirer: “But you’ve already published on the basis of at least some of your data. You’ve made claims about conditions and processes, you’ve made predictions, you’ve made recommendations about public policy. That data has to be open to examination so that other guys can do further work in the area. ‘We all stand on the shoulders of giants,’ and stuff like that. What gives?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “No! You’re only trying to prove me wrong!”
Inquirer: “What the fu… – I mean, what? Why are you afraid you might be proven wrong? You did the work, didn’t you? Your data is solid, right? Anybody would have to come to the same conclusions you reached. It’s in the data.” [A pause.] “Or is it?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “People bend things, twist things, criticize! I have to spend so much time defending what I’ve published that I can’t get any new work done. These outsiders, these skeptics, these people who simply don’t believe….” A shrewd look at the interlocutor. “You believe, don’t you?”
Inquirer: “Er, believe? What’s to believe? You’ve done the research, you’ve got the data, you’ve hammered out the calculations. You’ve got the sound, settled science on your side. You know. Okay, so now I want to know, too. Could I please look at your data?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “Sorry, no. Uh, we’re having computer problems. The IT guys are looking into it. I think maybe I kinda, well…erased most of it….”
Inquirer: What? You didn’t have it backed up? All the work you did getting those observations recorded, and you lost it?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “Yeah, well, things like that do happen. The computer people are working hard, but they’re not optimistic….”
Inquirer: “The data you used in your paper. You sent that raw data to the editor and to the guys doing peer review on your submission right? You can recover that much, surely.”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “Uh, no. We didn’t submit the raw data pre-publication. That wasn’t necessary.”
Inquirer: What? Your reviewers didn’t run through your observational data? Just what the hell were they reviewing, anyway?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “Oh, our conclusions. And the recommendations in our discussion, too. They really made us sweat about that last. We had to strengthen those policy recommendations a lot, let me tell you! Get rid of the equivocations, make it simple. Remember, politicians are going to be using this to pass legislation and enforce regulations, and none of them have any more education in the sciences than the average Bible Belt Baptist lay preacher.”
Inquirer: “Oh, my fu… – er, ah.” [Hesitates.] “Jeez, that’s unusual. Aren’t your professional peers supposed to be error-checking your methods and results?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “Oh, they don’t have to. The people who review my manuscripts are all familiar with man-made global warming. They all work in the same field. There aren’t that many of us. Highly specialized, y’know. And we all cooperate, talk it over at meetings, e-mail each other during the review process. Makes it a lot easier.”
Inquirer: “You mean that your peer review wasn’t blinded?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “Oh, no. Why should it be? Like I said, everybody knows everybody else.”
Inquirer: [Grim-faced.] “Okay, I think I get it. You don’t do blinded peer review, you don’t release your raw data – you’re telling me now that you don’t have the raw data to release – you’re deathly afraid that anybody looking under the hood is going to prove that you’re wrong…. So just how the hell do you justify your funding expenditures when the granting authorities audit you?”
Climate Catastrophe Charlatan: “Oh, we’ve never gotten audited. Why should they? The government people like what we’re publishing.” [A smile.] “You know how that works, don’t you?”
Inquirer: [Measuredly] “Uh-huh. I guess I do. Well, thanks a bunch anyway. No, don’t get up. I can find my own way out.”
Some “cohesion.” Some “credible research.”
Some credulity on your part, bubbeleh.
Cyrus P Stell says:
July 26, 2013 at 7:38 am….
Interesting your coming to the truth process. It would be interesting to think of putting the entire human biomass and energy activity into one single place…pick a spot, say Yukon, CA, more than enough room. Now you have one large urban heat island. Looking at all the mini UHIs do they as defined heat the planet? Or do they just represent a minuscule spot of heat? Would on combined UHI affect the planet climate? It is by definition and observation an island.
I didn’t expect to find that so many scientists were not doing real science, but I got lucky right off because I started to look at CAGW just before the TAR came out. Some conclusions were published well before the science in the TAR which allegedly supported the conclusions was published. This really irritated me because it was something that I’d never seen or even heard of, and I wanted to try to understand what they were talking about. Finally the whole TAR came out, and it suddenly dawned on me one day that there apparently weren’t any benefits to GW! It was all downhill from there and it’s still getting worse.
Here’s a shortcut to the truth, without need for a science background, a shortcut that Mr. Abbott touched upon in his post.
He stated that the communists/totalitarians, after failing at their objective of spreading communism across the globe, didn’t just die out, but rather found a new cause through which they could devote their efforts to seek control over the general population. That cause was global warming. As “warming” became suspect, they switched to “climate change” and then “climate disruption” since “change” was too non-threatening.
All one need to to determine the “truth” of certain matters is follow that crowd and determine what mechanism they are currently seeking to use to obtain their long-desired control over the rest of us. Whatever new threat they conjure up in the future (climate disruption today), you will be well ahead of the game by starting up a website devoted to proving the falsity of that threat.
In Mr. Abbott’s last paragraph he hopes to see the “deliberate manipulators of data punished.” They never have been, and never will be. Instead they will be hard at work manipulating different data relevant to a new threat, with the same old goal of bringing the rest of us under their control. Know that they exist, and are always hard at work somewhere.
My path to skepticism began by knowing of their existence, seeing their usual political methods deployed (instead of the science), and suspecting that, as usual, they were up to no good. For me, Climategate was confirmation, not revelation.
Incidentally, I second all of Mr. Abbott’s concerns for the environment, desires for the world to be a better place, etc. The global warming/climate change/climate disruption issue has never been about the environment or saving the world; it’s all about control.
furyforever says at July 26, 2013 at 8:00 am
You have far too much trust in the system.
Read this. It is very long but is fully referenced.
It shows how the system went wrong.
Behold the Climategate emails,; edited and commentated to pick out the fall of climate science:
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf
Oh and one other thing, if it were just a bunch of scientists running around, feeding at the grant trough, I probably wouldn’t care. It is the inclusion of the socialists, faux environmentalists, opportunity stealing groups which really got me to actively campaign against the crap. They are the #1 threat to my and my children’s future. The opportunity cost associated with these groups is huge.
Gore also represents my biggest “hate” in life – Hypocrisy. Leveraging fear and ignorance for profit. (he’s on the board of Kleiner Perkins which has millions invested in the CO2 reduction crap) And because they products can’t make it on the free market, they have to utilize regulations/subsidies to gain market share. Thieves, all of them.
It didn’t take much examination of AGW to determine it to be a political movement. Yes, it started with an observation of a short-term warming trend, but the science quickly fell by the wayside. The movement has always been about a social, cultural, economic and political agenda.
furyforever, thanks for posting the alternative view.Sometimes the more extreme showboating of the likes of Monckton and Delingpole makes me wince too. But given how difficult it can be to raise public awareness that opposition to CAGW is even possible, I am very glad that they are out there doing what they do. To paraphrase Churchill, you need the roar as well as the lion.
I hope you keep reading both sides of the debate.
Jonathan Abbott says:
July 26, 2013 at 4:17 am
Gareth Phillips makes an interesting and fair point. In the context of the essay I didn’t make my position fully clear. What concerned me was the politicisation of the science. If the proponents of CAGW had been fascists and other right wing groups I would have been just as suspicious, and my language towards them would have been far more caustic than I used above. The corruption of science under fascism in the 30s and 40s was far more sinister than anything happening today.
The important point is that once my suspicions were aroused, it was still the science that decided me one way or the other, not the mouthpieces involved.
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Thatcher came to regret trying to use CO2 as a weapon in her battle with coal miners’ trade unionists. That was a mistake reminiscent of Imperial Germany’s sneaking Lenin into Russia.
Science has often been corrupted by regimes throughout its history since the Revolution in the 16th century. To you Fascist governments, add of course Lysenkoism in the USSR & the hideously destructive myth of “scientific socialism” itself. Now science has been corrupted on a world-wide scale by the UN & many of its member states.
To paraphrase, now we are engaged in a great global struggle, testing whether the scientific method can long endure.
furyforever says:
July 26, 2013 at 8:00 am
“My skepticism on global warming was waning for about 10 years because of so many” correct predictions made from the CO2CAGW hypotheses?
h/t “Froggy The Gremlin”
RockyRoad says:
July 25, 2013 at 10:42 pm
I’m a rock sniffer too. Another real one…
More info… I studied applied Geology at Strathclyde University in Glasgow in the mid to late eighties. Early in my first year the oil price crashed and the Uni was set to lose a lot of funding – from the likes of BP for example – and it was all doom and gloom. Some of my fellow students – and ex-lecturers – are leading lights in the CAGW game these days…
Good move to make this a sticky by the way.
Another way to spot the fraudsters/totalitarians and their “useful idiots”: They rarely have any respect whatsoever for free markets.
I once told a “useful idiot” that I only recycled aluminum cans (not glass, not paper, not plastic) because aluminum was, at that time, the only consumer garbage that recyclers were paying at least a modest price to obtain in small amounts.
His response was along the lines of: “So you only recycle what someone will pay you to recycle?”
My answer: “Yes” (without elaborating the logical reasoning that, if no one is willing to pay for an item of garbage, the odds are excellent that devoting the resources to recycle that item will waste, rather than save, overall resources.)
His response: Something along the lines of my being a Neanderthal, unthinking consumer/waster of the world’s resources, etc.
I learned some time ago that certain people are immune to the logic of the free market, so I didn’t waste my time trying to convince him otherwise. I just avoided such conversations with him in the future. He no doubt was one of the useful idiots who supported mandating that all of us, not just true believers, should recycle what he wanted recycled or face penalties for ignoring him and his ilk, regardless of the costs of doing so and the burdens placed upon the people faced with the mandate.
Highest on my list of tragedies generated by the lack of respect for free markets: Mandates to add corn-based ethanol to our fuel supply, followed closely by windmills springing up all over the country.
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jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:02 pm
***
The author asked about how people achieved proper skepticism, not having their brain dissolve.
From 1983 till 1997 I worked with simulators, not only did I work with them I was an application engineer proving they worked, and their worth. I supported salesman for most of this time, doing demo’s, usually of customers tough circuits with Analog, digital and timing simulators. Many of these required models to be created, I also built an entire library of pre-configured logic functions for a digital custom asic.
I started hearing about GCM’s, their predictions of large amounts of warming due to feedback, and immediately because curious. Shortly after this I read an editorial in Car & Driver, talking about how a mere 4% increase in the carbon in the carbon cycle was the concern, that Co2 alone would cause maybe a degree of warming. that GCM’s were projecting 4,5-10 degree increases.
The pieces didn’t fit, what was being proclaimed wasn’t logical. Positive feedback loops aren’t stable, they “run-away”, because we aren’t Venus, this seems more like a modelers bias, then I read that modelers couldn’t get temps to increase with Co2, until they changed how water vapor was handled. Now the models sounded like they are just what the modeler thinks is happening, you can’t check it in a lab like the models I’m use to can be. I started reading theory of operation for some models.
I came to the conclusion that modelers could be right, or they could be wrong, but there was no proof.
I also became active in a love I had since I was a child, I’ve loved space, and wanted to look at the nights sky to see the marvels of the heavens. What I learned when I was a child, you can’t see this stuff without a really big telescope or a camera with long exposure ability. I got a 8″ scope. I had a digital camera, I became active in astrophotography. To reduce the thermal noise in an image you subtract an averaged set of “Dark” frames which are exposures at the same temp, for the same exposure time, but with the lens cap on. To match your “light” frames, I noted outside temps. After a while I became aware of how much temps dropped after the Sun set on clear nights. How can Co2 cause warming, when it doesn’t stop huge drops in temp over a hand full of hours.
In 97, I left the design automation industry, went into the Product Lifecycle field. Part of my job game me access to powerful database software. Could I find weather data to look at the changes to night time cooling? I found the NCDC didn’t have free hourly data (which I think is now available), but they did have daily Min/Max data, a lot of it. This search led to this work. I wasn’t 100% sure GCM’s bias was actually wrong at first, it was possible that their treatment of water was right, but my work on nightly cooling shows to me, Co2 is not the control knob, is not a problem, is not making it more than slightly warmer, unequivocally, the models are wrong.
What did I find on my journey? CAGW is rubbish, climatology as a science was hi-jacked by activists, they’ve poisoned true environmentalism, driven first world society into a ditch, and are still trying to drive it over the cliff.
Normally I’d just stay out of these kinds of “wars”, the pendulum swings around the center, when it gets too far one way, it’s pushed back to the middle. But these people, what they’re doing will derail society, will make my children’s life less prosperous than mine, what they’re doing in unacceptable. I found myself with skills that seemed pre-selected to look at at leased as a minimum GCM’s and large collections of weather data (NCDC has over 120 million daily station records).
The pendulum had gone too far, help was needed to push it back towards the middle.
My story is quite similar, just a little quicker. I was skeptical in school in the 1990 (How can they predict this dramatic warming when there has been only the slightest uptick so far? That is ridiculous extrapolation.). But then ‘trusted’ sources (e.g. BBC) kept hammering away that it is true and settled. Finally, probably around 2003, I decided to do a bit of digging (there must be some people who disagree right?) . Sure enough, I found some skeptics. Then while searching for a fix for a Windows XP issue, I ran into WUWT (for those of you who think that this is a climate skeptic blog, you are mistaken “Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news by Anthony Watts”). Been here almost every day since.
furyforever says:
July 26, 2013 at 8:00 am
I decided there was a good case for climate change in part because I found too many skeptical arguments to be inferior. The cohesion of climate change arguments has a lot of credible research and although the skepticism is sometimes valid, it didn’t reach a point for me that underlines climate change as being explained better by a cohesive skeptical mechanism and data.
————————-
I assume you mean catastrophic climate change resulting from man-made greenhouse gases, chiefly CO2.
As you know, climate changes all the time, but earth’s climate has in fact during the Holocene (especially since the last blast cold event 8200 years ago) been remarkably stable, more so than in most interglacial phases. The previous interglacial, the Eemian, was much warmer than our present one, without benefit of a Neanderthal industrial age.
Considering just global temperature, to the extent that it can be measured, the Holocene has ranged from a high of less than two degrees C. above present during the Climatic Optimum, c. 8000 to 5000 years ago, to about one degree lower during the depths of the Little Ice Age some 300 years ago. The Minoan Warm Period c. 3000 years ago was hotter than the Roman WP 2000 years ago, which was hotter than the Medieval WP 1000 years ago, which was warmer than the Modern WP. So right now we’re still well within natural variation, & appear on track toward the next glacial phase, as was feared by climate scientists in the 1970s.
Humanity has benefited greatly from the increase in CO2 over the past 150 years or so, of from about three molecules per 10,000 molecules of dry air to four (if you credit “consensus, settled” numbers of ~285 ppmv at the end of the Little Ice Age, c. AD 1860, to ~395 today). The human contribution is perhaps four percent of the total atmospheric CO2 concentration.
A correlation between temperature and CO2 seemed prima facie possible during the roughly 20-year period in which the two were positively correlated, c. 1977 to 1996, give or take, based upon data set. But now for some 17 years or so, despite a continued rise in CO2, global climate has stopped warming & in the least “adjusted” series, is cooling. Also, before 1977, climate was also cooling while enjoying rapidly increasing CO2 since 1945. So it’s hard to argue causation from the brief correlation.
There is IMO a warming effect from CO2, but it’s negligible & diminishes in strength as concentration increases. People do other things which tend to cool the planet, so science cannot truly determine what is the net sign of any human effect. In any case, it’s minuscule & insignificant.
Consensus climate science alarmism is based upon scary future scenarios which rely on positive feedback assumptions not in evidence, indeed shown false by actual observations, which in real science trump models. Climate sensitivity estimates of four to seven degrees per doubling in CO2 concentrations assumed for instance a water vapor feedback that hasn’t been borne out by observation. IPCC has lowered its estimates, which are headed into the zone advocated by skeptics all along, basically no net feedback effect, for an approximately one degree temperature effect from a doubling, ie from 285 to 570 ppmv.
So it’s hard to forecast catastrophe. We have seen the “worst” possible future in the past, & it wasn’t catastrophic. Under much hotter temperatures & with thousands of years more time, even the Greenland ice sheet didn’t come close to completely melting during the long Eemian interglacial, let alone the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Scandinavia did however become an island, as Lake Ladoga & its sisters were connected by a sea even shallower than the Baltic. But St. Petersburg still has thousands of years to adapt, & would only need to if temperatures climb more than is likely & the Holocene lasts longer than the Eemian. Even in the worst case of 600 ppm CO2, the increased gas supply would fairly rapidly (at most centuries, not millennia) be absorbed by sinks such as the warmer oceans & more verdant vegetation. Science really knows very little about sinks.
Return to glacial phase cold however would & probably will be catastrophic, unless technology advances to an extent to allow us to accommodate it.
Humans have indeed affected our planet’s environment, as have other lifeforms in the past. But control of the climate is presently beyond us. We could continue business as usual & burn all fossil fuels conceivably economically recoverable over the next few centuries without being able to ward off the coming reglaciation of continental ice sheets & montane glaciers.
I’d be happy to provide references for any statements for which you’d like sources.
On earth day in 1972 my teachers told me that if we did not stop polluting the world would plunge into an ice age. I went home in a panic telling my father that we had to stop polluting. He just laughed and said people have always claiming that there will be an ice age or the world will fry and that every 20 years or so they change their mind depending on what is happening with the weather at the time.
Later I read in The New York Times that the ice age was coming. Then in about 1980 I read in The New York Times that the world was warming too fast and the cause was the same a what they said years ago would cause an ice age, pollution. They didn’t mention at all the ice age article or what had changed.
So I wanted to know which, if either, of these ideas were right. So I read every article in the Times that talked about global warming to try to figure out what was happening. There weren’t too many articles at first, but none of them convinced me that global warming was happening. Then around 1989 the stories became more and more. After a while governments started proposing plans to do something about it. Then it became serious so I started hunting down more and more information.
At one point I had heard about Sallie Baliunas, I even called her up and got her to come on a local Vermont Radio show to argue with this insane weather man who believed everything Jim Hansen said and then some.
The more I learned the clearer it became that whatever global warming man caused it won’t be very much.
Stefan the geologist – yep deindustrialisation is the aim thanks to our own Maurice Strong and his buddies – heres a quick bio
http://www.afn.org/~govern/strong.html
Thanks for this nicely written and inspiring post.
I always find it fascinating to hear the stories how fellow skeptics came to their view. Until almost five years ago I was a believer. The first spark was a burning question and a desire to know the answer, the real answer. It gradually led me to a skeptical view and after a while I found myself firmly on the other side of the mainstream belief, which became my new natural habitat. In the process I learned a thing or two about weather and climate. Finally I regained critical thinking (never to old to learn I guess). If I would have learned more than five years ago that I would find myself in the skeptic camp and even blog about it, I would never have believed it.
More about my story:
http://trustyetverify.wordpress.com/category/my-story/
Best start from the bottom of the page (oldest post) and work your way up (newer posts).
Michel
A couple more points.
Jai said:
“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”
Of course, we don’t have reliable temperature records from the Roman period. But I was interested to note, while read “The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World”, the mention of olive trees (which are very temperature sensitive) growing at latitudes far north of where they can grow today. That is a pretty good indication that the temperature during that period was much warmer than today. The ability to have large and productive vinyards in Britain during that time is another indicator.
There was mention of the nuclear winter hypothesis. Some years back, I looked again at the TTAPS paper and was amused to note that the analysis of the burning of the world’s forests, which was the supposed trigger for the temperature change, had dismissed the creation of thousands of gigatons of CO2 from that burning as having “no measurable effect on the world’s temperature”. The “science” for these people obviously depends on the political point to be made.
First, I am a skeptic. It doesn’t mean I believe AGW isn’t real or not. I do not know. I do not think anyone “knows.” When I first heard of Cold Fusion, my father asked me about it (he is a real scientist), and I told him I thought it was hokum. I wasn’t skeptical, I flat out thought it was wrong. So my orientation towards AGW is different than that.
Here is why I was first a skeptic:
A) Can’t prove it one way or the other. There is no control group.
B) The earth climate system must be very complex, and claiming one “knows” from a single variable (greenhouse gases) seems premature. It seemed to me scientists were going from an “Aha!” moment, which is dangerous. If the earth’s climate were really sensitive, we would have serious periodic peaks of heat that fry everything, especially from natural occurrences.
C) As I was forming my opinion, I couldn’t find anyone in favor of nuclear power. Seemed like group think.
Since then, these views have been amplified as I read and study the material, along with understanding the nature of the (vocal) proponents. I’m still a skeptic, but only because “No one knows.” Simply because the people on the other side are acting in ways I view as biased does not mean they are wrong.
I’ve taught research at the graduate level. Once I realized that no reasonable data existed to support the theory, and that the computer models didn’t actually control for historical climatic variability, I realized it was all nothing but superstitious nonsense.
“Rod Everson says:
July 26, 2013 at 8:06 am
The global warming/climate change/climate disruption issue has never been about the environment or saving the world; it’s all about control.”
As in the days of Copernicus and Galileo, “truth” was about who controlled that “truth”, for the best part of 2000 years. A church, a religion. And we know how that turned out!
jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:02 pm
Another comment on this. The historical record is a joke, it’s anything but reliable. I know because I have a copy of it, I’ve generated aggregate reports from the data.
But if you know anything about data, which has been my profession for more than a dozen years, this chart says it all.
Yearly NCDC weather station record counts.
As an early GreenPeace member I soon became disillusioned by the non-scientific nature of this and other eco groups. Their habit in drowning out any opposing views with either name calling or bullying tactics made me skeptical from the start. The early global cooling scare then the switching to the global warming predictions, the convenient ignoring of the LIA and the Medieval Warming Period and the total lack of science has convinced me that CAGW is a fraud. To have an individual such as Al Gore warn me of his inconvenient “truths” and see that he has conned seemingly intelligent people depresses me. However, I will continue to ask warmists “what science are you basing your beliefs on”. And having the satisfaction of their gullibility when they call be a denier and cite the 97% figure and don’t use any data to support their claim. Welcome Jonathan.
Way back in the late 1960s (yeah, I’m getting pretty old) I remember legislation being introduced in California (of course) to ban the internal combustion engine. Since California obviously hasn’t been reduced to kings, paupers, and serfs driving oxen pulling wooden plows (at least, not quite yet) it should be obvious that that idiotic law didn’t pass. And, way back then, when the law didn’t pass, I thought, ‘wow, we’ve been saved.’
Well, I was wrong. Now those morons wanna do the same thing for the whole damn planet. In retrospect I really wish that law had passed. Think about that. No planes. None. Nada. Zip. Not a one. No jets flying into or outta the Golden State. Or props. No helicopters. No cargo ships landing at any California ports or harbors. Ok, maybe they could resurrect a few steamers, but that’s it. The railroads? Maybe they could electrify all of ’em if they had the time and money to string the lines. And there’d be no semi tractor trailers. Bulk shipments, in fact shipments of any kind, would be slashed. Did I say tractors? Sorry, we’re back to oxen pulling plows. And, of course automobiles would be verboten. That also would include taxicabs and ambulances. And, of course, all the extra hearses they’d need for all the additional people who would be kissing their a…s behind in that sorry new world. Maybe they could resurrect the Stanley Steamer but it’d be funny to see how spotless that alternative would’ve been. Did I forget anything? Oh yes; agricultural combines, earth movers, front end loaders, additional construction equipment of all kinds, portable generators, fire trucks and pumpers, chain saws… All of it – gone.
I guess I thought global warming was stupid way back then in my teens. But, unlike the UN IPCC, I don’t think I could’ve possibly peered 20 years into the future (and I really don’t think they can either) back then and realized such a thing as AGW would actually have been invented. In my wildest dreams I never would’ve believed that California Dreamin’ insanity would’ve been reborn and magnified so as to encompass the whole world.
Oh, do I wish that silly law had passed in California way back then. We would’ve seen the result so profoundly that any talk of AGW now would be rejected as the vicious, anti-human, gibberish it truly is. Now the world, just like with all the atrocities of the 20th century, will have to learn the results the hard way. If the world, at least, chooses to do so.
@Other_Andy:
I’ve been saying all along that the left is fundamentally reactionary: it oroceeds from authoritarian impulses, it clings to inhumane ideas long since discredited, it is infatuated with political-economic systems that have murdered hundreds of millions of people, it looks back to times of tyranny and slavery as its concept of the ideal society. The left is most positively NOT “liberal” in the classic meaning of that word – it is the opposite of liberal.
As to falling off the donkey on the route to Skeptical Damascus – I have always been skeptical of CAGW for all of the reasons other folks here have given – CAGW doesn’t make common sense on its face, the historical record proves that there are warmer times than now in the past and a net decline in temps over the last 80 years (not 15 or 17 or whatever!) all you have to do is look at commercial greenhouses to see the fallacy of runaway heating from increased CO2, the overtly leftist-reactionary politics of all of the alarmists, their shameless dishonesty and bullying of unbelievers, etc., etc.
I did undergo a conversion of sorts, however – at one time, earnest environmentalist that I am, I was supportive of alternative energy sources like wind and solar. But during 13 years in the employ of a municipal electric utility, I came to recognize and appreciate the enormous environmental DAMAGE being done by “alternative” energy sources – the slaughter of endangered species, the despoliation of landscapes, the destruction of habitats and the emission of a whole new set of pollutants – and this underscored the point that CAGW is not about the environment at all, not about saving the planet at all – it’s about totalitarian control, the infliction of hardships through unnecessarily high energy costs, the enrichment of crony capitalists at the expense of lower-income people, i.e., the transfer of wealth from poor to rich.
On all counts, CAGW is both ethically and scientifically indefensible – and odious beyond odious. It is a crime against humanity on the scale of the Holocaust, the Gulag and the Cultural Revolution.
Ed Barber,
It is interesting you mention cold fusion. The actual details of the process of nuclear reaction for this process has not been clearly determined (but there are several theories that seem reasonable, including Widom-Larson), but the actual process that was described as cold fusion has been proven correct multiple times. There are two major demonstrations that show large excess heating, at large scale, with COP >3. One by a company called Defkalion, and one by Rossi’s E-Cat. In fact hundreds of studies have shown the concept is valid. There is even a course now being taught at MIT on the process. Be careful when you become flat out skeptical (not accepting any possibility). I am a skeptic on CAGW, but not a flat out skeptic that does not admit the possibility, I just judge the best I can on best recent evidence, and could change my position if new evidence sufficiently changed the situation.
M Courtney says:
July 26, 2013 at 8:07 am
I will read what you linked at some later time it is far too long to read for me now. Thanks!
John Tillman says:
July 26, 2013 at 9:18 am
I must go to bed now but I hope I can re-read your post thoroughly later. I might actually ask for source material so I hope I can ask tomorrow. Cheers!
M Courtney says: “I quite like the left-wing solutions such as the idea of free bus travel for everyone.”
ALWEG consortium proposed to finance the construction of a major monorail system in Los Angeles, in return for the right of operation over the city wash’s. It would have cost tax payers nothing and to this day $0.50 a ride. Government said no.
We wouldn’t be in this CAGW mess if it wasn’t for the greed of government
I AM a hard core liberal which today the majority would label me a Milton Friedman conservative:
Yet another engineer here — Ditto!
Recent Tweet:
Yes, D, b/c we R adults.
Translated into actual English: Yes, DrillBIt-Dana, because we ARE adults we can address these issues on a rationale, factual basis and cite and actually express the reasons for our thought-out positions.
You?
.
Tucci78 says at July 26, 2013 at 8:55 am
Yes, I agree with you actually.
Politically, this is about the Libertarian/Authoritarian axis not the left/right axis
(Which simplistically is the Rescue the Weakest / Enable and Free the Greatest axis).
I am left wing but libertarian. I believe people are fundamentally good and do not need a Leviathan to hold them from the chaos.
Malthusians and any who believe the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is universally true are required to call on a Leviathan and are Authoritarian.
But as the political parties are aligned on the Left/Right axis many of the comments here have been conflating the Right with Libertarian. Not necessarily true.
For example, Graham Stringer MP is a Labour (left-wing) MP and was the only effective scrutineer of the CRU after Climategate. He is not a neo-totalitarian.
@M Courtney – this is not really the forum for the discussion, but at some time I hope we have the opportunity to discuss your description of being left Wing and Libertarian. I find many people saying that today (many as being more than expected, but not anywhere near a majority), and I find it very interesting, so am looking to learn more.
furyforever says at July 26, 2013 at 11:05 am
Thank you. It is far too long to read in one sitting. But it is fully referenced so you can see the spin is not inaccurate. Thus, I thought it was enlightening.
I was hoping you would read it in the next month or so. You don’t need to explain why you haven’t read it yet. How unreasonable must I have seemed to be?
Sorry.
This is just a blog conversation; I would think that a work demand would give more hours than this. I never expected you to drop everything and read it now.
@Ox AO –
Your self-portrait rather describes me as well – a traditional liberal who in today’s context is called conservative.
I think one of the strongest arguments against CAGW is the environmental catastrophe that it is bringing about – therefore all true liberals, i.e., in the classical sense, not of those who have stolen this title and so abused it by turning its meaning into its diametrical opposite, must oppose CAGW.
Ox AO says at July 26, 2013 at 11:11 am
So greed is good, eh? Because it is better to have economic corruption (that is open to all) than political corruption (that is open to only a few).
That is sound.
But is there another option?
Socialism is about giving people what they need from those who can give it. It is not about equalising everyone as Milton Friedman implied by assuming there was only Capitalism and Communism – excluding the middle. Socialism is just setting a bottom line that can’t be dropped below (especially in terms of opportunity) at the cost of those who can afford it.
Also, capitalism is not a religion. It does not have the keys to eternal life or even a better world – setting the downtrodden free.
It did not abolish slavery. That was Christianity – Evangelical Anglicanism. Capitalism found slavery quite profitable and so good.
PS. I think we are going to agree to disagree here.
But let us realise that our division in no way provides evidence for the cAGW theory. Therefore, we can still debate together, respect each other and maybe even support each other sometimes.
The effort to disappear the Medieval Warming Period from the historical record is what did it for me. I knew the historical record was actually very solid on the existence of the MWP, and Mann’s “hockey stick” and the shrill defense of it, and sleaze-pouring over the heads of all who questioned it, is what got me looking much more closely at what the so-called “consensus” was basing it’s narrative on.
As a practicing scientist (molecular genetics), I was aghast at some of the statements I started hearing in the late 1990s. Consensus, settled, etc. just didn’t have the ring of authenticity. So I started looking into data and the hypotheses that were being “tested” (since it’s tough to do a properly controlled experiment on the entire Earth), or at least considered. There didn’t seem to be many, other than the increasing CO2 would lead to some heating and then feedback would raise water vapor in the atmosphere amplifying the effect. Natural variation (which I knew from being married to a geoscientist has been enormous in scale historically) didn’t seem to matter. The notion put forward by the climate alarmists that “the observed warming has to be due to CO2 because we can’t (find) think of what else caused it” struck me as so incredibly unscientific that I couldn’t believe that anyone would buy into it let alone utter it without severe embarrassment. For a system as complicated and chaotic as the Earth’s climate to have no unknowns or uncertainty simply seemed preposterous on its face. This group of scientists relied solely on correlation, which is sometimes all one can do in a non-experimental science, but it seemed very weak evidence. Now that threadbare evidence has fallen apart. I stumbled into a Burt Rutan lecture on climate at the Oshkosh Fly-in several years ago after also finding WUWT and other skeptics. It was certainly comforting to find I wasn’t alone, although I am surrounded by otherwise skeptical scientists who find that AGW fits their world view so well that they cannot be bothered by evidence. Thus I remain closeted on this subject. The shennanigans exhibited in the climategate mess further underscored my disappointment in mainstream climate science. As a scientist, I am embarrassed to be lumped together with these investigators, who are no longer committed to impartial investigation of the world around them, but are clearly motivated by some other goal. They have damaged the entire enterprise, and this rubs off on all scientists.
Another engineer here, BS in Engineering Science & Mechanics with Nuclear option. Working at a company modelling power stations; one big current project is a carbon capture modification. It consumes 30% of the power output to eliminate SO2 & CO2 from the exhaust. What a waste. My rules of operation – never assume anything & follow the money. I so agree with most of the comments on this thread.
My journey was short and sweet. When I first saw the controversy I looked up the history of what had happened. What I found was the following.
