Matt Ridley Replies to His Climate-Change Critics
Jeffrey Sachs blows a gasket, and our contributor cleans up the intellectual mess.Sept. 9, 2014 9:56 a.m. ET THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Editor’s note: Matt Ridley’s Sept. 4 op-ed, “Whatever Happened to Global Warming?,” stirred a strong response, not least among the enforcers of climate-change orthodoxy.
Here is Mr. Ridley’s reply to his critics, adapted from his blog: Post-script. After the article was published, an astonishing tweet was sent by the prominent economist Jeffrey Sachs saying:
Ridley climate ignorance in WSJ today is part of compulsive lying of Murdoch media gang. Ridley totally misrepresents the science.
— Jeffrey D. Sachs (@JeffDSachs) September 5, 2014
Curious to know how I had lied or “totally misrepresented” the science, I asked Sachs to explain. There was a deafening silence.There then appeared at the Huffington Post an article under Sachs’s name. Its style was quite unlike that of Sachs. The piece purported to—in a spin doctor’s words—expose:
The Wall Street Journal Parade of Climate Lies – @JeffDSachs destroys daft @mattwridley article in@WSJ: http://t.co/gCbOThZV81
— Bob Ward (@ret_ward) September 6, 2014
However, it does nothing of the sort. It’s all bluster and careful misdirection, and contradicts nothing in my article, let alone producing evidence of lies. The sheer inaccuracy of the riposte in its descriptions of what I said or what I think are breathtaking, as are its failure to address any of the issues I raise, let alone contradict them. I had respect for Jeffrey Sachs as a scholar before reading this. Here are some key passages:
“Ridley’s “smoking gun” is a paper last week in Science Magazine by two scientists Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung . . .”
Notice the quote marks around “smoking gun,” implying that I used the phrase. I did not. In any case, the Chen and Tung paper was only one of the pieces of evidence I cited.
“. . . which Ridley somehow believes refutes all previous climate science.”
I said nothing of the sort and I believe nothing of the sort. Chen and Tung is about currents in the Atlantic, not about “all climate science”!
“The Wall Street Journal editors don’t give a hoot about the nonsense they publish if it serves their cause of fighting measures to limit human-induced climate change. If they had simply gone online to read the actual paper, they would have found that the paper’s conclusions are the very opposite of Ridley’s.”
In his writing the real Mr. Sachs does not often use phrases like “don’t give a hoot.”
In any case, he’s plain wrong about the contradiction. The quote I gave from the press release is accurate. And I have read the paper and can assure Mr. “Sachs” that its conclusions are not the opposite of what I have said. As further confirmation, how about asking the paper’s lead author himself? This is what he wrote to Prof. Judith Curry in response to her questions:
“Dear Judy,The argument on the roughly 50-50 attribution of the forced vs unforced warming for the last two and half decades of the 20th century is actually quite simple. If one is blaming internal variability for canceling out the anthropogenically forced warming during the current hiatus, one must admit that the former is not negligible compared to the latter, and the two are probably roughly of the same magnitude. Then when the internal cycle is of the different sign in the latter part of the 20th century, it must have added to the forced response. Assuming the rate of forced warming has not changed during the period concerned, then the two combined must be roughly twice the forced warming during the last two and half decades of the 20th century.”
In other words, as I said, the warming of 1975-2000 was only half caused by man-made emissions and half by natural causes, according to their conclusions, and natural causes were enough to cancel man-made forcing in the years after 2000.
To continue with the “Sachs” article:
“First, the paper makes perfectly clear that the Earth is warming in line with standard climate science, and that the Earth’s warming is unabated in recent years. In the scientific lingo of the paper (it’s very first line, so Ridley didn’t have far to read!), “Increasing anthropogenic greenhouse-gas-emissions perturb Earth’s radiative equilibrium, leading to a persistent imbalance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) despite some long-wave radiative adjustment.” In short, we humans are filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel use, and we are warming the planet.”
Mr. “Sachs” did not have far to read in my own article to find this is in complete agreement with what I wrote also:
“I’ve long thought that man-made carbon-dioxide emissions will raise global temperatures, but that this effect will not be amplified much by feedbacks from extra water vapor and clouds, so the world will probably be only a bit more than one degree Celsius warmer in 2100 than today.”
Instead of using words like “unabated” why not give numbers? I did.
