Guest post by David Middleton
A framework containing the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodology that are commonly accepted by members of a scientific community.
These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. Equally, it is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.
–Thomas Kuhn, 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Vol. II, No. 2 p. 150
What is the current paradigm?
- Human activities, primarily carbon dioxide emissions, have been the primary cause of the observed global warming over the past 50 to 150 years.
- The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration had stabilized between 270 and 280 ppmv early in the Holocene and had remained in that range prior to the mid-19th century when fossil fuels became the primary energy source of the Industrial Revolution.
- Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are causing the atmospheric concentration to rise at a dangerously rapid pace to levels not seen in 100’s of thousands to millions of years.
- The climate sensitivity to a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration “is likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C,” possibly even much higher than 4.5°C.
- Immediate, deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary in order to stave off catastrophic climate change.
- The scientific consensus regarding this paradigm is overwhelming (~97%).
Why is the paradigm collapsing?
- There has been no increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature since the late 20th century.
- Every measure of pre-industrial carbon dioxide, not derived from Antarctic ice cores, indicates a higher and more variable atmospheric concentration.
- The total lack of predictive skill in AGW climate models.
- An ever-growing body of observation-based studies indicating that the climate sensitivity is in the range of 0.5 to 2.5°C with a best estimate of 1.5 to 2°C, and is very unlikely to be more than 2°C.
- Clear evidence that the dogmatic insistence of scientific unanimity is at best highly contrived and at worst fraudulent.
The paradigm is collapsing primarily due to the fact that the climate appears to be far less sensitive to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations than the so-called scientific consensus had assumed.
One group of scientists has steadfastly resisted the carbon dioxide-driven paradigm: Geologists, particularly petroleum geologists. As Kuhn wrote,
“Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another.”
Petroleum geologists tend to be sedimentary geologists and sedimentary geology is essentially a combination of paleogeography and paleoclimatology. Depositional environments are defined by physical geography and climate. We literally do practice in a different world, the past. Geologists intuitively see Earth processes as cyclical and also tend to look at things from the perspective of “deep time.” For those of us working the Gulf of Mexico, we “go to work” in a world defined by glacioeustatic and halokinetic processes and, quite frankly, most of us don’t see anything anomalous in recent climate changes.
So, it should come as little surprise that geoscientists have consistently been far more likely to think that modern climate changes have been driven by overwhelmingly natural processes…
APEGA is the organization responsible for certifying and licensing professional geoscientists and engineers in Alberta, Canada.
This study is very interesting because it analyzes the frames of reference (Kuhn’s “different worlds”) in which opinions are formed. Skeptical geologists are most likely to view climate change as overwhelmingly natural. Skeptical engineers are more likely to view it as a matter of economics or fatalism. The cost of decarbonization would far outweigh any benefits and/or would have no measurable effect on climate change.
The Obsession With Consensus
In nearly 40 years as an Earth Scientist (counting college), I have never seen such an obsession with consensus. In geology, there are many areas in which there are competing hypotheses; yet there is no obsession with conformance to a consensus.
The acceptance of plate tectonics was a relatively new thing when I was a student. This paradigm had only recently shifted from the geosynclinal theory to plate tectonics. We still learned the geosynclinal theory in Historical Geology and it still has value today. However, I don’t ever recall papers being published claiming a consensus regarding either theory.
Most geologists think that granite is an igneous rock and that petroleum is of organic origin. Yet, the theories of granitization and abiogenic hydrocarbon formation are not ridiculed; nor are the adherents subjected to “witch hunts.”
One of the most frequent methods of attempting to quantify and justify the so-called consensus on climate change has been the abstract search (second hand opinions). I will only bother to review one of these exercises in logical fallacy, Cook et al., 2013.
Second Hand Opinions.
These sorts of papers consist of abstract reviews. The authors’ then tabulate their opinions regarding whether or not the abstracts support the AGW paradigm. As Legates et al., 2013 pointed out, Cook defined the consensus as “most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.” Cook then relied on three different levels of “endorsement” of that consensus and excluded 67% of the abstracts reviewed because they neither endorsed nor rejected the consensus.
The largest endorsement group was categorized as “implicitly endorses AGW without minimizing it.” They provided this example of an implied endorsement:
‘…carbon sequestration in soil is important for mitigating global climate change’
Carbon sequestration in soil, lime muds, trees, seawater, marine calcifiers and a whole lot of other things have always been important for mitigating a wide range of natural processes. I have no doubt that I have implicitly endorsed the so-called consensus based on this example.