1. The planet was warming.
2. The current models couldn’t account for it.
3. CO2, a greenhouse gas was increasing during the same period.
4. Ice core sampling showed a lock step between the level of CO2 and warming
5. Therefore it must be CO2 that caused it.
As time went on, the AGW industry started to blame everything on CO2. Any extreme weather event was an example of the destructiveness of AGW. Any rise in sea level was another example of the destructiveness of AGW. Future wars would be wage because of AGW. It became almost comical how any and everything could and frequently would be blamed on the increasing of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I then notice some things. The first chink in the armor was when more accurate measurements showed that temperature increased before CO2 increased. Since effect cannot precede cause, we suddenly had a problem. I found out that all these stories and peer reviewed studies that continually flooded out of academia that said warming was happening even faster than previously thought did not give us experiments with measurements that supported the AGW hypothesis, but rather climate models that were tweaked to make things worse. Michael Mann’s Hockey-stick was another warning sign. The AGW industry used his findings to eliminate the little ice age and the MWP. It seemed that with his study, we had a climate that never seemed to change for over 1000 years until we got to the modern age and the burning of fossil fuels. Mann needed to rewrite history and that is exactly what he did. The problem was that the techniques he used and his lack of transparency suggested he was hiding something. Things were getting contentious and the AGW crowd started to call anyone disagreeing with them names. Denialists was their favorite harkening to those who denied the holocaust. I also noticed the AGW industry never gave an inch. Every contrary study seemed to be paid for by the Oil and Gas Industry. As the AGW industry started to see some erosion of their support, they charged that the Oil and Gas industry was spending much more than they were which was absolute nonsense. Finally you had Climategate which cause the desertion of some of big name scientists and showed some very questionable practices by CRU. Their climate model was a disaster and we were supposed to rely on it.
Today I see the AGW industry struggling to survive. The biggest problem they have is what has happened to the climate. There has been no statistically significant warming in the past 17-23 years and a number of scientist are suggesting that this could continue for another decade or two. We had approximately 20 years of warming (1975 to 1995) which caused this industry to get started. In the next few years we will have as many years of no s.s.warming and it will be very hard for the AGW crowd to continue their crusade. Finally, today’s models have failed to explain the lack of warming. It appears we may be ready to go back to the beginning.
1. The planet isn’t warming.
2. The current models can’t account for the lack of warming.
3. Natural causes are probably the blame.
4. ….
“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.”
Sorry, not in this case Jai. Well OK, white….female, over 65, low income (I’m retired), and I don’t HAVE an ideology! Not an engineer or a scientist either, and my exposure to physics and chemistry ceased at O Level. Even so I can tell that the whole idea of CO2 being the cause of dangerous overheating of the planet and massive rises in sea level, and that unless we all expiate our sins by switching to ‘renewable’ power the planet is doomed.
The Climate Changes,,,,,,period.
My personal path is simpler. I just don’t believe any chicken little scenarios, because they have always proven false. Especially when delivered as obviously slick and packaged BS propaganda from political blowhards like Al Gore.
Anyone and everyone should be able to see through the lies of people like Gore and Obama.
My year was 2007. Here’s my story:
At the age of 14 I remembered our swims in the river Rhine while environmental clubs told everyone the water was extremely toxic. The water wasn’t good for sure, but they clearly exaggerated the issue. I know, because my friends and I survived. Just spit out any water that comes in. Later, still a teenager, the Brent Spar affair in 1995 confirmed my view that it was in the nature of the the environmental clubs to exaggerate risks.
I did not take a position on Global Warming until 2007. Although I met more scepticism than alarmism in the years before that. Some examples: In the early 2000’s a colleague had pinned charts on the wall behind him. He explained to me that those showed a relationship between the sun and the temperature. Later, in 2006, our CEO assured a colleague that Global Warming was most likely yet another blunder from the enviro’s.
On a winter morning in 2007 I heard on Dutch radio that someone called for revoking scientific licenses for any scientist not accepting global warming. This was decisive for my view on Global Warming. Surely the near-evident truth does not need this kind of bullying. The enviro’s where clearly exaggerating again. Not untill years later I found out it must have been Heidi Cullen from the The Weather Channel ( http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/?FuseAction=PressRoom.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=32abc0b0-802a-23ad-440a-88824bb8e528 ).
And then there was Climategate in 2009. I’ve met WUWT in the weekend after November 19th and it has been daily material ever since.
Tucci78 at 10:21
Love the scenario you painted, very true.
A request:
Jai Mitchell says “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.”
Almost fits for me: white, male, over 35 (just; not over 40 for a few years yet)… but I am a left-winger. Yes, I am a Socialist ! (eek)
Is it true that my gender and race influences me more than my thought out ideology? This is something I ought to investigate.
The theory has significant implications for my concept of freewill.
So the request is: Does anyone have references to the studies that show this?
This is a remarkably interesting series of responses. The article is far less interesting.
My own views shifted toward scepticism because a highschooler – my son – pouring boiling water into a clear glass measuring cup, remarked that the water was cloudy be the gas dissolved in the water was being forced out. That lead to an “oh, yeah!” moment, remembrance of college chemistry classes and a sudden flash of the temperature and CO2 curves from the Vostok ice core. The lag between temperature and CO2 already had me wondering. Prior to that the argument based on the experimental fact that CO2 absorbed infrared had seemed and the implications seemed fairly clear cut. After that lots of reading and gradually growing disinclination to agree that anyone really knew anything about how the climate “works.” Reading revealed the immense and dense jungle of disagreements about climate theory.
There isn’t any true broad scientific agreement about any phase of climate theory. There are “schools” of theory – rather like Classical Greek schools of philosophy, and they tend to denigrate rather than debate other schools. There won’t be anything like a legitimate science of climate until everyone sits down and debates and experiments until there is an actual agreement as to the mechanisms. That will in turn lead to a clear understanding of what can and cannot be predicted and how far in the future that such predictions can be carried. Personally, since climate is measured by weather records over long(ish) terms, and weather can’t be reliably forecast long terms except in place like the Atacama Desert, where Lorenz’s butterfly refuses to visit, until weather can be forecast, the potential for really understanding climate in a predictive manner is low to nonexistent.
Last hogging of this blog, I promise.
I wrote at July 26, 2013 at 5:50 am
I would like to update point 2 to:
” 2) People who could tell that honest-brokers don’t act like Michael Mann or Phil Jones. The rudeness of the alarmist blogs has been picked out, especially Real Climate. And the suppression of alternate views was clearly offensive to free thinkers.“
Oh, I lied. I’m back again.
But I had to recommend what Tucci78 says at July 26, 2013 at 10:21 am.
Moderators, Antony Watts, any other red flag to get noticed.
This post should be a main article.
It is Climategate in a nutshell.
philjourdan says at July 26, 2013 at 12:38 pm
Thank you.
Not the right blog.
Not the time for me, either. I’m coming, dear. See I am saying goodbye to the internet
But as a taster, consider that the lack of extremism between redistribution and unrestrained crushing of opponents means some form of intermediate system. My original example was providing free bus travel for everyone (paid via taxation) but not banning cars. If you want to drive you have the choice. But if you need to travel (commute was the word I used) then you should be able to.
Poverty should not restrict your opportunities. The cream does not rise to the top if there is a filter in place.
I missed Tucci78’s comment first time around. It is definitely worth recording in some way.
Like the Author, I fell for the “Next Ice Age is coming” scare. It seemed plausible then and the late Seventies were cold! ’cause we had to turn the thermostat down to 68 degrees when Gas prices soared to 56 cents a gallon. I also believed the “Limits to Growth” Malthusian dribble. The world didn’t freeze and mass starvation in China and India didn’t happen. So I didn’t fall for the CAGW scam.
Have you noticed the same people who forecast the “Next Ice Age” are now promoting CAGW?
H. L Mencken explained it, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. ”
CAGW is dying. I wish they would die like the bad guys in a Spaghetti Western, but the death scene will take longer than DiCaprio in the “Titanic”. (I’d had some beer and had to go and DiCaprio just wouldn’t die. I eventually left and he was still dying when I got back. In the North Atlantic in Winter no less.)
Don’t worry! The same group will return with something equally dire. Sustainability and Agenda 21 are waiting in the wings. They have the advantage of allowing the promoter to hyper-ventilate while making dire sounding, non-falsifiable predictions.
.000380 constituant in the atmosphere Is the PRIMARY determinant of all future weather
This weather will be worse and it’s all humany’s fault
Absurd at its face
My story is very similar and yet when you look at the original theory of AGW and see how it has failed, yet the proponents move the goalposts to cover the whole field, yet we sceptics have maintained the same stance without needing to move anything and still get called the D word
Isn’t it is ironic that they have had to change their theory from #
Man add CO2 to the atmosphere, this reflects heat back to the earth and warms the atmosphere and when 15 or more years of CO2 pumping makes no more heat than before it changes to;
Man adds CO2 to the atmosphere, this reflects back to earth and disappears deep into the ocean where it will pop up one day and bite someones backside. It does this using some magical process that they cant tell us about probably because it is covered by the magic circle union.
The Detroit solution; look how *that* has worked out (Detroit has filed for bankruptcy as a result of their FAILED, do I have to say it again(?) FAILED socialist over-taxing (and other programs) to create freebies and gimmes for their citizens – 50 years of single party / socialist (dem) rule can and does do this. (Recall it was Rudy G. that pulled NY out of an imminent death spiral.)
The sad fact that appears to some of us is that some ppl just _will not_ learn b/c they are incapable of learning … the real reasons go deeper, e.g. due to either poor prior training / poor education or a dysfunctional ‘early life’ experience, or perhaps their ‘hardware’ just doesn’t work correctly …
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-24/detroit-numbers
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/us/for-detroit-a-financial-crisis-was-long-coming.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
.
Till 2009 I was not interested in the climate at all. I took the weather as it was, usually rain and sometimes a sunny day in my country. This changed early 2009 when I read an article by the editor of the science edition of my newspaper. Besides historical texts, I never did read in modern times such an irrational and fanatic text. No dissident opinions were allowed any more in the newspaper because the science was settled. I concluded that there was something seriously wrong, and because my newspaper had chosen to become a Vatican, I was forced to get my information from the internet. I gave my self three months and I was ready right before climategate.
Tucci78 says:
July 26, 2013 at 10:21 am
Your send-up of pal review would be brilliant parody were it not sadly true, its starting point torn verbatim from the pages of Climategate.
but if you don’t believe, then how will crooks like Al Gore make their next billion off the suckers????
Re: Tucci78 says: July 26, 2013 at 8:55 am
Would you care to apply some of your illustrative effort to the way in which climate catastrophism is to a nosebleed-high level synonymous with left-wing politics?
—
AGW is straight up Progressive Collectivism/Left-wing politics. The political underpinnings began with the Orchestrated Crisis strategy and were fostered by the known Canadian Socialist and creator of the IPCC, Maurice Strong (now living in China). The Social Justice/Redistribution basis for AGW is found in Strong’s writings as Secretary of a variety of UN conferences, including Stockholm, Villach, and Rio. The larger Progressive guiding principle is documented in the Club of Rome publication, “The First Global Revelation,” which was used as a manual of sorts for the delegates to the first Rio Conference in 1992. In it, the authors discussed the need for a central issue to bring disparate countries together in a united cause of social justice and global governance. They wrote that the issue could be “imagined” and that climate change would fit the idea. Knowing this it becomes easier to understand and recognize the pervasive use of propaganda techniques in the AGW meme — the ad hominem, appeals to authority, glittering generalities, card stacking, etc. It is also easy to recognize the Alinsky methods at work.
@ Janice Moore says:
July 25, 2013 at 5:01 pm
Thanks for the kind remarks. I was touched by your comments.
One more thing – – whenever I talk to my friends about how bogus AGW is, they can usually follow what I’m saying if it’s not too technical!
I briefly believed in AGW until I considered the issues of scale and stability, plus the madness of crowds.
1) Scale: the atmosphere is a vast reservoir as seen by that if all combustibles on the Earth’s surface (including known coal deposits) were burned, it would use only 10% of the atmosphere’s oxygen. So how would our activities have such a profound effect as AGW claims?
2) Stability: a quick story as illustration: I did some air pilot training long ago, and the first times I hung on tight to the steering wheel to keep the plane flying level. Finally the teacher said “You look like you’re holding onto the tiger’s tail” and I agreed I was. So he said just let the wheel go which took me a bit of processing but eventually I did let it go and the plane just flew itself! So this reinforced a distinction between two kinds of equilibria: (1) STABLE equilibrium, such as the equilibrium of a marble at the bottom of a bowl, which when perturbed just goes back to the bottom, and (2) UNSTABLE equilibrium, such as the equilibrium of a marble at the top point of an upturned bowl, which when perturbed leaves that point never to return. My pilot time showed me once again that physical law features STABLE equilibria in all its manifestations, else the universe / Earth would have gone to hell in a handbasket long ago.
Really, the whole climate scare (and the thinking of “the Team”) depends on the underlying notion of unstable equilibria, the runaway greenhouse effect notably. Anyone who understands physical law knows that this just isn’t possible, and that the Earth has come 4.6 billion years to the current benign environment because there were (and are) no unstable breakpoints. Thus when the measurements show that increasing CO2 causes H2O to decrease, then one must say OF COURSE this happens, it must happen, because physical law mandates stable equilibria. We’re talking a priori science here, or 4.6 billion years of a posteriori, which is the same thing as far as we are concerned. The notion of “the runaway greenhouse effect” is simply COUNTER TO PHYSICAL LAW.
3) The madness of crowds, represented by the media. When’s the last time the media was correct in its prognostications about any scientific matter? Well, never. Not for AGW, either.
I had previously seen Al Gore’s movie and thought, ‘good heavens, are we heading for destruction?’ Some years later I happened to be on YouTube and came across Lord Monckton debunking some theory or other and noted how well he explained the facts and how convincing he was. I was hooked. I immediately thought that I needed to delve for the truth and the media weren’t supplying it, so from then on I trawled (and still do) all the sceptical blogs for enlightenment. Global warming is an epic scam.
I’ve tried to discuss with friends the fact that the scientific method allows for the possibility of being proven wrong so many times… Where I live arguing for science will get you labeled a conservative who’s pro oil and anti-science with such hostility that you will back down just to enjoy your night. But dang, really, don’t we want to keep science scientific?
I think your entire paper can be summed up with this small passage and I could not agree more whole heartedly.
“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.”
So well said!
As a kid in the 1970’s I was told that we’re heading for a new ice age. Because we’re burning fossil fuel. I thought to myself “Oh dear”.
As a young adult in the 1980’s I was told that all forests will be gone by the year 2000. Because we’re burning fossil fuel. I thought to myself “Oh dear”.
As a scientist in the 1990’s I was told that the climate is warming up at a catastrophic rate. Because we’re burning fossil fuel. I thought to myself “Shut up”.
And for the past 40 years I’ve been repeatedly told that oil will run out 30 years from now. All that time, 30 years from now. To all you peak-oilers: Please shut up. I’ve had it up to the neck with neo-Malthusians.
Ever since Chief Justice John Roberts flipped his vote to support Obamacare, my opinion has been that the Administration somehow got to Roberts. They did, didn’t they? Not one single national columnist or legal scholar predicted that Roberts would support Obamacare. All the discussion was about Kennedy and other justices.
So it came as a total surprise to everyone — and the ‘reasoning’ given by Roberts was a bunch of specious legalese nonsense. Roberts was corrupted, and if they can flip the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, then just about any judge can be turned. And of course, judge-shopping has become an art form.
Which brings me to this. Mikey sure has lots of friends in high places, doesn’t he? No matter how many folks come to realize that CAGW is a complete crock, the average guy on the street is constantly hit over the head with, “Well, he was exonerated, wasn’t he?…”
My tale is not an altruistic one. An investment opportunity was put to me by a broker who admitted knowing little of the background but the “promoters” were a known outfit with a “proven” track record.
We decided to go away, do our own research, meet again in 3 months time and compare our findings.
The subsequent meeting was startling, within 5 minutes there was a consensus, the joint view being – it is a crock of ….
The rest of the meeting was spent deciding whether or not there was a short term opportunity, especially with the imminent vote in the UK on the Climate Change Act.
We both reverted to type and eschewed any potential short term gain. Well, I did, he was/is a broker, they do their own things.
I am amazed at the longevity of the implausible scenario placed before us some 6 or 7 years ago. However, now experience, (hindsight) gives solace to our long term policy.
It did not stack up in 2007 and now the initial fervour has gone it is a far bigger crock than it was then.
Apart from “fun” investment activities, the day pay engineering more than confirms the original assessment – it is a crock…
Bottom line – “My Personal Path…” RESEARCH!
Do your own and then enjoy life because you have! Don’t let those without the wit to do their own research taint your life!
Awesome post and replies. Some of the stories seem so familiar as they are mine too. Am ashamed to admit from that first moment of thinking something was not quite right to acceptance was a three year journey. No excuse, just unwilling to leave that comforting cocoon of letting someone else do the thinking and not wanting to believe we were being lied to on such a monumental scale. Sometimes I wish I could erase my memory and go back to that naïve, simpler and trusting person. All we can do is go forward and never give up. Its up to us to educate our children as our education systems are very much corrupted with CAGW. That would be a good/disturbing story itself. Some of the assignments I have encountered are blatant shameful brainwashing.
dbstealey said:
Also note that if most skeptics are over 35 with above average income, they are likely more
educated than the rest of the folks, and more than likely, possess hard science degrees (liberal arts degrees do not – on average – result in above average income).
Just sayin.
Mark
Ditto on always having been a skeptic. As a geologist, I’ve always been frustrated with biologists’ narrow focus on the last few decades. But I’ve been utterly astonished at how many “physical scientists” have swallowed the anthropogenic warming nonsense hook line and sinker. I thought all science training was like mine – learning to poke holes in theories, find the weaknesses in argument, propose alternate hypotheses, and question, question, question. Guess not!
“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.”
That is -PRECISELY- the same line of reasoning that led me to doubt the certainty of their predictions and which led me to investigate further. Past data from the financial markets can in many cases be known precisely for model tests on past performance while the proxy data for climate definitely cannot be. Thus, how can climate models ever be properly checked for accuracy using such data?
A garbage model adjusted to fit garbage past data = garbage predictions. And when I say “garbage model,” I’m referring to climate models that don’t even include all of the possible natural phenomena -that we know about- which could act to control climate let alone the innumerable phenomena that we probably don’t even know about yet.
From all I have learned since I’ve begun my investigations, I am certain that -their- certainty is completely unjustified and probably related to the fact that their professional reputations and employment opportunities and incomes are dependent open it. The governments drooling over new taxes and the markets drooling over the carbon credits trade, yet another massive avenue for billions of dollars worth of fraud, supply preferential treatment for alarmists via a mass media that loves sensational news while having a journalism major’s understanding of science and no apparent capability for critical thought.
Chad Wozniak:
You are right. The art of deception should never be underestimated.
M Courtney says “So greed is good?”
Of course not. Greed is the rot that destroys every system of government.
Milton Friedman put is very eloquently. Greed is the parasite to the host.
If you are a greedy one (parasite) and want control of as much as possible.
Would you want to live in a system that is designed to control every aspect of everyone’s life or would you want to live in a system that is designed to have very limited controls?
Socialism is a collectivist view or a view that everything belongs to society. Those properties that does belong to the individual is still part of the zero sum game or socialist society. If everything belongs to society what does it matter if I steal? The very root concept of the system denigrates the individual.
In other words Socialism is the perfect system for greed to flourish.
Once parasites get too greedy, the host dies, and Socialism fails. When you hear Socialists talking about how Socialism hasn’t been tried the right way, they mean no one has figured out how to keep the host alive while the parasites feed.
The driving mechanism for the CAGW concept is based around the concept of the zero sum game or a socialist society. Were every new person born is a planet-killer.
CAGW couldn’t exist without a socialistic society to support it’s existence.
CAGW is a symptom of the parasite rotting the system. In other words if it wasn’t CAGW the greedy would find something else to rot the system. The real problem is collectivism.
jai mitchell says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:02 pm
‘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’
Let me see
uncertain model projections indicate
likely uncertain projections double
hang on
based on the liklihood of something that is uncertain indicating
No thanks jai,I think I’ll stick with science.
I knew something was up when the GAGA crowed found it necesary to rewrite history, that a sure sign of fraud.
Michael J. Dunn says:
July 25, 2013 at 1:01 pm
Thanks for reminding me of the Gulf War falsification of Sagan, et al’s (usual suspects) attempt to disarm the West & aid the faltering USSR with its ideologically-motivated Nuclear Winter garbage.
EdB says:
July 26, 2013 at 9:56 am
Good point about Sagan’s dismissal of CO2 in Nuclear Winter scam. Yet Ehrlich & Schneider reemerged to tout CO2’s all powerful force in promoting CACCA.
They peg a .9 Gores on the Hypocrisy Meter, where 1.0 Gore is the red (!) line max.
I also have an engineering degree. I got it in the days when we had to use slide rules. In my mind, I had no reason to question global warming until I read a comment in our news paper that temperatures had not risen in 10 years and we were encouraged to check out facts for ourselves. That caught my eye since I certainly was not aware of that. At about the same time, a friend sent the following 95 minute presentation by Monckton in Minnesota: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0&feature=player_embedded
The points that were made were very convincing. About a week after I saw the video, climate-gate happened. There was no turning back after that.
Johnathon Abbott,
Do you think that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause no warming at all? That is the implication of your article, which is at odds with the understanding of all the skeptic scientists with qualifications, including Anthony Watts.
It has become easier to be a skeptic, I used to be pointed at in 2006 and called crazy, at least now there seems to be some doubt. I have always been suspicious of people who’s decisions are predicated on receiving money. The climate-gate emails turned me from a skeptic to a total DENIER, and proud of it. I still believe that we need at least 3 years of cooling before the scam will end.
I remember my mother telling me in the 60’s that “they” thought the planet was going into another ice age. I haven’t been that scared since. I also remember sleeping on the screened in porch in the 60’s and waking up covered in black soot. We lived in Windsor, across the river from Detroit. An inversion happened overnight which brought all the soot down to cover the ground. I remember that everytime somebody says air quality is getting worse. I also remember the river in Cleveland catching fire. I remember that when people tell me we are destroying the environment. I also remember walking to work one day in the early 70’s and seeing a temperature sign reading 104F, That had to be in the early 70’s since it was before Trudeau changed Canada’s measurements to metric.From those memories, I see that we have cleaned up air pollution and water pollution. Air and water are now cleaner than they ever have been in my lifetime. We just had a 4 day heat wave. It never went over 33 C or 91.4 so temperatures are not warming. Surprisingly to those who now live with their air conditioners all summmer, I worked in a restaurant with no air, drove a car with no air and lived in an apartment with no air. Nobody died of heat then.I still don’t have air and really enjoyed that 4 day heat wave.
barry says:
Johnathon Abbott,
Do you think that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause no warming at all? That is the implication of your article…
I must call barry on this misrepresentation. Jonathan Abbott neither wrote nor implied that. If barry believes that Mr Abbott thinks that CO2 will cause no warming at all, then I challenge barry to cut and paste the relevant passage he is referring to, and post it here.
Jonathan Abbott clearly stated:
…in terms of previous natural variability, CAGW was demonstrably minor in scale.
It appears that barry has deliberately misrepresented Abbott’s stated position. “Minor” warming is certainly different than saying [or implying] that CO2 causes “no warming at all”. Isn’t it, barry?
I think you meant to say “Real Climate”.
~sigh~ Just making crap up again as usual: “Thatcher … the main driver for mainstreaming climate change action …”, give us a break. I dare say that no-one over here had a clue that she was a warmie or lukewarmer or whatever until very recently when leftists started parroting this propaganda. The actual “main driver” was the media who had finally tired of their previous global cooling message. The change occurred slowly during the 1980-1990 transitional period between cooler temps in the 1970’s and warmer temps in the 1990’s. This is when the media began repeating the alarmism being trumpeted by Schneider, Hansen, Sagan and others, and from organized groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club. They penetrated the public consciousness by repeating their mantra incessantly in newspapers, magazines, journals, television news and other broadcasts. That’s how it got mainstreamed, through all the normal methods, not from some politician wielding massive power that not even she knew she had!
Being in the USA, I’m still not up-to-speed on what Thatcher actually believed or did, but I am certainly not going to take your word for it. I would guess it is you who is mistaken or lying here considering how you smeared Thatcher shortly after she passed away before she was even buried. So for now I will assume you are doing precisely the same as always and leave it to your fellow British countrymen to set the record straight. Or perhaps Chris Monckton can really clear it up once and for all.
More importantly, most of us are sharp enough to know that no politician is perfect, it’s impossible. So when we hear about any of them scoring political points with some ridiculous issue like climate change it is no more surprising than Reagan doing the same with amnesty for illegal aliens. What you don’t realize is that going around finding “fault” in a politician who might be only 85% “perfect” does not really help your case because only any idi0t would truly expect them to be perfect in the first place, therefore you’re singing only to a choir of shallow thinkers. Moreover, you actually serve to perfect these leaders because being a politician by definition, they will often double back when called out by their real supporters. For example, Leftists that beat up Romney or Bush or McCain as supporting AGW or illegal aliens can actually serve to draw them back away from it (not enough though IMHO). So by all means, please keep helping us identify the weak links in our so-called “leaders” because you are actually working right alongside us and you don’t even realize it. I thank you for your help 😉
Even before I was born… I hatched a plan, some American friends of mine had ideas. We were wild in the streets. So, the moral of the story is?
My journey towards catastrophic climate scepticism took a circuitous path.
I was born a rebel, cursed or blessed with an independent streak. Even at kindergarten I resisted the massed singing and collectivised story-telling that were so much of a part of mid-twentieth century public education.
Fortunately, I was taken in hand by Sister Francis, who recognised a kindred spirit and fed my hunger for critical thinking. Even today, the smell of milk and cookies in the morning transports me back to those times: the generous embrace, the crisply starched linen, the warm fragrance of coal tar soap.
Interestingly, for years I ignored the siren call of the climate catastrophists, figuring it was just another scare cooked up by ex-hippie communists with an agenda. Then, in 2007, I watched The Great Global Warming Swindle. From the outset I was struck by a nagging feeling that the narrator was telling less than he knew, and was focusing in an obsessive way on the welfare of the working poor.
So I embarked on a course of critical enquiry, which boiled down to: the planet is going to fry, and man-made CO2 is the culprit. Intuitively, this made sense, but further reading revealed some disturbing facts, of which two struck me as crucial:
1. Al Gore was getting fat. Clearly, this man was consuming more than his fair share of resources while preaching austerity to the masses.
2. The top-ranked climate scientists were either terminally follicley challenged or, like a stubborn anti-cyclone, suffering from a permanent bad hair day. Meanwhile, sceptic scientists were almost to a man sleek and well groomed. If the top of the skull is a pointer to the internal workings, sceptical climate scientists were better disciplined and organised than their warmist brethren.
These impressions were supported by empirical evidence that eventually became a game-changer. My readings of the morning newspaper showed me that some parts of planet Earth were by no means warm.
Something wasn’t right. I remembered Bertrand Russell’s aphorism to the effect that fools are full of certainty while wise men are wracked by doubt. For a time, I was almost convinced. Now, I am not so sure.
For most people, uncertainty can be an uncomfortable state of mind. It frustrates the impulse towards decisive action and leads at best to a sort of quietism, cultivating one’s own garden while ignoring the concerns of the wider world.
But I accept uncertainty and am also happy to look the world in the eye. While tomorrow may bring disaster, it may also lead to the shining path, or things may stay the same. The only real drawback to uncertainty is that I’m never quite sure of my own mind.
Lots of us became skeptics for chance reasons when we ran into some devastating bit of data that falsified alarmist claims, in my case that was John Daly’s post of a temperature chart of a cooling South Pole. Yet becoming a competent and activist skeptic took longer, motivation for which being the astonishingly psychotic behavior of anybody I questioned about it who wasn’t already a skeptic….
Today’s death threat to you all appears in all it’s glory here by hyperactive Phys.org commenter VendicarE who is fond of tacking “tard” onto user names in order to make his point, seemingly immune to Phys.org policy, a site owned by a green energy consulting firm:
“VendicarE
“Are Anthony Watts and Marc Morano and Tom Nelson and Steve Goddard smart enough to be guilty of climate crimes? I think so.” – NikkieTard
They should be executed for the crime of treason against nature an man.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-07-global-storage-percent-oregon-watershed.html#jCp
I believe this now myself. We can no longer ignore the possibility that DC is nothing more than a cesspool of 24/7/365 deal-making, backstabbing and blackmail.
Historically there were lots of rumors of Hoover supplying information to several Presidents, and so many inexplicable things that were ignored by the media like FDR’s crippled status and JFK’s horrendous health and incessant screwing around. These were completely kept out of the press and the only believable reason is that they had stuff on key reporters and publishers, which would be a simple matter for the FBI to gather and use.
Then we have that little matter of thousands of FBI files that the Clintons had in their possession since the early days of that administration. It is the best explanation for acquittal of a President being tried for perjury in the Senate while he is on videotape committing perjury as President.
Here in the present the FBI and spook agencies have technology that dwarfs their previous ability by orders of magnitude and have the added benefit of a Constitutional privacy mulligan due to 9/11 and terrorists concerns. So just like human nature experiments where you drop a wallet on the ground and see if someone takes it ( they do ), what happens when the Justice department and intelligence handover to the President information that embarrasses his enemies? Will he leave the wallet alone? Not a chance.
At 8:58 AM oh 26 July, Blade had written:
Hardly an “experiment.” The one time in my life when I got prank’d this way by a group of kids (walking through a residential section of a small resort town early one night, spotted the wallet on the sidewalk, reached down to pick it up, had it jerked away through the hedge by the length of fishing line invisible in the dark, with the children up on the porch giggling), my thoughts upon initially sighting the item were those of worry and irritation.
“Oh, damn. There goes the evening. I’m going to be spending the next two or three hours in the police station filling out found property forms. Boy, I hope this guy’s address is in here somewhere….”
I expect I’m peculiar. What most people would instantly interpret as an opportunity for unearned value at the expense of somebody else, I pessimistically saw as just another goddam responsibility imposed upon me by circumstances.
When the youngsters on the porch yanked it through the bushes and snickered at me, my only feelings were those of surprise and then relief.
Just another one of life’s practical jokes, and no duty to waste time and effort (and perhaps even risk arrest) interacting with the humorless thugs of government.
Briefly, what just floored me is that Alarmist “science” has not produced one reasonably well confirmed physical hypothesis that goes beyond Arrhenius’ work and that can be used to explain and predict some important part of the “forcings and feedbacks” that determine the effects of rising CO2 on the climate.
To make things worse, they have no plans for new and better regimes of measurement that could support serious empirical science. No plans. How lame can you get?
Dear Anthony,
Not only is is very kind of you to do all this WUWT work…but you have the nose, good man. Making this a sticky post was an inspiration. I respect your excellent work, in attracting people who……think thoughtfully about……forget the “about.”
My story is too long to type right now. In short: Green leftist as a kid to….wait, I don’t call myself a skeptic. I’m certainly adverse to the blatant, obvious, disgusting, oozing pro-pro-love for big-government will save us thingy. I saw the tripa di brodo was too thin way back in 1995. I saw the wall of the nonsense being shored up brick by brick, power-grabber by power-grabber joining in to the flavor of the day……Climate, is tutti frutti…someday the flavor will change, but then another struggle will ensue.
I’m a resistor. I’m not skeptical; that’s not my nature. I”m a resistor of nonsense being thrust upon me by gosh encrusted nefarious egotists, that’s all. Again, I thank you for your hard work. STT
As I have mentioned here before, my wake-up call was Climategate 1.0. Before then, I just considered Man-Made-Global-Warming to be “The Al Gore Thing”
Oh, I read about it and frankly, in a strange sort of curious way, looked forward to a lot of the predictions. Especially the Arctic ice disappearing and huge swaths of Greenland, northern Canada, and Siberia becoming habitable. I thought of all the great advantages of opening up the Arctic to mining, trade, and general settlement. I figured, really somewhat idly, that Global-Warming would probably be good actually once it really got rolling as humans are quite ingenious at taking advantage of any environment. Hell, land rush in Greenland; open waters in the Arctic; what’s not to like?
Then I read about Climategate in the Wall Street Journal. I followed the story closely as I am an engineer and have had plenty of experience dealing with over-educated welfare cases – and please understand – some of my best friends are PhDs and I have worked with my share of totally awesome highly educated people – but I have had my fill of phoney pseudo-scientist types in love with themselves and in love with their ideas. Sorry. I am an engineer and have a job to do.
To me at first, reading about Climategate, it was just bums getting caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Funny – I mean I roared with laughter; at first.
Somehow I ended up on WUWT and read Mosher and Fuller’s book. God it was like some 19th century Russian novel with all those characters! Then and only then I started wising up. Read more books. Looking up at my bookcase as I write this I can count 15 books; I read papers; I measured UHI; and of course, read blogs.
Couple of things since:
1) I figured the media would be all over it. What a story. Nope. Crickets.
2) Official whitewashes were conducted covering up the most egregious criminal behavior
3) US Gvt still thinks it’s a problem, or is pretending to think it is a problem
4) Windmills and solar are bogus gimmicks – sad really; like Easter Island moas, evidence of a rotting, decaying, degenerate society
5) Europeans love AGW, windmills and solar
6) Horizontal drilling and fracking have and continue to revolutionize energy production
6a) Little publicity of this with Obama and Eurocrats still blathering on about wind and solar
7) As time goes on and Arctic ice refuses to disappear; temperatures refuse to rise with CO2; earth greens evermore due to added CO2, climate models predict nothing of value – in fact they are so wrong that they aren’t even wrong – just meaningless; one has to ask these questions, “who believes in CAGW; and why do they believe in it when a cursory survey of the facts disproves it?”