The warming during 1975-2000, even if you cherry-pick the end points, was about 0.4 degrees C if you average the five main global data sets, and if half of that was natural, then man-made forcing was going at the rate of less than 1 degree per century, rather less than what I said.
“Second, the total warming is distributed between the land and ocean surface on the one hand and the ocean deep water on the other. The total rise of ocean heat content has continued unabated, while the proportion of heat absorbed at the surface and in the deeper ocean varies over time. Again, in the scientific lingo of the paper, “[T]his forced total OHC [ocean heat content] should be increasing monotonically over longer periods even through the current period of slowed warming. In fact, that expectation is verified by observation . . . ” In other words, the ocean has continued to warm in line with predictions of just such a phenomenon seen in climate models.”
This is highly misleading. The quote from the paper does not contradict me at all. In any case, remember, the data on ocean heat content is highly ambiguous. As Judith Curry summarized it recently:
“The main issue of interest is to what extent can ocean heat sequestration explain the hiatus since 1998. The only data set that appears to provide support for ocean sequestration is the ocean reanalysis, with the Palmer and Domingues 0-700 m OHC climatology providing support for continued warming in the upper ocean.All in all, I don’t see a very convincing case for deep ocean sequestration of heat. And even if the heat from surface heating of the ocean did make it into the deep ocean, presumably the only way for this to happen involves mixing (rather than adiabatic processes), so it is very difficult to imagine how this heat could reappear at the surface in light of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.”
Back to the “Sachs” article:
“Third, it is the ‘vertical distribution’ of the warming, between the surface and deep water, which affects the warming observed on land and at the sea surface. The point of the paper is that the allocation of the warming vertically varies over time, sometimes warming the surface rapidly, other times warming the deeper ocean to a great extent and the surface water less rapidly. According to the paper, the period of the late 20th century was a period in which the surface was warmed relative to the deeper ocean. The period since 2000 is the opposite, with more warming of the deeper ocean. How do the scientists know? They measure the ocean temperature at varying depths with a sophisticated system of ‘Argo profiling floats,’ which periodically dive into the ocean depths to take temperature readings and resurface to transmit them to the data centers.”
I have no problem with this paragraph, which merely reiterates what I said about the Chen and Tung paper, with a bit more detail about the Argo floats, etc. It finds no evidence of my misrepresentation, let alone total misrepresentation.
“So, what is Ridley’s ‘smoking gun’ when you strip away his absurd version of the paper? It goes like this. The Earth is continuing to warm just as greenhouse gas theory holds.”
Check, I agree—over the long term and slowly, just as greenhouse gas theory holds. But the atmosphere is not continuing to warm right now.
“The warming heats the land and the ocean. The ocean distributes some of the warming to the surface waters and some to the deeper waters, depending on the complex circulation of ocean waters.”
Check. Could not have said it better myself, though remember this is still speculation and was not predicted.
“The shares of warming of the surface and deeper ocean vary over time, in fluctuations that can last a few years or a few decades.”
Check.Where’s the contradiction with what I wrote? There is none. If Mr. “Sachs” had bothered to read my article properly, he would find that his description of what is happening is pretty well exactly the same as mine. Except that he gives no numbers. What I did was to show that if Chen and Tung are right, and half the warming in the last part of the last century was natural, then the “rapid” warming of those three decades was still too slow for the predictions made by the models. It will if it resumes give us a not very alarming future. And if it does not resume for some time, as Chen and Tung speculate that it might not, then the future is even less alarming.And no, again, I did not use the phrase “smoking gun.” I used several other arguments, all of which Mr. “Sachs” fails to address at all, so presumably he agrees that there has been a “pause,” that it was denied for many years by the climate establishment, that there was general agreement among them that a pause of more than 15 years would invalidate their models, and so on.He goes on:
“If the surface warming is somewhat less in recent years than in the last part of the 20th century, is that reason for complacency? Hardly. The warming is continuing, and the consequences of our current trajectory will be devastating unless greenhouse gas emissions (mainly carbon dioxide) are stopped during this century. As Chen and Tung conclude in their Science paper, ‘When the internal variability [of the ocean] that is responsible for the current hiatus [in warming] switches sign, as it inevitably will, another episode of accelerated global warming should ensue.’ “
I hardly think it was complacent of me to ask world leaders to address the much more urgent issues of war, terror, disease, poverty, habitat loss and the 1.3 billion people with no electricity.
