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A person who is actually a climate skeptic (and WUWT regular) applied for and was granted a training slot in Chicago this week. http://climaterealityproject.org/leadership-corps/ and has graduated as one of the 1500 people that attended the event.
For obvious reasons, I can’t reveal the person’s name, but I can reveal the communication I received last night.
The ‘mole’ writes:
I’m now a card-carrying, official Gore-bot.
(I took copious notes)
a) This was a super-liberal “kum-bay-ya” crowd as I predicted. I kept many of my opinions to myself. The event truly did have a “religious cult programming” feel to it, similar to an Amway meeting I attended years ago – carefully timed applause, audience call & response etc. Very bizarre.
b) Al Gore himself went through the entire slide show that we are supposed to use as his “Climate Leaders.” Quite honestly, there is nothing new here, EXCEPT that there is no trace of the “hockey stick” graph that was so central to “An Inconvenient Truth”!! Amazing, considering how central that was to their arguments!
c) Instead, Al lumps data together year-by-year or decade-by-decade to show an ever increasing rise in temps. He poo-pooed measurement inaccuracies, specifically mentioning UHI effects and saying that the scientists determined these were insignificant.
d) A couple graphs stood out – one showed the documented rise in temperature PRECEDES the rise in CO2 which he brushed aside as “typical variation.” The only hockey stick was one that projected atmospheric CO2 over time, jumping up drastically in coming years. I didn’t have time to write units down, but it was a big jump. It could be a realistic rise with China & India bringing new coal plants online, I’d have to check any citations.
e) Al’s presentation was heavy on his new concept of “dirty weather,” see: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/14/24-hours-of-reality-dirty-weather_n_2130344.html
To summarize, I didn’t see anything new or ground-breaking in this mess. Most slides were BS, typical “this is due to climate, not weather” type stuff we kick around on WUWT all the time. Hurricane Sandy, torrential rains in Pakistan etc.
Personal observations:
a) We skeptics ain’t liked much with them folks. The “d” word (denier) was used liberally, and I queried several participants, some of who were very cool folks, about it. Al Gore and his speakers used “Denier,” “Denial Industry” and other terms I found objectionable. Lousy salesmen, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
b) Nothing new was presented, technically speaking. This thing was “An Inconvenient Truth” redux, with much of the controversial stuff (hockey stick & drowning polar bears) deleted. Al got our message, he doesn’t seem to want to engage folks like us.
c) Al gave some insights into his own choices for low-carbon technologies, with a focus upon photovoltaics & wind power. He doesn’t like BWR nukes and objects because of financial reasons, which I agree with (particularly post-Fukishima). He mentioned that Oak Ridge National Labs in TN is testing a variety of nuclear reactor designs which sound promising (thorium maybe?) but didn’t elaborate.
d) Stuff I’m interested in, like ocean acidification, were only briefly touched upon. Al didn’t discuss the diplomacy challenges of engaging China and India, although he did mention their growing carbon output.
Quick summary:
Al is a polished speaker, and looked trim & in shape. Very impressive command of his speaking material. Decent speakers lined up, including some sustainability folks from private industry. I’m told the health/climate breakout session was terrible & am glad I took a pass on it.
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UPDATE: Since many of the Gore followers are arriving here, I welcome you to answer this question that nobody would ask Mr. Gore this week:
If the position and science is so strong, why did Mr. Gore have to fake the results of his experiment in the Climate 101 video (which you may have seen and is still on the climate reality web page).
You can see the experiment recreated here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/climate-fail-files/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/
For the few of you brave enough, thanks for taking the time to answer that question – Anthony
Mary A. Colborn says:
“…extreme weather events happen around the world with increasing frequency. Temperatures reach into the high 90′s in Alaska in June. Fires devastate the state of Colorado, super storms flood Manhatten. You wonder who the real cultists are here. Climate leaders or you, who are paid so well by the fossil fuel industry.”
Note the usual ad hominem attack: scientific skeptics “are paid so well by the fossil fuel industry.” That is the canard that skeptics get when the climate alarmist crowd has no credible scientific arguments.
Mary Colborn gives her examples of routine events that happen every year, and that have happened whether CO2 was low, or high. In fact, CO2 has nothing measurable to do with global warming. Most of the rise in CO2 is emitted due to natural global warming, not vice-versa: ∆CO2 is the result of ∆T, it is not the cause. Mary probably doesn’t understand that fact. But most of us here have seen the chart that records that cause-and-effect relationship.