And I have come to the conclusion that it is all political propaganda benefiting a tiny minority of opinion makers. Belief in CAGW is simply a decision some people make as a rational pursuit of their narrow self interest and some do quite will thank you (refer to John Holdren for example), and the lot of them travel the globe, make a ton of money, et al. It is a cottage industry for a certain breed of charlatan.
MSM pumps it up just like they pump up celebrity gossip tidbits. Nothing is real. Once one educates oneself and looks back, it is like looking back on some sort of mass religious hallucination.
dbstealey says:
July 26, 2013 at 4:00 pm
It was the first time I’ve seen a Supreme Court decision upheald by a 1 to 8 vote.
Normally a single vote wouldn’t have been sufficient in a 9-judge court.
Maybe Roberts thinks he’s king of the court. The Executive Branch has the same problem.
Blade,
I dare say that no-one over here had a clue that she was a warmie or lukewarmer or whatever until very recently when leftists started parroting this propaganda.
= = =
Thatcher’s role was crudely documented in “The Global Warming Swindle.”
If you’re interested in getting up to speed, check out Maggie’s 34 minute sermon to the U.N. in 1989:
http://youtu.be/VnAzoDtwCBg
You may be surprised.
M Courtney:
I believe you are trying too hard to lump people into specific categories thereby turning individuals into generalizations.
Instead, consider listing the many attributes and allow people to recognize their individual traits, reasons and what caused them to either get off or just plain jump the CAGW religion fence into the free thinkers, (yes, many people were certainly free thinkers from the start).
While it may be that there are people who joined the hard science side because of only one reason, many of us will be able to tick off a number of traits.
e.g. “Old fart, as in born before 1963; or they’ve always have been mature for their age, as in a thirty year old who loves big band music, jazz, rock and roll, muscle cars and plain old levis’.”
e.g. “New age rebel who doesn’t trust the establishment”
As for myself; I intimated above but did not state specifically:
— I’ve voted liberal for most of my life, with the last election being my first for voting mostly republican.
— I’ve never joined greenpeace(NOT) as I’ve never believed in their ideas of environment.
— I have joined; Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Trout Unlimited, Smithsonian, Nat Geo, Quail Unlimited, Recreational Fishing Alliance, Coastal Conservation Association (CCA), Philadelphia and New Orleans Zoos, New Orleans Aquarium and so on. Some I just can not afford any more or live too far away to enjoy, others like Sierra Club, Audubon, TU, Smithsonian, Nat Geo I no longer support since science, research and conservation is not their purpose anymore.
— I am definitively free market
— I am definitively small government
— I have always been a person who could perform more work in a day than many people could in a week. Some of ‘those’ folks are so narrow in perspective and require other people to take responsibility and make all decisions, that accepting a week’s worth of work is blindly generous.
— As such, I despise people who believe that my work is their work and we all share equally in the communal output. I share, to a fault, freely with people that I believe deserve it. Whether by their need, their friendship, their assistance, their trustworthiness, their age, gender, whatever. But it is my decision to share, not some overlord.
— Even in the socialist and communist organizations their is a hierarchy where the people with the greatest burden and need are the least compensated. My Grandmother would have starved in Poland if it wasn’t for her personal garden and root cellar.
— I am definitively older and belong in the old crowd.
— Male
— White? What is white? I primarily have Scottish, Irish, Ukrainian and Native American (Chippewa) ancestry. I have Scottish/English ancestor colonists in America during the 1700’s while both of my Father’s parents were born in Poland (Ukraine technically). My Grandfather immigrated to the USA before WWI, joined the army and served as a cook.
— Salary? I’m a retired governmental flunky, good health benefits, marginal retirement income with part of it based on Social Security. I paid into Social Security for over forty years; I do not accept someone calling it an ‘entitlement’ as if I was a non contributor. Especially since the Federal Government decided that SS would be a major part of our retirement package. So, I am not wealthy.
— I’ve worked many jobs from laborer at U.S. Steel to ‘Business Systems Analyst’; I’ve done data and database analysis, financial analysis, programming (FOCUS, SQL, COBOL, CICS, BASIC, C, C++, Visual Basic, and spreadsheet design in Lotus, Symphony, Excel, TSO Calc, BAL Assembly…). Yes, I built models, mostly financial and production/productivity models. So when someone say’s ‘computer modeled’, my hackles and blood pressure rise. No! I do not trust models unless all inputs, variables, algorithms, code and output are available for inspection.
This is the largest personal data dump I’ve ever made outside of a resume’.
With the rather notorious rogues like Lewpy, Gleick thief, Cooked and Nuttticelli drooling over all of the rich personal insights of everyone skeptical; perhaps Anthony could do something to prevent copying; at least try and prevent the unpleasant creeps with perhaps criminal intentions from easily getting this info? Is there a way?
Maybe Copyrighted Material; all rights to WUWT?
After seeing Margaret; I remember I forgot to list a trait/belief.
— I am definitely a lukewarmer, very low down on the lukewarm scale; like one thirtieth (Wild As_ number) the lukewarming of atmospheric H2O.
Blade says at July 26, 2013 at 8:31 pm… that as a US citizen you do not know that Maggie Thatcher started the whole cAGW thing as a political movement.
Well, she did. Even the right-wing columnist Christopher Booker concedes that, although he makes excuses about a death-bed conversion.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
Post-war British history is dominated by the conflict between the working class (organised as Union and the Labour Party they fund) and the establishment classes (Tories). In the 1970s this conflict led to the NUM (coal miners) bringing down Ted Heath’s inept Tory government. In the 1980s Thatcher’s Tories defeated “the enemy within” by closing the coal industry.
This was bad for the economy and for UK independence. But she had a science degree and the rest of the political and media establishment didn’t. Thus she found a scientific justification for her policy.
Some may want to say she was right and the unions were at fault but that is not relevant to why she subsequently leapt on CO2 as evil.
dbstealey,
I’ll quote the full paragraph which contains the portion of a sentence you cut out.
Abbott is comparing IPCC projections (he calls them ‘predictions’) to ice ages – he is not endorsing the IPCC view. He also indicates that it is by no means sure that CO2 has caused any of the warming over the instrumental record, and later says he casually anticipates future cooling.
He also suggests that AGW is a dud theory.
There is implication that he may think that increased CO2 should cause some warming, but the stronger implication is what I suggested, and I framed my question thus hoping to get an unequivocal response. I’ll defer to his answer, should he reply.
@ Power Grab — You are very welcome!
********************************************
Re: Lady Margaret Thatcher [emphasis mine]
No longer able to defend herself, she deserves to have the ENTIRE record made known:
“… however, that there was a dramatic twist to her story. In 2003, towards the end of her last book, Statecraft, in a passage headed “Hot Air and Global Warming”, she issued what amounts to an almost complete recantation of her earlier views.
She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.
In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology… .”
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
***************
Mr. Courtney, please tell your dad that he is missed. I hope all is well with him. Tell him to not be a stranger. And, my dear ally in the Battle for Truth in Science, I urge you to read Milton Friedman’s books. Unless your devotion to socialism amounts to being your religion, his lucid, thoughtful, logical, intelligent, explanations will open your eyes to the truth about free market capitalism.
At 12:40 AM on 27 July, Janice Moore enjoins:
Ouch. Extolling a Chicago School “freshwater Keynesian” monetarist (who helped to invent payroll tax withholding in order to more invidiously implement a flagrantly unconstitutional unapportioned direct federal exaction on wages and salaries). To quote a recent extract from David A. Stockman’s The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America:
You’d be far better (and more lucidly, honestly, and rigorously) informed by reading the books and other writings of Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard, particularly with regard to both the nature and causes of America’s Great Depression (which Friedman hideously misinterpreted) and monetary policy in general (Friedman’s entirely unjustified claim to fame). Returning to Stockman’s assessment:
And thus we get to Ben S. Bernanke (Friedman’s “most famous disciple”) perpetrating all the monetarist malfeasances imaginable, including “Quantitative Easing Infinity.”
It’s not that Murray Rothbard was without his lumps and bumps, but when it comes to everything really important about what Milton Friedman actually instantiated as a theorist in economics, Rothbard was (and remains) by far the better-grounded man when it comes to keeping his assessments and assertions congruent with reality.
I was just a casual subscriber to an online sceptical magazine, with no real thoughts on AGW, when I received a bulk email from Michael Schermer, or at least someone at his offices, that drew back the curtains. The email detailed his dramatic turnaround from skeptic to alarmist in a published letter. It was very reasonable, if you consider his saying that watching ManBearPig’s movie changed his worldview; but the use of inappropriate capitals to emphasise some words as sarcastic was very strange (this WONDERFUL movie has SO convinced me etc.). I believed then that there was pressure on people to accept a view rather than have scientists do their job.
Did anyone else receive that email?
great thread.
having no scientific education in anything remotely related to “climate sciences”, i had no idea whether the CAGW claims had any vailidity at all but, as i’ve found my own sources of news online since the mid-90s, i was aware there were sceptics trying to be heard. like many others, i thought well, true or not, it won’t hurt to clean up the environment.
then along came The Great Global Warming Swindle WHICH WAS LIKE A BREATH OF FRESH AIR (that Martin Durkin has never been commissioned to do a followup speaks volumes about the MSM’s role in the swindle!); then i found WUWT, CA, Joanne Nova, Bishop Hill et al.
then came Climategate. once BBC’s Paul Hudson authenticated the emails & was gagged by the Beeb, it was all over for CAGW for me, and time to try to get my head around at least a little of the science.
oh, and it is so much nicer being a part of the sceptical community.
I asked myself:
Why do the proponents of cAGW wish to conceal their data and their methods?
Why does the completely irrelevant “consensus” argument keep getting trotted out?
Why do they seem to shy away from open debate?
Of all the accessible data, papers describing methods, online resources for modeling, code etc, which ‘concealed’ information are you referring to other than proprietary information?
Because people keep saying there isn’t one. If it is ‘irrelevant’, why does it get challenged?
Feel free to take up any of the points i responded to, but you’ll have to have some patience for my replies, and keep checking upthread, as there is a policy, apparently, to delay admission of my posts (I still have one pending 4 comments above yours). I’m all for open debate if the format is suitable.
dbstealey is so good at reading my mind, it is getting eerie.
It is basic physics that adding CO2 to the atmosphere should cause some warming. For me, the principle uncertainty arises from the question of feedbacks and all the other unknown factors such as cloud cover, etc etc. We are just nowhere near the level of understanding of the climate system as a whole that we would need to be to start making accurate predictions. I think this makes me a ‘mainstream sceptic’.
By the way, the post by Brendan H at 8.35pm is very well written and extremely funny.
First contact with cAWG: The Bastard Operator From Hell 11
Enough said.
Wow! So many interesting and worthwhile comments! I’m an environmentalist, in the sense that we do live on a finite planet, and need to take care of all the natural systems that in fact support us, a species of animal with perhaps too much power to harm those systems. I started my route to climate scepticism when a teacher colleague invited me to watch ‘An inconvenient truth’ in her class, and I found at least six scientific errors on the first viewing (I know there are many more). That led me to start reading the real scientific literature (Google Scholar is wonderful), and it became clear that in fact there is no ‘consensus’. I was anyway predisposed to consider the idea of ‘consensus’ in science as a complete non-starter by my reading of the works of Sir Karl Popper about how science works.
Some contributors to this thread associate critical thinking with the political right; here I disagree. I am fully capable of critical thinking and reasoning in general, and I also believe that with the development of technology and energy use, and the extension of democratic, egualitarian thinking and attitudes, we can achieve a situation where all humans enjoy a life free of basic cares, with the basics of food, health, home, education, and gender equality guaranteed. I may be called ‘socialist’, ‘communist’, or whatever, but really, what is the problem with such an ideal?
It seems to me that the AGW scare is a device to keep the poorer / developing countries from developing their potential. Sorry, don’t have time right now to document this, but read ‘clean water’, ‘infant deaths from curable diseases’, ‘enough energy to transform a primitive life’ (no offence, simply descriptive), ‘resources for an education that really can transform a country’, and much more.
If Great Britain (my homeland) raised itself on the basis of coal, why deny that way to other countries like India and China?
Regards to all contributors.
Peter
When I was a little lad – more than sixty years ago I would often read my fathers newspapers. There often appeared some one paneled cartoons where a hobo looking bearded character was carrying a sign around “The End of the World is nigh”. There would be someone ready to ridicule the sign carrier. The sign carrier was never fazed – he had a determination and a belief to rely on.
Later I became an engineer. Worked in many countries, First Second and Third world. I saw many different political and religious systems and beliefs and amazingly there was always some character carrying a sign around “The End of the World is Nigh”.
Times have changed. The era of communication and information has arrived. The man with the sign has taken to the new spread the word methods.
One thing I always have noticed with the men who carry the sign. They also have a little coin collection bag with them. The modern men need a bigger coin collection bag to pay for their more expensive signs.
The communications and information age may have arrived however the basic understanding of physics, mathematics, electrical and atomic theory and chemistry have not improved the minds of the masses.
AGW, Malthusian principles, sudden ice age, etc, etc. To my mind pushed by bearded men with the familiar cartoon sign.
I once worked in Egypt. I made the acquaintance of an archeologist who had been hired by a religious organization. His brief was to interpret some ancient Egyptian temples and monuments and tie them into a documentary script that had already been written by the religious organizations scriptwriters. I asked him whether or not if the work he was doing was ethical. His answer? “It pays the bills”. As a bonus he received a free trip to Egypt where he also put in some time on his own research.
Just thought I’d add – another brit born engineer here. Started off neutral (though I’ve always been
sceptical of doomsday-sayers). Started digging and found out just how thin the science from the IPCC was.
Zen moments: Finding WUWT, getting banned from C.I.F and trying to follow and understand one of skepticalsciences’ rebuttals.
I’m just a dumb ol’ engineer who heard “…AGW……….yada…CO2….buzz” in the background and being aware of UHI and the effects of land use changes, sorta nodded my head but didn’t pay much attention. Then they put the ‘C’ in AGW and started talking taxes and that got my attention. I’m old enough to have been there and done that with Ehrlich and Sagen and taxes solely to control behavior are a big red flag. And good ol’ Al Gore came out with his horror film and my ears really perked up.
The first things I thought about were taught as basic education in my grade school days. The earth had been much warmer than the present and the oceans never boiled off. The Vikings settled and left Greenland and they haven’t moved back to speak of. Where I lived had been a shallow sea and there was a layer of limestone beneath us 20 to 40 meters thick. There had also been several glaciations over the same area. What’s to be alarmed about? There’s plenty of time to move if you’re going to get wet or buried under ice.
I started looking into CO2-based CAGW starting with Pielke Sr.’s blog (he was still allowing comments then) and I visited Real Climate once on purpose and -very briefly – a few more times by accident. I was also reading Climate Audit and Revkin’s blog, Dot Earth. It was becoming readily apparent that CAGW was politically driven and not really supported by the science or even a good grade school education.
I stumbled onto WUWT along about the time of “How Not To Measure Temperature #50-something” and soon became hooked by the nice mix of science, political discussion, and the “puzzling things in life” that Anthony presents. I like how WUWT explores how little we really know about climate and is a leader in pointing out studies that add to what little knowledge of climate we have. And I think the comments are the best feature of all; lightly censored, all viewpoints allowed, lot’s of wit and good humor displayed, and the scientific cat fights that errupt from time to time.
The way I see it, humans have an effect on local and regional climate through land use changes, but I’m not certain if those effects add up to an effect on global climate. The average global temperature sounds nice and keeps a lot of people off of the dole, but it doesn’t mean much of anything. I can’t foretell the future, but based on the past, my bet would be on a slide into another glaciation or two or three or a dozen times before the oceans would ever boil away. And it’s always wise to keep tabs on the weather, keep one eye one the sky for the stray asteroid, and be ready to move quickly at the first rumble of an earthquake or volcanic action. Now those are catastrophes to believe in.
After reading many of the comments on this post, has anyone noticed how often the year 2007 is mentioned as a pivotal year? The year they switched from an alarmist to a skeptic. It seems to come up frequently. When the AR4 was released in 2007, it really opened the floodgates of skepticism.
Barry 27 July 1:15am
Of all the accessible data, papers describing methods, online resources for modeling, code etc, which ‘concealed’ information are you referring to other than proprietary information?
– that described so eloquently in the Hockey Stick Illusion and Hiding the Decline.
Because people keep saying there isn’t one. If it is ‘irrelevant’, why does it get challenged?
– the UK Minister for Energy and “Climate Change” says on national TV that 97% of scientists agree with cAGW and Mike Hulme (not a sceptic, but Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia) has said “The “97% consensus” article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister should cite it.” However, the basic reason for it being irrelevant is because science does not work on consensus. It takes just one lone voice to challenge and show that the consensus view is wrong. Consensus is a completely specious argument.
Feel free to take up any of the points i responded to, but you’ll have to have some patience for my replies, and keep checking upthread, as there is a policy, apparently, to delay admission of my posts (I still have one pending 4 comments above yours). I’m all for open debate if the format is suitable.
– why is the Royal Society so reluctant to debate with the GWPF group? It would be the perfect opportunity for their eminent climate scientists to put forward their arguments in open debate. To my knowledge that debate has been declined in favour of a private discussion with Lord Lawson alone.
@ Blade
Being in the USA, I’m still not up-to-speed on what Thatcher actually believed or did, but I am certainly not going to take your word for it. I would guess it is you who is mistaken or lying here considering how you smeared Thatcher shortly after she passed away before she was even buried. So for now I will assume you are doing precisely the same as always and leave it to your fellow British countrymen to set the record straight. Or perhaps Chris Monckton can really clear it up once and for all.
Gareth responds,
Well Blade, you could get off your butt and look at the evidence, there is lots of it out there. Not living in the UK is no excuse I’m afraid, patently you have access to the internet and you could check these things out. And yes, I criticised Thatcher before she died, after she died and during her heartless and ruthless rule which, unlike you, we had to live through. My point is that you and others always jump to the conclusion that concerns about the climate are a left wing commie plot. They are not, and criticism of climate science is not a right wing plot, despite your best efforts to make it so. I criticise climate science on both sides, that does not make me a Communist one day and a Fascist the next. Base your opinions on the evidence, not on some fantasy of political expediency.
Here’s an extract from one article, there are many more out there , I fully understand you will accuse the writer of lying, but there we are.
“An oft forgotten aspect of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure was her stance as a supporter of action against climate change. In her 1988 speech to the royal society she expressed the notion that as a race “we have unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself.” In this instance her interest went further than rhetoric, the succeeding years saw Thatcher support some of the first scientists to investigate climate change. The main issue that disturbs those of us concerned about climate change is the entangled nature of science and politics.
The trend in the rightwing media (good examples being found in the journalism of the likes of James Delingpole and Peter Hitchens) is to play down the debate as a form of left-wing, anti-capitalist hippy propaganda. The inference is that the only reason the large majority of scientists believe that climate change is man-made is because of their involvement in a leftist conspiracy; a conspiracy that presumably intends to turn the whole world into a grey communist landscape littered with wind-powered gulags.
The rhetoric is not only unneeded but downright pathetic. The scientific community is much more apolitical and – unfortunately – amoral than the political and media spheres”
My path is rather different. I talk about it a little bit here (http://paulhager.org/wordpress/?p=105) without explicitly stating that I’m a skeptic. Suffice that I first began to look at Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) back in the late 1970’s. By sometime in the early 1980’s, I considered the evidence “dispositive”. In the cited article, I note that when the issue first became generally known to the public in the late 80’s, the “problem”, based upon what I had learned, it was greatly exaggerated. I began to look critically at AGW – actually Catastrophic AGW (CAGW) – in 1998, as I became aware that satellite and balloon data didn’t match the claims. I was a full-on skeptic by 2000. My position was data driven all the way, from beginning to end.
To me, the most interesting phenomenon here is governmental politicization of science. “Big Science”, “Government Science”, call it what you will, turns out to not produce the best science. This was a painful, disillusioning discovery for me and it attended my journey from Big Government Technocrat to limited government free marketeer.
I too attended Bob Carter’s Canberra book-launch Thursday, and whilst he was signing my copy, mentioned my horror at the heckling he got whilst presenting a talk a decade ago at the Australian National University.
This was from my academic colleagues at its Research School of Earth Sciences.
To my compliments at his keeping cool under such onslaught, he assured that he was used to it.
Such a spectacle was enough for me to delve further, ‘and the rest is history’.
I’m a retired electronics design engineer who worked in the semiconductor equipment industry. Although I’ve always taken science very seriously, the whole global warming thing stayed off my radar until just a few years ago.
My interest was sparked by two articles by Christopher Monckton in the Sunday Telegraph. Al Gore helped, too. His article in response to Monckton’s contained very little science but many personal insults. It didn’t take long to decide whose side I was on!
I believe that CO2 can increase the temperature, but by a negligible amount. I’ve had a lot of experience with feedback mechanisms (what servomechanisms realy want to do is oscillate). The climate (and weather) data strongly suggests a system that is rather unstable but dominated by negative feedbacks. It is rather like a poorly-designed servomechanism that does basically work, but suffers from a lot of short-term instability.
To me the ice core records are incredibly important. They clearly show that the CO2 follows the temperature, due to the action of the oceans. As far as I’m aware, the ice cores contain no examples of a change in CO2 being followed by a corresponding change in the temperature.
Like many people here, I feel a sense of outrage at what has happened. First, the science has been badly corrupted by ‘scientists’ who have a big vested interest in global warming. And governments around the world are squandering trillions of dollars trying to solve a problem that almost certainly doesn’t exist. For example, a large proportion of American cereal production has been switched to biofuels, in effect taking food from empty stomachs in order to feed empty gas tanks. It is not just wrong, it is evil.
The UK government is squandering at least a billion pounds every year on wind farms that don’t work most of the time. This morning all the UK wind farms were generating just 271 megawatts. Yesterday, while travelling from the Lake District to Euston, I spotted four solitary wind turbines. Only one was turning – and that may have been due to its electrinc motor required to prevent distortion of the bearings.
Truly global warming / climate change is a catastrophe for mankind. But that catastrophe has nothing to do with the actual global warming. Ironically the modest global warming and the increase in atmospheric CO2 have been of enormous benefit to manking, just as the warming was during the MWP. It’s what happens when the world gets colder that we should fear.
I’m retired now, and I’m fairly confident that sanity will return, maybe encouraged by the onset of global cooling. But I’m not holding my breath….
Chris
I’ve personally never seen someone “convert” from skeptic to believer. I’ve seen people pretend to be skeptics, or possibly be scientifically illiterate and think they were a skeptic until someone talked them the other way. But the flow of thinking people is from believer to skeptic.
I was a believer, I’d use the term “passive believer” because I never really researched, I just accepted the AGW story as I’d heard it. 1998 was a good year for believing the world was warming. We practically didn’t have a winter, and when we did it involved an unusually massive dump of snow on St. Patrick’s Day.
Anyway, I was working for a company that potentially would be on the receiving end of “carbon credits”, and I did a bit of research about that. Seemed to me to be a great way to make big money. A friend and I were thinking big. We decided to build a website selling carbon offsets, and back it up with trees planted in Canada, in deforested areas, under the supervision of the government. We had actually gone as far as to have contacts at lumber and paper companies, the government, and a few environmental groups, all of whom were more than willing to cooperate (for a fee).
All that was left was to finish the site. As a web developer the backend was no problem, taking money, keeping track of trees planted and calculating “carbon footprints” along with the potential sequestration provided by the right kind of trees for the climate, it was all easy stuff. The only thing I needed to do was get the site content right. I needed to convince the uninformed that they needed to do this, it was a potential global catastrophe if we didn’t all change things.
You probably know what happened next. I started doing research, for real. I wanted the hard numbers, the facts, the details. And I was actually surprised when I realized there were none. Yeah, I avoided the “skeptic sites”, because the few I found were all badly designed, with the kind of ranting style, giant fonts, and grammatical nightmares usually reserved for religious cranks. But one day I found “Still Waiting For Greenhouse”. And I started reading it.
It only took a day or two of cross-checking what John Daly had written with the official “line” for the whole house of cards to fall down in front of me. Not only was there no actual “global warming” effects, like unusual rising sea levels, unusual storms, or any of the other dire effects we were constantly being told about, but I was seeing people using MODELS as data. As a computer guy I knew that was ridiculous. And when I realized they were comparing modern digitally measured temperatures with old mercury thermometer readings I was astounded.
Over a relatively brief time I realized the entire thing was, my word, a scam. I’ve spent almost the last 10 years actually laughing at the ridiculous claims, ludicrous projections, outrageous warnings, and outright fear. None of it has happened. For a while there, everything was “worse than first thought”, which is not possible, since what they “thought” was worse than anything. An Inconvenient Truth was pure entertainment for me (other than the anger at watching that dimwitted former VP lie his face off). I’ve always wondered how the pullback would look, since it was always obvious to me that eventually most people would see through it.
I’m seeing that now. Since Climategate a lot of formerly convinced governments and others have backed off. From what I can see, many are looking for a way to get out of what they were committed to without admitting they were fooled. Not too many politicians (people who might be idiots, but know how to manipulate people and often aware of when they’re being manipulated) are buying the feeble excuses for what Climategate was “really” about. Mostly they’re left “saving face”. Eventually they’ll pick a scapegoat and crucify him. Hopefully it’ll be that dimwitted ex-VP.
So that leaves the current crop of late-to-the-party skimmers, attempting to cash in on what remains of the fear. Like, for example, the dimwitted current President, the worst kind of opportunist. Also like, for example, the kind of fear-mongering science-illiterates that we see many of on here. And the media, who can’t admit they’ve been wrong all along and who tend to have a financial interest in the scare-mongering. When the truth is finally unavoidable they’ll never tell anyone, they’ll just stop talking about it. I so long for that day.
Gareth says
‘And yes, I criticised Thatcher before she died, after she died and during her heartless and ruthless rule which, unlike you, we had to live through. My point is that you and others always jump to the conclusion that concerns about the climate are a left wing commie plot.’
Margaret Thatcher was actually Britain’s most popular Prime Minister but polarised opinion as can be seen In Gareth’s vitriol
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/10/margaret-thatcher-more-po_n_3049755.html
Heartless and ruthless? Certainly not. She gave us back our pride and sense of purpose after a long period of decline, economically and politically. Many who thought the world owed them a living, should be in feather bedded jobs or were Union Barons came to dislike her.
So I fundamentally disagree with Gareth’s first comment. However I do agree that the idea that AGW is some kind of commie plot is very silly.
Margaret Thatcher was a scientist and at the time the scientific indications were that there was a change in the climate towards warming. 20 years earlier the scientific belief had been there was a cooling.
History is not a very well taught subject these days and our short termism and increasingly self centred attitudes perhaps means that anything that happened before we were born can be discounted. Until we recognise that climate has always changed we can not begin to recognise that the present warming is all part of the historic pattern.
tonyb
There are plenty of insults going back and forth on both sides of this argument and plenty of people with vested interests.
I think the discussion needs to be broken down along three dimensions. Too often both sides slip from arguments along one dimension to arguments on the other.
The first dimension is AGW without the C. How much are we warming and how much is warming caused by humans? Among scientists we can probably find a bell curve with outliers on either side. One outlier side thinks we are warming a lot, maybe 6+ degrees by end of the century, and it is caused almost entirely by humans. Another side thinks we are not warming at all or maybe will be cooling and humans have nothing to do with it. This is clearly a scientific question and most scientists fall into the middle range. Most skeptics think there is some AGW but would fall into the group on the lower end of curve. This is where I am. Better and more science will eventually arrive at a better answer but, right now, the models need a lot of work.
The second dimension is impact – the C part. Judgment of impact is influenced by the first dimension but not completely determined by it. One might be on the high side of the curve of the first dimension but still believe the impact to be unimportant or perhaps beneficial or on the lower side of the first dimension but still consider impact to be significant. Impact is even more difficult to model than the first dimension because the effect of warming on sea level, storms, ecological systems, and agriculture cannot be measured directly. We have to combine models of the system that might be impacted with the climate model. Anything under the control of humans and subject to future technological progress can throw off the projections. Many of the alarmist prediction about population growth came true. The predictions about mass starvation did not because of technological progress in agriculture.
The third dimension is what to do about (C)AGW. This is even more difficult to deal with because it is heavily determined by the first two dimensions. If you are on the lower side of the first dimension then you have much less inclination to do anything unless you are on the upper side of the second dimension. This also gets deeply into vested economic interests, considerations of political philosophy, and what is politically feasible.
Unfortunately many people jumble these dimensions together. We have people on the left who see economic interests vested in not doing anything and conclude the science of the high end of dimension one must be right. We have people who dislike liberal policies and conclude the middle ground of science must be wrong and the science is all hogwash.
I think the middle ground of science is mostly right although I fall on the lower side of the curve. Where I find the greatest problems is in the second dimension where the science is much more problematical.
There is a vast difference between a wrong scientific hypothesis and a wrong calculation within the hypothesis.
One can become a denialist of a current social theory like tulip trading for a quick quid, years ago, or one can be a denialist of some of the contradictory measurement methods used to show that the ocean levels on Earth are changing at a certain rate.
I guess I was in my mid-20s (mid 1960s) when I realised this difference and saw it in action. It was because there were so many mistakes being made in climate science methods and calculations, that I inferred (illogically) that the hypothesis of anthropogenic climate change was wrong. Man seemed too puny to change nature too easily.
I did not have a time when I thought AGW was right, so there was no epiphany. Like coitus interruptus before you start.
Then I honed my swords for the anti-nuclear mob, for the company I joined in 1973 had found Ranger Uranium in Oct 1969. I went through a near full cycle of activism rebuttal on anti nuclear and got to know a few of the professional agitators, the rent-a-crowd, and was distressed by their forlorn look at the future of any major advance. Next was the anti logging debate, because we also owned a large forestry and paper company. There was also anti-World Heritage stuff, objecting to United Nations intrusion and misuse of Treaties. Two sites we earnestly wanted to explore were made World Heritage and then turned into, or placed adjacent to, military training areas with live ammo.
It just gets more illogical and control freak stuff each passing year.
I’m still waiting for the seminal paper that provides a derived link between greenhouses gas concentrations in the air and the global temperatures that affect them. Or even a reliable paper on pH change of the oceans. Sloppy, ever so sloppy, is this new boy on the block by the self-adopted name of climate science.
“tonyb says:
July 27, 2013 at 5:57 am”
Well said. Thatcher was not only a scientist (Chemist), she was a wife and a mother. People all too readily (Conveniently?) forget what UK life was like during the winter of discontent, the power worker strikes in the 1970’s, general industrial “action” which, effectively, destroyed British manufacturing industry (Hey! We’ll just “offshore” it to somewhere where people will make stuff rather than take “action”). Some people blame Heath in 1974 for taking the UK to the Common Market, well maybe, the Tories did not have a mandate for that. So what?
Britain at that time was labelled “The Dirty Man of Europe” because, primarily, of it’s coal fired industry and power generation, hence the coal mining target. BTW, more mines were closed under Labour Govn’ts before and under Thatcher. Britain was “blamed” for acid rain over European forests. However, Thatcher needed “political science” to back up policies. The UEA CRU was born (To prove “coal is bad”). This is all before North Sea natural gas (NSNG) production began to slope off (circa yr 2000). I even remember when NSNG came online! The rest is history.
When the Discovery documontary “Raising the Mammoth” was aired around 1998,
apparantly not a lot of people did realize that there was a big formidable bug for climate science here. So here is this Yukagir mammoth dwelling on a big productive steppe, together with horses and antelopes in northernmost Siberia during the Last Glacial Maximum. No lonely behemoth dragging himself through the howling blizzard pursuid by a pack of hungry wolfs. That’s caricature. Something was clearly wrong here. The Last Glacial Maximum was not that glacial at all.
That’s what started it for me.
Default warmer here. Scientists wouldn’t lie – would they? What turned me towards scepticism was the language employed against such. Why so abusive about science? Why the personal insults? So, like others, I started poking around the internet, doing some reading, and here I am today.
Johnathon,
thanks for the reply.
Ok, you agree with the physics. So it comes down to what degree of warming may occur.
Do you
a) think the magnitude warming from CO2 +feedbacks is too uncertain to say anything concrete?
b) ‘know’ that there will be little response to increasing CO2 levels?
Just making sure I have your views straight before I make my argument.
Whenever someone asks me to believe him only because he is a specialist, I BY DEFAULT become sceptical.
It’s in my genes, you know.
Just ask the pastor of the church I was obliged to visit until I was 18 par ordre du mufti (Dad), how this worked out for him…
Steven Mosher says:
July 25, 2013 at 1:06 pm
Sadly the first person to read all the mails
============
irrelevant. straw-man. appeal to authority. the author didn’t state that ALL emails showed misbehavior. it only takes 1. there were many.
the emails clearly showed the scientists were attempting to direct the findings and results towards an already agreed conclusion. this is contrary to the scientific method, which relies on full disclosure of the evidence, both pro and con. the scientists involved were breaking the fundamental rules of good science.
there is great danger of injustice when evidence is suppressed. thus, in law you cannot withhold evidence, even if it is contrary to your case. under the rules of discovery, you must make all evidence available to the other side, regardless of any harm it might do your case.