The only disagreement is whether future warming will be “devastating,” and that is a prediction not an empirical fact. I cannot yet be “wrong” about it.
When will Mr. “Sachs” get around to including a number? He surely cannot be under the impression that lukewarmers like me think there is no greenhouse effect? He surely knows that the argument is not about whether there is warming, but how fast.
And where did I lie, or misrepresent? Where did he “destroy” me, pray? He did not.
Mr. “Sachs,” who is usually a careful academic, has published a lot of wild accusations against me and “totally” (his word) failed to stand them up. How did this come about? Perhaps, being a busy man, he asked somebody else to ghost-write much of the piece for him and did not check it very thoroughly. Perhaps he wrote it himself. Either way, no problem, a quick tweet apologising to me and admitting that nothing in his article contradicts anything in mine, that we merely disagree on the predictions of dangerous warming, and I will consider the matter closed.
I published most of this riposte to Mr. Sachs’s article on my blog post on Sunday and drew his attention to it on Twitter.
He ignored it but posted a single tweet as follows:
WSJ ignores science conclusion that another episode of accelerated warming should ensue as ocean variability "inevitably" switches sign.
— Jeffrey D. Sachs (@JeffDSachs) September 7, 2014
Actually, the word the scientists use is “rapid” warming and they use it also to describe the warming of the 1980s and 1990s, which as I showed was not nearly as rapid as predicted by the models. So, even when the Atlantic currents are boosting the man-made warming, it is not as fast as the models predict.
Clearly Mr. Sachs and I disagree about how dangerous man-made global warming is likely to be in the future. I think all the explanations for the pause, including the Chen and Tung one, only make my case stronger that man-made warming is not being enhanced by feedbacks and is proceeding according to the greenhouse effect of CO2 alone. I may of course be wrong. But it is ludicrous, nasty and false to accuse me of lying or “totally misrepresenting the science.” I have asked Mr. Sachs to withdraw the charges more than once now on Twitter. He has refused to do so, though he has been tweeting freely during the time.
Soon after my article was published, another peer-reviewed paper appeared in the Journal Nature Climate Change, about as mainstream a climate science publication as you can find. It is entitled: “Climate model simulations of the observed early-2000s hiatus of global warming.” The respected commentator and academic Roger Pielke Jr. tweeted:
http://twitter.com/RogerPielkeJr/status/508712561135464448
When science can explain the mechanism that initiates interglacial warm periods and then initiates glaciations perhaps we will be able to control climate change to some degree.
Until that time I shall be on the fence waiting on my daily dose of new data to determine my angle of leaning. In my opinion the level of Alarm seems to be currently receding with a shallow exponential.
Sachs tweets: “WSJ ignores science conclusion that another episode of accelerated warming should ensue as ocean variability “inevitably” switches sign.”
Wow. When did “science” “conclude” that that “should” “inevitably” occur?
I thought that that particular untested hypothesis was one of the multitude that are currently seeking to explain the failure of the all the CAGW models. Maybe I’m wrong. When “science” devolves to throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks to justify its failures, it’s hard to keep track.
@chris Moffat t:
Please don’t disparage Economists. I am one, as are many of the Skeptics. We have a certain amount of specialized training in dealing with lousy statistical analysis of sparse, dirty, and missing time series data subject to political manipulation; and that background often makes use MORE skeptical about the statistical hand waving.
(See the ongoing need to ‘undo’ to various politically driven definition changes to things like the unemployment rate and GDP by all political parties as examples of the crud Economists have to ‘back out’ of the data on a regular basis… Both Reagan and various Democrats have fudged GDP / Inflation and other government statisitics. So much so that now hundreds of folks are employed keeping real statistics and un-doing the government ones….)
Frankly, it was my (mandatory) statistics training as an Economist that was one of the first hackle rasing moments when I ran into the AGW ‘methods’. That whole “average a bunch of intensive properties and get a intesive property out to 3 decimal digits of precision” is just so entirely bogus.
Then there is the use of time series plots with various start / end point cherry picks without any awareness of the impact of endpoints.