The second largest endorsement group was categorized as “implicitly endorses but does not quantify or minimize.” Pardon my obtuseness, but how in the heck can one explicitly endorse the notion that “most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic” without quantification? This is the example Cook provided:
‘Emissions of a broad range of greenhouse gases of varying lifetimes contribute to global climate change’
Wow! I contributed to Romney for President… Yet most of his campaign war-chest didn’t come from me. By this subjective standard, I have probably explicitly endorsed AGW a few times.
No Schist, Sherlock.
One of the most frequent refrains is the assertion that “climate scientists” endorse the so-called consensus more than other disciplines and that the level of endorsement is proportional to the volume of publications by those climate scientists. Well… No schist, Sherlock! I would bet a good bottle of wine that the most voluminous publishers on UFO’s are disproportionately more likely to endorse Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a documentary. A cursory search for “abiogenic hydrocarbons” in AAPG’s Datapages could lead me to conclude that there is a higher level of endorsement of abiogenic oil among those who publish on the subject than among non-publishing petroleum geologists.
These exercises in expertise cherry-picking are quite common. A classic example was Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009. This survey sample was limited to academic and government Earth Scientists. It excluded all Earth Scientists working in private sector businesses. The two key questions were:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
I would answer risen to #1 and my answer to #2 would depend on the meaning of “human activity is a significant contributing factor.” If I realized it was a “push poll,” I would answer “no.”
Interestingly, economic geologists and meteorologists were the most likely to answer “no” to question #2…
The two areas of expertise in the survey with the smallest percentage of participants answering yes to question 2 were economic geology with 47% (48 of 103) and meteorology with 64% (23 of 36).
The authors derisively dismissed the opinions of geologists and meteorologists…
It seems that the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.
No discipline has a better understanding the “nuances” than meteorologists and no discipline has a better understanding of the “scientific basis of long-term climate processes” than geologists.
The authors close with a “no schist, Sherlock” bar chart:
The most recent example of expertise cherry-picking was Stenhouse et al., 2014.
The 52% consensus among the membership of the American Meteorological Society explained away as being due to “perceived scientific consensus,” “political ideology,” and a lack of “expertise” among non-publishing meteorologists and atmospheric scientists…
While we found that higher expertise was associated with a greater likelihood of viewing global warming as real and harmful, this relationship was less strong than for political ideology and perceived consensus. At least for the measure of expertise that we used, climate science expertise may be a less important influence on global warming views than political ideology or social consensus norms. More than any other result of the study, this would be strong evidence against the idea that expert scientists’ views on politically controversial topics can be completely objective.
Finally, we found that perceiving conflict at AMS was associated with lower certainty of global warming views, lower likelihood of viewing global warming as human caused, and lower ratings of predicted harm caused by global warming.
So… Clearly, 97% of AMS membership would endorse the so-called consensus if they were more liberal, more accepting of unanimity and published more papers defending failed climate models. No schist, Sherlock!
What, exactly, is a “climate scientist”?
35 years ago climatology was a branch of physical geography. Today’s climate scientists can be anything from atmospheric physicists & chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, astronomers, astrophysicists, oceanographers, biologists, environmental scientists, ecologists, meteorologists, geologists, geophysicists, geochemistry to economists, agronomists, sociologists and/or public policy-ologists.
NASA’s top climate scientist for most of the past 35 years, James Hansen, is an astronomer. The current one, Gavin Schmidt, is a mathematician.
It seems to me that climate science is currently dominated by computer modelers, with little comprehension of the natural climate cycles which have driven climate change throughout the Holocene.
Climate scientist seems to be as nebulous as Cook’s definition of consensus.
What is the actual consensus?
The preliminary results of the AMS survey tell us all we need to know about the so-called consensus…
89% × 59% = 52%… A far cry from the oft claimed 97% consensus.
Based on BAMS definition, global warming is happening. So, I would be among the 89% who answered “yes” to question #1 and among the 5% who said the cause was mostly natural.
When self-described “climate scientists” and meteorologists/atmospheric scientists are segregated the results become even more interesting…
Only 45% of meteorologists and atmospheric scientists endorse the so-called consensus. When compared to the 2009, American Geophysical Union survey, the collapsing paradigm sticks out like a polar vortex…
In reality, about half of relevant scientists would probably agree that humans have been responsible for >50% of recent climate changes. And there might even be a 97% consensus that human activities have contributed to recent climate changes.
However, there really isn’t any scientific consensus if it is defined this way:
So… Why is there such an obsession with a 97% consensus? My guess is that it is to enable such demagoguery.
Great article!