@ Tontb
Margaret Thatcher was actually Britain’s most popular Prime Minister but polarised opinion as can be seen In Gareth’s vitriol
Gareth responds
Thatcher was indeed very popular with those that benefitted, but not so with the majority who saw all the social achievements of the post war years undermined. She did some good things, but like Blair, her downside outweighed her positive achievements. Reminiscing with rose coloured spectacles gives a distorted view. I do appreciate that she kept climate science out of politics unlike todays right wing commentators. She was indeed worshipped by the hard right, but hated by those who saw her as the most divisive force in UK political history, and no fawning, creeping or hero worship will change that. I suppose at least she was to the left of Obama, but most US citizens would never understand that and would have figuratively burned her at the stake if she had run for office in the US.
In consideration of whether Thatcher was the most popular Prime minister, it may help to read her obituary from a middle of the road newspaper.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/margaret-thatcher-obituary-the-most-divisive-political-leader-of-modern-times-8564559.html
I tend toward the centre left of politics and dislike extremes of either philosophy, but we should recall that the evil men do oft lives after them, the good they do is interred with their bones.
I was involved in the soap biz for awhile and the head of inventory decided that computer modeling was the way to go to predict how many cases of soap would be required. He bought an expensive modeling system and got us to plug in all the historical sales figures, promotions, seasonality, areas of the country, brand, and size. Going forward we were to use the historical data to predict how many cases of soap could be sold using the same promotions, time of year, location, brand and size. Guess what? Couldn’t do it. We could not capture the random factor of nature – human in this case. So, if we can’t predict the sales of something as simple as a box of soap, or as complex as the economy, how the h*ll are we expected to predict the climate?
As young lad learning science, maths, physics et al the basic understanding from the natural sciences of the time was that 14.7C was the average temperature of the world @ 1013mb and from memory 29.54 ” of mercury pressure. That was a shipload time ago, more than half a century.
Please can any one here tell me has this 14.7C been exceeded by any amount that could possibly cause trouble? I see anomalies in temperatures in charts and graphs and models, but they tell nothing. What is the new or is it the old guesstimate of the worlds temperature, that is the standard for aircraft and shipping. Has the standard barometric pressure changed?
I have on my wall a thermometer, barometer combination in perfect working order manufactured by a jewelry company in my home town in 1901. In light of recent decades does it need recalibrating to show the new and approved system of measure.
It is not just climate that has been hijacked, science per se has been less than honest and much needs to change.
Interesting that there has been no mention of Arthur Robinson’s pivotal Oregon Petition in the discussion so far…
Gareth
I think you are rewriting history from your own (substantially) left of centre position. I don’t recognise the person you describe. This country was a basket case when she took over. It was very much better (but by no means perfect) by the time she left.
tonyb
That’s a great point about Art Robinson’s pivotal Oregon Petition Project. Here’s the link:
http://www.petitionproject.org/
Thanks Jabba…
Typical of almost every geologist not working for government, I believe CAGW is a complete crock.
Add the rantings of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other pseudo environmental groups and any doubt about the validity of CAGW theory just disappears.
I know a lot of scientists and not one believes in CAGW, but then none of them work for government, where there are obvious employment consequences for not parroting the party line at all times.
Guys like Jai just reinforce my certainty that CAGW advocates are by and large either charlatans or professional peddlers of bad science.
What’s unique about this petition is that you actually mail it in Snail Mail. I would sign, it but I’m not a scientist. Any scientist reading here and agrees should sign it. Here’s the list of the 31,487 that have signed it so far. (I See Don Easterbrook, but can’t find Willie Soon) Is your name on it? :
http://www.petitionproject.org/signers_by_last_name.php?run=all
jchang says:
July 25, 2013 at 12:29 pm
….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
============
he is however required to make it available to the other side, even if it hurts his case. suppression of evidence by a prosecutor is a violation of the 5th amendment to the United States Constitution. This can result in a mistrial and/or the dismissal of the prosecutor.
Barry, I’m afraid you’re trying to frame the question in a way that is not fair. Your suggested stances boil down to:
a) I don’t know anything and so can’t reasonably claim the warmists are wrong, or
b) I’m an anti-science idiot.
So of course I’m going for…
c) It is clear that the natural variability of the global climate greatly exceeds any changes seen since industrialisation, and anyway if it was possible for anything like runaway warming to take place it would have happened millions of years ago, plus it is not possible to run a control Earth, plus I am yet to see a single warmist clarify what it would take to falsify their conjecture, etc etc. Pretty much just read any random thread from WUWT, Climate Audit, Judith Curry etc, it’s all in there.
Mr. Abbot-
Like so many other commenting on your post, I first visited this blog with the hopes of engaging in thought-provoking discussions about the science of climate change. Instead, I found myself consistently and rudely shouted down when I suggested an alternative point of view. When I posted a comment during my unpaid lunch break at work (a government office) Anthony personally emailed me threatening to “expose” my activity to my superiors. I’ve seen more name-calling and poorly veiled threats of violence on this blog than I can count. Anthony and his followers regularly bemoan the use of terms like “denier”, but colorful phrases like “eco-idiots” make up a healthy chunk of the lexicon here, by bloggers and commenters alike. It’s a virtual lock that I will be floored by hypocrisy each time I visit this blog.
I would ask you to continue reading the WUWT posts and comments and keep track of how often you come across a well-formed conclusion based on an understanding of peer-reviewed science and how often you find yourself exposed to nothing more than a profound and paranoid distaste for government. My guess is you will find, as I did, that the ratio is nowhere near what one should reasonably expect from a “science” blog.
Please, withhold your judgement of Anthony, his fellow authors and the denizens of this website until you’ve taken time to carefully and thoughtfully examine the ideas and words posted here with the same skeptical intuition described in your post.
All the best.
tonyb says:
July 27, 2013 at 5:57 am
Gareth Phillips says:
July 27, 2013 at 8:26 am
– Baroness Thatcher, Statecraft, 2002
Phil M. says:
July 27, 2013 at 9:42 am
“When I posted a comment during my unpaid lunch break at work (a government office) Anthony personally emailed me threatening to “expose” my activity to my superiors”
And yet, here you are freely being allowed to post. What aren’t you telling us about this conflict? What, exactly, did you post?
“Anthony and his followers regularly bemoan the use of terms like “denier”, but colorful phrases like “eco-idiots” make up a healthy chunk of the lexicon here, by bloggers and commenters alike.”
“Eco-idiot” is obviously an empty taunt intended to vent frustration. It has none of the loathsome connotations of the “denier” label, a label which is purposefully intended to draw an equivalence between those who disagree with AGW advocates and “Holocaust Denier” kooks who seek to cast doubt on one of the worst genocides every perpetrated.
I became skeptical because of the use of the term “denier” against anyone who had questions about the anthropogenic warming claim. Another reason is the lack of real alternatives. Thorium is something we could be using right now, Geothermal energy i.e tapping the volcanoes in Iceland and reducing our energy worries to zero. What do we get instead? Biofuels, solar panel and wind farms. None of which threaten oil industry.
@TonyB
Gareth
I think you are rewriting history from your own (substantially) left of centre position. I don’t recognise the person you describe. This country was a basket case when she took over. It was very much better (but by no means perfect) by the time she left.
TonyB
You are probably correct that I write from a centre left perspective (not substantially left any more than you are substantially right) But don’t we all write from personal perspective and subjective interpretation? My main gripe with Climate science is that many of the mainstream scientists who support the so called ‘consensus’ do not recognise this. They see everything in black and white, hence the silly 97% issue. All perspective is subjective as we see with Thatcher. Even the most quantitive research can be interpreted in many ways, and far too many people start their studies with a hypothesis which they seek to prove. This site can be a bit like hard work, I’ve been accused of everything from being a catastrophist to an anti -semite. Annoying in the extreme but nowhere near as bad as say Skeptical science or the Guardian blogs which do not allow any dissent from the accepted norm. In such worlds there are no colour, just black or white and we digress in such places at our peril.
Phil M, you seem to assume that I am new to WUWT. I only started posting recently but have been reading the site for many years. You are quite right that there is often a full and frank exchange of views, which to my mind is healthy. Sometimes Anthony gets upset at someone, but it is his site. Perhaps he deletes posts, or illicitly edits them, or bans people who simply ask difficult questions; I wouldn’t know. But I’ve seen the screen shots from RC: it definitely goes on there. There are other websites I visit where the most appalling language and insults are used on all sides. WUWT is very civilised indeed. If you believe in your point of view you will always have to persevere, whatever the discussion forum.
If Anthony did act towards you as you say he did, personally I wouldn’t approve. Perhaps it depends what you wrote. However, you should note carefully that your comment has passed moderation and been posted.
Jai Mitchell:
“white males over the age of 35 with above average incomes”
– Mike Mann
– Al ‘Jazeera’ Gore
– weepy Bill McKibben
– Joe ‘rantin’ Romm
– Dana ‘drill-bit’ Nuttyjelly
– Jimbo ‘adjuster’ Hansen
– a warmist professor who lives down the road from me
Need I go on?
BTW All the skeptics I know love to join me in the pub. It’s where those weary of MSM BS like to reside.
Gareth
Nicely put. I stopped commenting at the Guardian as everything I wrote was deleted. Even links to the Met office backing up a (sceptical) point I made disappeared. Its a highly biased site which is why I like it when warmists come over here, else we all sing from the same song sheet and don’t learn anything to challenge our biases.
tonyb
Tony
Sorry to harp on this, but next time someone quotes to me about the 97% of scientists who agree with CAGW, I will ask them this:
If the petitionproject.org represents 3% of the scientists with 31,487 signers, where is the list of 1,018,080 scientists which would represent the 97% ?
Where is their petition project?
Thanks Art Robinson. I was first introduced to him on the Rachel Maddow interview:
I “fell in love with him” due to that interview.
I almost sent him money for his campaign after that interview, but still have never sent money to any campaign. I am cheap, and I live in Mexico.
As far as my testimonial about global warming, er climate change, er climate disruption, er extreme weather, just the constant name changing is enough to keep me a skeptic. I have been a skeptic since I can remember – never had an epiphany.
Was a point made?
In keeping with Johnathon abbott’s testimonial about familiarising onesself with all sides of the debate, here are some critical comments on the petition.
Bottom line is 0.3% of the science community signed the petition, the petition makers won’t release the data (the full qualifications/field of each signatory), it is likely only a small fraction have expertise in climare science (should statisticians give opinion on neurosurgery?).
There are more opinions than this, of course. It pays to be skeptical.
REPLY: Except that “skeptical science” isn’t. That’s the best you can do? Laughable. A rhetorical point: should anonymous cowards like you with no qualifications in climate have an opinion on climate science? -Anthony
@Peter Hannan –
If you want to see a convincing, frightening, enraging view of how the greenies want to keep the Third World poor, read Paul Drieesen’s Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Deatyh
Henry Bauer wrote a book about the pernicious influence of expensive science, government funding, Big Academia, and national and international science bureaucracies in creating dogmas (consensuses): Dogmatism in Science and Medicine, at http://www.amazon.com/Dogmatism-Science-Medicine-Dominant-Monopolize/dp/0786463015/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370848052&sr=1-1&keywords=dogmatism+in+science+and+medicine
Janice Moore: I will speak to Dad but he’s on holiday at the moment and needs his rest.
He has just, finally, fully retired and it was probably a bit later than ideal.
Also, as you may have noticed, he is very stubborn. This led to long threads of ripostes to people he disagreed with on this very site. Ripostes that were usually (though not always) pertinent and technically correct and even very occasionally correctly formatted.
Yet, alas, my father’s lack of IT skills led to a serious faux pas with respect to our host and a ban from this site followed. Not a permanent ban (a week I think, but my knowledge is all second-hand) yet my father doesn’t want to come back. Stubborn ,you see.
Interestingly, he also feels it’s no longer worth it as cAGW is a dying creed that’s not worth kicking anymore.
CAGW may be a dying creed, but it has still left an indelible mark.
In Australia we have a Murray-Darling Basin plan based on corrupted science (that we are probably stuck with), and a carbon tax, shortly to become marketised and linked to the corrupted European trading scam (ETS).
Although this seems trivial, and as you know C is worth hardly anything per tonne right now; the CRITICAL thing is that the tax in its market guise will be beyond the reach of the ballot-box. It will simply be impossible in the future for people in this this “democratic” country to vote it away.
As a permanent feature of our tax system that people won’t be able to do anything about it will shovel truck-loads of money off-shore via, NGOs (non-government organisations) such as WWF etc. to distribute on their “pet” projects.
The scientific basis for CAGW from an Australian perspective, has been hijacked by WWF-linked climate activists in Australia’s science institutions, including the Bureau of Meteorology; CSIRO; the ClimateCommission and of course Universities (especially the University of NSW; University of Tasmania; ANU; and Macquarie University).
Our peak “science” institution CSIRO, has been described as an “employer of last resort”; and of having a “toxic work culture”, which says it all.
Australians in general; have been set-up by clever marketing, and I’d have to say, a very successful science/media strategy. It cannot possibly be claimed that research in Australia is being conducted for the public-good; or that it is independent (of causes); or that it is not heavily censored.
I understand the thrust of this thread is not about science per. se. but in reality science is the crux of the issue. More correctly, it is data-based research and analysis that holds the key to just about everything being discussed here (except of course UK politics and M. Thatcher).
What has been forgotten in that vein, was that in the 60’s to 80’s, much of the UK’s productive capacity was getting too expensive. Coal could be bought off-shore much cheaper than it could be mined using labour intensive methods in mines that were past their use-by date. For Britt’s to afford their own coal, it had to be heavily subsidised, more and more. There came the point when it simple had to be shut-down.
Recently I toured the UK and I saw evidence of this, in England and Wales. I was surprised at how much metaliferous mining had occurred in the past, but unsurprised at how long mining had been propped up; and how uneconomic it became as a result.
It is not all doom-and-gloom. The stuff is still in the ground, and the economics of getting it out could reverse in the future. Manufacturing could re-surge, but it won’t on the back of wind turbines that work only half of the time; solar panels that are fogged in for much of the day; and dreams about tidal electricity generation when again, for a lot of the daily tide-cycle there is little or no potential energy to be used.
My plea is for people to get hold of data and check things out for themselves!
Cheers,
Bill Johnston
I’d been thinking about doing a longer comment about my personal “path” including what I perceived as the motives of the perpetrators but I won’t.
The short version, a couple of decades or more ago the Environmental Defense Fund and Citizens’ Action were using their usual tactics trying to scare people about Atrazine in drinking water. SEPP and Junkscience took an interest. In checking them out I noticed articles about “Global Warming”. I remember one about satellite measurements not agreeing with it. I remember balloon measurements not agreeing with it and their temperature readings agreeing with the altimeter reading of those balloons. (I also remember one about some guy that was running around taking pictures of surface weather stations.8-)
The MSM was touting it more and more. Somewhere in there “An Inconvenient Truth” came out the Hero of the Holy Ozone was once again hoisted on his own petar … pedestal.
So everybody seemed to be pushing the globe warming and applauding those who said it was.
Now, my daily routine for years had been to turn on The Weather Channel in the morning. When “your weather on the 8’s” was done at 5:30, it was time to leave for work. (Since “Wake Up With Al” came on, I mute it.) They would usually show the record high and low for that day. I began to notice that the years for the record highs weren’t recent.
In 2007 I copy/pasted the records for my little spot on the globe from the NWS into Excel. After getting the dates, temps and years into separate columns, I sorted them by year. Most of the record highs for my area were set before 1950. (The most recent, in 2007, had been set in 2001.) Most of the record lows were set after 1950. No sign of a Hockey Stick. It would seem those who had the ear of the MSM were mistaken. I did it again a couple of times in later years and noticed that old records were being changed. Not broken. Changed. (For example, the record for July 31 on the 2007 list was 96*F set in 1954. On the 2012 list it was 100*F set in 1999.)
This isn’t about an honest scientist getting it wrong. This is about powerful people manipulating the weather (on paper anyway) to gain more power.
barry says:
“Bottom line is 0.3% of the science community signed the petition…”
That is not the bottom line. The bottom line is that the number of OISM co-signers far exceeds any numbers the alarmist crowd has been able to come up with. Therefore, the alarmists’ “consensus” canard is falsified. The true consensus, as stated by more than 31,000 OISM co-signers [including more than 9,000 with PhD’s in the hard sciences], is that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
barry has no science or engineering credentials [if I am wrong, post them here… verifiably.] barry is not a professional; he is simply an uneducated layman arguing his climate false alarm. But even so, barry must surely be aware that every OISM co-signer is listed publicly; and has been cross-checked, and has earned one or more degrees in the hard sciences.
Those co-signers understand the scientific argument, and they were willing to put their names to the statement that CO2 is harmless and beneficial. What more can barry say? He and every other climate alarmist together cannot produce more than a very small fraction of the OISM numbers — and most of those alarmist names are riding the climate grant gravy train. Who should we believe? Scientists and engineers with nothing to gain [and maybe much to lose] by signing their names to the OISM statement? Or should we believe a much smaller clique with a vested, self-serving interest in keeping the climate scare alive? Because they cannot both be right.
“Harmless”. “Beneficial”. Think about it, barry. Maybe the scales will fall from your eyes.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
At this point I’m adding nothing to the discussion at Watts Up With That, and the half-dozen page views I might get with this certainly have little effect, but this is a noteworthy point from a concerned individual. Someone who obviously thinks. Most of the comments are thoughtful too. So, clicking over to Anthony’s is worth your time to read. It is an example of how reason is supposed to work. He also notes well a couple of key drivers behind the CAGW movement.
Being educated in the 70s and even having a bachelor degree in Geology I am a bit ashamed to admit that I only started questioning the CAGW story in 2006 after having seen a ‘climatesceptic’ on tv. He was heavily outnumbered by learned CAGW believers who tried to make a fool out of him.
On the internet I discovered a number of critical climatescience sites with serious scientists (like Roy Spencer) exchanging well written critical opinions that seemed to make a lot of (common) sense.
I was completely surprised that there existed such a wealth of reasonable insights, backed up by credible data, that largely debunked the whole notion of CAGW. I was so excited that I decided to write an article on the subject (in Dutch) in the format of a testimonial to try and convince the public that the big problem that they (and I up to that moment) seemed to be perceiving did not exist in reality. The article was even published in a small critical agricultural monthly.
Since then i have been following developments closely, with the debate becoming more political (and scientifically absurd) by the day. In 2010 I published a second article on the broader subject of sustainability although this subject has nothing to do with my everyday professional life (and my views on the subject could even hurt my career).
All in all I recognize a lot in Abbott’s story. Sorry I cannot offer a testimonial going from sceptic to believer, which would not doubt be more interesting (and no doubt a lot rarer).
Late to the party. Why am I a skeptic?
When I first learned about the dangers associated with CO2, I was curious. I bought “An Idiots Guide to Global Warming”. Not much meat. So started looking around the internet. Came across Real Climate first. Read that for awhile and got tired of Gavin ranting when the arguments were sound. This led me to ClimateAudit.org. Much of what was discussed was over my head. I wasn’t prepared for the depth of the statistical analysis. But the ClimateAudit article that turned me around covered a study on UHI by Tom Peterson. McIntyre’s analysis of the article showed me that Tom Peterson and the rest of the alarmists were basing their views on an artificial temperature increase. Since then, my views have only been solidified as more and more data shows that CAGW is false.
I started commenting here in the spring of 2009, before Climategate, when the volume of comments and the number of threads was much lower. At that time the moderators apparently had time to edit comments on a line by line basis (as a result, comments sometimes piled up for up to half an hour or more before being posted), and were (IIRC) much stricter about enforcing house rules. This site was never as strict as CA, where attribution of motives is not allowed (no “fraud”-word allowed, for instance), but it lacked the problems you described.
It’s pained me to see warmists so often immediately called trolls or addressed insultingly. That stuff should be moderated out (those portions snipped), and posters reminded to be more polite. Only retaliatory insults should be allowed–plus expressions of exasperation at persistent and deliberate obtuseness.
The problem is that this site isn’t funded by Big Oil, and hence its unpaid volunteer moderators can’t be expected to do all the work that’s needed. (Heck, the strain is now so great that prior moderation has had to be abandoned.) This is just one more indication that our side isn’t well funded and well organized.
(For more indications, see my thread, “Notes from Skull Island” at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/notes-from-skull-island-why-skeptics-arent-well-funded-and-well-organized/ )
dbstealey
you said, “Even climate alarmists like Richard Alley show that the MWP, the RWP, the Minoan Optimum, etc., were significantly warmer than now. ”
and I say, the most comprehensive analysis to date shows
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/holocene/marcott/marcott-fig-s12.gif
and
I know you think it is a grand conspiracy but the reality is, no, it is the reality. These temperatures have not been seen before, except, maybe the holocene optimum, which we are basically tied.
——
You also say,
“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.”
and I say,
1. fraud or malfeasance:
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/global_warming_contrarians/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html
Six official investigations have cleared scientists of accusations of wrongdoing.
A three-part Penn State University cleared scientist Michael Mann of wrongdoing.
Two reviews commissioned by the University of East Anglia”supported the honesty and integrity of scientists in the Climatic Research Unit.”
A UK Parliament report concluded that the emails have no bearing on our understanding of climate science and that claims against UEA scientists are misleading.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Inspector General’s office concluded there was no evidence of wrongdoing on behalf of their employees.
The National Science Foundation’s Inspector General’s office concluded, “Lacking any direct evidence of research misconduct…we are closing this investigation with no further action.”
Other agencies and media outlets have investigated the substance of the emails.
The Environmental Protection Agency, in response to petitions against action to curb heat-trapping emissions, dismissed attacks on the science rooted in the stolen emails.
Factcheck.org debunked claims that the emails put the conclusions of climate science into question.
Politifact.com rated claims that the emails falsify climate science as “false.”
An Associated Press review of the emails found that they “don’t undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.”
2. “threatening journals”, “firing scientists”
again, this is a falsehood, has been reviewed, the discussion is normal amongst scientists who believe that the quality control process of peer reveiw at a specific journal is no longer sound. Simply stating that people shouldn’t submit there is a correct path when this happens at a journal (for fear of losing professional reputation).
The paper in question, after publishing was so inherently flawed that,
In the case of Soon & Baliunas 2003, it was not only CRU which reacted strongly to the paper. The Review recounts:
A number of review editors resigned as a reaction against the publication of what they regarded as a seriously flawed paper. The journal’s publisher admitted that the journal should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication. The Editor in Chief resigned on being refused permission by the publisher to write an editorial about what he regarded as a failure of the peer review system. [8.3]”
———-
you also say,
“Note the ad hominem attack”
and I say,
no, it isn’t an attack at all, it is an observation, there is nothing wrong with being a white male over the age of 35 with a conservative political slant and a higher than average income. . .
it is simply the overwhelming demographic of a climate “skeptic”.
“cool white dudes”
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in
the United States
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/students/envs_5000/mccright_2011.pdf
“We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial.”
———-
you also say,
natural cycles, countered by antarctic sea ice. . .
Winter antarctic sea ice actually works to increase warming by insulating the ocean from losing heat energy to space. The amount of summer ice increase is paltry and well within normal ranges of variance.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
compare this with arctic ice and you will find that the increase in land mass in the northern hemisphere provides a REAL difference and the fact that the summer melt is happening (radically changing albedo) causes a signficant effect.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
-it isn’t not talking about it because I am trying to hide it, it is not talking about it because it is inconsequential and your attempt to make it significant shows just how you are simply grasping at straw after straw after straw (man?).
for you arguments.
—–
he also says,
“CO2 sensitivity is proven to not be significant”
and I say,
not says Richard Lindzen who states that a CO2 related feedback of slightly greater than 1C is expected.
or Roy Spencer who also agrees that CO2 causes warming.
what you are saying is not just a complete lack of understanding it is, as with EVERYTHING else you have said so far,
a complete lie.
you are simply gish galloping. . .stating so many lies, falsehoods, distortions, trying to win an argument by lying. This is simply childish.
this is all that you have????!!!!???
yes, it took me about 2 years to learn what I know, I took it all from peer reviewed articles and books. not from the wholly debunked, fringe science, politically skewed and inbred information channels your information (apparently) comes from.
———————-
You also say,
“he doesn’t define, “our” emission”
I meant IPCC emission scenarios as my reference of A1Fl should have tipped you off
————
you also say,
“warming has progressed at the same rate since the LIA”
and I say,
enough with the lies man, you are totally off your wall.
keepy lying to yourself and your audience, it won’t be too much longer now.
this image has been completely vindicated.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/assets/images/articles/am/v3/n2/2000-year-comparison.jpg
you can keep complaining about it but Dr. Michael Mann is taking the National Review and the CEI to court. He isn’t afraid to open the books but you and your financial backers sure are. . .because when it comes out that you intentionally swayed debated of the science for political gain, of a subject of the most inherent importance, just like the tobacco lobby did in the 90′s leading the deaths of thousands of innocent children, when it comes out that you did this intentionally and without regard to human life, it will be all over.
M Courtney,
What a shame. I miss your father’s excellent comments greatly. Ask him to return soon.
Excellent post that reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of an engineering education. Engineering isn’t science but both builds on it, and contributes hugely to it – e.g. aviation, CERN…
I agree with Theo. Your father’s input was something I always read with pleasure.
The reasoning I have seen here for supporting the fringe science of no global warming or no anthropogenic global warming is absolutely hilarious.
I do recall that only about 8 years ago it was “no global warming” and there is still a remnant of people who believe that the temperature data record is flawed somehow, that satellite measurements are the only way to go and that only specific satellite measurements from “trusted” sources can be used.
I see how people here like to claim the high road using the 31,000 “scientist” signatures of the OISM, when this has been so thoroughly debunked, only the most abhorrent liars would claim this and still know that this petition was signed by such astute scientists as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse. this is clearly shown in the short documentary posted here:
I have seen how people here will use the temperature history of Greenland as though it is a global temperature, crow about the warming of the medieval and Minoan warming periods as though they are not currently explained under current warming theories. They are! and to say that there isn’t warming that is significant, and if there is, then it has paused for 10, 15, or whatever years, as though that somehow proves them to be correct.
I see how people here quote the GISP2 temperature record which actually ended 95 years before 1950 in the schedule (that is 1855) and the temperatures at the dome peak of Greenland has warmed above that of the Minoan warm period. And we have had plenty of northern hemisphere stratovolcanoes that have caused periods of cooling during this time (unlike the medieval and Minoan warming period)
In fact, all I see here are lies based on lies based on even more lies. fanciful claims like, “CO2 doesn’t cause warming” or “The saturation curve of CO2 in the atmosphere shows that further increases cause no warming” or “increased moisture vapor in the atmosphere causes no warming” or “the greenhouse effect is a myth” or even, “all AGW climate change science is a global conspiracy to push socialism over the earth and destroy America and American-style capitalism”
all of these things being complete lies, falsehoods, based on more falsehoods.
as only a propagandist outlet would act, as though the authors here KNOW that AGW is real, that the empirical evidence is conclusive, and they just don’t care.
it won’t be long now, just try to keep an open mind to the SCIENCE that is going on.
There is only one more thing you need to understand, The Michael Mann’s hockey stick curve has now been thoroughly supported by hundreds of independent records.
The proof of this work as vindicated and the continuing scandalous effort to discredit his work shows only how desperate the oil-backed deniers are.
For those with open eyes to see and open ears to hear, from data sources as diverse as thousands of different:
seabed and lake bed core data,
ice core data,
stream bed sediment records,
coral ring data,
stalactites and stalagmite core data,
pollen data
as well as additional tree ring data
-data that has been taken from all over the world.
The Michael Mann global temperature curve has been COMPLETELY vindicated. If you have ANY shred of honest introspection, then you would HAVE to concede that this anti-global warming cult is a teetering house of cards, akin to the anti-smoking regulation campaign of the 1990s and more closely associated with the religious assertions of creation-sciences than of actual science.
http://www.atmos.albany.edu/deas/atmclasses/atm305/figspm-10b.jpg
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/Patagonia_LIA_fig2.JPG
http://www.scilogs.de/wblogs/gallery/16/Marcott.png
I accepted AGW until I read that the science was settled. From that moment I knew something was wrong, so I dug more. Found a gold mine of what’s wrong.
jai mitchell tries to make the argument that current temperatures are unusual or unprecedented. As shown in this link, that notion is nonsense.
jai mitchell also appeals to a false authority by pointing to the six self-selected Potemkin Village committees that gave a pass to Mann’s shenanigans. But the fact is that skeptical cross examination was never permitted in any of them. In fact, Mann was permitted to meet with the committees beforehand, and ‘help’ formulate which questions would be asked! Could they be any less credible? Note also that Mann is the rainmaker, personally responsible for bringing many $millions into Penn State. That is their incentive for the whitewashes.
Next, mitchell disputes that scientists were fired. But that is a matter of record. jai mitchell also claims that the Soon & Baliunas paper was so wrong that multiple people resigned over its publication. I note that their paper is still published, and I say that jai mitchell is peddling one-sided nonsense. People do not forfeit their carreers over a single paper with which they disagree. How naive can mitchell be? There is plenty more to the story than mitchell claims. But when you’re a propagandist, truth takes a back seat to ‘say anything’.
Next, the “white male over 35” nonsense has been thoroughly debunked above, by multiple commentators.
Likewise, the ‘Arctic sea ice’ canard has been repeatedly falsified. There is nothing either unusual or unprecedented happening. The Arctic has been ice-free in the past, and will be again. jai mitchell would understand this if he hadn’t just stumbled across the global warming scare only 2 years ago, as he has admitted. A keyword search for ‘sea ice’ will provide many years of education for newbies like mitchell.
Next, jai mitchell tries to imply that a 1ºC temperature change is significant. It isn’t. We have already seen a 0.8ºC rise, and it has caused no global damage or harm whatever. But some folks get wild-eyed over anything… Chicken Little comes to mind.
Finally, jai mitchell tries his hand at comedy: “you also say, ‘warming has progressed at the same rate since the LIA’ and I say, enough with the lies man, you are totally off your wall.
keepy lying to yourself and your audience, it won’t be too much longer now.”
It is jai mitchell’s audience, too. They can decide for themselves if natural global warming is accelerating or not. I have posted numerous charts showing that is not the case. mitchell has emitted his opinion. Readers can now decide for themselves if they think global warming is accelerating — or if global warming has stopped for the past decade and a half.
Really, it’s unfair taking advantage of a noob who isn’t up to speed yet.
Jai Mitchell
You have linked to a spaghetti graph of reconstructions.
I used them here in my article
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/26/noticeable-climate-change/
You do realise they use 40 and 50 year smoothing and therefore completely miss out on the annual and decadal variability which is far far greater than the smoothed figures?
There has been enormous variability as evidenced by the instrumental record. It is ONLY when Mann spliced on the instrumental record on to the paleo proxies from 1900 that the chart then shows the variability that gets you so excited. Please look at the various graphics in the article.
Unfortunately dr Mann has not released his hockey stick code and it proved difficult to reconstruct it. But we did it. That will be the subject of a future article
Tonyb
Jai Mitchell, disintegrated once again. If he didn’t exist, we would have to invent him.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlVoD17y5y4&w=420&h=315]
Apparently jai mitchell has no employment prospects. Posting on blogs appears to be his life’s work. In his newest load of noinsense jai mitchell says a few things that are easily debunked. So, may I? Thank you:
The reasoning I have seen here for supporting the fringe science of no global warming or no anthropogenic global warming…
Misrepresenting skeptical scientists’ positions is the only way the alarmist cult is able to argue. Skeptics know that global warming has been happening since the LIA. “No global warming” is jai mitchell’s attempt to misrepresent our position. Regarding AGW: it probably exists, which is consistent and verifiable with my position for many years.
But the question is whether AGW matters. Since it is too minuscule to measure, it can be completely disregarded for all practical purposes. A small part of the 0.7ºC rise is probably due to CO2 emissions. How much? No one can definitively say. But natural warming has been happening at the same rate for hundreds of years, and the warming has not accelerated [quite the opposite lately], so CO2 cannot be contributing much. Can it?
Next, jai mitchell alleges that “Mickey Mouse” and “Donald Duck” are listed as OISM co-signers. Is that the best he can do? First, mitchell is fabricating his facts. All OISM co-signers are listed online. Second, Let’s give him those names. That still leaves well over 31,000 OISM co-signers. Third, the alarmist crowd has repeatedly tried to get anywhere near 30,000 signatures on their petitions. They have failed miserably, unable to collect more than a small fraction of anti-OISM signatures. Thus, the true consensus is that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial. Facts don’t lie, and it is only jai mitchell’s psychological projection that causes him to label skeptics as “liars”.
