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After a 239 post exchange on Facebook, an alarmist gets the last say.
Mark Ruscoe, of Asheville NC writes.
Anthony,
Reading your latest post regarding the lengths to which “tauntology” is used by the alarmist crowd, I wanted to forward something from a long FB thread I’ve been involved in for the last 8 months or so.
I’ll also preface that besides having biological science degrees and enjoying a long career in health care, I’m a climate nobody. So it surprised me how exercised global warming disciples could be out here in the hinterlands when their faith was questioned.
This was occasioned by the Typhoon Haiyan last year, when one of my (many) liberal friends linked it as a sign of our warming planet. It piqued my decidedly non-climatically oriented interest, so I decided to delve in a bit. Lo and behold, thanks to your site and others, I found that events such as that have actually declined in the past several years. I made note of this, and expected not much more.
Little was I prepared for the onslaught to follow. One thing led to another, and I spent much of my winter brushing up on the climate war. I engaged my local FB friends in what I took to be honest skeptical debate.
In particular, one of my antagonists proved unappreciative of my arguments or my sources. Especially, so it seems, yours.
After 239 posts to this particular thread, I felt as if I had made a sufficient skeptical scientific case, and decided that enough was enough. I announced that I was through.
To which my antagonist got the final word:
“…I’ll also give you this: You and your fellow deniers are wrong, and you will be on the wrong side of history. In 50 years you will be scattered with the witch-burners, the white supremacists, the birthers and the creationists who illustrate the limits of the human mind and the danger that come (sic) with them. You’ll be crammed into historical footnotes that students around the world will chuckle at for those five minutes you are mentioned. I wish you could be around to see it, if for no other reason than to hear you bray frantically that Anthony Watts is still right.”
John Marshall,
And any others who know something of physics, I finally after many hours of study understand what is meant by “back-radiation.” Of course the atmosphere cannot heat itself nor the Earth’s surface. Already all the 15-micron IR emitted by the surface is absorbed and “thermalized” within a few feet of the surface, so changing the concentration of CO2 will not change anything at the surface from below
The issue is at the Top of Atmosphere/tropopause. Increasing CO2 there makes the atmosphere more opaque to 15-micron IR. Since the atmosphere only COOLS itself by radiating to space, and the relevant temperature at the tropopause is right in the area that generates 15-micron IR, the atmosphere must radiate to space at a cooler temperature if it is more opaque, and this indeed retains extra energy in the atmosphere. At the tropopause “thermalization” is much reduced by the low pressure, so quite a few photons are re-emitted by CO2. There is not much water vapor at all up there.
What does extra energy/warmth at the tropopause do down here on the surface? Well, back-radiation does indeed transmit energy downward. How much, and how is it absorbed and thermalized? That is the subject of much debate. A 0.04% fraction of the atmosphere radiating at 70 below, does not sound like it could do much, but this is electro-magnetic transmission of energy as the microwaves are re-absorbed by CO2 and water vapor down here, not traditional radiative heat transfer. The atmosphere acts like many individual “layers” absorbing, thermalizing, and/or re-emitting, quite complex. The Trenberth diagram shows it as a similar amount of energy as the Sun’s input, but this is counter-intuitive to me.
So, saying the theory violates the Second Law, not so much. But, “settled science?” No indeedy. Anybody help me out here?
@James Baldwin in Perth: Climate alarmism might be a mental illness, but an extremely lucrative one.
it’s a sad state of affairs. CAGW is a suicidal religious cult – which always translates out to murder-suicide since not everyone is the true believer. The malarkey about ‘settled’ science makes things all the worse. Trying to go by data is not always going to get one where they should be. Data always has noise and can be subject to interpretation. Sometimes, it’s just plain defective. Because of this, one pretty much winds up accepting science on faith to some extent. One can usually go with the majority opinion and be safe from criticism but it doesn’t mean that the majority opinion is correct. Science is about turning over those opinions for something new – and that something new may work better than the old but odds are, it is not right either and someday it will be overturned or need to be modified due to new evidence.