As part of my research I found that sceptics tend to focus on data whereas alarmists tend to focus on what is “socially acceptable”. So I suspect to an alarmists a consensus is seen as STRONGER evidence that something is true than seeing the data themselves. And this I suggest it because most alarmists really don’t understand data analysis and have very little confidence in their own ability.
So, to them the whole subject is really just a celebrity beauty contest. They don’t understand the data themselves and so they just want to see what everyone else thinks. Also they want to know “who thinks”. So social status is very key and an alarmist will utterly reject data of argument from someone they deem to be a low social status whereas they will swallow quite gullibly blatant lies from those they admire or respect.
I agree, great article.
It would be nice if you could convert your comparison of Academia/Scientists and Engineering/Doctors into a graphic file.
http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2014/07/13/why-climate-engineers-beat-the-climate-academics/
Knowledge of the origin of ‘consensus’ in UN climate “science” proceedings is essential to understanding the entire AGW discussion. It’s an aspect of UK Wellington House, Tavistock Institute, SRI and Aspen Institute social engineering, based on the theories of psychiatrists Dr Kurt Levin and Edward Bernays; it’s one of the principles used in mind control, inner directional conditioning and mass brianwashing, the MK Ultra experiments, etc.; the formulation of the disinformation campaigns (psyops) used to inspire US participation in WWl, WWll, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, etc. The Aspen Institute is adjacent to IPCC founder Maurice Strong’s Baca Ranch in Crestone, CO, supposedly also the Trilateral Commission’s US headquarters. Aspen Institute holds seminars for upper management and elected officials using dialectic decision-making processes including consensus engineering.
It ain’t science.
One of the self-evident aspects of “climate science” in contrast to a real science is that the “scientists” in question are either working outside their specialty areas (astronomers, biologists, computer and political scientists, pyschologists, etc.) or are not scientists per se (mathematicians – don’t argue with me about that – call up the ghost of Kurt Goedel and dispute it with him).
Scottish Sceptic;
Over the last year or so there seems to be a well defined and fast developing consensus on all of that!
Quite right S.S., the media programmed public want to be good citizens who are in the correct tier of the social environment. They will accept the authority of scientific consensus rather than exert the time and effort to learn for themselves, as that is “instant knowledge” to them. They have been programmed to believe that they “owe it to the planet” to adhere to the guilt and shame that accompanies all things human, and to seek retribution through taxation and high energy prices.
@ Scottish Sceptic. “So, to them the whole subject is really just a celebrity beauty contest. They don’t understand the data themselves and so they just want to see what everyone else thinks.”
To me it is anything but a “beauty contest” . To me it is very dangerous dogma. There are way too many LIV (low info voters) that eat this like candy without understanding even 1% of what effect this dogma has on their lives. To me it is dangerous and even frightening. The way this is lapped up (as it seemed that way at Al Gore’s speech the other day in front of a young impressionable crowd of students ) by those young inexperienced people is scary, those may be our “leaders” one day
I think the author was alluding to the type of beauty contest described famously by Keynes, in which the winner was the person who best predicted what other balloters would select as the winners (top five).
The whole story. + the magic word: Status.
Hans
/ don’know how to lift my status but wish to be with ‘my’ peer group. magical, wishfull thinking. /
and the conclusion:
change / diminish the OBJECT of the wishfull thinking.
Solution of a / nonexistent / problem.
Hans
Great article! I agree with the explanation of the poll. However, why didn’t this analysis go further into the subject of “Human caused warming”. I would be interested in knowing how the percentage of those stating “human caused” define “human caused”. That is more black top roads, cutting forests down for agriculture, More physical structures, increased population, etc.
Nicely done.
Indeed. It is a clear and well written article. It is reasonable and rational.
I will be amusing, as always, to see if any troll is angered by it and how the misconstrue it in order to find fault with it.
The MMGW aka “climate change” paradigm was always a house of cards constructed on the shifting sands of lies, deception, and of course, money. Destined to fail, and fail big.
It hasn’t failed yet and it won’t fail as long as it has $350B of government money supporting it. What will happen is the same thing that happened under Nazi Germany – any skeptic, even people that don’t believe strongly enough, will be made into pariahs. Eventually they’ll just be sent to re-education camps.
“Why is there such an obsession with a 97% consensus? My guess is that it is to enable such demagoguery.” +1 and I don’t understand why the 97% meme is allowed to continue after being thoroughly trounced by the truth.
Because, no matter how loudly you bang the drum, nobody listens!
Empty vessels make the most noise. I tend to turn off when someone is too vocal. It makes no difference whether I agree with them or not.
Because it’s not about truth; it’s about control.