Next, I have posted conclusive proof that Greenland ice core temperatures are confirmed in both hemispheres, therefore jai mitchell’s claim that Greenland is not a good proxy is easily debunked.
Next, mitchell says, “all I see here are lies based on lies based on even more lies.” And then mitchell proceeds to lie: “…fanciful claims like, ‘CO2 doesn’t cause warming’ or ‘The saturation curve of CO2 in the atmosphere shows that further increases cause no warming’ or ‘increased moisture vapor in the atmosphere causes no warming'”, and so on.
Speaking for myself, I have repeatedly stated that CO2 causes some warming, which is too small to measure. At current concentrations, adding more CO2 does not cause measurable warming. And of course, skeptics know that relative and specific humidity has been declining for decades.
See? jai mitchell misrepresents everything, and then labels his own strawman fallacies as “lies”. He is amusing, no?
Finally, jai mitchell is Mann’s little sycophant, labeling any disagreement with Mann’s debunked Hokey Stick chart as “scandalous”. As if. What is really scandalous is the plain fact that the UN/IPCC is no longer able to use Mann’s original, discredited chart in their publications. And it was such a scary chart, wasn’t it?
Well, too bad. Mann’s Hokey Stick chart is dead and buried. ☺
[Oh, and I really liked mitchell’s wild-eyed Chicken Little charts. Amusing, aren’t they? Especially the “projection” part. And the “reconstruction”, as if that is empirical data. heh]
(Snip. You constantly call other people liars for disagreeing with you. Up with that we will no longer put. ~mod)
Thank you, people who have noted my father’s absence.
When he returns from holiday I will talk to him (on phone – we don’t live within 200 miles of each other).
But I can’t promise he will want to be involved anymore.
It does cost; being reviled online, facing personal mockery from opponents, facing scorn from those on your own side who disagree with some other part of your belief system (he is a Christian socialist – as am I)… the raised blood pressure from being in conflict. Yes, textual ripostes on a blog are a form of conflict.
He has been on the front line in this debate since the mid-1980s. He suffered the loss of John Daly as a colleague whom he stood beside, from the far side of the world. He had to learn how to use the internet to continue doing what he had always been doing.
That wasn’t fun.
He has done his bit.
But I will ask him to come back.
My becoming sceptic of CAGW was a little more funny. I use to live some 60 km north of Triest, where the olive trees don`t survive some harsher winters, although 20 km to the south they thrive. reading and hearing about the GW, I hoped, I would not have to protect my olive trees during the winter. And yes, I couldn`t understand, why some countries don`t ratify the Kyoto treaty.
I was waiting and waiting but the situation for my olive trees went from bed to worse. So, I decided to check the stuff a little bit. By profession, I`m an engineer and I ordered first some german books about climate change. Than followed Singer, Swenmark, Spencer, Hansen, Vaclav Klaus… and websites CA, WUWT, Bishop Hill etc.
I am now a convinced sceptic, and yes, I still have to protect my olive trees during the winter!
(Snip. When you stop calling other commenters liars for having a different opinion, you will stop getting snipped. ~mod)
Jai Mitchell
Why will the jet stream get harder and harder to find?
When you reply perhaps you would comment on my link above whereby I confirmed the spaghetti graphs do not show annual or decadal figure but merely a modelled artificial 40 year smoothing. It is important you realise it bears no relationship to the real world climate we all live in
Tonyb
“… my father doesn’t want to come back.” [M. Courtney]
I’m sorry. Please pass this along, if you would be so kind:
Dear Mr. Courtney,
Many of us at WUWT miss you. You are respected and valued, here. I’m certain that a man like A-th-y, with such a great heart, long ago forgave you. Would you at least consider posting just one last time? You left without even saying “Good bye.”
I hope that your holiday leaves you rested, well, and rejuvenated enough to sit down before that ol’ computer and pound out another enthusiastic post. Your son is a fine man with many insightful things to say, there is, however, no substitute for your verve in s-lay-ing trolls. I’ll be forever grateful for the gallantry displayed in this one:
Hopefully,
Janice Moore
******************************************************
D. B. Stealey! You get the Hank Aaron Award for Heavy Hitting — Bam! Blast! Over-the-fence-ladies-and-gentlemen-MY-OH-MY!!! (late Dave Kneehouse re: Seattle Mariners)
Way to go CONTINUING to engage with the “Software App” (forget who coined that, here) above.
*******************
@ K. D. Knoebel and Gold Minor, you, too, are missed. At least tell us you’re okay!!!
Tony B,
Didn’t you hear? The Second Law was repealed, so the jet stream will go away.
[/sarc, of course. One of the reasons for the jet stream is to equalize temperature.]
Thanks, Jonathan. Excellent article.
For me it was: Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” -> Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” -> Roy Spencer’s “Climate Confusion” -> Donna Laframboise’s “Delinquent Teenager”.
Background: Electronics Engineering ans Solid State Physics.
Time frame: 2006 -> 2013 and counting.
jai mitchell says:
July 27, 2013 at 12:35 pm
“………then you would HAVE to concede that this anti-global warming cult is a teetering house of cards, akin to the anti-smoking regulation campaign of the 1990s and more closely associated with the religious assertions of creation-sciences than of actual science.”
==============
You sure pulled out all the stops at the end of that screed, feel better now ?
Ms Janice Moore,
I have forwarded your comment to my father on email. Don’t know if he will pick it up until he comes back.
Thank you also for your polite comments about me. One day I may be able to be as chivalrous as my father but for now I will just adopt the role of the peasantry. I will try to cultivate our field by offering novel ways of looking at issues whilst leaving the important battles to the nobility who have the time and ability to fight honourably and victoriously.
Amongst the nobility I do, of course, include you.
jai mitchell,
Might I say I’m a little late in commenting on this comment you made quite a bit earlier in this thread:
‘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.’
You have no idea how silly that foregoing statement sounds do you? Now, I know I’m quite tardy in commenting on that but better late than never. Now, may I suggest to you that both you and I will be long dead 100-200 years from now. So try not to trouble us with statements about a future that cannot possibly be ascertained and in which you and I will not be around to verify the truth, or more likely, the falsehoods of those same predictions. Furthermore, may I also suggest that since you and I can’t have a clue as to how people will live, or not live, 100-200 years in the future (in same way that people in 1800 might’ve had a wee bit of difficulty in imagining the world in 2000) that it might just be hell-nigh impossible to, not just determine what that temperature might be, but also to relate it to a temperature 50 million years in the past that we sort of have to guess at since Tyrannosaurus Rex wasn’t kind enough to record it and write it down for us.
Ok, that’s the end of my conversation.
Dbstealey
Does jai mitchell ever reply to factual information? He doesn’t seem to like history.
I am bemused by his referencing the spaghetti graphs apparently in the belief they represent real temperatures. He needs to acknowledge they are nothing more than a modelled representation of the climate using 40 year smoothing and thereby missing out on the annual and decadal climate we actually live on.
Having spent a great deal of time tracing the jet stream back 1000 years through research at such places as the met office I am equally bemused as to why he thinks it is behaving in a different manner to the past.
Tonyb
jai mitchell et al:
Climate change is real. See these images of the basin and range province of North America.
http://fopnews.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/p1060133small.jpg
http://imnh.isu.edu/digitalatlas/hydr/lkbflood/imgs/pliocn.jpg
http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/histgeol/gilbert/bon1.jpg
R.E. Lake Bonneville, excerpt: “Finally, with a hotter, drier climate that slowly emerged about 8,000 years ago, Lake Bonneville gradually disappeared.” Mind you this was a 20,000 sq. mile lake.
No doubt due to prehistoric industrial activities of ancient man?
M Courtney
I seem to have missed out on the events that apparently led to your father bowing out of wuwt.
I have corresponded with him many times and wrote an article for him on wave energy. He is a stoic and knowledgable commentator on climate matters and I am quite bemused as to how he could have departed under what seems to have been something of a cloud.
Please give him my personal regards and add my to it my hope he will reappear, if less frequently than in the past.
Tonyb
Tonyb says at July 27, 2013 at 2:57 pm…
I don’t think my father left under a cloud but if Anthony wants to correct me then I am using the name Anthony Watts here to get the moderators to notice and edit this conversation as required.
Also, I forwarded your comment to my father, on email, as well. But he’s on holiday.
Good night,
Matt
Gareth
Independent middle of the road? It is a left-wing rag.
Thatcher benefited real people in the UK, the ordinary people rather than the bien pensants. That is why the political establishment of people who went to the right schools and knew the right people (not unlike Blair and Cameron) in the form of the “wets” finally destroyed her. That is why the left hated her, because she actually cared about the people they pretend to care about in order to win elections. She was not just playing political games, treating Westminster as student politics in a larger forum as they were. She actually wanted to help people.
Do you know why the polling predicted Major would lose in 1992? According to the head of Gallop it was because they could not use the 1991 census data, and were relying on 1981 information. He said that in that decade there was more social mobility in the form of people rising from the poor and working classes than in any other decade on record, hence their surveys were skewed. Thatcher did that.
So Jai, you know of no actual empirical evidence for strong positive feedback. You have no answer to the fact that climate “scientists” have been caught in multiple episodes of dishonesty, many of them systematic and co-ordinated, to become conspiracies by the legal definition.
Quoting the whitewashes of the CRU email leak is laughable. Not one was independent. None took evidence from sceptics. None asked the questions that sceptics wanted answered. The dishonest actors were believed without question. It was pathetically obvious as a whitewash. You suggest that they indicated that the science was not affected but you are either completely ignorant of the facts or you know quite well that none of the inquiries actually addressed the science, and so are dishonest in implying otherwise.
Read the actual emails, not the reports. You will see that they do show dishonesty from basic nastiness to conspiracy to break the law. You will see that the attacks on journal editors go far beyond normal scientific discourse, if you have any idea how a peer-reviewed journal functions. Disagreement with a paper should not mean that you ask for the editor to be sacked.
M Courtney says:
July 27, 2013 at 3:08 pm
Tonyb says at July 27, 2013 at 2:57 pm…
I don’t think my father left under a cloud but if Anthony wants to correct me then I am using the name Anthony Watts here to get the moderators to notice and edit this conversation as required.
==========
Edit how ?, just spell it out.
What do you want to hear, I’m confused, and defensive towards Anthony and mods.
What is “required” exactly ?
Poor little Jai, its going to be so funny watching is desperation over the next few years as the global temperature starts to drop. Now that Hansen has left, I doubt his replacement will be able to manipulate the HadCrud and GISS values enough to forestall the cooling.
You are hilarious Jai, great for a laugh. Maybe you should become a cartoonist as well.
ps….. Must buy a popcorn machine. 🙂
Mods:
Please don’t snip Jai’s comments, no matter how obnoxious they are.
He’s really starting to lose his temper and it amuses the hell out of me. He can call me a liar if he wants to, I’ll just keep laughing.
So c’mon Jai, bring it on!
Yours, in a very rainy London, supposedly suffering from a ‘heatwave’,
Andy
(Reply: Perhaps you are right. I’ll let jai mitchell’s future comments stand [other mods might feel differently]. The last comment was snipped because practically every paragraph was filled with especially vile and baseless accusations that everyone disagreeing with him were “liars”, and worse. Thanks for the feedback. No more snipping unless this poster severely violates the site Policy. He did, but maybe the best course of action would have been to show how he really thinks. ~mod)
The difference between Jai Mitchell and the rest of us here is: We all encourage our children, and everyone else for that matter, to research all available data and find the answers for themselves. Jai doesn’t.
M Courtney:
It isn’t just the heavy hitters here who miss your dad. Due to work, I am only able to visit WUWT on weekends. I’m the average Joe. Tell your dad I miss his comments here too.
My skepticism began with the banning of refrigerants Montreal Protocol Circa 1985. It cost you all as consumers dearly at the grocery store and lined the pockets of Dupont and Allied Signal.
My skepticism has been reinforced with the liberal democrat fascist agenda to present day. The current CAGW crowd is teaming with mindless Democrats ready and willing to dictated what toilet paper you will use to wipe with.
I have since questioned every model and every law coming from the left since those days.
They cannot be trusted with power or the scientific method.
jai mitchell says:
July 27, 2013 at 12:35 pm
I would urge you actually to conduct research before commenting.
The warmest part of the Medieval Warm Period occurred before the phase identified as short on volcanism. Even the IPCC says that its warmest years were “between 950 and 1100”:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-6.html
Yet the phase of lower volcanic activity occurred from “1100 to 1250”:
http://www.global-climate-change.org.uk/2-6-3.php
I’d be interested to see your evidence for lowered volcanism during the Minoan Warm Period. There was a spectacular volcanic eruption during Minoan Civilization, but it may have happened before the perhaps poorly named Warm Period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_eruption
Between these two naturally occurring Warm Periods of course lay the Roman WP, famous for its volcanism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius
I’d say as with all your other special pleadings, this canard has been blasted out of the sky.
What is even more interesting to me is that the Greenland Ice Sheet cores & other proxy data suggest that each of these warm periods was progressively cooler, ie the Minoan seems to have been warmer than the Roman, which appears to have been toastier than the Medieval, while the Modern is coolest of the four. The Little Ice Age also appears to have been colder than the Dark Ages & earlier Cool Periods.
My skepticism began while working in the Sierra Nevada studying bird populations. There was one meadow where the population suddenly collapsed and several biologists lamented that it was due to global warming and damned Big Oil. Although it is wise to think globally, all plants and animals respond locally. After examining USHCN temperature trends at Tahoe City http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=048758&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_meanclim_mon_yr2012.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=TMAX&minyear=1893&maxyear=2012
and the rest of the SIerra Nevada, I found maximum temperatures were declining since the 1930s. I realized that it was landscape change not climate change that was the most critical element affecting wildlife. It was the degradation of the watershed that had diminished the wildlife and after restoring the watershed populations rebounded. At professional meetings I was astounded to see how many biologists blamed wildlife problems on the chimeric “global average” even though local maximum temperatures had not warmed. For those seeking funding for their research the joke in the biology department was “how can I connect my research to global warming.” It was clear that those in control of research funding had in essence been bribing scientists in to creating a “consensus”, and research and implementation for the most valuable environmental remedies such as habitat and watershed restoration were being misdirected.
jim Steele says:
July 27, 2013 at 5:20 pm
The need to say the magic words “global warming” or “climate change” to win grant funding for your research is just one of the reasons why Oreskes’ study of journal articles is a tautological nonsense.
M Courtney says:
July 27, 2013 at 1:27 pm
Thank you, people who have noted my father’s absence.
===============
I’m also sorry for not keeping up. Although I did note the surname, I didn’t realize you were his son.
Please add my “name” to the list of people urging him to come back.
He may have taken some nicks, but he’s vanquished quite a lot of the frauds and sub-mediocre scientists who come on here.
Another engineer here. My eyes were opened quite wide when the Integral Fast Reactor was killed, as I had close association with one person on the project and received some insight into the underhanded things that occurred. It became apparent to those involved that there are those who seek to destroy the prosperity and liberty of others and will stop at nothing to achieve that goal. Given that some of the same folks were pushing AGW as had fought and killed the IFR, it had to be bogus – the IFR addressed the very concerns raised by the warmists. It was killed precisely because it would have moved the world toward safety, liberty, and prosperity.
The Ozone Hole crap also played a part and seemed to be a warm-up for AGW. The same tactic was employed, to take a bit of science, twist it, exaggerate it, and sensationalize it, and then “save” the world from disaster by killing liberty and prosperity. No, eliminating Freon didn’t save the world and didn’t do a tremendous amount of damage, although it was a pretty big annoyance. It seems to me it was a practice run to see if such a ploy might succeed, to see if the general public was sufficiently gullible.
Kudos to Steve McIntyre for being one of the first to push back against the pseudoscience, and to Anthony and many others who have fought the valiant fight. I hold you in the highest regard.
You know… it’s like you have this best friend and you get along on so many different subjects but he/she supports a different football team. Why did you have to include this silly quote, ‘most of the most prominent scientists supporting CAGW were well intentioned but wrong, akin to those opposing the theory of continental drift…’? Continents acting like dodg’em cars on a molten conveyor belt hasn’t really sold me, nor did CAGW and I have patiently waited for that silliness to be exposed. Now, having made my thoughts clear, I welcome you as a friend but I don’t like your continental football team! 🙂
‘I have never previously found myself at odds with the scientific mainstream…’
Ever thought seriously about string theory?
‘I think in the next 5 years many more will share our journey to skepticism.’
Well, we’ll see….the problem is that during that time the Earth’s temperature could rise, for reasons completely unrelated to CO2 (or completely caused by it) …Or it could fall, or maybe even stay the same.
Here’s the thing…I’ve said this a thousand times but almost no one understands this very simple concept. Climate change has to be measured against what would have happened; not against the past. Whatever the effect of CO2, it will be superimposed on any climate change which would have occurred anyway…so for example if the temperature would have dropped two degrees but warming effect of CO2 (if such exists in the complex mixture of our atmosphere) mitigated it to a drop of only one degree or no change, then that is in effect, global warming.
That’s why in laboratory experiments, a negative control in addition to time-course is needed to prove a hypothesis.
@Steve D
I agree it is who it should be measured, bit it’s tangled up with too many other things if you’re just looking a daily/annual average temp.
I took the simple concept that co2 has to reduce nightly cooling to change our temp.
I mined daily records, took how much temps go up today, subtracted how much they’ll fall tonight, and found no co2 signal.
Follow the link in my name to see my work.
I thought it was the most succinct rebuttal of many online. I’m not wedded to SkS because of their activist bias, but sometimes they put out a good article. But if you don’t think they can be skeptical enough, here is an article on the Oregon Petition by The Skeptics’ Society.
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-11-12/
And there are many others.
http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com.au/2008/07/petitioning-on-climate-part-1.html
http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com.au/2008/07/petitioning-on-climate-part-2.html
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Oregon_Institute_of_Science_and_Medicine
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/the-30000-global-warming_b_243092.html
http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/oregon-petition-redux/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Petition#Signatories
http://que2646.newsvine.com/_news/2010/01/29/3828196-the-oregon-petition-how-can-31000-scientists-be-wrong
http://climatesight.org/2009/06/17/ignore-the-petition-project/
I didn’t find any that countered these arguments, so I can only offer the petition site itself for balance.
http://www.petitionproject.org/
Rhetorical answer: ask eco-geek, Shano, Blade, The Northern Eye, Sparks, Hockey Schtick, justthefactswuwt…
(Rhetorical reply: moderators can see the identities of those posters, and so can Anthony. But you hide your identity. ~mod)
@Ron Richey (“I’m the average Joe”) — I’m the average Jane, nice to meet you. #[:)] I’m not a heavy hitter, that’s for sure — just a big talker, lol. And, keep on posting (IT’S FUN!).
Dear Matt Courtney, [Re: Yours at 2:46PM]
[blush] Thank you.
And, thanks so much for doing your best to get my message to your dad.
Your ally in the Battle for Science Truth,
Janice
“Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.”
Well that question just answers itself, doesn’t it?
Interesting comments on the subject of science and enlightenment. I was all jazzed up thinking of purchasing future waterfront. No joke. However; after checking the facts… NOT!
The other aspect of all this is the demonizing that “believers” of the AGW faith delivered upon “deniers” (an effort to collectively put holocaust deniers into the camp of AGW global warming skeptics). Further, is the fact that there is no skepticism of global warming of the last several centuries, however the skepticism is a notion that we humans are the cause, as if it were somehow evil the planet had warmed out of the “little ice age” and humanity is the cause. The witch hunt mentality of CAGW’s rhetoric and the incredible amount of funding to dominate the conversation of skeptics became a circus.
So here comes along a certain individual who with intense deliberation steps into the conversation only to continue the personal attacks rife with misconceived assumptions of what skeptics of AGW consider. It baffles any reasoned logic the 2 year old childishness rant an adult is so capable of.
As for the civil side of the conversation…cheers! …and refreshing!
Now that’s terrific news! When and where?
barry says:
…here is an article on the Oregon Petition by The Skeptics’ Society.
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-11-12
Oh, please. The so-called ‘Skeptics society’ in barry’s link has been ripped to shreds here on several occasions. In fact, that same silly article has been debunked several times. If that is the best that barry can do, it is no wonder he is foundering on the rocks of scientific debate.
That ‘Skeptics’ article was written by a psychologist, Gary Whittenberger — which bars him from even qualifying to be allowed to co-sign the OISM statement.
Whittenberger’s sour grapes come across loud and clear, as would befit a bureaucratic government drone who writes on ‘religion and psychology’ — a perfectly unscientific field for another know-nothing climate alarmist. Whittenberger’s nit-picking over things like referring to a “survey” instead of a “petition” during an interview does nothing to refute anything the OISM project has stated or accomplished. It is merely the psychologist’s pouting over the fact that the overwhelming consensus of scientific thought reflects the fact that CO2 is a completely harmless and beneficial trace gas. And barry is such an uneducated layman that he is incapable of posting a single verifiable, testable scientific fact or observation that supports his CAGW ‘Chicken Little’ belief. That is what happens when a layman like barry possesses no scientific education at all.
It is not surprising that the best barry can do is to cut and paste his appeals to authority by a non-authority such as a psychologist, since barry himself is an uneducated layman, possessing even less knowledge of the hard sciences than that of a psychologist. His opinions are simply a regurgitated scare by the relatively small clique of climate alarmists; barry gets his talking points from the same discredited alarmist blogs like SkS, and from religious psychology writers at his ‘pseudo-skeptics society’. No wonder barry has no credibility. That fits in with barry’s complete lack of any scientific or engineering education or experience.
How do you explain decreasing temperatures in the stratosphere? As a scientist, in my opinion, this is by far the strongest argument for AGW. I’ve yet to hear a good argument countering it.
Steve D says:
July 27, 2013 at 8:57 pm
Here is but one of the many explanations. Seriously, sir, as a scientist, I’m surprised that you haven’t already found the innumerable debunkings of this canard.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/30/a-tale-of-two-altitudes-how-stratospheric-temperature-is-de-coupled-from-the-surface-temperatures/
OTOH, how does CACCA explain the fact that the atmosphere has warmed less & later than the surface, as measured by the professional lying charlatans of GISS, NOAA & the HadCru crew of self-serving fraudsters?
jai mitchell
How could we believe in this? really?
‘your’ friend Dan Miller (he is part of the ‘climate project’ or 1000 Al Gore Trainees that are paid) predictions of Ice caps being completely gone by about now hasn’t panned out. It has been 4 years since this video: (skip to 4 minutes in)
I loved it when he implies the last glaciation was a result of CO2 being 100 ppm CO2 less then it is today. In part 3 he claims billions of people are going to die if we do nothing about it. Then says, “climate change is invisible… ppm translates to deg C but it is just too complected… but we must convenience people because of the real threat” In Part 4 at 4:50 he explains why they are doing this (biggest economic changes in human history and we need to be part of it.)
Al Gore’s project more info on the non-paid people:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/05/lucia-drops-some-reality-on-the-gorebots/
I couldn’t find any information on the paid trainees. The Video above says he was under copy right laws which means he was paid for the talk.
I was terrified of global warming. I had no scientific background. I went on a cruise in 2011 and attended a series of lectures by a retired RAF meteorologist. He said his last lecture might surprise us. It did. A few simple facts were displayed that undermined the whole of my terror.
He suggested a book to read and that was that.
I must admit to understanding not a great deal on the WUWT website but still like to try and enjoy the challenge..
u.k.(us) says at July 27, 2013 at 4:32 pm:
No need to be defensive. Anthony was named so as the mods could see I was reporting on events between him and my father that I have only heard second-hand.
It is not my place to come to Anthony’s site and talk about him at the bottom of a thread where he may not notice it.
Netiquette is new to me but this seems like common courtesy.
I grew up in the late 50’s and early 60’s when ice age global cooling was becoming popular. I remember at least one teacher talking about it about 1958,, and reading about it in the press.
I never had much truck with people who believed in fads; my own brother used to follow most fads and I would avoid them. I was on a hike with a buddy at work, when he asked me what I thought about “global warming,” I said I didn’t know anything about it, but that I thought that it might be warmer. At that point, I got an awful look: It was like I had become an enemy, or had done something wrong. I didn’t think too much about it, and let it pass, but needless to say, our relationship deteriorated after that.
About two years ago, I was debating on a political forum called TheWorldWatch and made a post in the,, “When will Conservatives believe in global warming”, thread which said that I knew that government would do everything possible to take care of it. I suddenly started getting links posted for me to visit. In addition to the pop science links, there were some serious science links explaining GGW, and links to RealScience and SkepticalScience. I looked at RealScience.com, but I found that their ideas were often contradicted by other websites I found online. I looked at SkepticalScience.com, but found their approach a bit patronizing but interesting. I found the “list of scientists skeptical of global warming” page at Wikipedia and learned some interesting counter theories, from scientists like Abdusatamov and others.
Soon I was off looking at various websites, trying to put the story together in a coherent way for myself. What I discovered was that 95% of the stuff at real science was disprovable – they were basically just making facts up, or making facts fit. Needless to say, my posts at the political debate site became full of references to scientific papers showing disagreements between scientists and people who believed in global warming catastrophe.
Finally, I reached a point where I had debated enough. I started looking at skeptical sites like Wattsupwiththat, to see if there was anything I hadn’t thought of, started posting, “rejections”, of global warming horror stories in the popular press, and even changed from being a Democrat to a political independent. I currently publish papers on Philosophy and Foreign Policy, but I’m thinking about publishing on Climate Change, and looking for some live venues where I can speak and debate on Climate Change fear-mongering and how science is defeated by reporters, politicians and scientists in order to promote what are essentially Malthusian values. .
The final nail for me was the explanation of the Climategate emails by John Costella at http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf It makes me furious that the people in these emails have not been held to account by the media, the law and the majority of other members of the science community.
A few here have mentioned Prince Charles. I think he is a right royal plonker. I wonder what his sons think of this issue?
Steve D says, July 27, 2013 at 6:03 pm:
You lay out the following premise: “Climate change has to be measured against what would have happened; not against the past. Whatever the effect of CO2, it will be superimposed on any climate change which would have occurred anyway …”
I agree wholeheartedly. And that’s why and how it’s easy to show that the 20% increase in total atmospheric CO2 content has had zero effect on global temperatures during the entire recent period of global warming (since about 1976/77).
You see, a few of us has been pointing this out for a long time now, but most if not everyone seems to either not grasp this very simple concept or they just completely ignore it for the sake of … I don’t know really, the firm belief that CO2 climate sensitivity just somehow HAS TO be significantly positive?
Global temperatures follow NINO3.4 rigorously without upward OR downward divergence since 1970, except at THREE abrupt instances: 1978/79, 1988 and 1998:
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/GWexplained_zps566ab681.png
These shifts are easily shown to be process-related to the ENSO phenomenon (referring to Bob Tisdale’s thorough descriptions and explanations), that is, NINO3.4 is a narrow equatorial region in the central and eastern part of the Pacific, normally representing the EASTERN part of ENSO. It misses however all that is happening in the WESTERN part of ENSO, which includes the West Pacific Warm Pool region. And also what is happening in the East Pacific outside the narrow equatorial band.
In 1978/79 the East Pacific warmed suddenly relative to NINO3.4. Before this, in 1976/77, it had warmed equally abrupt, though this time in tune with NINO3.4 – El Niño warming. At both of these instances the West Pacific did not warm. First it cooled (El Niño cooling), then it stayed flat, unresponsive. This was an East Pacific climate shift (‘The Great Pacific Climate Shift’ of 1976-79), a phase shift in the entire Pacific climate regime. And it pulled the rest of the world along with it. It is found both in the OHC and SST records and originated when the mean level of the pressure gradient between east and west in the (tropical) Pacific basin suddenly dropped in 1976 (SOI) and stayed there for about three decades. This flattened the thermocline east/west and also reduced the mean strength of the trade winds across the basin, reducing the average latent heat loss flux (evaporation) from the tropical Pacific region:
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/SOIvslatentampwind_zps8dcdab36.png
The next two sudden shifts were decidedly West Pacific. At these times the East Pacific did not warm. In fact, the East Pacific hasn’t warmed at all since the Great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976-79. The mean temperature level in the West Pacific, though, has gone up in two mighty steps (and not at any other times), the first established during the transition between the El Niño 1986-88 and the La Niña 1988-89 and the second during the transition between the El Niño 1997-98 and the La Niña 1998-99:
http://i1172.photobucket.com/albums/r565/Keyell/Trinn_zps234f2e4e.png
There was also an attempt during the aftermath of the El Niño 2009-10, but it has yet to materialise into a real step up.
As you can well see, there is no place or room for any CO2 warming effect in here at all. Zero. Unless you want to argue that the effect is such that it does nothing for about ten years, then all of a sudden lifts the mean temperature level with about 0.2 degrees. I would be interested to hear about the mechanism behind that …
The abrupt shifts simply are the ‘climate change which would have occurred anyway’. So where do we see the superimposed effect of increasing CO2?
My ‘kickstarter’ is retailed at http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/2009-year-end-musings.html (second picture onward). Meanwhile, major re-thinks seem required: some scientists’ recent views that I found, should be more widely investigated; they are quoted on my blogsite a thttp://t.co/vZKx895Hty amongst other considerations. Some IPCC revelations in my post of 04 October 2011 could also be of interest. As to so-called ‘climate models’ – I couldn’t find a single one yet, viz http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/snippets-questions-2-climate-models.html.
Ceetee says:
July 28, 2013 at 2:38 am
A few here have mentioned Prince Charles. I think he is a right royal plonker. I wonder what his sons think of this issue?
Whatever they think, they need to keep it to themselves. Just like actors; when you are in the public (entertainment) limelight, one of the sacrifices you have to make is to not take an extreme stance on anything ‘extreme’. Then everyone will love you. They love you because of who you are and not what you think; it’s good for business that way.
Btw, ‘nother engineer here, of the electrical kind. 25 years of experience of knowing that when you get things wrong, bad things happen. (the comments are racking up, here).
“SJWhiteley says:
July 28, 2013 at 4:56 am
Ceetee says:
July 28, 2013 at 2:38 am
A few here have mentioned Prince Charles. I think he is a right royal plonker. I wonder what his sons think of this issue?
Whatever they think, they need to keep it to themselves. Just like actors; when you are in the public (entertainment) limelight, one of the sacrifices you have to make is to not take an extreme stance on anything ‘extreme’.
It’s a shame “Royals” and “actors” don’t keep what they think to themselves…rather than use what they “think”, via the MSM, to drive an agenda. Fonda/Windsor/Gore etc etc for instance.
Clearly as shown by the comments, the pathway towards becoming a CAGW skeptic, or preferably, climate realist is knowledge, while the True Believers like jai seem to prefer ignorance. Takes all kinds I guess.
Born in the early 50s I was used to and inured to the background drone of anticipated dooms: new ice age, becoming radioactive from nuclear power, post nuclear war Apocalypse and ‘nuclear winter’, acid rain, overpopulation and widespread famine, the AIDS iceberg, cVJD epidemic, Y2K… all now filed under ‘Pending’.
So the AGW thing was just part of the drone, so my default position was sceptic. But as the pitch got louder I took note and decided it was quite plausable. CO2 was a ‘greenhouse’ gas; Mankind was releasing a lot of it; it must be having and effect but how much? I was ready to persuaded.
And so I then paid attention and looked for ‘the science’ to demonstrate the ‘how much’ part…. and found none, just assertion, bluster and shrill, ever louder and increasingly desparate cries of doom.
I then realised there was no ‘science’, just religion. We must believe because all the bishops and priests did, and even the rulers.
I did of course mean vCJD.
I never believed that warming was anthropogenic at all. I was born in the 50s. In the 70s, we had dire predictions of “peak oil”, coming ice age and worldwide famine, which were all bogus. Then came the incredibly hyped acid rain and “hole in the ozone layer” issues. Around that time DDT was demonized for no good scientific reason. Greenpeace, which I supported at the time, became political. My BS meter became very sensitive.
Also, I had trained briefly with Ron Glass at McGill University where we were introduced to the theory of chaos and the stability of systems. IMO, there is NO way that a system driven by a positive feedback multiplier of 3 could survive and Earth has obviously always survived extremely harsh conditions. I read parts of the IPCC reports and realized that natural forcings were summarily discarded. Progressive organizations jumped on the bandwagon and made the whole thing emotional.
Clearly, Science was being hijacked to advance an ideology: GREEN, the new RED. Nothing good could come out of that. Communism had only brought pain and suffering to the people. When I discussed this with family and friends, I was either laughed at or ignored.
I discovered WUWT soon after its creation and realized tons of people think the same way. And now, slowly, it appears we may be proven right.
I really do not know/cannot know or prove either way whether Global Warming is true or not. I do know that Climate is always changing – and that for example the Romans had vineyards in Northern England, the Tudors had a very wet century ( not the sunny dappled time with Cate Blanchett !) and that the Thames froze over with regularity in the 17Cy.
