A poll follows, a first for QOTW.
Sometimes in the climate wars when things get ridiculous and emotional we often ask or see asked “what is this, high school”? A classic example is Al Gore’s “high school physics” when it comes to the CO2 effect:
“The deniers claim that it’s some kind of hoax and that the global scientific community is lying to people,” he said. “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics.” – Al Gore in an interview with MNN 9/14/2011
Unless you are a fringe skeptic (for example a “Slayer” at Principia Scientific) you wouldn’t call the greenhouse effect a hoax, I surely don’t. But as my replication of Al Gore’s “high school physics” experiment proved, Gore even got the “high school physics” wrong. Then, he faked the results in post production.
Steve McIntyre has some perspective on the “high school” nature of climate science that is worth repeating:
It seems to me that most famous “amateurs” from the past were highly professional in their field. Nor do I find invocation of their stories very relevant since the sociology of the science enterprise has changed so much.
In my opinion, most climate scientists on the Team would have been high school teachers in an earlier generation – if they were lucky. Many/most of them have degrees from minor universities. It’s much easier to picture people like Briffa or Jones as high school teachers than as Oxford dons of a generation ago. Or as minor officials in a municipal government.
Allusions to famous past amateurs over-inflates the rather small accomplishments of present critics, including myself. A better perspective is the complete mediocrity of the Team makes their work vulnerable to examination by the merely competent.
– Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit Aug 1, 2013 at 2:44 PM
h/t to Charles the Moderator
Please take a look at this graph from the essay Steve left a comment in:
The poll is about the graph:
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Note to Steve McIntyre: Sir John Houghton was an Oxford don a generation ago….
Steve McIntyre says:
August 4, 2013 at 1:51 pm
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In 1937, the “feedback” concept hadn’t been invented, AFAIK. In fact, this is only about 30 years after Arrhenius and Angstrom were arguing about the value of the no-feedback climate sensitivity based on physical chemical estimates (they had no accurate spectra and no computer IR absorption models then, and had to make statistical mechanical guesstimates).
If I understand correctly, the reason for the logarithmic curve is pretty straightforward. As CO2 increases, the early CO2 absorbs most of the infrared at the specific wavelengths that CO2 absorbs it, leaving less infrared at these wavelengths for later CO2.
Yes.
http://www.cipa.org/files/public/GlobalWarmingScience.pdf (page 53)
http://books.google.com/books?id=X3XD9VwhETkC&pg=PA16&lpg=PA16&dq=pat+michaels+co2+%22logarithmic%22&source=bl&ots=PDguFiRtQN&sig=85we669RkeB8Ceteo8vKWD-Km0A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=59z_Uaq7EYetigKutoFA&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=pat%20michaels%20co2%20%22logarithmic%22&f=false
Whenever you get that “heating component” figured out for the refrigerant class of gases in the atmosphere – it’s a frigid nitrogen oxygen bath refrigerated by the phase change refrigerant water – to move an instrument, or when you find the text with the heating component shown for a refrigerant, you let us all know.
The only people on this earth to be laughed at to their face by so many people they’re afraid to go off their own reservation is climatologists who believe in that magic gas story.
Show us some magic gas believers being right about which way an instrument is going to point.
Show us some magic gas believers being right about anything at all.
People laugh at those who believe in the “heating component of refrigerants” with the offhand disdain one reserves for a child who thinks movies are real.
I never read the Dragon Slayer book but I did check the loon-tunes crowd who’s trying to bark magic gas is real.
Magical back and forth-isms un-countable by mathematics of any kind, and undetectable by instruments of any kind swarming between objects two ways, when every instrument and mathematic ever devised shows clearly heat transfer is from more concentrated to less;
the fantasy belief that the lack of any warming for nearly 20 years doesn’t dent their procession of ludicrous and insultingly ill-conceived claims,
the fantasy that lack of a developing tropospheric hotspot isn’t instant death to their bullshoot.
Then there’s the fact that they’re the only bunch of goobers on earth to claim their bullshoot’s “too big to check with an experiment” while “maybe being” in the next hype story, “so small as to be barely measurable” while being “too obvious not to believe in.”
The things you magic gassers say are far and away the most ridiculed statements in modern technological dismissal of luddites who can’t read an instrument or predict which way one’s going to point.
If magic gas has any traction in reality based science there will be found to be a textbook describing how to project the warming done by the refrigerant in a phase-change refrigeration system.
If it has any reality based values, the infrared astronomy field would have no problem revealing and describing in full, the giant infrared light you’re constantly claiming is in the sky, “too big to not believe in, too small for any instrument to actually measure.”
The insanity of people whose theory can’t even predict the direction a thermometer is going to move, and who systematically preach against entropic thermodynamical motion by charge carriers
claiming people in real sciences believe that crap,
is the mark of just how bad it’s gotten in the world of “opinion based” pseudoscience.
You people have actually tried to redefine science so that something that can’t be tested at all goes beyond hypothesis to be ‘theory’
and where you claim you have a “scientific theory”
that’s not falsifiable.
Your peoples’ claims have included everything from hockey stick generators looking into bore holes to turn trees into magical treemomiturs that are 1/10th degree thermometers,
to the lack of a tropospheric hotspot not proving it wrong,
to the fact there’s a giant gas mirror receiving 168 watts from the earth emitting 324 back down to it, and 324 out toward the sky.
That’s your official scientific earth energy budget. 168 watts from earth gets 324 back. And 324 out the top.
To you that’s science.
To the rest of the world that’s a laughingstock.
Richard Vada says:
August 5, 2013 at 12:28 pm
to the fact there’s a giant gas mirror receiving 168 watts from the earth emitting 324 back down to it, and 324 out toward the sky.
That’s your official scientific earth energy budget. 168 watts from earth gets 324 back. And 324 out the top.
To you that’s science.
To the rest of the world that’s a laughingstock.
It is achieved by giving the solar constant figure (which is a measure of how much direct radiant heat from the Sun, longwave infrared, heats the surface), to shortwave at TOA, claiming that no direct radiant longwave infrared from the Sun gets through TOA.
This in order to claim that real world measurements of downwelling longwave infrared from the Sun which does reach the surface and which we feel directly as heat, is attributed instead to “greenhouse gases backradiating longwave infrared from the atmosphere under TOA”.
They then take off from this misattributed solar constant which they have placed at TOA and given to “shortwave in” (mainly visible with some uv and near infrared either side, nir being 1% of this ‘total shortwave in”), reflection and so on, and arrive at their physically impossible shortwave heating the surface figure.
I have asked this before – did Trenberth devise this energy budget himself?
richard vada,very eloquently put.