Each event cited by Mary Colborn can be easily deconstructed: Alaska’s record high temperature was set at 100ºF, back on June 27… 1915. Fires “devastate” Colorado and other states every year. And Tropical Storm Sandy was a “superstorm” for only one reason: it hit right in the middle of a very densely populated, expensive area — which also happens to be the center of the broadcast/news industry. Three examples hardly make a credible scientific case. Ms Colborn is ruled by her emotions no less than Chicken Little was [Chicken Licken to our Brit friends].
And of course, Ms Colborn does not identify her “climate leaders”. Might she be referring to Prof Richard Lindzen, who heads M.I.T.’s Atmospheric Sciences department, and who would surely disagree with Ms Colborn? Or more likely she is referring to
Doctor, um…Professorum… Mr. Al Gore, who flunked Science. Is that her “climate leader”?You’re right. I’m pretty sure that everyone writing here sincerely believes what they’re saying and I commend them for discussing the issue even if so much of what is posted here is unnecessarily vitriolic and, quite frankly, incorrect. Is your church, school, country, sports team, etc. a cult? If not, then please explain why you listen respectfully, watch avidly, and/or clap enthusiastically when their leaders/members say something you agree with and/or do something you like? Or are you a fill-in-the-blank-bot? Let’s move away from the name calling and discuss the issues. For starters, why not check out this article from today’s New York Times (unless of course, you refuse to read things published in the “liberal media”…even when written by self proclaimed Republibots, err, conservatives). http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/opinion/a-republican-case-for-climate-action.html
@Lucy, the extent to which man is responsible for the increased C02 is debateable. It is also moot. It doesn’t matter one iota, except to you Alarmists. There is no real evidence that the increased C02 has affected our climate, though, in theory at least, it should have some effect. The problem is that climate is about the real world, not models. And unfortunately for you climate clowns, the climate isn’t reacting the way that the models say it should. The reason for that is that they are all fatally flawed, being based on wrong assumptions.
At 1:14 PM on 2 August, Bruce Cobb had written:
Well, no. If there’s no evidence to support the supposition that anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2 have had any significant effect upon the global climate, it’s not even possible to say that “in theory…it should have some effect.”
Remember, scientific conjectures, hypotheses, theories and laws are intellectual models created to explain observed phenomena. The anthropogenic global warming conjecture, predicated upon carbon dioxide “greenhouse gas” effects and somehow fantastically exacerbated by alleged positive feedback mechanisms (for the existence of which there is also no evidence whatsoever), hasn’t even achieved the strength of a testable hypothesis, much less “theory.”
Catastrophic AGW is a blithering idiocy cobbled up back in the 1970s by a cadre of third-rate incompetents with second-rate academic credentials to perpetrate a first-rate fraud.
And the word “fraud” is used advisedly, for theft of value by way of deception – in the writing of those applications for billions of dollars’ worth of research grant funding especially – is nothing other than the perpetration of criminal fraud.
Let’s no longer call them “the consensus.” How about “the usual suspects” instead?
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Reminds me of this quote:
@ur momisugly temp says: August 2, 2013 at 12:45 pm
Pol Pot demonstrated your thesis very well.
David L. says: August 2, 2013 at 4:46 am
@Bruce Cobb August 2, 2013 at 4:18 am
Good point. That raises a question for me: I wonder if this AGW movement is more closely related to Marxism, rather than f@scism (or any of the other varieties of -isms of the era!) With the idea of wealth redistribution (under the guise of saving the planet) I’d propose it’s more in line with Marxism.
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This subject is of interest to me and I’d like to bring a little clarity. The terms Fascist, Communist, and NAZI seem to be partly misunderstood. For the below, I have used Wikipedia as it is easy and I am lazy.
Fascism is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
When people talk about Fascism, they usually mean the National Socialist (NAZI) German version
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialism
And finally “Communism” in its many variations, Marxist-Leninism being the earliest application.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism
From reading the foregoing, some generalizations are possible:
National Socialism and the NAZIs. An all-powerful leader and a personality cult. Total control of the state and the people, i.e. totalitarianism. Setting the focus of the state on militarism. Subjugation of other countries to advance the ideology, e.g. Western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. Control of the media and education to be used as a propaganda tools. Extermination of groups to advance the ideology, e.g. some 12.5 million Jews, Gypsies, handicapped, and others.