Worse than climate change though we are subjected to and brainwashed with the Great Global Warming Swindle – where politicians from Obama to Cameron have been taken in/chosen to be taken in by those with a commercial interest in the Fraud
Global Warming/Climate Change are liberal left politics dressed up as science. In the UK the BBC/Met Office ( both funded by taxpayers) play a leading role in this con trick. It is as if Ponzi/Madoff and any other con artist have taken control of the economy.
China and India etc – who are not useful idiots like Obama and Cameron – must be laughing all the way to economic supremacy as the West kills off its industry, exports jobs, imports unemployment and massive trade deficits – all in pursuit of a falsehood.
In the UK it is regarded almost as immoral to question these falsehoods – as if one should feel guilty about believing them. Similarly- with membership of the EU, Green energy and uncontrolled migration – the bien pensants of the UK political class turn the questionning of these topics into a thought crime. Just like 1984
At 7:09 AM on 28 July, Michael had written:
With regard to the economy in these United States, the “Ponzi/Madoff…con artist” crew had “taken control of the economy.” Consider he Federal Reserve Act of 1913, f’rinstance.
So how could we be surprised to learn that the “Liberal” fascisti had simulated the appearance of “science” to advance their Watermelon scheme to further pillage and destroy that same long-suffering economy?
The first time I heard about warming, I immediately remembered a graph I had seen about the global temperature through millions of years. It showed that the earth was most often in the deep freeze state of ice ages with brief periods of warming that lasted only about 10,000 years. We were currently into an 11,000 year warming period. Therefore the chart suggested that a new ice-age could begin soon.
At the time, I was able to look up the said graph on the internet. I showed it to the person who was arguing for “Global Warming.” Her response was, “It does not matter who is right. If reducing CO2 gets people to stop industry from polluting the environment then it is a good thing.” Right there I knew that the movement was political not scientific. A short while later, I was no longer able to find that graph on the internet and have not seen it since. Later, the medieval warm period disappeared. And they began teaching “Global Warming” in my daughter’s grade-school. Unfortunately, many grade-school teachers are not big on science but are on big trying to be “good” people so they support what appears to be “a good cause.” Right or wrong, a generation of children has now been indoctrinated to this cause. Libraries may have Global Warming Skeptic books for adults but there are none for children. My own children have not been able to stand up to the peer pressure in their schools. They would rather be liked than right. I have stopped trying to convince them otherwise. They may turn me into the thought police.
Nevertheless, there are some many obvious daily observations that counter the claim of warming. For example an article that writes about how paleontologists are finding artifacts that are uncovered as the glaciers melt due to Global Warming. That means that it was once warmer than it is now. That is how the artifacts got there in the first place.
Certainly Anthony’s research into the poor siting of weather stations solidified my convictions that Global Warming was not what they said it was.
However, I was never really convinced about Global Warming because the only evidence ever presented was a computer model. Anyone who has ever programed knows, GIGO, which stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. When I learned that people with the model did not let anyone inspect their program, well, that’s tells me right there they are not scientists.
With some 500-odd replies, it is likely that no one gives a rip, but on JoNova’s website, under “Weekend Unthreaded”, my post is #7 with a brief history of my path to skepticism. Rather than re-post here, I would send you there, if interested.
Regards,
Mark H.
Skeptic since the 9th grade, 1978, while learning about Soviet propaganda (don’t believe everything you read). In 2007, stumbled on Climate Audit and have regularly ‘checked-in’ spending hundreds of hours in search of the truth. Being an engineer certainly helps to understand the science. Anthony, you and Steve et al are deserving of many thanks for your tireless efforts in getting the truth out.
Steve D says:
“How do you explain decreasing temperatures in the stratosphere?”
How do you explain the stratopheric cooling hiatus since circa 1995?
Check out figure 1:
http://www.acd.ucar.edu/Research/Highlight/stratosphere.shtml
Back in 2009 John Henriksen asks @ RealClimate:
“what would FALSIFY [linking CO2 to ‘warming’]?”
Schmidt answers:
”that the stratosphere is not cooling as expected (this is a cleaner test than the surface temperatures because there are less extraneous factors)”
http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=2019Note
It would be interesting to see an analysis of this post. There are enough comments to tally up lists of the main reasons why people “became skeptical” of the whole heap of crap they have been shoving down our throats ad nauseum since the late 80’s.
As I mentioned above I never bought into the con at all and I highlighted reasons why this was. I’m sure there was a high increase in our numbers in 2009 when Climategate occurred but there must be other “catalytic” or penny-dropping moments. I know a lot of us of my vintage and older – 52 – remember the global cooling scare of the 70’s for example.
I’m pretty busy on other things right now – half of my family from Scotland are visiting me on holiday over the next two weeks – but I’ll see if I can do something. It might give us some pointers on how we can fight back.
Nearly 500 posts! I’ve been trying to keep up (-:
Besides initially noting that Global Cooling morphed into Global Warming and pushed by left-wing politics I’ve gleaned a few things from the data available on the internet over the years:
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming CAWG tells us that temperatures will go up about 3.2°C for every doubling of CO2. The empirical record, HADCRUT4, tells us that the trend since 1850 is 0.8°C and the record says CO2 is up 40% since then. Were the 3.2° per doubling true, temperature should have gone up well over a degree. They haven’t. CAGW supporters say that’s because of a lag in the warm-up. Transient Climate Response (TCR) they call it. I observe temperatures going up way more than that on a daily basis with a lag of a couple of hours after the sun reaches its zenith and seasonally a few weeks after the solstice. They want me to believe the lag is 40 years for the CO2 induced warm-up.
Sea level is another big scare. We are regularly treated to predictions of multi-meter sea level rises by 2100. Simple arithmetic tells us that the current rate would have to average at least ten times what is is today for that to happen when there’s no indication of any acceleration necessary for that to happen. Besides the impossibility of such a rise, the data has obviously been manipulated. For example of the 1260 tide gauges listed in the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL), CAWG researchers only use about 500 of them which just happen, by a wide margin, to have higher rates of sea level rise compared to the 760 they choose to not include. You can verify this by searching on the Church and White papers available on the net. Satellite altimetry of sea level has also been manipulated. Old data from available on a search of the Way Back Machine shows that in 2004 the rate of sea level rise was as low as 2.6 mm/yr. Today, that same time series 1992 – 2004 yields a 3.5 mm/yr of sea level rise. An increase of 0.9 mm/yr most of which isn’t explained.
Probably the scariest feature of CAGW is drought. We are regularly treated to photographs of dried up lake beds and dead animals. This is in spite of the IPCC telling us that in a warmer climate there will be more evaporation, water vapor and precipitation. Additionally NOAA’s Climate at a Glance web page has data, for the USA-48 at least, that can be accessed for a variety of time series and trends that clearly show that precipitation has increased since the 1890s. Fully 41 of the 48 states show an increase since 1900.
There are other issues, polar bear populations are only quantified if the numbers are going down, otherwise we’re told the data is insufficient. The ARGO floats initially told us the ocean was cooling, but Dr. Josh Willis changed the data and now those floats report ocean warming. We are told that when glaciers disappear, the rivers will dry up ignoring the fact that rain and snow will still fall in the watershed.
There are lots of issues associated with CAWG but not all have data that I can find on the net and examine. But because of the above, I don’t believe anything the CAWG folks tell me unless I have good reason to do so.
jai mitchell says:
”petition was signed by such astute scientists as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse”
Really? Well, let’s see. I went to the petition project full list and searched duck.
http://www.petitionproject.org/signers_by_last_name.php?run=all
Results: Earl W Duck, Kenneth L. Duck, Earl E. Duckett, Ronald H. Duckstein Jr
So I white page searched for Earl Duck:
Earl W Duck
San Antonio, TX
Earl W Duck
Newark, OH
Earl William Duck
Newark, OH
E Duck
Toronto, ON
E Duck
Jacksonville, FL
E Duck
Dundas, ON
Well, it seems to be a real name. But let’s try that suspicious looking Ronald:
Ronald H Duckstein
Butler, PA
Ronald H Duckstein
Beaver, PA
Ronald S Duckstein
Yorktown Heights, NY
Ronald H Duckstein
Beaver, PA
Ronald Scott Duckstein
Yorktown Heights, NY
I searched for Mouse but there were no matches found.
I don’t know, Jai, but it would seem that it is you that has bought into a lie.
I’m a skeptic because I fact check. The alarmists always either get the facts wrong or leave out pertinent facts. Yes, every time and I’ve been fact checking global warming alarmism since 1994. You are no exception.
Jimmy Haigh. says at July 28, 2013 at 9:00 am
At July 26, 2013 at 5:50 am I wrote,
“It seems there are some common themes in these testimonies. Generally, the people here can be split into one or more of these types:
1) A science or engineering background that led to the confidence to research the science itself and found that there wasn’t any evidence at all. Just wiggle fitting of unvalidated computer models.
2) People who could tell that honest-brokers don’t act like Michael Mann or Phil Jones. The rudeness of the alarmist blogs has been picked out, especially Real Climate.
3) Old-timers who’ve seen apocalyptic warnings before (“the ice age is coming” as the Clash sang) and need a very high level of proof before accepting this one.
4) People who just doubted for no apparent reason because they just doubt every new claim. These people are very rare but are featured on this thread.
5) Right-wingers who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of AGW.”
Since then everyone has continued to fit into one or more of these options.
And by far the most common is option 1seems to be researching the science itself.
But I haven’t done the numbers or considered false reporting and what impression people may want to create..
jai mitchell says:
” I do recall that only about 8 years ago it was “no global warming” and there is still a remnant of people who believe that the temperature data record is flawed somehow, that satellite measurements are the only way to go and that only specific satellite measurements from “trusted” sources can be used.”
There’s always some that go to the extreme i.e. no global warming or no GHE, but I think you’re confusing the fringe with the mainstream WUWT view. I would say most of us would contend that the temperature record is undoubtedly flawed but that also warming is evidenced by other metrics such as glacier retreat. Exposing UHI and other issues concerning the temperature record doesn’t necessarily assert that there’s been no warming but that the accuracy of any attempt at quantifying the magnitude of that warming is questionable.
However, I think you’ve pegged me with regard to the satellite data. Yes, I think the satellite data is more comprehensive and accurate and to top it off the people accumulating and processing the data haven’t succumbed to noble cause corruption. In short, I “trust” the satellite data and distrust data that is inaccurate, incomplete, and under the control of those that believe the world needs to be saved.
Jonathan Abbott says:
It is basic physics that adding CO2 to the atmosphere should cause some warming.
Is it basic physics though? I think basic physics can say CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but i don’t think it says adding CO2 to the earth’s atmosphere should case some warming, as you say it all depends on the feedbacks, so that moves beyond basic physics to a chaotic system.
I once sent Anthony copies of ATI’s release of UVa emails, identified myself from WUWT and declared my name. Very happy to email Anthony my name again, and he can share it with the mods if he wishes.
REPLY: I don’t recall seeing such an email, or if I did, making any connection. OTOH I get dozens to hundreds of emails a day, so it may just be lost in the noise. – Anthony
(Reply #2: Anthony previously wrote to you: I’m really rather tired of your pot shots here from behind the comfort of anonymity, where if you are wrong there’s no downside for you because you take the no risk hidey hole route. You were then asked again to identify yourself. Your one word reply: “No.”
Now is your chance, ‘barry’. Provide a verifiable identity, or remain anonymous. ~mod)
Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for your entertaining story!
To jump the gun, I still believe in a loose form of AGW (don’t stop reading, anybody!). After reading or skimming through hundreds of Climategate Emails, browsing through scientific papers and working my way through further hundreds of more or less convincing articles arguing all sorts of positions, I’m starting to feel a bit dizzy int he head.
What I have learned above all is to be careful. The problem is that a good speaker or writer (e. g. Chris Monckton, Al Gore) can defend almost any position, true or false. This doesn’t even need to involve deceit. Firm but mistaken belief will do. So, had I read just one single well-phrased article, rather than the many I have, it would have surely pushed me towards believing its core tenets –even in the absence of well-sourced information. In fact, I am almost sure that my early belief in AGW was based on just such an articles somewhere in the news, though I can’t now remember it. This is an unpleasant insight, because I have always seen myself as rational. But after reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman my doubts about the reliability of human judgement, my own obviously included, are bigger than ever. We are not even close to being fully rational by nature. The more emotional a debate is, the harder it is to stay calm and unbiased. And I must admit that the AGW debate is far more emotional for me than any murder trial. What is most annoying: A completely cold, neutral, logical argument is harder to engage with than an emotional statement. So, the more rational I try to be, the slower my thinking goes. And I bet most of you are not much different!
Some useful principles/rules of truth-seeking (science):
1. Be relaxed and modest. Here’s the test: Imagine in detail that you are completely wrong and the other side have got it just right. If you can calmly consider this possibility for a minute or so without feeling anger, injustice, shame or any other sort of pain, you can be proud.
2. Be patient and rigorous. Don’t look for easy, flashy answers –in fact be on your guard, if anything flashy comes your way. Look for answers that acknowledge uncertainties and reason no further than they can.
3. Resist confirmation bias, appealing narratives, wishful thinking, overconfidence and all those fallacies. But that should follow if you can do 1.
Unfortunately I have yet to find a site that does all this. Instead, you need to hear both sides. This is why I have decided to receive Emails from both WUWT and Skepticalscience.com, as they are both among the most relevant outlets on their side of the argument.
Why and how I still believe in AGW? Split the hypothesis into four statements that combine to form a sufficient argument, if true.
1. Humans have caused an increase in CO2-levels from 280 to 400 ppm in the past 200 years.
2. This will probably to lead to an increase in temperature of X to Y (e.g. 1.5 to 4.5 °C), whatever nature does.
3. These changes together will alter the climate by shrinking glaciers and icecaps, raising sea levels, acidifying the ocean, possibly releasing methane from the permafrost, changing the weather patterns our food production is accustomed to all over the world.
4. This is strongly negative.
All are substantiated with references at Skepticalscience.com. But, as I say, that isn’t enough for me.
I am very confident of 1, but have yet to grasp the complexities of 2 and 3. Statement 4 I really don’t know. So why am I sure it is a problem? I am not, pure and simple. Nor am I sure it isn’t.
But I believe two things: Firstly, while many people on both sides of the debate have long left the high road (it seems to be contagious), it is not logical to say “Jones and Mann are funny types, so the whole theory is crap”. As it happens, I don’t think Jones and Mann have been soundly discredited anyway, but even then, Monckton also seems a funny type, as do Plimer, Delingpole and various others. The point is that there are also sound-looking types (e. g. Tom Wigley, Richard Muller as far as I can see) who propose AGW. Secondly, we would be fools to ignore even the moderately remote possibility of a global crisis. So unless we are very sure it isn’t coming, we should not focus our energy on the task of killing the theory.
Best regards from a skeptic warmist.
M. Courtney, thanks — that was an excellent summary of peoples’ motives to turn sceptical. They are a little more substantial than just “conspiracist ideation” 😉
It is also interesting to note that quite a few people went through a phase of self-doubting, of distrusting their own conclusions — which seems to be due more to social pressure than to the strength of arguments pro AGW. We don’t usually expect to find ourselves so much at odds with common received wisdom, and it can feel quite uncomfortable.
Also interesting to note the effect on many of “Real Climate” — which really looks like website of CPSU would have looked, had it lived to see the internet age. Real Climate must be one of the greatest foot-self-shooting incidents in history. It was one of my first stops when I started to research the issue, and from my complete failure to find anything of value there — it was all, “we are the experts and have no time to waste on morons like you, so you will just have to take our word for it” — I knew something was up.
Patrick says:
July 28, 2013 at 5:19 am
‘It’s a shame “Royals” and “actors” don’t keep what they think to themselves…’
It’s even more of a shame that so many people allow themselves to be swayed by them. It always makes me hum this tune: “I’m Just A Singer In A Rock And Roll Band”.
John B says:
July 28, 2013 at 6:23 am
“So the AGW thing was just part of the drone, so my default position was sceptic. But as the pitch got louder I took note and decided it was quite plausable.”
That pretty well describes my path, too. For a little while, I started to believe it. Then, I started pulling at the threads of the narrative, and it quickly unraveled.
Steve Case says:
July 28, 2013 at 9:01 am
“We are regularly treated to photographs of dried up lake beds and dead animals.”
Yes. Al Gore’s attempt to stoke AGW fears by showing pictures of the Aral Sea really ticked me off. Ironically, of course, the Aral Sea dried up because Soviet central planners diverted the waters. It had nothing to do with the natural climate in general, much less with CO2.
For me it was simple. I learned about the little ice age in 6th grade world history (Leif Erikson discovered N. America, et. al). When I first heard about CO2 global warming in the early 90’s, i kept waiting to hear how they determined CO2 was the cause and not a rebound from the LIA. I am still waiting.
I was sceptical from the beginning. An engineering background comes with a large BS detector. The large positive feedback mechanism is not likely in long term systems and I have wasted lots of time trying to model reality with computer simulators. Maurice Strong, Al Gore, James Hansen, AR4, and Climategate were over the top political and left a further bad taste.
Question now is how to reach the non scientific – how break the cult like mind hold on the gullible masses?
I have condensed the simplest shortest least technical argument that works with the non technical crowd. See http://climateequilibrium.wordpress.com/ This simple message is not new or profound and has been said many times by more qualified people but it places doubt in their minds which is step one in breaking someone free of a cult. Most people are relieved to hear that the sky is not falling but true believers are shaken to the core and take a month ot two to recover.
Feel free to copy, modify, distribute or provide feedback.
The next big thread like this should be personal stories about conversions and deprogramming the cult believers. Maybe we can do a reality TV show on CAGW interventions.
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I would also love to have your father return here. I don’t know what happened or was said when he “swore the site off” but I can accept that his reasons are his own. If he never returns, please tell him that he is missed. He doesn’t “owe us” his contributions but we miss them.
Michael Palmer says at July 28, 2013 at 10:47 am…
You were interested in my summary of why people are sceptical which I split into 5 categories.
There is a 6th category that I don’t mention before as it has only one member – me. I ignored it is I assumed everyone thinks they are special and I’m no different. Yet on reflection it may become a larger group in a decade or so. Therefore I add it here:
6) Second generation sceptics who have had the science of cAGW as part of their basic academic make-up. They have had no period of doubt and discovery. They don’t instinctively doubt everything until they have checked it out like category 4.
I say “they” but in this blog it is just “me”. My father was a sceptic in 1984 (the year not the metaphor) so it would be expected that I am ahead of other second generation sceptics. This category, if it is real, may grow in number.
Al Gore’s book made me become suspicious of the CAGW idea straightaway. Then I began to poke around, and found out that nothing could be taken at face value, even proclamations from apparently expert organisations or bodies. Here are a few examples.
The manner in which data is presented can immediately colour a reader or listener’s perception. It’s often said that CO2 levels have increased by 40% since 1958 – but to give a meaningful picture, a concentration is far more useful. CO2 currently is increasing somewhere between one and two molecules in a million of other atmospheric gases (assayed dry) annually. That’s arguably a trivial increase. As I endlessly ask, where is the laboratory bench experiment which shows the effect of such a tiny increase in an artificial atmosphere, and at various concentrations of water vapour? Granted this is not the real atmosphere, but at least there would be a solid real-world reference point to work from, not endless model projections and calculations of the possible effects of a doubling. What other science bases so much on model ‘projections’?
CO2 has been measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii since the late 1950s using a technique called infra-red spectroscopy. Measurements prior to that date were by the so-called ‘wet’ chemical methods. When I first found out about these and wanted to know more, I contacted the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre (CDIAC) in the USA. Their website proclaims that the CDIAC is “the primary climate-change and information centre of the US Department of Energy”. Yet their spokesman knew nothing of any methods of analysing CO2 levels prior to Mauna Loa!
Yet it turns out that this been done literally thousands of times. Ernst-Georg Beck has reviewed the data extensively, and his findings make for interesting reading. It would appear that our present day CO2 levels are not necessarily unprecedented. Interestingly, as pointed out by Ian Plimer (Heaven and Earth), the two methods have not been compared (i.e. validated) against one another (p416). He points out that previous peaks of CO2 levels occurred in 1825, 1857, and 1942 – the CO2 level in the latter year reaching 400ppm.
Then there’s the matter of the ice cores. The 280ppm ‘pre-industrial’ value is etched on the minds of all those who take an interest in CO2 levels. But can this be relied upon?
Having been 3000 feet down a mine, I have seen how even huge steel girders buckle under pressure. This set me thinking as to how air bubbles could possibly survive intact in ice cores. Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski’s ‘Climate Change: Incorrect Information on Pre-industrial CO2’ considers these pressure effects in detail. Essentially, his conclusion is that the ‘pre-industrial’ figure is too low.
The increase in CO2 post-Mauna is usually portrayed as an inexorable rise. However, as pointed out by meteorologist William James Burroughs in his book ‘Climate Change’, the rate has fluctuated dramatically (see p227). There were rapid growth rates in the late 1980s, and a marked slowing in the early 1990s. He refers to IPCC, 1995, Fig 2.2 to make the point. He concludes that ‘these fluctuations have not been explained but suggest complicated feedback mechanisms between short-term climatic variations (e.g. the ENSO) and the uptake of carbon in the biosphere.
Already, it can be seen that the measurement of levels of CO2 does not have such a straightforward history as might be imagined.
Another question which can be asked is ‘how much CO2 is there in the atmosphere, and how much of it is due to fossil fuel combustion?’
Professor Robert Carter in ‘Climate – the Counter Consensus’ cites the work of Norwegian geochemist Tom Segalstad, who has concluded that human emissions account for about 4% of the total. That’s 16 molecules in a million (16ppm, or parts per million) of all atmospheric gases. The current total for CO2 is 392ppm. Of course, the total tonnages look much more impressive – a CO2 total of 3000 billion tonnes (Gt), with the human contribution being 125Gt.
All this has taken quite a while to find out, and there’s the problem. Unless someone is interested and has the time, how can a member of the public decide what to think given so much shoddy and lazy media presentation about the subject?
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May I suggest you rephrase that? How about, “5) Those who see it as a lever to political power.”?
Right-wing, Left-wing don’t matter. It just happens that, right now, the Left has their hand on the lever. Politics is not the most most honest profession regardless of its bent.
Gunga Din says at July 28, 2013 at 12:32 pm
In response to my “5) Right-wingers who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of AGW.”
You say,
I want to say “YES” because I think you are absolutely right.
But the problem is that I am reviewing this thread – and only this thread.
And on this thread it is only right-wingers who fall into category 5. So I must say “NO“.
Your suggestion is more general.
Your suggestion is, in theory (a theory I agree with), more true.
But your suggestion is not supported by this thread and so not justified within the scope of my review.
‘Doubting Rich’ wanted empirical evidence of positive feedback. In fact the increase in water vapor has been observed and is in line with model projections. See, for example, Dessler et al 2008.
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/229/Dessler_et_al_2008b.pdf
who concluded .. The existence of a strong and positive water-vapor feedback means that projected business-as-usual greenhousegas emissions over the next century are virtually guaranFteed to produce warming of several degrees Celsius. The only way that will not happen is if a strong, negative, and currently unknown feedback is discovered somewhere
in our climate system.
Gunga Din says at July 28, 2013 at 1:19 pm…
Will do. But he’s on holiday at the moment.
And sorry. I know you’re right but I can’t justify that belief from the evidence in scope.
When Climategate ‘broke’ I wondered what it was all about and started searching the internet. Within about fifteen minutes I found the phrase ‘the science is settled’. “How can science ever be settled?” I thought. “There is something funny going on here.” After researching various sites on the internet to try to ascertain the truth, I am totally unable to accept the CAGW theory.
Thomas Traill says:
July 28, 2013 at 10:17 am
“…1. Humans have caused an increase in CO2-levels from 280 to 400 ppm in the past 200 years… I am very confident of 1…”
*
Given that 95% (or is it 98%?) of CO2 comes from nature, humans cannot be responsible alone for this increase. It’s happening naturally. Even if we are responsible for 2% or 5% of that increase, it’s still happening naturally. Every living thing on the planet is a carbon-based life form. We all emit CO2, all life, not just humans. If there were no people at all on the planet, CO2 concentrations would still be going up. It’s a natural cycle. Nature is not static.
If one is over fifty, say, he probably is less likely than a youngster to trust anything computer generated; let alone, doomsday, “The end is near“, crapola. When I was young, I saw people walking the streets wearing sandwich board signs prophesying doomsday. These alarmists were doing the same thing Al Gore and his ilk does today. Only Gore uses PowerPoint instead of the sandwich board. It’s the same thing though.
The Man-Made Global Warming scam/lie/hoax becomes evident when one looks at the narrative/language that spews from the alarmists:
Only evil and suffering can come from a warmer Earth. Constant bad-weather-from-bad-karma misanthropic guilt trip doomsday warnings
Fossil fueled, Western style prosperity must stop. This is the real agenda. Saving the Earth has little to do with it.
I say, why can’t it be? : “Congratulations children, The Energy sources that fuel our economies and our prosperity, give us long life and comfort, these fossil fuels will also cause our planet to warm gently, about 2C degrees over the next century. What luck!
With the warmth and extra CO2 for plant life, millions of acres of tundra will become forests. Millions of acres of frozen steppe will become arable. Starvation will end. Prosperity will reach even the poorest people. We must keep searching for and burning oil and coal so we can improve our climate and prosper. Humanity will become wealthy. With this wealth we can preserve habitat for animals, protect the rain forest. We will clean the oceans and the land. Our future is bright. We are entering the age of abundance. “
The Earth is not warming of late though. Too bad.
Not a scientist, and it was my general skepticism of modern “science”, along with an inherent understanding that modern whacko-environmentalism was the new home of socialism and CAGW was just further manifestation of their desire to control people’s lives, that kept me from ever falling for the CAGW scare to begin with.
I say I am a skeptic of science in general. By that, I mean a skeptic of junk science, which CAGW falls into. We were told; caffeine will kill you…..oh, wait, it may be beneficial…..bran will make you live longer…..er, wait, doesnt do much really….liquor is bad bad bad…..wait, wine may be good for you….and on and on. Tack on the second hand smoke junk science, and the scare tactics the anti-tobacco lobby has heaped on us (millions die from second hand smoke every year, huh? Show me a body, with incontrovertible evidence the person died from second hand smoke….just one), the alar scare starring Meryl Streep sobbing before CONgress “what are we doing to our children”, which it turned out was…nothing. You get the point.
(As an aside, I’m not promoting the tobacco companies with the second hand smoke bit, just pointing out that the second hand smoke scare is based on so called science that’s equally as shabby as climate science)
As with everything, follow the money, or at least remember that everyone is motivated by something, the three biggest motivators being sex, money, power. If you understand human nature, and also understand that just because someone wears a white lab coat with a name badge starting with Dr. or ending with PhD it doesnt mean they are imune from injecting their political or moral world view into their work, it isn’t hard to believe the stories of turf wars, hidden science, made up science and plain old fraud that seemingly is systemic within climate “science”. It’s as old as mankind itself.
Wow, what a thread. Took me three long sittings to get through it all. My turn.
I have always “Zigged”, when everyone else “zagged”. No technical background at all. English Lit. Uni grad, 6th of 8 children. Dealing with my brothers and sisters growing up honed my internal BS meter to keen rasors edge.
Post on a rugby union site and used to watch the climate change “sh*tfights from the sidelines, followed some of the links to Sks, RC and here.
Only one of the three didn’t set the alarm bells of my BS meter off.
Guess which one that was.
I now spend more time here than there.
Anthony et al Thanks for all of your good work
M Courtney says: “on this thread it is only right-wingers who fall into category 5.”
Category “5) Right-wingers who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of AGW.”
The statement can ONLY apply to a single group of people.
If you remove ‘When a right-winger’ from the sentence even you fit the category.
“Those who didn’t like the collectivist policies promoted in the name of (C)AGW.”
You might want to open your horizons a little
Late to the party – I wanted to read all the comments first. Thanks Jonathan for starting this wonderful thread; it should be a gold-mine for psychologists if they have any real dedication to academic integrity.
I’ve written in other threads about my own experience, but will repeat it here for the sake of convenience. I am a historian of science, and my specialty is the history of fisheries biology. I had the spectacular horror of seeing the world’s once most prolific ground-fish fishery (cod, haddock etc) collapse just when I was completing my dissertation, which focused on the Canadian development of fisheries science. I had been following the fortunes of the fisheries, which I already believed were in a profoundly bad condition based on newspaper reports (this was before the Internet) of fishermen demanding a moratorium on the offshore cod fisheries. Yet fisheries biologists at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans kept saying everything was fine -their models showed that the fish stocks were recovering from the international over-fishing that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. They did not explain the basis of their models and projections (it turned out the data was largely based on commercial fish catches by sonar-equipped trawlers that had been scooping up the last concentrations of cod.) Since then I have had a profound distrust of models.
I have to admit I was mildly convinced of global warming to begin with – very vivid memories of the summer of 1988 in Toronto with no air-conditioning in a south-facing apartment listening to ‘hot times’ beer ads on the TV in the living room while working on my studies in the bed-room. Living in Canada made one rather hopeful it was all true. However, when the issue re-heated and Kyoto was proposed as the solution, I realized the entire exercise was a scam, since the solutions would do nothing to removing carbon dioxide and everything to penalize advanced economies. I was also very concerned that the poor in all economies would suffer. I also read Ronald Bailey’s Ecoscam at about that time, which gave me a political context and framework to understand why scientists were using environmental issues for political ends. Of course, as a historian of science am was already well-aware of science as a human endeavour, with all that implies, including ideological agendas.
Also, for me as a historian, confirmation that CAGW was apolitical and not a scientific exercise came with the Stalinist attempts to erase the Medieval Warm Period. How could something that was historically non-controversial be the spur for so much revisionism and nastiness? I was delighted when Steve McIntyre took on Mann’s hockey-stick graph because of this concern, and when I finally began to use the Internet for more than e-mail and direct historical research, around 2006, I was delighted when I discovered Climate Depot, and quickly thereafter WUWT and Climate Audit, and slightly later Bishop Hill. I felt a sense of relief as I returned to WUWT with increasing frequency, delighted to be learning so much from this website – especially Bob Tisdale’s threads on ocean warming trends, and the solar threads – and to be able to feel I was among friends. Previously, my main outlet had been ranting at my hapless family, and my main life-line was the National Post’s occasional series on climate skeptics and articles my McIntyre and McKitrick.
I deeply resent the need I have professionally to remain anonymous here. I keep hoping the scam will blow up in a spectacular fashion, and that I can come out of the closet – or at least say what I really think when this issue is brought up – before I retire.
I, like others here, wish to express the hope that Richard Courtney will return.
I hope you don’t me taking up so much space here to share how I became sceptical.
I am an engineer too; over 25 years in advanced product research and development. I am also a very keen outdoors person spending most of my holidays trying to leave the modern world behind exploring remote places and mountains and I feel very strongly about the way we are destroying the natural world. Through my interest in the natural world and survival and my engineering background I am very conscious how important it is to understand our world that we live and try and survive in. In engineering and survival if we get our facts and understanding wrong we could be in serious trouble. I do not know enough to say if the CO2 AGW theory is wrong or right but I am very sceptical, it doesn’t make sense to me and I’m extremely concerned that it could be wrong putting the science back decades and seriously hindering any chances of getting to the truth in the near future.
My climate scepticism started in the mid to late 1980’s. I love sciences and during my childhood in the 70’s I was absorbing lots of scientific information from textbooks and the media. When I was first aware of the CO2 AGW concern I assumed it was right and couldn’t understand why others weren’t taking it more seriously. I realised I didn’t understand the relevant science well enough because I couldn’t explain to others why they should be more concerned so I tried to find out more. The more I tried to understand the CO2 AGW theory the less sense it made. Just because it’s warming and possibly relatively warm compared to recent history and CO2 increasing doesn’t prove CO2 caused it or justify invoking the precautionary principle if that becomes the justification for letting wrong scientific conclusions and recommendations continue – if we get the science wrong and fail to correctly understand what is or isn’t actually happening we could be in an even more dangerous situation and fail to recognise or predict it and adapt in time. E.g. (as a purely hypothetic example) what if the Sun is a major player and this unusually inactive period causes different weather patterns which disrupts agriculture, animal and plant life, economies, results in more extremes and advancing glaciers. As scientists/engineers we will have let society down.
In my engineering work I enjoy working with a lot of clever people on complex products and problems and you have to get to the truth (with never enough resources or time!) or your products fail and you go out of business. You need to try and develop the ability to be able to take a reality check and realise when a clever theory is just that and not the real world. I became very sceptical of complicated theories; theories that have to explain away lots of evidence that at first glance seems to contradict it (I prefer to be more hands on or observational and not to get too reliant on theory, and usually the real answer is surprisingly simple). Only the clever guys can explain the complex theory, you can’t argue with them and given a bit of time they can find a seemingly plausible answer for almost anything they need convincing themselves and everyone else they must be right, anyone who tries to pull their theory apart is made to look stupid. Such theories can stand up to thorough theoretical checking so in a way they are not wrong, but they are wrong.
