With much fanfare from the faithful (a grand total of 15 comments as of this writing), SkepticalScience recently released their 4-Hiroshima-Bombs-per-second widget. Their claimed intent is to “raise the awareness of global warming”.
Nonsense.
Their intent is to scare people—children and adults—into believing that something must be done about global warming. It’s nothing but propaganda—plain and simple. It’s based on estimates of the radiative imbalance caused by human-induced global warming.
Without thought—nothing new there—SkepticalScience has now opened the door for people to illustrate (1) the diminutive size of the radiative imbalance in relation to the amount of sunlight and infrared radiation that warms the planet every day, and (2) the massive uncertainties behind the imbalance.
So that’s the foundation for the first of a series of YouTube videos titled “Comments on Human-Induced Global Warming”. Episode 1 is “The Hiroshima Bomb Metric”.
SkepticalScience has used spambots in the past. I wonder whether they’ll use them again for this offensive widget. So, if you see links to that widget around the blogosphere, please feel free to leave a link to this video:
As you’ll note, the video is about 6 minutes long. My goal is to limit the lengths of all of the videos in this series to 5 to 6 minutes.
The paper referenced in the video is Stephens et al. (2012) An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations.
Sisi: ” That’s your invalid extrapolation.”
Oh? So when you say: “I read the abstract and the first page and looked at the figures. That is all you need to realise that Bob is telling porkies.”
What you meant to say was that Bob mentioned the surface imbalance and used the surface imbalance number of 0.6+-17 from the same figure you got the non-surface imbalance of 0.6+-4 from?
After all, your response to Tisdale about ‘porkies’ specifically includes the quotation from the paper in question: “This lack of precise knowledge of surface energy fluxes profoundly affects our ability to understand how Earth’s climate responds to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.”
Now, I bolded the relevant bit you keep missing. Not because you’re telling ‘porkies’ or that I would accuse you of such a thing. As to refute yourself in your own post is a special breed of intelligence that I cannot quite describe in polite terms.
I like Bob’s easy-going, thorough style of presentation. It’s lack of slickness is a benefit.
A stick of TNT blows up on my basement every day….
http://climatesanity.wordpress.com/2013/02/08/its-even-worse-than-al-gore-said/
So let me get this right,,,,,,,,, one can respond to a critique of a paper without reading the actual paper?
Ya gotta love that MAGIC!
This the season I suppose 😉
http://youtu.be/L8mLrLDd-5Q
Autocorrect truncated , or perhaps I should say extrapolated “Tis” in my prior post!
Sorry for the android coding …..
Lance made a good point:
“Lance Wallace says:
November 27, 2013 at 6:44 am
If 0.6 watts/sq meter = 4 Hiroshima bombs per second, the uncertainty of +-17 W/m^2 would be on the order of 100 H-bombs per second. Could we ask SkS to add the uncertainty to their widget?”
0.6 against ±17?
SkS has a 1 in 56 chance of being correct — according to their theory..
Trenberth 2009 has the energy imbalance at .9 w/m2 +_ .5 w/m2. Where is the source of the +_ 17 figure?
JK, look at the video. stop it at the right place and read the numbers on the bottom of the silly little diagram.
Large integer value +/- on all of them, and then they pretend that the balance is 0.6 .
ROFLMAO !!!
These guys should re-do kindergarten, and learn maths from the start !!
Robert!!!! I still say it! I always contribute to the old geezer computer conversation with, “I cut my teeth on a Wang”. Makes all the men in the room cross their legs. LOLOLOLOL!!!!
There was a great game on the Wang that was all about a cave-like dungeon, trolls, and dragons but no graphics, just a black background with words on the screen. You had to type in what direction you wanted to go and you had to keep an imagined vision of the multi-level landscape in your head. If you kept getting killed before you found the treasure deep in the labyrinth of the cave and typed in a swear word, the game programmer had embedded responses like “Do you eat with that mouth?”.
Loved the black screen and yellow font of a Wang. But there was no screen savor. Most of the monitors had a faint shadow of the login that had burned into the viewing screen.
3:12 ish will do.
There are uncertainties in measuring the w/m^2 balance at TOA. Here is a graph comparing satellite performance. http://www.geoffstuff.com/The%20problem%20-solar%20irradiance.JPG
would love to see this video redone by MinutePhysics!
@Pamela; You mean like this?
For those at Yahoo Climate Sceptic group, Donna Laframboise has a post http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/11/27/that-silly-coal-speech/
in which our dear “friend” Mike MacCracken is featured:
“Also on the list is Michael MacCracken – who pals around with professional lobbyists from the World Wildlife Fund. MacCracken sits on a WWF panel, the express purpose of which is to increase the public’s sense of climate change urgency.”
That may explain why the good Mike has been discreet these days… Busy propaganding. It is time this Yahoo group seriously think about not letting the fox in the hen house and cutting that one loose!