Marxist-Leninism. An all-powerful leader and a personality cult. Total control of the state and the people, i.e. totalitarianism. Setting the focus of the state on militarism. Subjugation of other countries to advance the ideology, e.g. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Finland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, China, and North Korea. Control of the media and education to be used as a propaganda tool. Extermination of groups to advance the ideology, e.g. some 120 (to 170) million Ukrainians, Cossacks, “counter-revolutionaries, intellectuals (2,000 writers, intellectuals, and artists were imprisoned and 1,500 died in prisons and concentration camps), civil servants, prisoners of war, peasants, Trotskyites, “semi-Trotskyites, quarter-Trotskyites, one-eighth-Trotskyites”, Mensheviks, Jews, “degenerate fascists”, “ex-kulaks” (Kulak Operation was largest single campaign of repression in 1937-38, with 669,929 people arrested and 376,202 executed), other “anti-Soviet elements”, and finally Christians (85% of the 35,000 members of the Russian Orthodox clergy).
Curiously enough during the Terror, Stalin had tens of thousands of Communist party members slaughtered to “encourage the rest”: On October 15, 1937, for example, the Politburo passed a secret resolution increasing the number of people “to be repressed” by 120,000 (63,000 “in the first category” and 57,000 “in the second category”); on January 31, 1938, Stalin ordered a further increase of 57,200, 48,000 of whom were to be executed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
The Great Helmsman Himself, Mao, the Great Hero of the Left, murdered over 40 Million just during the Great Leap Forward. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
Of course, WWII started when the Soviet Union with their ally NAZI Germany attacked Poland; the NAZIs on 1 September 1939 , followed by their ally, the Soviet Union, on 17 September 1939. Some 50 to 80 million died in that war which should be added to the (various) Socialist murders: 120 (to 170) million for the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist etc. Socialists . and 12.5 (to 25) million for the National Socialists. That brings the total up to 180 to 280 million murdered by socialists of various stripes in the last century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact
But, there are some important differences: NAZIs had total control of the economy i.e. “means of production” by using regulations, crony capitalism, threats, and confiscation of property in “the name of the people” but small business and home ownership was left mostly alone. The Communists, on the other hand, confiscated EVERYTHING “in the name of the people” and kept it all for themselves. Second, the National Socialist Third Reich was to last 1,000 years. On the other hand, the Communist Utopia was to be SO perfect that there could be no further change possible. The achievement would mark the end of history. And, of course, the NAZIs murdered some 12.5 (to 25) Million while the Communists murdered 120 to 170 million plus war dead for the two of them.
Hope this clears up some of the haziness in the concepts.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
dbstealey says:
August 2, 2013 at 1:06 pm
Here in the Pacific NW, we still recall the Tillamook Burn of 1933 (355K acres) in Oregon & the Big Burn of 1910 in Washington, Idaho & Montana (over three million acres), which killed at least 85. Also the Big Blow of Columbus Day, 1962.
Anthony Watts says:
“I have an electric car, solar on my home, put solar on local schools, LED lighting and timer switches to conserve electricity. Besides preach to us about “sustainable living” what have you actually done? Show your work.”
Doesn’t matter… Tell me who is the bad guy in this example:
Bush W’s house (fully sustainable for water, electricity, cooling, heating, waste and on a ranch having it’s own food)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_Chapel_Ranch#House
Al Gore’s homes:
first home and still owns:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/29/al-gore-snubs-earth-hour/
Second home and still owns:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/photos-al-goree-new-8875_n_579286.html#s91230
@ur momisugly pkv says: August 2, 2013 at 1:10 pm
YOu seem to have a problem distinguishing between a republican and a conservative. It was written by a republican. Not a conservative (that is not to say that no conservative believes in AGW, or CAGW or CC or DCC).
Dodgy Geezer: “GKC is a much underrated author, and completely out of fashion at the moment.
Which is a shame, because he’s one of the best there is…. ”
Agreed! Could I suggest reading “The Flying Inn”, based around prohibition coming to England through the influences of a crazy prophet getting the ear of ‘the great and the good’ , written in 1913 but extraordinarily prescient of today. It is also extremely funny.
pkv says:
August 2, 2013 at 1:10 pm
“Is your church, school, country, sports team, etc. a cult?”