Science sometimes finds out that its previous view was wrong but since the 1980’s to me this seems to be happening suspiciously often with climate science, that adds to my scepticism. Because that rewriting is spread over more than 30 years I think few people are aware of the implications or are not noticing it happening, I think if we could condense those 30 years or more of ‘discovery’ and rewriting what they said earlier into a presentation lasting a few hours maybe the penny would drop for a lot more people.
When I discovered Realclimate it added to my scepticism – they didn’t seem to be discussing/explaining/dealing with scientific issues the way I’ve become used to working with others in ‘getting to the truth’ in engineering – when I would try and follow the leading climate scientists arguments I would frequently have this uneasy feeling like when you’re watching a magician, a slight of hand that could convince a lot of people but made alarm bells ring in my mind.
My instinct would be to try to understand/model the basic thermodynamics and do a simple energy balance. But as I think about it it soon gets very complicated. I have no idea how climate models work so I should not really be commenting, however I thought I heard a scientist say the models do not include the physics of CO2, only an assumed forcing or sensitivity!? I could not believe what I was hearing! In other words, and I could be wrong but the models don’t appear to be built from first principles around the laws of physics/thermodynamics in the way I had assumed they would. I’m probably missing something or showing my ignorance of physics/thermodynamics but I don’t understand why we talk about sensitivity to CO2 (I’m not sure it’s sensible to define it as a number or simple equation?), or global/average things; they strike me as meaningless and misleading – a world where everywhere is, say 15degC, 5m/s wind speed, x% humidity, xmm/hr, rain, ymb pressure etc is a totally different one thermodynamically from one with the same averages but massive variations from one time/place to another. Even if we did build a model up from first principles I’m still struggling to understand where the envelope of the model would be – do we include just the sea surface, or how far down do we go? How far down (e.g. underground) do we go with snow and ice, rocks, forests, low vegetation when including heat content, conduction, radiation, etc, changes of state, work done, winter snow over warm ground, ice over water, etc. AND it strikes me the system has so many degrees of freedom; so many different ways it could use/convert/store energy that we haven’t got a chance – for example this current rather large discrepancy between modelled and measured temperatures is being blamed on some as yet unexplained mechanism by which the heat is supposedly going into the oceans: I’m struggling to buy that particular argument whilst still buying the rest of their modelling, but that’s the sort of potential freedom the system has to do its own thing that I mean. So what I’m getting to is I’m wondering if the system is so complex compared to our current understanding that to just do an energy balance; try and measure energy in and energy out, or thinking in terms of losing or gaining heat or warming or cooling is a waste of time because it has so many freedoms to decide what to do with that energy and where is the envelope of this system (how far into our planet, oceans, crust etc), hence it’s probably confusing us by trying to model it and concentrate on temperature or average/global measures, or sensitivities. Warmers and sceptics can argue and theorise about sensitivity, temperatures etc, but I wonder if that’s really going to get us anywhere.
I’m wondering if, instead of thinking global/average, temperatures, sensitivity, climate models etc we should be analysing weather/jet streams and changes in weather patterns etc. A year without extremes may have the same averages as a year with extremes, but is totally different. Factors on/in/outside our planet could affecting the thermodynamic behaviour which affects the weather, measuring an average for the planet (e.g. temperature) might show, as a result of the changing system/weather a warming, but some places warmed, some cooled, some used energy/heat in a different way and trying to plot the usual suspects/drivers – greenhouse effect, volcanoes, solar activity etc verses average temperature, say, is not going to be very meaningful, perhaps instead we should be looking at some measure of the weather or thermodynamic system verses potential drivers.
I’m surprised the rest of science is not asking more probing questions. In engineering we have procedures and independent audits (if we fail to maintain certification we would probably lose our customers), as an example it sounds to me like the paper trail, archiving of raw data, methods etc to allow independent verification of their work, for example the hockey stick, was probably inadequate and I’m surprised the rest of science let them get away with it. Similarly the thermometer network I’m surprised they did not themselves require an audit or the rest of science did not require an audit for both the paper trail (station history) and siting of the thermometers etc – how do they know what the data is that they are analysing and making very important conclusions with? They are investing a lot of their work on the results of the analysis of that raw data.
At 4:29 PM on 28 June, Paul in UK had written:
You’re not “taking up so much space” at all. You’re addressing issues pertinent to first principles of investigation and analysis, and on these none of us should ever lose focus.
I was first taught about the Greenhouse Effect in my Environmental Science degree course at the University of Lancaster in the early 1970s. I have spent my entire career working as a Geoscientist. The more Geoscience I study the greater the inconsistencies I find in the theory that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations control the climate.
For example during the Carboniferous Visean the major Gondwana Continental Glaciation occurred at the South Pole. Geological field studies of the marine deltaic Yoredale strata in Yorkshire showed the presence of cyclothems, repeated patterns of sedimentation for which the preferred geological explanation is ice-cap controlled global eustatic sea-level variations. This conclusion was reached before the modern theory of continental reconstruction was accepted and the Carboniferous glacial deposits of the southern continents were linked together in the combined paleo-continent of Gondwanaland.
Clearly the cyclothems show that the planet was experiencing Ice-house atmospheric conditions in the Carboniferous, however the Carboniferous was also a time of marine sapropel deposition in deep sea marine shales associated with warm dense bottom water anoxia. It therefore appears that in the Carboniferous planetary Ice-house world and Green-house world ocean water conditions occurred at the same time.
But the Carboniferous was a long time ago and the world has changed since then. True; so ask how it is possible under current low carbon dioxide atmospheric conditions for the modern Red Sea Bottom Water (RSBW) to have a year round temperature of +21.7C and a salinity of 40.6 psu, which means that the RSBW has a density of 1028.59 kg/m3. By contrast modern Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW) has a temperature of -0.8C and a peak salinity of 34.7 psu. This means that the coldest sea water on the planet, which has a density of 1027.89 kg/m3, is less dense than Red Sea Bottom Water. In a straight contest between these two marine waters the Red Sea Bottom Water would win and the deeps of the ocean would be filled with warm oxygen poor bottom water from the tropics and not cold oxygenated water from the polar seas.
The implication is that tropical seas can create warm dense bottom water irrespective of atmospheric gas conditions. In the Carboniferous the waters of the world ocean were filled with warm tropical and anoxia prone bottom water producing the abundant organic carbon found in the deep marine shales of the Culm, yet at the same time the Gondwana Ice-cap controlled sea-level variation and produced the observed shallow water cyclothems. Both Green-house and Ice-house conditions occurred at the same time. There is no paradox here; the truth is that it is the oceans which control world climate and not the atmosphere.
At 4:42 PM on 28 July, Philip Mulholland had written:
Say rather that the oceans have greater effect upon global climate than does the atmosphere. When we’re speaking of “control,” the principal factors are extraterrestrial – chiefly solar.
At any rede, there is no statistically significant role played by anthropogenic increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide content as the result of the purposeful combustion of petrochemical fuels, and therefore no possible way in which the political machinations of the Watermelon alarmists could make any impact whatsoever upon “man-made global climate change.”
“If some have gone from genuine scepticism to accepting CAGW, I would find that especially fascinating.”
It is very interesting that almost all conversions have been the other way. In fact I don’t know of anyone who was once a skeptic and became an alarmist. In my own case, seven years ago I invested the time to read the case for strong AGW, including IPCC reports. I was flabbergasted at the weakness of it and the presence of obvious finagling and omissions in some of the papers and chapters.
It was a life changing experience because it put me on notice that there may be other scientific sacred cows out there that are false. It is now a voyage of discovery.
First, I’d like to thank Anthony and all the WUWT contributors for providing an engaging and informative forum on climate issues! I’ve been visiting this site for several years after retiring as a research materials engineer in the aerospace sector. My knowledge of climate science remains limited, but my materials engineering and modeling experience has taught me to be risk averse, humble when confronted by a multiplicity of complex, interacting, competing physical mechanism involving a range of length scales and time scales. . . whether attempting to model behavior using, statistical methods, phenomenology, or using physically-based methods. Rather than expounding on this further, let me summarize the main reasons I’m skeptical about CAGW.
(1) Proclamations that “The Science is Settled” seems to be a red herring. Yes many of the mechanisms contributing to climate behavior may be reasonably well understood when studied in isolation under laboratory controlled conditions. However, understanding and modeling such ideal isolated scientific mechanisms is the easy part. . . the key to progressively building climate understanding is to establish the relationships and associated uncertainties among mechanisms using the strategies and tools used to predict the behavior and performance of a complex aeronautical machine (whether by data or model). My experience tells me that typically academics and those that view themselves as “scientists” have limited training, experience, or interest in systems engineering tools and research.
(2) Aerospace design and materials engineers quickly learn to question both data and modeling results particularly when confronted by a new material, design concept, or manufacturing process. This risk aversion stems from (a) professional responsibility (given that carelessness can lead to injury, loss-of-life, and the destruction of costly aircraft), (b) rigorous design engineering practices and risk averse management oversight, and (3) review and acceptance by regulatory and certification authorities (e.g., FAA). However, CAGW advocates often appear to be cavalier, seemingly unfettered by any skeptical oversight by anyone or group empowered to seriously review, question, or set standards or requirements for data gathering or model development. This despite that CAGW, if pursued politically to the extreme, could have enormous, societal, economic, and human impact globally.
(3) Engineering groups (e.g., American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Computational Solid Mechanics) have established recommended practices for verifying and validating computational models. Maybe I’m wrong, but I see no evidence that there is any systematic discipline-wide effort to do the same for climate studies and modeling.
(4) It strikes me that climate models involve a fair level of calibration. Yet it’s well know that calibrated models have limited extrapolation power. This appears particularly dangerous given that CAGW advocates are projecting unprecedented climate changes that differ significantly from regimes included in climate model hind casts.
(5) My industrial experience taught me that unquestioning, good-boy rain-makers and engineering politicians are sometimes the most dangerous type of engineer of all. . . for the most fundamental reason. . . you can’t trust them. . . and too often they cause harm.
Again, Anthony thanks for a great climate web site!
I’m an infantryman, not a scientist, and my grades in calculus, chemistry, and physics were, let’s say on the up slop of the curve not the down slope, if you know what I mean. However, I grew up as a farm boy in the midwest of the united states. My experience is much the same as yours, I noticed the political language, the certainty, the religious fervor, and most of all, the absence of any real reliance on the scientific method that I had been taught in school (that much I did retain).
At 6:48 PM on 28 July, J. Locke had written:
It’s not surprising that a ground-pounder should be grounded. Every field training exercise (FTX) upon which a serving soldier embarks is a nose-rubbing experience of empiricism in which the need for congruence between the manuals and the real world is driven home.
With regard to “the political language, the certainty, the religious fervor” of the climate catastrophists, you obviously experienced what I like to call a Cyrano de Bergerac moment in your assessment of these specimens:
In the 1970’s I worked at a small local ski area, I litteraly skied to work. This was about the time that scientists were being alarmists about a coming ice-age (they can deny that all the want, I was there). Then a few years later the ski area was closed due to a warming climate, so much for a coming Ice-age! Later after being in the Army in a Germany with uncharecteristicaly warm muddy winters, I went to college and studied a fair amount of science and computer science and learned enough about science and what computers can and can’t do, to be highly sceptical of the claims of AGW. Even with my formal training and after the prevoius false claims of comeing ice-age, I was looking into the AGW and just about the time I was starting to think that there might be something to it, Climategate broke out. Climategate lead me to believe that climatology is not worthy of the title science.
Philip Mulholland says:
July 28, 2013 at 4:42 pm
I agree it’s the oceans, although the positions of & connections among the continents can influence oceanic circulation patterns. And in the case of the Pleistocene glaciations, orbital mechanics & the Earth’s wobbles.
Noblesse Oblige says:
July 28, 2013 at 5:17 pm
“… I was flabbergasted at the weakness of it … It was a life changing experience because it put me on notice that there may be other scientific sacred cows out there that are false.”
—
Amen. Plenty of them — a whole thundering herd of sacred cows, although none of those I can think of is quite as politically charged and foisted on the public with the same kind of intense, relentless propaganda. But it is very common for groups of scientists to gang together and promote a “new field” of research, make pie-in-the-sky promises to the public about curing cancer and whatnot in order to funnel a disproportionate amount of research dollars their way. It has become a way of life for many, and is on the whole very detrimental to science and to society.
At first I believed the global warming siren song and growing up in the southern coast of Sicily I was for a warmer climate and not too fund of cold climate but as I researched the pros and cons I became aware of the increasing demonizing of those who disagreed I became more and more disgusted with the mud slinging by the warmists and their more doomsday predictions. To put it in a more plain way not only I smelled a rat but a whole plague of political liars who would say and do anything to impose their nefarious agenda and leave us poor and shivering in the dark just as is being done to the pensioners in Great Britain who have to chose between eating or heating resulting in the doubling and tripleling of the death rate of pensioners. A truly demonic agenda by those who were elected to serve the people who voted for them! Betrayal would be also a way to describe their action!
Golden;
Your “bullock” list is “bollocks”. A bullock is a young castrated bull. “Bollocks” is a vulgar Brit expression for “claptrap”, “junk” etc., probably referring to the discarded parts of the poor bullocks. 🙂
;p
My moment of revelation came a few years ago when Prof. Nir Shaviv posted some comments on an Internet forum, proposing his theory about the connection between the sun’s activity and Eearth climate.
It set me off reading on the Web where very quickly I found WUWT.
The rest is history.
I wonder if Cook et al. might be interested in mining this thread as a species of survey conducted to assess the sociological characteristics of those who have come to deny the validity of the great gaudy crapola of “man-made global warming”?
There certainly appears to be more substantive information here than in the laundered lies of their most recent excuse for “research.”
Just Steve: I’m very off topic here, but it’s on health matters, always important to me. I was interested in your comments on ‘second hand’ smoke. From personal experience, I can tell you that it most certainly can have an effect. My late teenage years and my twenties saw me spending a lot of time listening to live music in pubs. The air was always thick with smoke, and it affected my lungs for a day or two afterwards. My breathing felt ‘tight’, as if on the tail end of an attack of bronchitis. A friend was a semi-professional musician, and I wondered how he could stand such respiratory punishment night after night. The banning of smoking in public places was a major step forward as far as I was concerned. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of medical papers on all this if you have a look.
At 10:19 PM on 28 July, Carbon500 had written:
What you’d experienced had been the effect of cigarette smoke as a primary irritant, almost certainly inducing bronchospasm, whereas the campaigns against secondhand smoke have clamored without support about the putative carcinogenicity of such exposure.
As you’d noted, your personal (and idiosyncratic) pulmonary sensitivity to tobacco smoke was not manifest in your musician friend’s experiences with even greater exposure to the same types of environmental conditions.
You’re just unusually vulnerable, and were I your personal physician I’d have to take the history you’ve recounted as an indication that I’d best consider you an incipient asthmatic, and make available to you such expedient treatment modalities (probably at least a short-acting inhalant “rescue” bronchodilator) as might alleviate your future episodes of distress and help to preclude more severe respiratory difficulties.
It ain’t secondhand smoke per se with which you should be concerned, but rather your own respiratory tract.
You’ve got that backwards. The Null Hypothesis is that the changes ARE natural. The Warmistas must first disprove that before any alternatives (e.g., Human emissions of CO2 drive it) can even be considered.
My eyes were opened during my PhD. For the first time in my scientific career I was contributing to new discoveries in my field. I realised that understanding is hard won and settled science is never settled. The consenus method to stop debate rang alarm bells for me. I then began reading the original papers that this settled science was based on and realised they suffered from the same problem every scientific paper does – over interpretation. My sceptical position was the only position to take.
Philip J Clarke says: July 28, 2013 at 12:59 pm
” ‘Doubting Rich’ wanted empirical evidence of positive feedback. In fact the increase in water vapor has been observed and is in line with model projections. See, for example, Dessler et al 2008.
http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfiles/229/Dessler_et_al_2008b.pdf
who concluded .. The existence of a strong and positive water-vapor feedback means that projected business-as-usual greenhousegas emissions over the next century are virtually guaranFteed to produce warming of several degrees Celsius. The only way that will not happen is if a strong, negative, and currently unknown feedback is discovered somewhere
in our climate system.”
…
I have only one thing to say … NASA satellite data shows a decline in water vapor … http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/06/nasa-satellite-data-shows-a-decline-in-water-vapor/
I was educated in Adelaide in the 1950s and 60s, so I actually learned a few things. In the 70s, living in Britain, I became very interested in environmentalism, and studied it quite a bit. I had the same sort of concerns as Jonathan Abbot. I paid particular attention to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth scenarios. However, in the years that followed, I saw that (a) concern and care for the environment moved into the mainstream, and thus was well supported, (b) the scarier global scenarios had not happened, and (c) the alternative technologies just weren’t providing the goods. (How much electricity comes from Salter’s duck?) So when the Global Warming scare started getting publicity, I was somewhat inclined to accept the idea (I understood the proposed physics) but not totally convinced. Wouldn’t the CO2 be absorbed by plants? Was this another of the many promised catastrophes (such as the Ice Age threat of the 70s) that had failed to happen? How did this fit in with the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age? But I didn’t give it a lot of thought.
The biggest obstacles were the supporters of the idea. It was endorsed and promoted by Margaret Thatcher, as part of her destruction of British industry. Slightly less poisonous was the push by a right-wing American politician, Al Gore. (American politicians are all either ordinary right-wingers, like Gore and Obama, or bat-shit crazy right wingers.) Since I was living in the US during the election in which he was cheated out of the Presidency, I was not impressed. I became even more suspicious when I saw the similarity between AGW belief and religious belief.
In spite of this festering pollution, I tried to avoid falling for poisoning-the-well, guilt by association, and genetic fallacies, and told myself “Stick to the science.” That is, until the emission trading schemes started up. It was obvious that a bunch of nasty financial parasites (the type that Thatcher supported) were going to make huge amounts of money shuffling “credits” around, all at the expense of those who did useful, productive, work. We were all going to be screwed. At that point I started taking it seriously.
And it did not take long to dig up flaws in the science. The biggest was the missing hot-spot (thanks, David Evans) which, for someone with a Popperian background like me, was a major failing. And the more I have read, the less convincing the AGW story seems. Now the whole thing seems to falling apart, and the profiteers are grabbing their dosh, and, like their rodent superiors, fleeing the sinking ship. The True Believers are desperately trying to prop it up, but even some of them are making slow, careful, retreats.
A terrible cost, and a tragedy for science.
I too am very grateful to Mr. Watts for the tireless job he has done with this impressive website and his other work. It is unbelievable how a dozen or so websites run on shoe string budgest are able to effectively counter literally billions of dollars of government and special interest money being spent to influence public opinion.
And the tactics being used by the warmists are quite literally intended to mislead the public with malevelant methods much of the time. And it works with a fairly high percentage of the population. When I attended universities I was told by my professors on more than one occasion that the most imprtant goal of my education was to learn how to learn on my own and be an independent thinker. Most of my instructors probably had a political agenda and maybe their intention was other than what was stated, but they did help teach me to be skeptical of all things so I will give them credit for that.
I hope that students are being given similar opportunities today, but I fear they are not. My wife’s hobby is setting up living history displays and giving lectures largely at local schools, universities, historical societies and museums. After talking to students, teachers, historians, and the general public… I feel that the emphasis on independent thought and study is not what it used to be. That scares me.
Philip J Clarke says:
July 28, 2013 at 12:59 pm
“See, for example, Dessler et al 2008.”
Actually, it was abysmally poor analyses like Dessler’s which turned me against the farce. The fellow clearly has little to no experience with phase plane analysis. The slope of a best linear fit of the scatter plot can be positive or negative regardless of the sign of the feedback, depending on the phase. But, the direction of encirclements gives an indication as to whether the phase is leading or lagging. In this case, it lags, which is usually indicative of negative feedback.
I asked Dessler himself about this when he made an appearance here on WUWT when we were discussing his work (you can find it in WUWT archives). He assured me they had every reason to assume the phase lag was negligible, to which I of course replied, “you don’t have to assume it, you’ve got the data“. I was sitting there looking at the swirls telling me there was significant phase lag, and he just sat back blithely assuring me they could assume there wasn’t. It was surreal.
D Johnson @ July 25, 2013 at 8:43 pm
Junkscience.com by Steve Milloy should be read regularly by all Watts readers. While Anthony focuses upon the Warmista scam, Malloy covers many other similar “scientific” scams.
Donate to both!
Streetcred
I said “strong positive feedback” not “one strong positive element of feedback”. My apologies, I should have been more direct and said “net feedback”, but I really think that this is implicit when talking to anyone who knows anything about climate and is being honest in their reply. Individual feedbacks are irrelevant if we cannot use them to judge net feedback.
So do you have any empirical evidence that net feedback is positive, let alone strong and positive? It would be unusual in any stable, natural system, and indeed an interesting case of the weak anthropic principle.
Interesting you should use a study covering 2003 to 2008 though. I can accept as they state that temperature varied by 0.6 degrees worldwide in this time. However they were short-term fluctuations, there was no net warming at all over this period, and the response cannot be applied to the equilibrium climate sensitivity without further evidence. Given that radiosonds sent up during a far longer time when the surface was, on average, warming show no warming at all above the 300 hPa (9000m) level in the tropics, and that NASA data over the same time also show a fall in water vapour up to that level, I am doubtful about the relevance of this 5-year study to longer-term climate trends.
Ooops, sorry streetcred. That should have been addressed to Philip Clarke!
Philip J Clarke
Further to my last post to you, erroneously addressed to Streetcred, I also have to take issue with either the competence or the honesty of researchers who state
“The existence of a strong and positive water-vapor feedback means that projected business-as-usual greenhousegas emissions over the next century are virtually guaranFteed to produce warming of several degrees Celsius.”
This is of course ridiculous even if their research is perfect and correct, as they have not addressed any other element of feedback. They would have to reject every possible source negative feedback, known or unknown, or give empirical evidence of net feedback to make this statement honestly and reasonably. They do neither. So are you quoting research by incompetent or dishonest parties?
Johnathon,
You misapprehend.
The questions were not aimed at your intellectual capability. I am only interested in your opinion.
Mainstream climate science gives a range of estimates for equilibrium climate sensitivity. I wanted to know if you believed the range is too high, or too uncertain.
If too uncertain, then the range is what it is, and my argument would be to take the full range as a risk assessment and plan accordingly.
I have not come across a convincing argument that climate sensitvity is low. The typical ‘argument’ is to selectively quote from the literature – any low estimates – and posit that as the *truth*. I find this approach as unconvincing as someone cherry-picking studies to say that the top end of the range is the *truth*.
Your argument that ‘climate has changed a lot before’ leaves a lot to be desired. CO2 contribution to previous ice age shifts is estimated to be anything from 30 to 50%. So according to the literature – the weight of estimates, not a cherry-picked quote – CO2 has played a significant part in global temperature changes within the Quaternary period (a period where the Earth was much the same throughout – landmasses are roughly in the same position, ocean currents are not much changed).
You seem to be certain that the current rate of CO2 cannot have much impact (in truth, your position is a bit vague on that). Rather than deferring to the literature, you have offered that ice age shifts, which take thousands of years, have had greater global temp swings than that seen over the last 250 years. The last shift of 5C took place over 5000 years, roughly 0.1C a century. We’ve had 7 times that rate in the last century. CO2 climbed by 100ppm over ~4200 years (accounting for the 800 year lag). That’s 2.4ppm per century. In the last 250 years, the rate has been 40ppm per century, 16 times faster. You are comparing a 5000-year change to that which has taken place of a couple of centuries, as if the two time frames are equal. Can you see how this might tickle my skepticism?
I am not feeling alarmed – I actually don’t worry about the future. Not because I think it will be rosy, but because I’m inured to the possibility of disaster. My approach is based on reason and ethics. Here is what I think, and why I asked you the questions I did.
I don’t believe the range of sensitivity is a result of group think or conspiracy. It is an honest assessment. researchers from all over the world – not involved with CRU and climategate – have come up with a range of estimates, and if you take out Phil Jones et al, the mid-range is still 1.5 – 4.5 per doubling of CO2. That’s my base understanding.
I can’t accept the high range only, because that is not warranted by the literature – it is an alarmist position.
I can’t accept the low range only, because that is not warranted by the literature – it is a pollyanna-ish position.
I can’t accept the argument ‘climate has changed more before’, because that ignores the rate, and it apears things are changing much more rapidly than the quaternary ice ages. There are caveats, of course, and that is why I see the rate difference as ‘apparent’. I maintain my skepticism about our knowledge – I neither believe nor disbelieve – belief doesn’t come into it.
Thus, not knowing whether the effects of emmitting billions of tons annually of CO2 to the atmosphere will be benign or disastrous, I choose to plan (vote) as if either scale is possible. Ethics demands balancing present needs with future risks. I’ll vote for the party that takes the full risk seriously, balancing policy against the exegencies of the day.
My questions to you were about whether you were certain the risk was low or if you thought the range was uncertain. As far as I can tell, ‘skeptics’ must be convinced that climate sensitivity is low. I have come across no good argument to accept this premise (aside from the cherry-picked offers I mentioned above).
Regarding your final comments.
Sure, the planet was 1000C when it was being formed. But we are interested in the rate of change, a factor completely absent from your comments. Of course, civilization in its current, land-locked form was not a factor in the great geological changes of the planet. that should be taken into account, too.
Just about every pro-AGW comment on the runaway effect posits that it won’t happen on Earth. The only notable counter-proposition I can think of was Hansen’s, and that rested on the notion of all fossil carbon being released to the atmosphere. This seems like a red-herring to me. The IPCC certainly doesn’t project runaway warming.
You used the acronym CAGW throughout your piece. Is it possible your skepticism is about the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect? That would be a straw man argument.
Exactly. We are conducting the experiment with no possibility of a control. This is a one-time experiment, and we are performing it on our only habitat. I think we should wind it back until such time as we become more certain that the outcomes will be insignificant. Can you guarantee me the future?
Any piercingly insightful science that doesn’t rely on short-term, statistically non-significant data. If surface temperatures remained flat from 1998 to 2028, and natural or anthropogenic (aerosols) factors/interannual variability for the period did not combine to lower temps for the second half of the period (eg massive volcanic eruptions ongoing for the latter 15 years), then I would think that projections/climate sensitivity would almost certainly be too high.
Other ways would be for a better and different understanding of physics to overturn the theory – something the Skydragon Slayers utterly fail to do, for example.
I’ve read voraciously on the subject and subtopics of climate change, spending much time on ‘skeptic’ and mainstream blogs, on hundreds of scientific studies, and many more just the abstracts. I believe I’ve kept an open mind, and read both sides of the stories. I’ve been critical and complimentary at WUWT, SkS, realclimate and climate forums on both sides (and been attacked from both sides on occassion). I have no emotional or ideological investment in the debate or the outcome. i am only interested in reason and the scientific method, and when it comes to making choices, with ethics. My position is that I don’t know better than the experts (and many bloggers – but not so with much of the GP commentary at these places), that the notion of a conspiracy rests on selected quotes and second-guessing motivation with no data. I don’t think we can forecast the future, but i also think we can’t guarantee that the worse case scenarios don’t materialize. My position is much more skeptical than almost everyone I read. It is not because i know so much, but because I think we don’t know what our uncontrolled experiment will bring us, that I favour reducing emissions in a responsible fashion. I think that is happening now – we are not courting economic disaster – and I think that governments will probably respond too slowly to make much difference to emissions or economies. I don’t use my cynicism as a smokescreen for a do-nothing argument. Reducing emissions is an ethical solution (among others). We should do the right thing regardless. Cynicism (or despair) is not an argument.
I don’t belong to a tribe in the climate wars. I was always a skeptic, never emotionally or ideologically engaged with this topic. It was never an either/or thing. Not for me. It’s always been a risk-management issue. Hence my questions about your opinion. If you are convinced there is no risk, can you offer a better argument for your opinion? If not, and with the possibility that timeliness in action may be an important factor, how would you have the risk addressed?
How about a study of Day/following Night temp Rise and Fall, based on actual temperature records.
RoHa
Thatcher, far from destroying British industry, saved it. I am sure that she, like most scientists of the time (she has a degree in Chemistry, and used it in her early career) believed that AGW was not only real but potentially catastrophic. That was reasonable, as the evidence we now have that the models are wrong (lack of warming in the upper troposphere in the tropics, negative relationship between temperature and outgoing radiation, the “pause”, lack of ocean warming shown by Argo floats, stronger evidence for MWP beyond Europe and Greenland etc.) was not then available. The issue did need study, I don’t know of any sceptic who disagrees, and Thatcher cannot be condemned for supporting that further study. The study has shown, however, that AGW while probably real will be benign or even benevolent.
Very similar to mine. I remember sitting at my place listening to the radio and hearing about how the US wasn’t going to sign Kyoto, or something. I was dumbfounded at how short sighted and stupid the US government was for not doing something so obviously beneficial to Mankind. A few years later, I discovered AGW scepticism as you did, and that was that.
By the way, I was pre-conditioned to believe AGW by reading people like Konrad Lorenz when I was at University (just for fun, not as part of my course, which was computer science).
Barry, 3:37
Your comment to Jonathan about the rate of temperature change today versus the past caught my eye. I recently read “The Inconvenient Skeptic” by John Kehr (which I found excellent). One of his main themes is to look at the past to put today into context.
According to him ice core data show that there was a period from 45,000 to 25,000 years ago when the temperature swung wildly, by as much as 4 degC in 100 years. Here is the relevant excerpt:
“There is one period during the last glacial period that was even more difficult than the rest of it. It was the period between 25,000 and 45,000 years ago. This was a period of unusual insolation from the sun. The 65N insolation anomaly can behave like this every 400,000 years or so. The last time it happened there was a long interglacial, but this time the energy was lower and the result was disastrous. Instead of stable climate it brought about one of the least stable climates that we have yet to discover. The ice cores from Antarctica do not show as much variability as the ones from Greenland do, but even they show more change than usual. What the ice cores from Greenland show is short periods of rapid warming followed soon thereafter by rapid cooling. According to the ice cores the temperature changed by as much as 4 °C in periods as short as 100 years. The worst aspect of these changes was how short a period of time they lasted. The NH would warm, and then cool just as quickly. These spikes in temperature happened about 10 times over that 20,000 year period.”
That rate of temperature change – up and down – makes the present experience look pretty mild.
It is interesting to consider the implications if CAGW is ever proved to be wrong. Some implications are clear – the huge amount of wasted money and the related opportunity costs, reduced global growth, increased poverty and low growth in developing countries, etc. One implication is rarely mentioned but could be the most important. Pretty well the whole scientific establishment backs CAGW and states that the science is done, every serious scientist agrees and that anyone that disagrees is therefore deluded or evil. If this is proved to be wrong (and admitedly this would be difficult to achieve in any way), then it means that the entire scientific establishment is wrong in both the science and in attempting to prevent discussion of the alternatives. What will happen then? Will there be a popular backlash against science? When Galileo was forced to recant his Copernican views in 1633, ‘his trial also signified something else. The weight of papal authority which had brought Galileo to his knees also succeeded in halting the growth of the new science in Italy. It is no accident then, that following Galileo’s death in 1642 that the greatest advances in science would come from outside Italy in countries like England, Holland and Germany.’ http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/lecture11c.html Will science itself move to more enlightened regions of the world, if such exist?
At 6:34 AM on 29 July, Pat Smith had written:
Who gives a damn if there’s “a popular backlash against science” (whatever in hell you conceive “science” to be)?
I suppose it was inevitable that even on this Web site there should be someone who conceives of “science” as some quasimystical monolithic thing-a-ma-jig which can be thrown down in a crash of masonry and timbers by yanking out one or another single element. This betrays a complete misapprehension of what “science” actually is.
Not to mention a confusion of “science” as such with politicized (and therefore corrupted) government-funded “science” bent and twisted and otherwise perverted to serve the purposes of the perfumed and expensively costumed prostitutes who make their careers by grafting their way into public office.
The value of “science” rests in the practitioners’ adherence to scientific method, which is fundamentally a systematic approach to the investigation of phenomena in the physical universe, said approach incorporating error-checking mechanisms to ensure the validity and therefore the trustworthiness of information thereby gained.
What the great anthropogenic global warming fraud (“catastrophic” or not) has proven is that so-called big “science” has been broadly and deeply corrupted by government thuggery, such that not even in the professional societies dedicated to other disciplines can there be any genuine intellectual integrity – not once the high muckety-mucks in those associations have become dependent upon politicians ripping off the taxpayers to fund big “science.”
If there’s to be “a popular backlash” as the result of exposing the CAGW fraud in all its hideous processes and pillaging effects, it will be against big “science” slurping away at the public trough, preying upon the private citizenry in order to product propaganda for the cork-screwing, back-stabbing, dirty dealing politicians who count themselves booted and spurred to ride the productive sector of society like so many long-suffering, beaten animals.
Real “science” – systematic inquiry conducted according to strict adherence to the professional ethical code embodied in scientific method – will continue to produce insights into the universe around us, and in order that the general population of the republic should perceive them as both trustworthy and valuable contributors to the common weal, its professionals will do this work openly and honestly.