I agree with Snotrocket. The video has good content, but it is dragged down by inadequate production values. It needs a better VO, and it needs more visual energy (a Hiroshima bomb or two would do), and some polish. This can be accomplished by simple means, and at no cost. I volunteer to help.
Bob,
you are still telling porkies. If you want to critically check the Hiro measure you have to compare to the total earth energy imbalance. This is measured at the Top Of the Atmosphere. Not at the earth’s surface. You are using an incorrect comparison. And this is clear from looking at the figure you yourself use in the video. And no, for this you do not need to read the paper you referred to (thanks for providing the link btw; had found it before I read your comment though).
@Jquip
I just explained again why I think Bob’s comparison is nonsensical. Do you understand it now, or should I explain it to you again? Are you one of Bob’s Faithful Followers?
Sisi says:
“No, I didn’t read the paper…”
And thus, her critique and her credibility go down in flames.
Forget the enegry yields etc. The Hiroshima metric was chosen by the CAGW nutters as it represents an event of huge human suffering. Aside from the sick morality of stealing the memory of this suffering for their own agenda, it’s prefectly reasonable to ask if a event of this human significance was happening every 4 seconds – 15x a minute, 900 times an hours – that’s 21,600 times a day – we all might have noticed. We haven’t, it hasn’t and they’re full of shyte.
@dbstealey
Meanwhile I did read the paper. I am still sure that you only need the abstract and the figure that Bob uses in his video to figure out that he is making a false comparison. The Hiro measure (whatever you think about this measure) is meant to illustrate how much energy is accumulating in the earth system. Bob compares the Hiro measure to the energy budget of the earth’s surface. However, this has not much to do with how much energy the earth is accumulating (the earth’s surface is only for some part exchanging energy directly with surrounding space). For this you need to look at the energy budget at the top of the atmosphere. The numbers for the top of the atmosphere are in the figure that Bob uses in his video, for everybody to see! 0.6 watts/m^2 +/- 0.4. That’s why it is not necessary to read the paper. Bob is making a porkies comparison, that’s all.
I truly appreciate the thought and effort Mr. Tisdale has put into the video.
But I have to agree strongly with Snotrocket@3:25 AM and Torgeir Hansson@1:07 PM. I am reluctant to use these words, but I must: the narrator has worked so hard to make his points crystal clear that paradoxically he has failed to do so. The narration is slow and dull, even lifeless and a bit condescending. It does not hold interest.
Tip for the narrator: do not keep your eyes stuck to your script. Instead, talk mostly to someone sitting opposite you. Have a real conversation, with all the life that comes from that. Talk to a living person.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I think this is important. The videos could do a lot of good with more life in the delivery.
Please don’t be offended by this criticism. I mean it to be constructive.
Bruce!!!!! That’s the one!!!! And I sounded just like that when I played it!!!!!! Well, I swore a few times….OMG thank you for that snippet of past fun!
When I got tired of entering a couple thousand pieces of data, I would play that game. It helped to shake the data cobwebs out of my head when the hour was late.
WUWT 2013-11-30
Pamela Gray says:
November 27, 2013 at 7:29 pm
If I remember correctly the game was “Colossal Caverns”; it was the first quest type game I played. I never beat it. I couldn’t remember everything, and refused to make notes and draw maps. I very frequently ended with, “You are in a maze of twisty little tunnels, all alike,” with only the Dwarf Comic Books.” Earlier I had played the same or similar game on a DEC machine, perhaps a PDP-10xx or 11xx.
The yellow/orange monitor font was billed by Wang as easier to read and producing less eyestrain. Ha!
There was also a Star Trek game.
The people at Wang headquarters wanted Wang pronounced approximately Wong as Mr. Wang and family did.
My first computer was an IBM 1620, strictly cards in and cards out, with just a few toggle switches to control processing.
All this is off topic, but fun nostalgia.
As I have very limited time, and want to peruse the rest of WUWT, TTFN.
Bob, i found this a while back. Note, it’s for kids/z. In a very bizarre way, it sums up global warming insanity quite accurately.
In 1997, it brought more energy with it than a million Hiroshima bombs, and it’s resurfaced again in 2007. El Nino is a weather cycle that happens every few years but the El Nino of ’97-’98 was one of the most devastating. It killed nearly 2,100 people worldwide and left $33 million US in property damages in its wake. As if that wasn’t bad enough, El Nino was followed by one of the worst La Nina cycles in recent history – the very next year. Curious about how a weather system can wreak so much havoc? Read on to find out!
Read more: El Nino | La Nina | Weather Pattern | 2007 | Forecasts | Effects | Flooding | Storm http://www.kidzworld.com/article/2620-el-nino-and-la-nina-systems#ixzz2mEqSu9k0