My guess is that MSM reporters probably DO agree at close to a 97% rate. Those reporters are obviously the smartest folk around, and they all agree with each other, so it must be true.
Hence, that is the way the issue is reported.
The 97% claim , has nothing to do with ‘truth’ therefore its can not be undone by pointing out how truth refutes it.
Concur
Why 97%? From marketing and psychology. It’s why stores price goods 1 to 5 cents below a round dollar amount. It looks “cheaper” and is easier to accept among the hoi poloi.
Actually that is more true now than in the past.
Early cash registers had a little bell inside that rang when they were opened. While 1 cent and 5 cents isn’t much nowadays it was a fair bit early on and people would want their change and this fact was used as an anti theft device..
An even dollar or pound amount allowed a cheating cashier to pocket the money without opening the cash drawer. So the price was set so that the cashier was forced to open the drawer to give change. This also rang the bell to alert supervisors to the fact a sale had been made.
The practice has continued both for the reason you said and from simple tradition.
Cheers.
JohnB,
Nowdays, the sound of the bell just results in a bunch of droolin hounds.
When all of the data shows AGW theory is wrong how can it be correct?
Answer it is not correct and the data shows this over and over again.
Because AGW data doesn’t have to be correct. It simply must convince enough laymen to raise an overwhelming outcry in their favor. That’s not going so well now.
97% is such a catchy number….
I like 98.6% better. That point-six really shows you lied very cleverly with your statistics!
The old number was always 99.44% (pure) from the old Ivory Soap commercial of ~50 years ago.
As Legates et al., 2013 pointed out, Cook defined the consensus as “most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.” Cook then relied on three different levels of “endorsement” of that consensus and excluded 67% of the abstracts reviewed because they neither endorsed nor rejected the consensus.
Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009 An invitation to participate in the survey was sent to 10,257 Earth scientists. The database was built from Keane and Martinez [2007], which lists all geosciences faculty at reporting academic institutions, along with researchers at state geologic surveys associated with local Universities, and researchers at U.S. federal research facilities (e.g., U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) facilities; U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories; (and so forth). This brief report addresses the two primary questions of the survey
With 3146 individuals completing.
In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.
Gee no private sector people need apply?
the AMS survey Stenhouse et al., 2014.
In this survey, global warming was defined as “the premise that the world’s average temperature has been increasing over the past 150 years, may be increasing more in the future, and that the world’s climate may change as a result.”
Questions – Regardless of the cause, do you think that global warming is happening?
2a./2b How sure are you that global warming (a. is /b. is not) happening? How sure are you? –Extremely –Very sure –Somewhat sure –Not at all sure -Don’t know –Not at all sure –Somewhat not sure – Very not sure – Extremely not sure
So answering the questions –
1) most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic?
2) When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant? (Yes/No?)
3) Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
4) Regardless of the cause, do you think that global warming is happening?
5) How sure are you that global warming (a. is /b. is not) happening?
Answers and questions use generalized words of most, think, significant, contributing and no values or significance is asked for.
Do these questions really provide the answer that man-made, catastrophizing, CO2 control knob, ever increasing (global warming / climate change / disruption / weirding ) [pick 1 or more] which can only be prevented by giving your money, control & freedom will keep us all from floating down the River Styx in a handbasket?
Seems ‘Climate Science’ the outcome to Geography Study has devolved into a religion of hatred.
To which we raise our voices with Tom Lehrer’s ‘National Brotherhood Week’.
Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks.
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.
But during national brotherhood week, national brotherhood week,
Lena horne and sheriff clarke are dancing cheek to cheek.
It’s fun to eulogize
The people you despise,
As long as you don’t let ’em in your school.
Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks,
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks,
It’s american as apple pie.
But during national brotherhood week, national brotherhood week,
New yorkers love the puerto ricans ’cause it’s very chic.
Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can’t stand.
You can tolerate him if you try.
Oh, the protestants hate the catholics,
And the catholics hate the protestants,
And the hindus hate the moslems,
And everybody hates the jews.
But during national brotherhood week, national brotherhood week,
It’s national everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It’s only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn’t last all year!
Ha ha
masint,
Tom Lehrer is the best! A scientist/musician. Here is a pointless tune that I’ve always liked.
“Tom Lehrer is the best! ”
And, who said that dbstealey and myself could never find anything that we’d agree on?!?
☺
Masint– Governments’ use propaganda tools to generate hate, anger and envy among the Takers, and generate fear, quid pro quo and guilt against the Producers to achieve their agenda of increasing property confiscation, control and power.