Which the Cargo Cult Science charlatans of “Mike’s Hockey Team” have refused to do for the past several decades, and in collusion with whom the big “science” establishment porkers have cohered in cover-up.
Observe that there really is “professional courtesy” among con artists, hustlers, government-grant-seekers, and other flim-flam men.
Stands to reason, doesn’t it?
=====
Whenever I read about AGW I am reminded of a quote from Sherlock Holmes – “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist the data to suit the theories instead of the theories to suit facts”
Is that not what the warmists have done?
At 6:55 AM on 29 July, Robby B had written:
Not anything as sophisticated as what had appeared in A. Conan Doyle’s detective stories.
Instead, it’s gone pretty much according to the lazy and deceitful high school sophomore’s dictum, which is paraphrased thus:
barry replied to Johnathon at 3:37 am
Nice to see you here Barry, I’m glad to find out that you haven’t fallen off the edge of the planet.
Not my post to answer and my apologies to Johnathon, but, well you know (-:
Mainstream climate science gives a range of estimates for equilibrium climate sensitivity. I wanted to know if you believed the range is too high, or too uncertain.
It’s exaggerated
I have not come across a convincing argument that climate sensitivity is low.
The models use the mainstream values for CO2 sensitivity and the empirical record is at the bottom or below those results. What more do you need? I’ve pointed this out to you many times, and you usually invoke Transient Climate Response (TCR), so answer me this, do the models not include TCR?
I have no emotional or ideological investment in the debate or the outcome. i am only interested in reason and the scientific method … I don’t belong to a tribe in the climate wars.
Come on Barry, as I’ve told you before, you put on airs that you’re above the fray, but in reality you’re in there eye gouging with everyone else.
You spent the rest of your post mostly describing the precautionary principle but didn’t use the term. As you know, I have it on good authority that the boogie man is living in your house and the boogie man is really bad news. What you need to do is burn your house down to get rid of him. I can imagine that upon receiving that news you haven’t run out to get a can of gas and some matches, Why not?
Gareth Phillips says:
July 27, 2013 at 3:35 am
@ Blade
……………………….
Gareth responds,……………………………………..
The rhetoric is not only unneeded but downright pathetic. The scientific community is much more apolitical and – unfortunately – amoral than the political and media spheres”
————————————————————————————
Note: The “apolitical side” does not include most of the noisy scientists.
First of all, you have your divisions wrong.
It’s not Communism or Fascism, left or right or liberal or conservative…It’s liberty or tyranny.
I would never vote to give government another revenue stream. They piss away too much money already. People are starving because the UN wants people to starve, period!
(least we forget, “food for oil”)
Taxing the people, filtering the money through a corrupt government and giving it to an even more corrupt UN to hand out as they see fit is not an answer I accept. I don’t trust them. Where is the UN on Islam and the Middle East and the murder of Africans?
You seem to believe deeply in the problem of CAGW.
Do you also believe the answers being sought by our leaders?
Do you want to set up carbon trading scheme?
Do you want to put Wall Street and the likes of Al Gore, the UN and the IPCC in charge of everything on earth….literally every breath you take?
That’s the only proposal on the table and it does nothing to curb “warming”.
How do you defend that position because they don’t even try?
Ending cheap energy will kill more people and that’s what is what is being proposed.
Finally, all you have to do is to look at your team member’s positions.
UN, Al Gore, John Holdren, James Hansen, Michael Mann, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Barbara Boxer (ma’am), Barrack Obama, Lisa Jackson (Richard Windsor), Van Jones, Michael Moore to name a few of the team members. Plus the alphabet soup of NGOs all wanting control and our money.
Liars, charlatans and thieves.
These people have a solution looking for a problem to attach it to.
Is the globe warming? I don’t know.
Is man the cause? I don’t know.
Warm is good cold is bad and I don’t like their answer to their problem.
cn
“NASA, which I then personally still very much respected; despite the space shuttle evidently being the wrong concept poorly executed, ”
… and that’s where I stopped reading. Do you even know how many succesful missions the Shuttle program achieved? a…nd since you seem to know better than NASA, where is your Shuttle?
I am not a “skeptic” of CAGW or CO2 caused Anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change.
I am a confirmed, passionate, highly vocal “denier” of said and have been ever since I started reading about it in online newspapers and other publications like 15+- years ago.
Having earned my Degree in the biological and physical sciences, in the early 1960’s, it was quite obvious to me that all the “claims” being touted by the climate scientists and other proponents of CAGW were not based in/on actual, factual science or mathematics.
On the contrary, said junk science “claims” are based in/on “weazelworded” rhetoric, associations, correlations, estimations, falsifications, guesstimations, half-truths, insinuations, obfuscations, opinionations, projectionations and/or tripe n’ piffle, …… none of which are scientifically factual entities …………… no matter how much one wants to believe that they are. Some of the aforementioned are “tools” that are employed or used by researchers to aid their quest in/of scientific investigations and discoveries, but other than that they have no intrinsic value.
Over the past few years I have generated a “list” of fifteen plus (15+) “disproofs” of CAGW, all of which are based in/on factual science or math and/or logical reasoning and intelligent deductions. And when the individual “parts” are disproven, … then the “whole” is disproven.
CAGW is probably the greatest “flim-flam scam” ever perpetrated upon the public. And I have to give Al Gore credit for that. And I do so because it is my opinion that James Hansen et el of NASA had been inferring all sorts of CAGW claims in order to keep NASA’s Congressional Funding “pipeline” open. But the public was not aware of said CAGW claims ….. until Al Gore found himself without a job ….. and decided to produce his “Inconvenient Truth” documentary based on all those “fuzzy” claims that NASA had been inferring … and which Gore was aware of via his tenure of Congressman, Senator and VP. Now that put James Hansen et el in a bind, … between a rock and a hard place, because NASA couldn’t discredit anything that Al Gore was claiming without discrediting NASA itself. Thus NASA was forced to jump on the “Inconvenient Truth” bandwagon …. and the rest is recent history.
@dbstaley
“The Arctic is going through its natural cycle, ”
ORLY? told by whom? .. evidence to back up your opinion.
– – – – – – –
vigilantfish,
Have enjoyed for several years your comments from your perspectives in the history of science.
Based on the lessons learned from the history of science, what is your view of the evolution from now of the problematic science in the ideologically informed CAGW research. Are there any go-no-go checkpoints we should anticipate as it works to save its ideologies from rational critical analysis?
My view of CAGW ideology’s future is the main intellectual architects of the CAGW campaign will morph into lukewarmerism and then they, as lukewarmers, will disintegrate into many separate intellectual microcosms without a central ideological theme to bind them together. Then I would anticipate that the science of climate will be rather balanced and independent scientific views will dominate.
With respect to your resentment about needing to be anonymous on WUWT, I hope you will be fortunate to achieve better circumstances where you won’t feel the need to be anonymous. Good luck to you.
With respect to the discussion of the recent absence Richard Courtney, I was unaware of any circumstances and his absence. I hope he is doing well. In my personal experience, I have found that taking an extended hiatus occasionally from the rigors of skeptic venues does improve the mind’s clarity upon return.
John
I became a sceptic at the very instant that Channel 4’s Jon Snow told me that “the debate is over” in about February 2006 (or maybe 2007).
Because if the debate is over, it’s no longer science. In true science the debate is never over.
And as a piece of collateral damage, I also lost my respect for Jon Snow that day.
AN OPEN LETTER TO BILL MCKIBBEN OF 350.ORG–
The Hadley Center email scandal was something I had dismissed. But this gem from Phil Jones changed that: “Bottom line – the no upward trend has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried. We’re really counting this from about 2004/5 and not 1998. 1998 was warm due to the El Nino.”
Yet there is still good reason to believe that people are influencing climate and that the climatic system is one that is sensitive. However, there is also good reason to believe that proponents of the climate change theory themselves have, in vino veritas, little personal inhibition to really do anything anyhow.
I started to realize this much myself when I visited World Wildlife Fund’s U.S. website and took the Carbon Calculator survey. Though I do not feel convinced in the climate change theory, my score of a 16 made me realize that a lot of the problem is well beyond my control anyways. You may want to take the same survey. Granted, someone who is an evangelist of the alarmisms of climate change does get to have a high score, knowing all the work and travel that goes into spreading the word.
However, there is one aspect of the climate change evangelist’s lifestyle where this excuse does not apply–and it is the same area which represents the bulk of my own carbon score. No evangelist of climate change can really convince me of changing what I do without committing himself to a strictly vegetarian lifestyle. Though there are some on the fringe of the AGW camp who do follow through, it is an ironic peculiarity that the vegan evangelists represent a small minority, and it is from there own websites and discussions that I have found the greatest opening in disputing any need for action on climate change whatsoever. You can actually look at a person and tell what he eats, and clearly, some of these climatologists haven’t given up on burgers and steak. The list of vegetarian celebrities is pathetic, most of whom I am not familiar, and there choices probably have little to do with environmental issues.
Not to forget what James Hansen said with this [inappropriate blogosphere adjective] comment, “I’ve almost become a vegetarian.” In other words, I’m not calling myself an ovolactovegetarian because I really haven’t given up on meat.
Please understand the weight of this inconsistency when you discuss this scientific issue; a review of a climate change evangelist’s lifestyle is a relevant point. Tiger Woods limits his cheating to women, not golf. So in the present era it is not so offensive for some to see him out there on the course at St. Andrews, but I think many people would take exception to the idea of Woods becoming pope. And that is the perfect analogy to this debate.
“Samuel C Cogar says:
July 29, 2013 at 8:18 am
On the contrary, said junk science “claims” are based in/on “weazelworded”…”
Catweazle discovered electrickery…it’s on Wiki, must be true!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catweazle
Tucci78,
Wonderful was your discourse on the aspects of what is the fundamental nature of science and what it isn’t. Thanks.
Also, that was a great Mencken quote.
Note: I value much of the works of: H.L. Mencken, F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.
John
” Pretty well the whole scientific establishment backs CAGW and states that the science is done, every serious scientist agrees and that anyone that disagrees is therefore deluded or evil.”
1) Could you provide a citation to the position of the “whole scientific establishment”.
2) What’s a serious scientist? Can you name a scientist that isn’t serious?
3) You’ve really gotten the word from every “serious scientist”? I wonder why it wasn’t 97%.
4) So, one has to be deluded or evil to disagree with your assessment? You can’t think of even one other possibility?
5) So, do the deluded and evil not get to vote? Do they have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Should scientists identify a genetic configuration that predisposes one to evil-nous should we kill all babies with that genetic predisposition?
6) Even if the “science” is spot on, is it right to condemn millions to starvation and leave entire ecosystems at risk now in order to save our grandchildren the inconvenience of a 3 degree C warmer world?
7) Have you completed a cost benefit analysis that you could share?
Jakehig,
Dansgaard–Oeschger events see temperature swings in the Greenland ice cores of about 10C in a few decades. But they are anticorrelated with Antarctic temps.
http://rockbox.rutgers.edu/~jdwright/GlobalChange/Blunieretal_1998.pdf
They are thought to be caused by sudden changes in ocean heat transport, possibly when deglaciation reaches some threshhold under insolation changes. They have no analog in the post-glacial record (8000BC to present). They only seem to occur when Earth is in or climbing out of an ice age.
If kher is claiming a global phenomenon, it would lend credence to the notion that climate sensitivity is very high on short time-scales. If his claim is roughly correct, negative feedbacks would appear to be greatly outweighed by positive. Richard Lindzen would find such temp swings improbable, for example, because he believes a low climate sensitivity keeps the global temps from changing much. But he is unable to explain how his sensitivity model fits ice age shifts. By itself, Kher’s claim (if global) wouldn’t necessarily validate high climate sensitivity, but it does nothing to reject it.
The drawback of arguing that the global climate has changed dramatically on centennial scales is that it is very difficult to then argue for a low climate sensitivity, and impossible to argue that the sum of feedbacks is negative. One of the ways climate sensitivity is assessed is by figuring the response to the initial forcing for ice ages – the shift in focus of insolation. By itself, the orbital forcing should only have a very limited effect, but the response to the changed focus of insolation is (comparitively) huge. And the effect is global even if the change of focus is towards one of the poles. Heat transport through the oceans and a global rise of CO2 are generally held responsible for spreading the heat from one pole to the other and across the Earth.
(Kehr’s book would be the only reference I’m aware of that posits such large swings on a global scale in a century. But he falls short of actually saying that in your excerpt. My skeptometer twitches. I’ve read a great deal on ice ages, but maybe I missed some pertinent studies Kerr may be referring to)
Jakehig, if you would be so kind, could you cite the studies Kher relies on for the section you quoted? i want to discover studies where it is estimated that Antarctic and Greenland temps are correlated for these events.
Pat Smith says:
July 29, 2013 at 6:34 am
Yep. Whether it is true that “the whole scientific establishment” agreed or not, that impression has been intentionally promoted, and too few have either made the effort, or been allowed the outlet, to speak out against it. When this fiasco becomes undeniable, “science” in general is going to take a major hit.
And, maybe that is not such a bad thing, considering the deification of “Science” which has been gathering steam in the past century, though I cringe at the rampant run of pseudoscience which will undoubtedly be unleashed at the fall.
Danabanana says:
July 29, 2013 at 8:17 am
“Do you even know how many succesful missions the Shuttle program achieved?”
A LOT fewer than were supposed to. Defending the Shuttle program in its entirety at this juncture is not helpful to the space effort. Good things came of it, but mistakes were made. Best thing to do now is to assess what went right and what went wrong, learn from it, and move forward. IMHO, one lesson is that Government is good at crash programs which require corralling the full productive capability of a nation, like sending men to the Moon or fighting a war. It’s not so good at ongoing operations like AMTRAK or the Space Shuttle.
@Danabanana says: July 29, 2013 at 8:17 am
How does your record on the Shuttle stack up against Max Faget’s?
Danabanana says:
@dbstaley
“The Arctic is going through its natural cycle, ”
ORLY? told by whom? .. evidence to back up your opinion.
See here.
Now that you can see it is not simply my opinion, but rather, that it is based on empirical [real world] physical evidence, I await the withdrawing of your snark [“ORLY”, etc.]
Steve Case,
Hi steve.
ECS models start with a sudden jump in CO2 (usually a doubling), and the model is allowed to run until the system reaches equilibrium. TCR models are run with a continuously varying (usually increasing) CO2 component. They are better analogs for what may occur in the real world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_climate_simulation
Your model is a TCR model. You may remember that you had initially made a model with linear CO2 increase, which was not correct. You may also remember that the resulting fit to TCR was pretty much on the money for current temps. (TCR mean sensitivity is 2.1C at the time of doubling – ie, the immediate response).
Recent research has indicated that the AR4 estimates of ECS might be a bit too high. Jury is still out, but hopefully it will prove sound. If so, ECS may be downgraded to 2C/doubling. Still within the old IPCC range, but a lower bottom end (maybe 1.5C). I doubt it could be lower.
db stealey
Way up thread I posted some charts for jai Mitchell demonstrating the nonsense that is the Hockey stick data
He seems to have disappeared. Does he always do this when presented with stuff he doesn’t like?
tonyb
@ Tucci78 says:
I believe you are missing Pat Smith’s point. What is going to happen once the so called, ‘established science’ no longer has the power it does? The events might resemble what took place with Galileo. Which I hope he is right. Either way the damage they are doing will in my opinion take decades for the public perceptions of science to overcome.
BTW- does anyone know how to find this thread other then in my history?
@ Danabanana
dbstealey said, “The Arctic is going through its natural cycle, ”
Danabanana said, ORLY (Oh really?) told by whom? .. evidence to back up your opinion.
I laugh every time I see statements like this. The so called ‘established science’ say this to imply humans are not natural we are demigod with special powers over the planet or aliens from another world. They are not the established science they are science fiction writers with degrees.
At 11:01 AM on 29 July, Ox AO had posted:
Nope. The “public perceptions” of science as such will almost certainly continue to accord the boffins degrees of respect disproportionate to these critters’ real merits. I think that what will happen is going to be a profoundly reduced proclivity on the part of “the public” to be panicked by the “We’re All Gonna Die!” yips and squeals of the politicians’ and their running-dog lamestream leftie-luzer legacy media accomplices’ future attempts to manipulate dodgy science-y factoids into eyeball-grabbing hysteria.
Of late, we’ve been seeing much such disdain for science-oid squalling, haven’t we? As a primary care grunt, for some years now I’ve been appreciating the general population’s much-reduced susceptibility to the annual “Tens of Thousands Will Die!” up-and-down jumping of the professional noisemakers every time we approach viral ‘flu season. Folks are responding with a disgusted “Meh!” and we’re no longer running out of ‘flu vaccine doses as those in the identifiable lower-risk cadres have been staying away in droves.
The damage that’s going to “take decades” to resolve is in the broad range of allegedly peer-reviewed scientific periodicals and textbooks which will need to undergo agonizing debridement to excise and fulgurate the cancerous rot imposed by the machinations of “Mike’s Hockey Team” and those who had – wittingly or unwittingly – colluded with those credentialed charlatans to spread this phlogistonic flappery so hideously through the literature.
That and the thousands of young men and women who had wasted their time and effort – indeed, their lives – in academic preparation for careers on the glorious CAGW bandwagon, only to discover it’s more like one of those trucks dedicated to the drainage of overfilled septic tanks.
The whole “man-made global climate change” fraud is rapidly approaching the point at which it will hold a place in the history of the sciences about the equivalent of Piltdown Man (with more than a little hint of Ponzi to make the reek more piquant).
tonyb,
I just noticed jai mitchell making a really outlandish prediction on the ‘NASA predicts 8º warming’ thread. But to answer your question, jai is not one to let scientific evidence like what you posted interfere with his belief in runaway global warming.
“The questions were not aimed at your intellectual capability.”
Sorry Barry, but if you ask a leading question and then offer a choice of two replies, both of which attempt to entice me into saying something stupid, then either you’re dumb or you think I am. And you don’t come across to me as all that dumb.
Danabanana, you picked just about the worst excuse possible to stop reading my post. Only someone who doesn’t know much about the full shuttle program, from inception to retirement, would think it achieved its goals. Perhaps you should ask where is Space-X’s shuttle or son-of-shuttle. There isn’t one. Current space companies are developing reusable systems, but they aren’t based on the shuttle. Perhaps it was a necessary lesson, but it was still the wrong concept.
Regarding the execution, have you any idea how far short of the originally stated goals the orbiter actually operated? And both times that orbiters were lost, fundamental organisational flaws were uncovered in NASA. On both occasions the necessary information to avert disaster was known but ignored by managers. Hmmm, ignoring inconvenient data, what does that remind me of?
It’s a terrible shame, because I have a great love of spaceflight, but NASA sure isn’t what it was, or should be.
Jonathan,
you don’t seem all that dumb to me, either. You’ve explained why you are a skeptic, and posited that the science is too uncertain to make accurate predictions. My questions, which first tried to get you to clarify your views, ultimately were to find out what you would regard as a responsible policy response in light of that uncertainty (knowing a little is not the same as knowing nothing). I think it’s a natural follow-up, but it seems we’re not going to go there. No matter. Thanks for the replies.
It will be a big black eye for the capital-S “Skeptical” organizations that have heavily bought into the warmist narrative and whose leading members have played a role in whipping up the hysteria: Bill Nye, Phil Plait, and Eugenie Scott, among those I can recall off the top of my head.
Tucci78: I note with interest your comments with regard to my posting on passive inhalation of tobacco smoke, and concur with your views regarding my own responses to such smoke.
However, let’s revisit what ‘Just Steve’ said: ‘tack on the second hand smoke junk science, and the scare tactics the anti-tobacco lobby has heaped on us (millions die from second hand smoke every year, huh? Show me a body, with incontrovertible evidence the person died from second hand smoke….just one)’
There is no question that tobacco smoke contains respiratory irritants and carcinogens, as pointed out for example by Jeremy Colls in ‘Air Pollution’ (Spon Press, 2002).
Examples include formaldehyde, benzene, toluene and N-nitrosodimethylamine.
The U.S.A.’s National Cancer Institute website states that there are 69 carcinogens in tobacco smoke, and moreover Colls comments that ‘it is not possible to measure and specify the whole range of toxics’.
The National Cancer Institute also says that there is ‘no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke’.
That’s why I don’t wish to inhale cigarette smoke.
Enough of the tobacco talk, all further comments snipped.
Barry,
I have had a quick scan of John Kehr’s references etc. That particular excerpt did not have a direct reference but most of his ice core data came from “EPICA” and “Vostok”:
“EPICA Dome C Ice Cores Deuterium Data. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series # 2004-038. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.
Vostok Ice Core Data for 420,000 Years, IGBP PAGES/World Data Center”
He also mentions Greenland ice cores – GRIP? – but I did not find the specific reference in my quick scan.
He makes another point which does not get much air-time. The time lag between historic temps rising and CO2 levels increasing is well-known. He points out that, at the start of each glacial, temps fell for thousands of years while CO2 remained high.
As he does not attribute much significance to the role of CO2, these points are not interpreted in terms of climate sensitivity.
May I suggest you take a look at his book and then take up your counter-arguments with him directly? He has a website under the same title as his book and states that he is open to contrary evidence.
They will have a harder job re-editing all the TV science documentaries in order to make them look non-laughable when rebroadcast. it may be that this will be impossible (or the rewriting so mockable) that their value to rebroadcasters (cable networks) will decline substantially.
I hope that, once or side gets the funding it deserves (e.g., from a congressionally established Inquiry Board), we will create bibliographies, with links, to such documentaries, and to the effusions of propagandists in the MSM. These should be viewable from many angles, including by publication and author/producer. I look forward, after the fall, to clicking on hundreds of hilariously misguided NPR & PBS programs on the matter.
The MSM will take a greater “hit” from this than science, because the MSM was the amplifier and (effectively) censor.
Carbon guy – there is no safe level of anything. It is sometimes helpful to do some risk analysis on the perils of being alive. I’d guess that more people die from slipping on the results of poor aim at urinals than from second hand smoke. Ditto walking down our country lane to the post box. Then, once you have some measure of risks, it would probably be prudent to evaluate the costs of encountering vs. avoiding each. Ultimately, the precautionary principle forces one to place a value on human lives – and WHICH human lives. Compared with those of birds, sharp-tailed snakes and “snailbats”. But please go ahead with your own superstitions if it lessens your angst!
PS: “Public” broadcasting will take the greatest hit, because it has been 87% one-sided, worse than the average MSM outlet. (It had to be that way, to cater to the prejudices of its rabid audience. But it won’t be able to say that. Ouch!)
The public will indeed “turn on” the MSM, because the public likes to exact revenge on those who have made fools (believers) of them.
Oops–I meant to say, ““Public” broadcasting will take the greatest hit, because it has been 97% one-sided, worse than the average MSM outlet.”
Another element of the MSM that will be hard-hit will be the “prestige” publications like the NYT and WaPo, which have been the main cheerleaders for this crusade. Especially after the Inquiry Board’s examiners put their whole coverage under the microscope, and post their findings.
The problem is that it’ll take five or ten years for the enemy to be undeniably exposed as phonies, during which time it can and will “deny” its eroding credibility by tactical retreats (on climate sensitivity, for instance), by hyping weather events, by focusing on acidification, by issuing smoke-screens excuses to make things look OK for their position, and by just falling silent and hoping the whole topic will fall down the memory hole, with the aid of a compliant media.
I just wrote: “The public will indeed “turn on” the MSM, because the public likes to exact revenge on those who have made fools (believers) of them.” I should also have said that the public likes to tear the sanctimoniously high-and-mighty down from their pedestals.
RE: barry at 10:44 am
Barry, the issue is that the models have predicted or projected a larger temperature rise for the planet than has actually occurred. As of the past June the “Global Warming” scare is 25 years old and the predictions aren’t coming true.
Global Hurricanes aren’t more frequent:
http://policlimate.com/tropical/global_major_freq.png
Droughts aren’t increasing
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
And temperatures aren’t matching up to the models.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT-5-yr-means1.png
If you can’t hit the broad side of a barn at 25 feet, you aren’t going to hit the target at 100 meters.
Quoting: “…… but most of his ice core data came from “EPICA” and “Vostok”:
Using ice core data for determining atmospheric CO2 ppm quantities requires more guessing and estimating to come up with a ppm number ……. than does the forecasting of next month’s daily temperatures or weather.
Near surface, where snow accumulates, CO2 ppm is highly variable, …. which is the reason Charles Keeling moved to atop Mona Loa, Hawaii.
Hurricane frequency was not predicted to increase.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-6-3.html
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/368.htm
You’ve been at this for at least 6 years and you still get this wrong?.
There’s no long-term drought data at that link. This study should suit your purpose, though.
http://sa.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/file/global%20drought.pdf
I’ve read pretty widely on it in the last few months. Drought monbitoring is extremely difficult for many reasons, one of them being the difficulty in establishing start/end points for drought events. It seems there may be a slight increase in ‘dryness’ (PDSI index) on drought, and either a slight increase in drought area, or no statistically significant trend. That’s the global record. For many already dry regions around the world, the trends are stronger. But that is not unexpected, as it has been predicted that precipitation and flooding will increase in some areas, and drought in others. The value of improved regional forecasting is obvious, and still leaves a lot to be desired.
Spencer is showing 5-year running means for UAH tropical mid-troposphere data against what appear to be surface data (he hasn’t specified when asked). As the years since 2005 have been dominated by la Ninas, the 5-year averages he applies will pull the values downwards in the latter part of the record – satellite data have more pronounced peaks on ENSO events than surface. No wonder his chart produces the greatest model/obs divergence amongst even the qualified skeptics.
Lucia at The Blackboard (skeptic blog, she’s a competent statistician) compares apples with apples – surface data. As most people here know, current temps are at the bottom of the model ensemble envelope.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/models-v-observations-ar5-rcp4-5/
“How do you explain decreasing temperatures in the stratosphere?”
“How do you explain the stratospheric cooling hiatus since circa 1995?”
A negative feedback mechanism loop kicked in, perhaps at just that time? It would also explain the leveling off of surface temperatures a few years later.
If there weren’t mechanisms to normalize our climate, I’m guessing it would have gone rogue billions of years ago, one way or another, killing all life on earth.
But none of this disproves the AGW by CO2 theory. In fact it supports it. It simply suggests the effect of the CO2 on temperature will be much less than we previously believed at least within the concentrations of CO2 we’ve encountered in the recent past (or maybe even over the Earth’s history)
‘And that’s why and how it’s easy to show that the 20% increase in total atmospheric CO2 content has had zero effect on global temperatures during the entire recent period of global warming’
It’s hard to prove a negative. My point is that unless we can prove what would have happened we have no way of knowing whether or not the CO2 had an effect. And even if we did, it could simply be that because of negative feedback loops (see above), the effect was simply to small to measure.
‘Here is but one of the many explanations.’
Many explanations? Really? Sounds to me like darts thrown at a board, hoping something hits. You need to figure out which explanation makes the most sense and make that your hypothesis. Then test it. That’s how science works. But ‘darts at a board’ seems to describe most of the AGW skeptic community.
There is a real big problem with the explanation you linked to. Something to do with apples and oranges or yearly fluctuations vs. long term averages but I’ll let you think it through. All I will say is that this data only proves that stratospheric temperatures are very sensitive to solar fluctuations and that we should be extremely careful interpreting it; a conclusion somewhat favorable to your point of view I suppose, but definitely not a slam dunk.
Tucci78 says:
July 25, 2013 at 8:04 pm
“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.”
—
I’m so far behind in reading WUWT that it’s not funny. However, seeing the menition of Beckmann leads me to mention that he, too, was the inspiration for me in his “Access to Energy” newsletter. Someone (not Beckmann) asked me to write a short article, but it turned into a larger one, which Beckmann publised on his dial-up bulletin board. The article (www.fortfreedom.org/s27.htm), and the rest of Beckmann’s “Fort Freedom” is on the Web. That was 1988. Oh, I’m an engineer, too.
Friends:
I am returned from Indonesia, I have yet to unpack, and I am weary from the long journey, but I am writing in response to the email my son repeatedly reported in this thread that he had sent to me.
I am grateful for all the kind comments about me in the thread. They were completely unexpected and they are appreciated. The following is an attempt to address the issues raised in the above posts which mention me.
Firstly, I did try to support WUWT as best I could in many ways over several years. And that support did include slamming trolls. Please note that I welcome dissent because dissent engenders debate, discussion and dialogue from which I learn. Indeed, the great value of WUWT threads is their presentation of a wide diversity of opinions from people with varieties of backgrounds, nationalities, political persuasions, and religious beliefs. But I revile trolls. The purpose of trolls is to prevent debate, discussion and dialogue by deflecting threads from the subject under discussion and, thus, trolls intentionally inhibit any learning about a subject under discussion. The changes to Moderation on WUWT initially led to a great troll infestation which has (fortunately) since assuaged. But I count myself among those who defended against that infestation.
Secondly, and most importantly, I want it to be clearly understood by all that I hold Anthony Watts in the highest regard. He is a gentleman. Also, his achievement in establishing WUWT as the ‘Best Science Blog’ demands respect for his work and ability.
If I have ever said anything which implies I have any lack of respect for Anthony Watts then that was an unintended error for which I wholly apologise.
Thirdly, the facts of my departure from WUWT without making a “Goodbye” are as follows.
I made a mistake (n.b. not on this or any blog) which revealed the email address of Anthony Watts to a person with whom he did not want contact. It was an honest error but it severely offended Anthony Watts who banned me from WUWT for a week. Thus, at that time, I could not say “Goodbye” on WUWT as it seems some would have wished. And I understood the manner of the messages which stated Anthony’s reason for the temporary ban to indicate that he did not value my attempts to support WUWT. Hence, I decided to not return after the ban. Clearly, it would have caused unwarranted and undesirable disturbance if I had posted a “Goodbye” on WUWT after the ban had expired, so I did not. I merely ‘walked quietly into the night’.
Simply, I saw no reason to bother making contributions which were not valued, and I thought it would be unhelpful if I were to say why I was discontinuing my contributions.
Importantly, WUWT is a quality blog. It has no need of any specific contributor and, therefore, I did not (and do not) consider my departure as a discernible loss to WUWT.
In conclusion, I point out that – as I have repeatedly said on WUWT – AGW is a political issue which has used ‘science’ as its excuse. AGW is not – and never has been – a scientific issue (it has no supporti empirical evidence and is refuted by much empirical evidence). Also, AGW is not – and never has been – a ‘left vs right’ issue. AGW is a means to obtain totalitarianism which is desired by a dangerous minority of politicians of all political persuasions. And totalitarianism is opposed by good people of all political persuasions.
Importantly, AGW is dead. It died at Copenhagen in December 2012. It was then defenestrated by failure to provide any way to obtain a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Now, like a headless chicken that runs around a farmyard, AGW continues to provide the movements of life but it is dead and will soon stop moving.
I put much effort into opposing the political issue of AGW over three decades. Such effort is no longer needed because AGW has been defenestrated. Instead, the need is now to avoid the movements of the deceased from creating harmful bureaucracies before it stops moving.
My interest was always an attempt to defend science from the harm caused by the pseudoscience of AGW. Others are better able to fulfil the present need to oppose creation of the political bureaucracies.
I hope this explanation is an adequate and clear answer to the several posts about me in he above thread.
Richard
REPLY: adequate, ban lifted. I hope you won’t give my personal email address out to people that I don’t want to get invoolved with again. I realize you were coming to my defense, but at the same time that opened up a crapstorm in my inbox that continues today. – Anthony
Hello Richard,
I for one would very much welcome your return to WUWT.
When I published my January 2008 article on icecap.us stating that dCO2/dt varied almost contemporaneously with Lower Tropospheric (LT) temperature, and its integral atmospheric CO2 lagged LT by about 9 months, I was harshly criticized from almost all sides – and you were the notable exception. Thank you very much for that. You provided me with references I was unaware of that predated and supported my hypothesis – that temperature drives CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature – climate heresy at the time, and still often deemed worthy of death my fire.
Murry Salby’s similar work since 2011 has made my hypo more well-known, and perhaps a tiny bit less scary for the climate mainstream – but Salby is now experiencing his own tribulations.
Sincerely Richard, you have the rare capability to express highly complex issues in a manner that is understandable for most educated people. I found your debate with Ferdinand on the Mass Balance Argument highly worthwhile.
As far as CAGW being truly dead, I wish it were so. CAGW science has been demonstrated to be severely flawed, CAGW proponents have been proven to be charlatans and fraudsters by the Climategate emails, and yet the CAGW ship sails on.
Two factors will ultimately stop the CAGW movement:
1. Energy costs will rise to prohibitively high levels in those countries that foolishly embraced CAGW mania; and
2. Earth will start to get cooler, and everyone will finally realize how badly they have been fooled by CAGW alarmists.
In the meantime, there are interesting scientific and political challenges that remain to be resolved…
Hope you decide to stay around.
Best, Allan