Then there is the fit of linear trends to cyclical data (shades of the 10 ish year business cycle… )
So much of my Econ background caused an immediate “WTF?” moment when looking at what was done in ‘climate science’, that it is hard to immagine a better background for knowing how to spot the errors.
That some of my ilk (fellow economists) are less than adept students (even with Ph.D.s) ought not to color all of us… Yes, one of the sections in my Stats class was titled “How to lie with statistics”, but at least at my school it was intended to teach how to expose it, not as suggested practice.
Please don’t disparage Economists. I am one …
I’m disappointed; I thought you were an engineer … 😉
I’ve always felt Economists were extremely useful. They are very good team players and come out of the box wearing a suit and tie. I wouldn’t go into a business deal without at least one economist. However you do have to understand and program tax law and follow legal accounting practices in your models. Given that caveat I think economists are indispensable. Marxist economists are excluded, of course.
But if it cools a lot, as some predict, we could be in for a truly miserable time.
Svensmark’s comment in his and Nigel Calder’s book “The Cooling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change, Svensmark’s is that we are the first people to complain about warming. Significant cooling will bring crop failures and the risk of world famine.
All of the recent solar observations, the fact that both poles have started to cool, the latitudinal warming paradox, the tropical troposphere lack of warming paradox, the fact that there are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleo record where the same regions of the planet that warmed in the last 50 years warmed when there was a solar grand maximum supports the assertion that the planet will significantly cool due to the solar magnetic cycle 24 abrupt change to the solar magnetic cycle.
It will be interesting to hear the imaginative warmists’ first attempts to explain away planetary cooling.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Chilling-Stars-Cosmic-Climate/dp/1840468661
Sachs is simply defending his religion and faith from blasphemers.
Sachs pontificates and has always been tendentious. His column is one of the many reasons I cancelled my Scientific American subscription 10 years ago.
“smoking gun” does not have to indicate a quote. It may also indicate that what is being said is not meant literally. E.g. My mother’s “pizza” looks more like an omlette.
He said you did not have a real ‘smoking gun’…
That’s why we need a new punctuation mark for such figurative quotes; I suggest the carat: ^
The Warmalistas are only able to fight off an army of straw men. They cannot deal with real arguments, data, or debate.
Off topic, appologies. A very big day in Canadian History. Stunning sonar image.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/lost-franklin-expedition-ship-found-in-the-arctic-1.2760311
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-29131757
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/09/british-ship-1845-franklin-expedition-found-canada
So how did a wooden sailing ship make it to this location in 1845 or 1846.
Even today, as in 2014, it would not get within 1000 kms of this location unless they were extremely, extremely lucky in timing the movement of the ice etc. As in ridiculous luck because it was only possible over the last week if you have all the best satellite tracking and a very fast boat with ice-breaker support waiting in the wings.
If the historic sea ice extent was anywhere near what has been estimated before, not a chance a wooden sailing ship would get anywhere near this location.
Which means that all of the historic sea ice reconstructions are way, way off and the numbers should be much, much closer to today’s numbers.
I’m sure the WSJ would have gladly printed a well-reasoned rebuttal as either and opinion piece or a letter to the editor. Instead with get this nonsense posted on a site with an audience highly receptive to this kind of sophistry.
OK. I’ll bite.
You either didn’t read the article or didn’t understand it. Or both. You certainly don’t comprehend the provenance.
Your surety regarding the WSJ is naive. At least that matches your perception of Matt’s readership.
I’m not sure, but I think he was referring to Sachs’ article in the Huffington Post, with the Huffington Post as the “site with an audience highly…”, and that WSJ would have given Sachs space to rebut in a letter. I think you took offense by inferring that MSG was referring to either us here at WattsUpWithThat or WSJ as the “highly receptive to this kind of sophistry” group.
Each time I look at the charts in the Reference Page of this site I am , as a complete layperson, struck by 2 facts : the linearity of the CO2 growth rate in the last 15 years and the flatness of the temperature anomalies (except for the 0-700 m Ocean Heat content) .
Is the global temperature in recent years flat and steady not , DESPITE, the growth in CO2 (implying an opposing effect which ,coincidentally, exactly cancels out radiative forcing ) , but BECAUSE OF the LINEAR growth rate of CO2.
ie over a limited ppm range Temperature anomaly is proportional , not to absolute CO2 concentration, but depends on changes in the rate of growth . So global temperatures rise (after allowing for super El Ninos and large volcanic events ) as a result of increases in the rate of growth , but following that initial period a steady , consistent growth results in a plateau of temperature.