Do you live in the real world? Have you seen some of the rioting when some teams win championships? Yes many sports teams have cult and cult like followers, yes many religions have cult and cult like sects. Things like eugenics and global warming belief though are pure cult.
” For starters, why not check out this article from today’s New York Times (unless of course, you refuse to read things published in the “liberal media”…even when written by self proclaimed Republibots, err, conservatives). ”
Can’t I not read the new york times for covering up genocide through much of history? Can’t I not read the new york times for purposely and knowing spiking stories that hurt democrats or “like minded” collectives. Can’t I ignore self proclaimed republibots and those damn dirty centrists.
Why is it that i must refuse to read the new york times based solely on them being socialist? So many reasons to ignore them why just limit myself to one?
Jon Jewett says:
August 2, 2013 at 1:17 pm
“but small business and home ownership was left mostly alone.”
This is a very common myth. Jews and millions of other non-approved groups had their small businesses and homes along with their lives “socialized” via national socialism.
Both national socialism and communism are basically the same. The easiest way to define them as different is to say that in national socialism/fascism the government pretends that you have “rights” as an individual until those “rights” are removed as the government see fit for any reason it sees fit and you have zero recourse. In communism the government never pretends your an individual at all. That’s really the only difference between them.
@dbstealey, mary colborn –
More of the height of alarmist hypocrisy – alarmists get a huge multiple of the funding from Big Oil (BP, Exxon Mobil, Shell) that skeptics do – in fact skeptics get almost NO monies from energy companies, while alarmists get billions. Big Oil promotes AGW because it has committed itself to making money on trading carbon credits, that worthless increment to energy costs that is paid by consumers and skimmed off by these speculators, thereby redistributing wealth from working lower income people who produce real goods and services to idle rich people (like Al Gore & Co.) who produce nothing but lies and waste.
Vivian Groves Fulk says:
August 2, 2013 at 7:31 am
“The salient point is, that Insurance companies live and die by their ability to estimate risks.”
The salient point is that insurance make more money charging higher premiums. They are only limited in being able to do so by their competition. Imagine the gravy train that rolls in when you all increase your rates together!
@bart – when they all raise their rates in unison, it is called collusion and is illegal. However if you are the single source, you cannot collude. So government can raise rates whenever it wants to,. and it is not colluding.
[snip – this conversation is getting too far off topic – Anthony]
I don’t believe I am alone in the idea that Al Gore’s group is another of history’s dangerous cults.
How dangerous we don’t know. History might help a little, I don’t know.
It is your site… and I will respect your wish’s
Thank you for a wonderful site and allowing me to post here.
Steve Van Dorne
Col Mosby says at August 2, 2013 at 7:36 am..
Forgive me if below you have expounded. I am new to this thread and it is too late in the UK to read it all.
But I am genuinely keen to know more about how nuclear has become cheaper even than coal as a power source. I don’t see that as obviously false. Nuclear energy is an order of magnitude greater than chemical energy. And it’d reliable, unlike solar or wind.
But I hadn’t heard the argument before. I mean the risks and insurance are real issues… as are the disposal of waste (although dropping the waste in a tectonic plate subduction zone sounds reasonable),
Seriously, tell me more. Get Anthony to publish a pro-nuclear paper and let us attack it.
You might win.
I ask this in a friendly adversarial manner.
philjourdan says @ur momisugly August 2, 2013 at 10:45 am
No!
There is no reason to think she is not sincere.
She is obviously wrong. The failure of the models and Ben Santer’s editing of the Summary for Policy Makers proves that. And more besides.
But there is no reason to call her a hypocrite.
@M Courtney – except it was virtually identical to the other Gorebots. IN other words, she may be sincere, but apparently not bright enough to come up with her own sincerity instead of regurgitating talking points.
has anyone done a proper assessment of the Gore heat lamp experiment? I see several issues in what he is attempting to demonstrate. Lets assume the earth atmosphere has 30,000 ft of air at 1 atmosphere (I could probably lookup what the air column mass is). Lets further assume CO2 concentration is 330ppm (for simplicity of math) = 1/3000. Then there is 10ft of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. A doubling of this to 600ppm should cause 1.7W/sq m equivalent, and I have that this should contribute perhaps 1C of warming. In the Gore experiment, he at most 6in of pure CO2, or 1/20th the total CO2 of earth, so his warming should be 0.1C not several.