It’s a game of divide and conquer. Now, 50% of Americans pay no income taxes and 50% of Americans are dependent partially or entirely on government largess for their livelihoods…..
Humans are intrinsically social animals that have historically worked together to achieve their own mutual benefit. Through massive government propaganda, human nature has been twisted upside down, where the people serve the state, rather than the state protecting the natural rights of individuals.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we’re beginning to see what that means….
Eventually, this era of MASSIVE government theft, power and control will come to an end, and humanity will return to minimal governments, where societies are based on mutual cooperation and the principles of non-initiation of force.
It may take hundreds of years to accomplish this natural order, but technology will eventually make governments redundant institutions for all intents and purposes.
The Kingston Trio had it right long before “climate science” went completely left:
“The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don’t like anybody very much!”
“The total lack of predictive skill in AGW climate models.”
Also this important one:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/24/are-climate-modelers-scientists/
Excerpts:
Climate modelers are not scientists. Climate modeling is not a branch of physical science. Climate modelers are unequipped to evaluate the physical reliability of their own models.
I will give examples of all of the following concerning climate modelers:
* They neither respect nor understand the distinction between accuracy and precision.
* They understand nothing of the meaning or method of propagated error.
* They think physical error bars mean the model itself is oscillating between the uncertainty
extremes. (I kid you not.)
* They don’t understand the meaning of physical error.
* They don’t understand the importance of a unique result.
Sometimes I think modellers are like bad CAD drafters. “Meh – I’ll just draw some stuff. If it’s wrong, I’ll just re-do it later, ’cause CAD is fast.” (And then there’s no time later, so original crappy design stands)
VS
Old-timey draftsmen: “I don’t want to have to draw this frikkin’ thing again, I’d better get it right the fist time.”
Piping designer/engineer?
Good guess, eyes.
😉
Been there, done that!
IPCC climate modelers are social engineers working on a political/economic process, not an environmental research project, consciously or unconsciously. Anthropogenic effects on the environment are an idea that a group of globalist totalitarian government depopulation supporters “came up with” to disguise their agenda. The science is irrelevant.
“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
– Club of Rome
http://green-agenda.com/
Who would ever suspect an ulterior motive concealed in protecting the environment of the planet? or perceive a need to explore the history of AGW-alarmism?
It’s nearly impossible to discuss anything with someone who believes that Mankind is some sort of unnatural phenomena or “virus” plaguing the planet.
Concur
Beautiful essay. Needs to be published far and wide.
I will second that!
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2013/12/agw-falsified-noaa-long-wave-radiation-data-incompatible-with-the-theory-of-anthropogenic-global-warming-2/
AGW enthusiast are in denial of the data once again.
I was looking through some of the ClimateGate-related posts this morning and saw comment after comment along the lines of “now that the outright fraud had been exposed, AGW (as it was called then) would surely be recognized as wrong and the whole political movement would fall apart”.
That was more than 5 years ago, and all that seems to have happened is that AGW became ClimateChange (TM). Unfortunately, it will take a lot more than truth, rationality and real science to kill the meme.
Jim,
Got a number for that email? If so, please post.
And thanks to Dave Middleton for another excellent article. You always do such a great job. I look forwared to all of them.
We made the mistake of assuming the public and academics were rational and that they would look at the evidence like we did and quickly change their view.
It turns out that the “establishment” are very very slow to respond. I use the metaphor “that it takes 5-10 years between kicking the dinosaur between the legs for the signal to travel all the way up the neck to the brain”
http://uclimate.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/dinosaur-between-legs.png
The UN’s program, in addition to global government, is ‘redistribution of assets’; nominally from developed to developing nations; in practice, from the US to the UN and NGOs, with green projects financed through Rothschilds and Rockefeller and other international bankers; Edmond de Rothschild announced the sale of shares in his private Geneva bank to UN bureaucrats and international bureaucrats at the 1989 Fourth World Wilderness Conference – truth, rationality and real science won’t kill it; the wrong kind of green.
Allan Cheetham’s website, Appinsys.com has the best description of the history of UN agencies (and many other topics) in AGW that I’m aware of.
http://appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_History.htm
Well Jim, I thought a couple of harsh winters ought to do it. Silly me.
“…it will take a lot more than truth, rationality and real science….”
Not that much more, actually, just reality – a few more winters with snow and freezing weather penetrating into the Deep South, Mexico, Egypt, etc., and a few more winters with unprecedented numbers of cold and snow records broken in the higher latitudes will completely eliminate any public support for the meme. More winters with the Great Lakes freezing over, along with massive amounts of sea ice forming in the bays and inlets along the northeast coast, bringing maritime traffic to a standstill, will contribute to the demise of the AGW theory. Ultimately, a few cool summers with unexpected snow at higher latitudes and altitudes, along with earlier, cooler Autumns and later, shortened Springtimes will finally put the icing on the cake.