I have found that the best way deal with confirmed believers is to either leave them be, or to question them. When questioning do not attempt to inform them; simply challenge them to support an assertion with evidence (that may be an educational experience in and of itself) and, where cherry picked evidence is what they have based convictions on, ask them about the exceptions. It is critical to ask though, not assert. Your questions become their questions. They become psychologically invested in answering them and not infrequently discover that their view has changed. Questions are insidious and are the actual basis for demanding a sceptical view in science.
since when is a FB comment news?
Ace wrote, “I’ve often wondered how things will play out in the next 20 – 40 years, especially if the data still doesn’t show the increased warming and correlation to increased CO2. How will the warmists likely respond?”
Maybe like this …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich
“…you will be on the wrong side of history…”, “In 50 years you will be scattered with the witch-burners…”, “You’ll be crammed into historical footnotes…”, “…bray frantically…”, etc.
You know, all that five-year-plan language, up-above, really conjures up some cherished memories of my vanished, priapic youth. I mean, like, when I was a lad I was incessantly pestered by the hive-babes, who were forever sneakin’-around and lookin’ for what their weenie good-comrades couldn’t provide–if you know what I mean.
And you might not believe this, but all that lefty-cant, top-side there, is actually a pretty good example of the hive-babe’s preferred form of “dirty-talk”. I mean, like, I admit that I felt a little awkward spouting all that silly-assed, Marxist crapola, at first. But then I thought, “What the hell!, what’s wrong with tellin’ the ladies what they want to hear–they all know it’s a big, fat fib anyway.” That, and they were always driven to such wild paroxysms of animal passion, big-time, by all that party-line B. S. deal. Win-win situation, it seemed to me.
Mark Ruscoe, Look how much you’ve learned! You have gathered to yourself treasure that no man can steal or moth corrupt. And the time will come, if you live long enough, that everything you learned will come to pass, and you are now on the right side of the future.
The parade goes by and the dogs bark.
We’re in the parade, and I propose to enjoy the event.
: > )
“It will be very reminiscent of those who were so damn sure about how Y2K was going to play out and be such a catastrophic event. They never admitted they were wrong, they just spun things to say how preparation was never a bad thing to do.”
Actually Y2K would have been a serious problem if nothing was done. But in fact thousands of COBOL programmers worked for several years (95 – 99) to fix problem code. Millions of programs were replaced wholesale by ERP systems to avoid having to do all the mitigation work of fixing them. So by the time the year 2000 rolled around 99%+ of everything was already repaired/replaced. (And of course by 2001 those thousands of COBOL programmers were all permanently laid off but that is another story.)
The far left has become bullies, and for many many causes.
Name calling (tauntology) is just one aspect of bullying, but the far left extremists act out as well — through protests, boycotts, lawsuits, even assault and intimidation (SEIU), to outright mass violence and riots (occupy).
A lot of the bad behavior is prefaced with tauntology, and most of the extremists have their own chief “tauntologists” (people like Al Gore or Michael Mann). But there’s plenty of others out there taunting for various other extreme causes, Tauntologists like Al Sharpton, Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Maddow, (maybe even…. the President).
One common thread seems to be – the more extreme and indefensible their position is, the less apt they are to listen and the more they try and bully for their cause. It seems to be a law of nature.
Speaking of nuts, AlGore is spreading his BS in Rolling Stone (fitting, eh?)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-turning-point-new-hope-for-the-climate-20140618?print=true
Michael Moon says:
June 18, 2014 at 10:09 am
Increasing GHG concentrations increase the longest potential departure paths an IR photon can take leaving the planet. That in turn would mean that a fraction of those photons simply hang around longer. The gotchas are the other dissipative system that interact to collectively create what we call climate. If the science were really “settled,” that would mean that useful models would tend to track the real world varying randomly above and below that real world mean. Since the models used by the IPCC show a bias, running “hot” compared to reality, the self-evident fact is that the models contain an error and it is pervasive affecting all current theory that is widely used.