Now the average CO2 growth rate for each decade from 1960 has been provided for us on the Ref Pages and varies from 0.83 ppmCO2/year to 1.95 for 2000-2010. If you plot against these values your temperature anomaly of choice (land sea or atmosphere) there is a sort of trend , which suggests that if we want to keep the temperatures at their present level we should maintain a CO2 growth rate of at least 1 ppm/year – which no doubt the Chinese will be happy to provide.
Reduce the growth rate and the global temperatures will fall. Reduce them so sharply that the absolute CO2 concentrations fall, growth rate is negative, and you will need to stock up on FairIsle sweaters.
The only temperature data that did not fit this , admittedly wacky, idea , was the Ocean Heat content.
“…Temperature anomaly is proportional , not to absolute CO2 concentration, but depends on changes in the rate of growth .”
You’re almost there. Temperature and rate of change of CO2 concentration are affinely related. No doubt about it.
However, the idea that the rate of change of CO2 drives temperature implies that temperature does not depend on the absolute concentration of CO2 – we could pump it up to 1000 ppmv and, once we stopped, temperatures would go back down. That doesn’t make sense, and it is certainly counter to the GHE theory.
Much more reasonable instead to interpret this as temperature driving the rate of change of CO2.
Correct. It has been well established that CO2 follows temperature. Over the course of geologic time, as best it can be reconstructed, there have been many periods when temperatures were high and CO2 low, as well as when temperatures were low and CO2 high. Not once has the evidence ever indicated that temperature rose following CO2 increase. On the geologic time scale, the present period (~10k years into the Holocene interglacial) the earth is at the low end of the range of both temperature and CO2.
The last Pleistocene glacial max ‘sequestered’ most of the atmospheric CO2 in the oceans. It has taken more than 10,000 years for enough to ‘boil’ back out to start regreening the planet. It is now estimated that over the last 25 years or so, plant biomass has increased by at least 13-15% worldwide. Anyone who thinks this is bad news needs professional help.
With the exception of the industrial era when Homo sapiens started burning coal and then oil in ever increasing amounts. Think of us as a large group of monkeys who figured out how to light a fire and later learned how to burn old rocks.
I do believe we have the ability to change the planet. It will be rather short lived in the grand scheme of things. Eventually we will either figure our newer technologies or we will run out of fuel and be forced to embrace our inner caveman.
Fernando Leanme September 9, 2014 at 2:13 pm
Burning fossil fuels contributes 3.27% of the total of atmospheric CO2 according to:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/energymyths/myth10.htm
Unless we discover that abiotic carbohydrates are real and extractable, I agree that eventually we’ll run out of ‘fossil fuels’. However, that’s not going to happen any time soon:
http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/
That’s just the USA. Shale extraction has written a new book on energy. I think we’ve got enough lead time to figure out something renewable and reliable that actually produces more energy than it consumes. The only things that can force us to embrace our inner cave man are stupid politics and self-loathing environmentalism.
Fernando Leanme
September 9, 2014 at 2:13 pm
“I do believe we have the ability to change the planet.”
There is no “belief” involved. If we exploded the entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, we would have a definite and immediate impact on the planet.
And, in specific locations, humans have decidedly changed local conditions, both for the better, and the worse.
However, as to the question of whether we are affecting global weather patterns, there is no evidence of it, so believing it is a matter of faith.
If temperature is correlated with ” changes in the rate of growth” of CO2, rather than to the log of the changes in CO2, it’s probably changes in industrial waste heat that’s causing temperature change rather than changes in greenhouse gases.
That’s what McKitrick argued here
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/MM.JGR07-background.pdf
Michael, let me lay out the problem: as we produce oil from a reservoir class we deplete the oil reserves. Because we know reserves will be depleted we seek new technologies and test new rocks and environments. This means that over time we get a lot better at it, and we also run through the inventory of available targets.
As time goes by we fall behind demand, prices rise and this gives us legs to be more aggressive and move to more expensive projects.
You posted a table showing increasing reserves. But take note those reserves are oil and condensates. The gas and condensate set of targets is broader…but it also has limits. And to those who think the inventory is endless I wish to remind you of what happened to the silver in Greece, the iron mines in Spain, Indonesian and North Sea oil, and what’s happening to the Dutch gas industry. In other words the planet does have a limited amount of extractable minerals.