All of the above is unavoidable, I’m afraid. The climate is indeed changing, if not the way alarmists would have us believe.
Nonagintaseptemist : A statistical subdiscipline of the social sciences which studies the art of getting the answer to be 97%. From the latin “nonaginta septem” meaning 97.
Nonagintaseptemist – It’s the flashy new field to get into, pays extremely well, and attracts all the hot women… oh wait…
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.
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Completely off topic but, how’s John Cook doing these days?
…and:
…and:
Three salient points. Draw the line therefrom.
What I have often said, but really can’t be repeated often enough (with apologies to Paul Samuelson): People who oppose the current scientific paradigm have correctly predicted 1000 out of the last 3 paradigm shifts.
I’ll also note that there is another rather obvious explanation for why petroleum geologists have tended to be more skeptical about AGW than other earth scientists.
Because they work in the real world and if they screw up they get fired, instead of getting renewed grant money, promotions and peer support? Is that what you mean, Joel?
First of all, I’ve worked “in the real world” of industry too. And, it bears very little resemblance to your free-market-fundamentalist fantasy real-world. It has every bit as much cronyism, stupidity, and promotion of incompetence as the academic world.
Second of all, I mean: (1) that their expertise in climate science is rather limited…it is not what they are trained or actively working in and (2) that they have strong financial incentives to believe that using fossil fuels is not the major factor in a serious global problem.
And Big Government “self-selected” climate scientists have pure and unadulterated motives in seeking to justify their next 22 billion in climate change money coming from Big Government bureaucracies that pay their salaries and computer fees – but only if the computer theories justify continued Big Government and Big Finance 1.3 trillion dollar carbon schemes, don’t they?
LOL, good comeback 🙂 We all know what he meant, but the facts are the alarmists are the ones on the crony capitalist’s payroll.
(1) If climate scientists want to make tons of money, they wouldn’t have gone into climate science. They would have gone to Wall Street. (Although they would also probably do at least somewhat better by becoming petroleum geologists.)
(2) Big government bureaucracies fund science in ways that are at least somewhat insulated from what the funders want to see the results to be. Furthermore, what the funders want is complex because in a Democracy, those in control of the government purse-strings may or may not be sympathetic to the ideas of stopping AGW. Congress now certainly isn’t and the executive branch wasn’t when Bush was in charge. And, right now in Florida, we have a classic case of the politicians at the top trying to squelch the scientists (http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article13576691.html).
Joeldshore:
You wrote of petroleum geologists
One can more accurately say of climatologists earning their living promoting AGW:
(1) their expertise in climate science is rather limited…it is not what they are trained or actively working in
and
(2) that they have strong financial incentives to assert that using fossil fuels is the major factor in an imagined global problem.
Richard
Richard,
Alas, just saying something does not make it true. In fact, the climate scientists who agree with the overwhelming consensus on AGW are generally actively working and publishing in the field.
And, as I pointed out, incentives to please funders are much complex: Some politicians controlling the purse strings would like nothing better than for AGW to be shown to be insignificant. Furthermore, the way grants are awarded at least tries to separate the politics of the funders from the process.
And, while there may indeed be some incentive to go with the dominant paradigm to get funding, there is another incentive that to make a name for oneself in science, one wants to change the paradigm, not just say “me too”.
One of the things that I have noticed about you guys is that you only seem capable of seeing the incentives that go in one direction and are completely oblivious to any incentives that go the other way.
joeldshore commented”
“One of the things that I have noticed about you guys is that you only seem capable of seeing the incentives that go in one direction and are completely oblivious to any incentives that go the other way.”
Are you saying some scientists are becoming rich with their skepticism? Refresh my memory on “incentives that go the other way”.
joeldshore
You reply to my rebuttal of your untrue and unjustifiable assertion by saying
Yes, Joel, that is what I said.
And you add
No, Joel, playing computer games in an office is NOT “working and publishing in the field”. Very few of them have ever worked in the field.
Richard
I’m sorry, Richard. I didn’t realize how the game is played by people like you. Yes, if you are free to define who constitutes an active researcher in the field, ignoring all standard ways of defining this in favor of your own perverse definitions, then what you say is true.
Apparently, everything you say is true just by virtue of the fact that you have made yourself the arbiter of all truth. My bad for failing to understand this simple point.
joeldshore
My reply to your offensive, abusive and evasive nonsense is here.