Gary: Re cognitive dissonance (CD): A salesman friend explained it to me thus: You’ve just paid a huge price for the car of your dreams; as you drive home you wonder, was it money well spent…
“…I’ll also give you this: You and your fellow deniers are wrong, and you will be on the wrong side of history” Letting this guy have a last word like that was probably so satisfying to him that you did him a huge favor. I don’t think people like him care about what actually happens, only what they can say and feel right about. You can have the satisfaction of making a fellow human being’s day and move on with your life.
But it can be very effective to counter THEIR facts with a correction. Counterpunching–and going no further–has worked for me.
One more point: This is a debate in which the alarmists should want to be proved wrong. That they seem not to is telling. When have you have heard an alarmist say to a skeptic, “I hope you’re right, but I’m very worried that you’re not.” They don’t want to be wrong because being wrong will interfere with their agenda. Skeptics are doubters, and alarmists have an ideological fever that won’t break.
Ive attempted honest debates on this topic for years. Several dozen now. I have yet to find anyone who doesn’t simply resort to calls to authority and or name calling. I actually first studied it to figure out how to better prove it to people and convince them to care.
It is glaringly obvious if you study that things are hardly settled. We often hear, if you do not include co2 as a dominant factor then we cannot explain the last 30 years! Doh! well if we DO include it we cannot explain it either. There must be over a dozen completely different peer reviewed cases published trying to explain this lack of warming.
The media and many governments want to portray all of this in a way the data simply does not support. This tells us without any doubt there is agenda here, that knowledge and data are NOT driving this issue at the level this agenda does.
This should be very alarming to anyone who cares about truth and the environment for that matter. We have real enviro issues whether or not co2 is one of them.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this final post is that it describes the warmists’ collective future to a T.
Re Climatism as a ‘religion’: The vast majority of religious believers in the United States (not to speak of other countries) have gotten accustomed to the principle of living cheek-by-jowl with people of other faiths. How many even waste time discussing matters of doctrine? Except, of course, where it affects public policy, as with abortion or same-sex ‘marriage’. And that is the nub with Climatism: it’s basically an argument about public policy, where True Belief and politics intersect. And that’s why Climatism has become dangerous. You are not just a heretic; you doubt the validity of the Movement. What should happen to you, then?
The Puppet President has become a spokesman for the Movement. He makes speeches disparaging skeptics are “flat-Earthers.” What’s next? What should happen to people who stand in the way of “saving the Earth”? It is not hard to imagine the directions this misguided man and his handlers could take us.
/Mr Lynn
Guys it is a Cult. What they say about deniers is projection. What they say will happen to deniers is what they secretly fear will happen to them. They know that something is not right, they know that 20 years of no warming is not a good sign that they are right, they know that their arguments are weak, they know. They just can not face the fact that their noble cause is a load of cr@p and that they are puny worthless nobodies.
I consider it an honor being lumped with creationists. Name calling doesn’t bother me. When they start throwing stones, that bothers me.
People get brainwashed, I have tried many times to convince others that global warming is essentially trivial and can be ignored and in any case cooling looks more likely. But I have not succeeded. How do you convince people, even bright university students are taken in by the sustainibility label of co2 global warming.
Wow, you have much more patience than I. And the final retort is some rather sophisticated and polished prose. Makes me wonder if it’s original. I had a couple of tauntologers on my case until suggesting they sounded similar to those call centers out of Mumbai with set piece arguments, epithets, and a list of skeptics they were paid to engage and pester. Never heard from them again.
Actually we climate change skeptics are already the same side of history as the cold fusion skeptics, the WMD skeptics, the big foot skeptics, the geocentric universe skeptics, etc.
It may be time to change our name to “nonconformists” as we become more mainstream.
Tell you friends that “Climate Change is very real” and send them over to my data page. No hype, no commentary. Just data.
https://www.dropbox.com/sc/ofcl5g9r00bhfyf/AAAa7MpBm1zUsmm4D_qnWRbfa
Maybe they will actually absorb some facts for a change.