My forecast for the USA production pak is about 10 million barrels of oil per day. After that it’s downhill with minor wiggles but the good tines are over. And this is one reason the ipcc’s so called business as usual case is vaporware. Not only are their models in need of better tuning they also need much better underlying inputs.
Finally, when we put CO2 in the air we do have an impact. The question in my mind isn’t whether the impact is there or not. The question is what’s the amount? Matt Ridley put it very well, he gives a number. Sachs didn’t give one because he knows very well his position lies in avoiding a debate over the numbers. Obama and the rest rely now on imperial dictates and an incredibly intolerant disregard for the opposition. But Obama did turn out to be quite disappointing.
As for Sachs, I was also in and out of Russia when he and his friends advised Yeltsin. Lets just say we thought he was naive, didn’t understand their culture and politics. And it seems he didn’t learn much since his debacle in Russia, because he’s demonstrating to me he doesn’t understand the culture and political nature of the American people. Pandering to the extreme left on Tweeter isn’t going to work.
Fernando Leanme September 10, 2014 at 1:29 am
1. I already agreed with you that eventually we’ll run out of ‘fossil’ fuels unless we discover abiotic is real and extractable. So I have no argument about that. What we seem to disagree about is how soon we will deplete and move to something else. You may recall that ‘peak oil’ was first predicted to arrive in the 1970s. Didn’t happen. You seem to be predicting ‘peak oil’ in the immediate future. I don’t think so. Alarmists have been predicting the imminent arrival of ‘peak oil’ for 40 years. Hasn’t happened. Sans abiotic, it will happen eventually, but I’m not worried about it. Humans have a way of innovating when motivated sufficiently.
2. I also agree with you that human activities are adding CO2 to the atmosphere. My first link showed the exact percentage (3.27%). Your contention is that it has “an impact”. My response is “so what?” The ONLY impact that has been documented so far is an increase of plant biomass by about 15% world wide in the past 25 years or so and steadily increasing domestic crop yields. CO2 is plant food and the more of it the better. The GCM models that portray CO2 as a catastrophic pollutant have all failed. Outside of all the failed models there is NO EVIDENCE that CO2 causes any detrimental effects on anything. You have some evidence to the contrary? If so, let’s see it.
FTA:
“‘When the internal variability [of the ocean] that is responsible for the current hiatus [in warming] switches sign, as it inevitably will, another episode of accelerated global warming should ensue.’ “
Sachs seems to believe that, when this happens, it will continue on indefinitely. But, the very nature of a cycle is that it cycles. It will accelerate for a time, then it will decelerate. Net result over the long term: zero.
The thing is, once you take away this acceleration/deceleration cycle, you are left with a long term trend, which even Ridley seems to concede is due to AGW. But, that trend was in place by the end of the LIA, and it has not accelerated or decelerated. There is no indication whatever that this trend is human caused.
Take away the trend and the cycle, both of which have been around since before major industrialization, and you have: not a whole lot which could reasonably be laid to the feet of human forces.
Regarding the ‘missing heat’ in the oceans:
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today;
I wish to heck he’d go away.
The models have correctly predicted that rapid AGW “should” begin soon! This is a “science conclusion”! We have already correctly predicted that AGW will happen! This prediction flows from the models and has already been verified by them!
you forgot the /sarc tag.
“… the Earth’s warming is unabated in recent years.” – Sachs
Unabated? Sachs obviously missed the memo on the pause. Also he is trying to imply the equivalent of an unabated torrential thunder storm when it is so far more similar to a light rain that lasts for a few days.
Recent years? Like what, the last 1,000 recent years the last 100, the last 20 or is it the last 2?
Was a more ambiguous statement ever made. I guess the ambiguity is unimportant because the content of the sachs article is not important. what is important is the message.
In typical knuckle dragging style, the message is, “Me smart, you dumb.”
@ur momisugly Matt Ridley,
Just keep doing what you’re currently doing so well. No need to panic or start throwing expensive lawsuits about because your latest protagonist is angry. He’s upset because your bullets are hitting their targets and as ever your fair-mindedness cruelly amplifies his own side’s illogical flaws. Revel in it, Matt, because evidence is on your side. Just as history will be.