Hopefully, this pointer will be in the right place.
Richard
Joel wrote, “First of all, I’ve worked “in the real world” of industry too. And, it bears very little resemblance to your free-market-fundamentalist fantasy real-world.”
You answered your own question… Since free-market capitalism has been destroyed by the US government through: $2 trillion/yr needless and senseless rules & regulations, $100’s of billions of subsidies, insane anti-trust laws, crazy labor laws, a 75,000-page tax code, onerous corporate taxes, cronyism, too-big-to-fail bailouts, crazy union regulations, huge income taxes, massive government debt, etc., free-market capitalism no longer exists, so it’s illogical to assume free-market capitalism doesn’t work since governments have purposefully destroyed it….
Were all the natural mechanisms of free-market capitalism allowed to work: corporate taxes were a flat 10% (no tax breaks), income taxes were replaced by ONE national 14% sales tax, federal spending was limited to 10% of GDP, federal and state governments were unable to run up debts, public sector unions were made illegal, interest rates were market based, a gold standard were reestablished, etc., the economic boom and technological advancement would be incredible.
But, alas, none of these things will occur until the existing “mixed/hindered-economy” paradigm is allowed to collapse; which is should do shortly.
Ah yes…The old libertarian argument that if we only had a purer free market economy, life would be all peaches and cream. That is indeed what I call “free market fundamentalism”, which means a religious belief in free markets rather than a scientific understanding of markets, when and how they work and when and how they fail.
The reason that we have evolved toward a “mixed economy” of regulated market capitalism is that the pure free market paradigm has failed time and time again. While the mixed economy may have its problems, I think it is basically like what Churchill said about democracy: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Joel,
Free Markets have never failed for the simple reason they have never been tried. The local governments are always interfering, whether that government is a local king, chief, or Congress. The closest thing to a free market is the local farmers market that sometimes exists, and that is already constrained by the formal markets around it.
edcaryl said:
Free Markets have never failed for the simple reason they have never been tried.
——————————————————————————————————–
That’s a dangerous line to take – that’s what lefties always say about communism.
However, I agree that free markets as such don’t fail – in the same sense that gravity doesn’t “fail”.
(If you fall down and break your arm, you don’t say that gravity has failed.) The problem is that
people subvert free markets. So joeldshore’s prescription is right even if I don’t agree with his
diagnosis.
rw: Yes, that is a very apt analogy…Both true believers in Communism and true believers in free markets are very similar.
As for saying that the markets fail, well markets fail for example when there are externalities, i.e., costs or benefits not borne by the buyer or seller. And, when there’s issues with information (e.g., the buyer doesn’t know that the medicine the seller is hocking has adverse effects he’ll experience 10 years from now).
At 5:31 PM on 19 March, joeldshore demonstrates that he’s unfamiliar both with the practice of clinical medicine and government regulation of the pharmaceuticals industry, writing:
First, common law mechanisms had been devised to address “externalities” long before politicians began to normatively intervene in the market process (ostensibly) to protect “third parties” from the “costs and benefits not borne by the buyer or seller.” An example of early government regulatory intervention is found in the onset of the industrial revolution in Great Britain, when H.M. government issued rules “holding harmless” those politically-favored enterprises which produced air and water pollution incidental to their operations, nugating the common law processes whereby those parties injured by those fouling the water and the air had sought – and gotten – redress.
Therefore anent negative “externalities,” rather much more often than not, government “protection” hasn’t so much addressed how “the markets fail” as to have purposefully deranged the ways in which trespass upon the property rights of injured parties were protected.
Second, with regard to medicines and similar products, the effects of regulatory measures like the Pure Foods and Drugs Act include not only “capture” by the established actors in the market sectors being politically controlled (popularity contest winners – elected politicians – and arrogant “Iron Law of Bureaucracy” government employees are, ex officio, the ne plus friggin’ ultra in their knowledge of pharmacology, epidemiology, pathology et alia, ain’t they?) but also disarmament of the caveat emptor imperative among the consumers of the products being regulated.
Y’see, with the propaganda-promulgated presumption that “government knows best” and that the politicians are actually looking – benignly – out for the consumer rather than for the “campaign contributors” who batten their warchests and the sources of “honest graft” shuffling to them obscenely profitable IPO opportunities and guaranteed successes in equities and in the real estate and futures trading markets, the average yutz (like you, most definitely!) is suckered into thinking that the Office of New Drugs of the United States F.D.A. is really purpose’d primarily to secure you safety and efficacy in the pill bottles on your medicine cabinet’s shelves.