Second is the choice of a heat lamp which I assume to be an incandescent lamp, which emits most of its radiation in the IR, meaning more of it will be absorbed in the CO2, not reaching the surface of the “earth ball”. I think he should use an LED light that emits mostly in light. TSI is 340W/sq m, so if the target ball is 10cm2, we need 0.34W incident on the ball. What is the energy efficiency of an LED? perhaps 1W could be equivalent to TSI?
By “us” and “our”, do you mean humanity? I guess not. You’re speaking as though you’re a sceptic addressing like minds, but your previous posts suggest you’re very much signed up to the anti-science that is the CAGW movement. Why the painfully transparent pose? Oh I see, you’re just equivalent to the writer of this post. Course…
What on earth is embarrassing about heatwaves? That’s what happens when you get blocking patterns in the summer, which are more likely when the jet stream meanders, which is more likely when the sun is relatively ‘quiet’. Give it a few months and these same patterns would be causing seriously cold weather. Would that be embarrassing for warmists? It shouldn’t be, as it’s just weather. However, meridional jets are more indicative of a cooling world than a warming one.
Among the general public, there’s typically two ways of coming to an opinion on most matters. One type of person takes an emotional approach, weighing up any arguments they hear on the basis of how the debates and debaters make them feel. The other type of person takes a logical/rational approach, following the arguments through to their conclusions to assess their real-world impact.
It’s clear from the posts here, and thousands of articles elsewhere, that the non-expert CAGW adherents tend to take the emotional approach, while CAGW sceptics tend to take the rational/logical approach.
Now which of these approaches is closer to the scientific method and which is closer to political persuasion?
@tucci78 –
“The usual suspects” – I like it!
In response to my earlier quotation from L. Neil Smith’s “Tactical Reflections” (“Go straight to the heart of the enemy’s greatest strength. Break that and you break him. You can always mop up the flanks and stragglers later, and they may even surrender, saving you a lot of effort”), at 11:43 AM on 2 August we have Stephen Rasey remarking:
Whereas it emphatically did “work out” for Grant at Missionary Ridge, through the Overland Campaign and the siege of Petersburg that effectively ended the war, not to mention the campaigns of Sherman and Sheridan.
The lesson is that you work with your resources to pursue the strategic initiative.
In the attack upon the preposterous bogosity of “man-made global warming” (and remember that it is always the contention that anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 increases had been “trapping” heat by way of the greenhouse gas effect that is supposed to have been causing the climate change seen on our planet since the Little Ice Age finally abated circa 1850), there is no benefit to be gotten from chopping at the bloody nonsense sprouting peripherally when the rotten root at the base of this poisoned tree is so eminently amenable to fulguration.
Burn out the heart and the beast will die.
Dr. Richard Lindzen gave an excellent talk about the “religious” aspects of the CAGW movement in this presentation to Fermilab, so this all sounds very believable. This is a great lecture, it’s very high-level science! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHg3ZztDAw
A couple of notes after reading the comments above: First off, I learned of Karl Popper’s “falsification” requirement from reading Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.” I would never have imagined that anyone would argue that the ability to prove a hypothesis to be false would be unimportant in science. Isn’t one of Einstein’s most famous quotes “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”? Isn’t that Popperian at its most basic?
Secondly, I hope our visitors have appreciated their ability to post here without being blocked or banned for being “off-topic” or “argumentative.” I speak for my self, and I’m sure for many others, when I say that I didn’t receive such a tolerant welcome at some of the CAGW sites I in which I attempted to participate.
No information can be exchanged when one side won’t listen to the other. Perhaps more of “the other side” will participate here now that they’ve learned that they won’t be cut off for not toadying to the “local opinion.”
At 3:56 PM on 2 August, James Schrumpf had written:
But what gives you to think that the “We’re All Gonna Die!” (or should that more properly be “I’m Taking Over Everything You Live For!” instead?) Watermelon bastiches are to any extent whatsoever interested in the exchange of information when the whole of their “settled science” is nothing but suppressio veri, suggestio falsi?
What information have they to offer in any exchange that isn’t overt proof of their criminal mens rea?
JY says:
August 2, 2013 at 10:21 am
“What you think should happen isn’t real, what happens is real.”
Money quote.
Mary A. Colborn says: @ur momisugly August 2, 2013 at 9:16 am
Interesting. Attempt to rebrand the attendees as cultists…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And the rest of your post, being devoid of actual facts proves the label is correct.