Sachtimonious (sic)
Good one…. ;^D
The spittle flecked climate obsessed kooks are outraged that anyone would step out of line with their apocalyptic claptrap.
I saw a Sachs interview immediately after Climategate broke. He was asked directly if there was something significant about the emails. He denied there was but his body language and facial expression exposed what he was really thinking. I knew instantly he knew something was wrong but he couldn’t admit it. The whole facade is crumbling one brick at a time.
…increasingly, the ignorant ones on climate are clearly the extremists. They seem unaware that the catastrophe has been called off, that things are not in a crisis mode, that the climate is changing in reasonable, historical precedented ways.
No, they are fully aware. That is why they have abandoned any pretence at a scientific argument and are just concentrating on ad hom attacks like this and frawdulent claims like Cook’s 97% fisco.
They are still hoping that if they shout their lies and propaganda loud enough for just a little bit longer maybe, just maybe they can spin it out long enough to get an international agreement signed before the rest of the world catches on.
They will get more desperate and more extreme as their “cause” falls apart and fades into history.
They will finally come to realise that there are far bigger and more important things for people to worry about than a hypothetical warming a hundred years from now.
War and disease are killing NOW. And now trumps “maybe as much as” in 2100.
Moon battery has an interesting view of the insanity among the climate science extremists. Click on the pics to see the evidence.
Well this is just lovely – yet another economist (albeit with BA, MA and PhD) pretending to be a real scientist.
If this is what he want to be, why not a BS, MS and PhD in something like, say, physics?
He’s already got a BS in Physics, it’s on full display. Maybe you meant a BSc.
It’s an oddity of religions that they always harder on those they see has heretics for refusing to believe in the ‘right way ‘, then they are on those that don’t believe at all. Ridley has just learnt the lesson, that ‘belief’ in AGW is not enough , this belief must be total and unquestioning in regards to the dogma . His not the first he will not be the last.
And has ‘the cause ‘ falls it will turn on itself to ‘root out the heretics ‘ , which be fun for everyone else to watch has ‘the Team ‘ tearing itself apart in an attempt to by each member to save themselves can only ever be good news which cannot come soon enough . We can say that when Mann does get through under the bus , it will after be a big one to cope with his ‘ego’
“Second, the total warming is distributed between the land and ocean surface on the one hand and the ocean deep water on the other. The total rise of ocean heat content has continued unabated, while the proportion of heat absorbed at the surface and in the deeper ocean varies over time. Again, in the scientific lingo of the paper, “[T]his forced total OHC [ocean heat content] should be increasing monotonically over longer periods even through the current period of slowed warming. In fact, that expectation is verified by observation . . . ” In other words, the ocean has continued to warm in line with predictions of just such a phenomenon seen in climate models.”
————————————————————————————————————————–
OK, I know I must be missing something here. Are they saying that the air temperature is what warms the oceans?
The sun warms everything. Sometimes water has a little bit higher salinity and it sinks even if it’s warmer than the water underneath. Nature has really nifty tricks it uses to move heat around.
I know the Sun warms oceans. My question was are they saying air does also?
If the air is warmer than the ocean the air warms the ocean, if the air is colder than the ocean then it goes the other way. I know the answer is bit dumb sounding. But think about it. Overall the ocean tends to be the controlling factor because water has a really nice heat capacity and it covers more area. As Tisdale points out the elephant is the Pacific. If you want my draw the whole thing starts with water warming in the Western Pacific. I like to think of Funafuti as the center of the universe.
Basically yes. An engineering diagram of how this LWIR missing weapon of mass destruction is getting to the deep oceans without heating the first 700 m is notably absent. In addition the poorly measured heat content increase of the deep oceans, and indeed overall oceans, is less then 1/2 of what is predicted by CAGW theory. so saying “the ocean has continued to warm in line with predictions” is a lie. And finally, as others have noted, there is no mechanism for how this heat will escape the deep oceans and cause global disaster.
Rupert Murdoch built his vast media empire by being right about stuff years before his opponents.
Whether you like him or approve of him is irrelevant, he’s good at picking winners.
The fear and loathing detectable in Warmist diatribes against him, is born of the certainty that Murdoch’s open questioning of CAGW, surely marks the beginning of the end for them!
Not always, Myspace was a bust.