Jeez, how blazingly stupid can you be?
Tucci78
March 20, 2015 at 6:03 am
There is a plant medicine that, if fully exploited, could destroy 25% to 75% of Big Pharma. It is illegal. Big Pharma in connivance with government works very hard to keep it that way.
Government in this case is not fixing the market externality. Government is the externality.
Msimon, this is not the place for one of your drug rants.
Geologists have a good understanding of chemistry and physics. Earth scientists consider scientific apparatus as ‘magic’.
my comment is in the wrong spot
My degree is in Earth Science.
Geology, marine science, meteorology, environmental science and sometimes astronomy are generally classified as Earth Science.
David Middleton
I’m an ancient and in my day there really wasn’t the environment/earth science thing.
As an intelligent human being you should also understand where I am coming from.
Science is taught in universities and so is environmentalism.
Earth Science sounds like a legitimate science and it probably is (as a generalisation) but it is probably being done a disservice by being polluted with environmentalism.
Where does my opinion come from? From dealing with universities and Marine institutes in Queensland since the 1980s. I knew these people on the ground and even assisted with grant applications (to sell my equipment). I know how smart they are and I also know how dumb they are. I have even worked in a chinese university for the last 10 years and have found that the administration and faculties work in a similar way to the west. I haven’t worked out who is worse. The administration/faculties or the students. Both lots are lazy good for nothings. However there were some exceptions.
In industry, in Australia, we the workers groaned when a graduate was hired. They didn’t have a single clue about how things worked even though they had been in university and supposedly used this equipment in their studies. I could continue ad nauseum , but I am boring myself.
Colour me sceptical about qualifications.
You seem to have a reasonable head on your shoulders and worth reading.
“I hope I wasn’t out of line with my remark about Earth Sciences, chief”
joeldshore
This may be a “game” that is “played” by you but it is much, much more important than that to me.
This is about a bunch of pseudoscientists whom you support who have usurped what was the scientific discipline of climatology; i.e. the study of climates.
You want to redefine climatology as being the playing of computer games. Field work for real climatologists consists of obtaining real data and determining the quality of that data for their analysis: it does NOT consist of sitting in an office playing games.
That is not me “being the arbiter of all truth”. It is me stating the dictionary definition of climatology. Do you know what a dictionary is?
Temperature measurement results are one basic data set for climatology and the pseudoscientists resisted conduct of field work to determine its data quality so that was not done until our host established a project to do it for them.
To you the promotion of pseudoscience is a game you play.
To me the opposition of pseudoscience is defence of the advances obtained by the reformation.
Richard
When climatology mutated into “climate science” it ceased to be a science. Time to take away the game-players’ supercomputers.
The 97% number came from a piece of really sloppy work, cited below, which is pretty much junk. If you look at the selection criteria for this work it’s a haphazard convenience sample…. I would flunk a grad student in a nano second if they proposed this as a sampled design…
W. R. L. Anderegg, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 107 No. 27, 12107-12109 (21 June 2010); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107.
Ooooops! That’s sample design, not sampled design, hey it’s 8PM here and I’m on my second cocktail… and I really don’t care about grammar anymore because graphs work so much more better…
Excellent read. I am just reading ‘how the hippies saved physics’ and was shocked to see young scientists kicked out of jobs in the 60’s and 70’s or not hired due to their interest in looking at the fundamental nature of quantum mechanics, ‘shut up and calculate’ was the watch cry of the bigoted majority. I guess nothing changes it is the same old thing, agree with the rest of our herd or go out and die on your own.
What?
Follow the money….green bs everywhere you turn.
It is a runaway train of (our) money going to useless
Windmills, solar power plants. Elec. Cars, coal plants
Converted to wood. Nuts
Meanwhile, the NOAA global analysis today puts February at 0.82C, the third highest reading ever. The average for the last 12 months was 0.74C, 0.04 degrees over the 0.69C record for the 2014 calendar year.
‘the third highest reading ever. ‘
remind us again how 200 years ago they could get temperature measurements accurate to two decimal places?
I mean they did not even have the ‘magic models ‘ then so could not ‘prove’ that reality was mistaken in way modern climate ‘scientists’ can.
There are no instrument global readings from 200 years ago. And why would you expect any average from the little ice age to be warmer than now? It’s unlikely that even during Medieval times it was warmer.
trafamadore says:
It’s unlikely that even during Medieval times it was warmer.
So you completely disregard mountains of evidence, such as the fact that Viking villages keep emerging from the permafrost in Greenland, and assume — just because Michael Mann tells you so — that we’re burnin’ up here and the MWP was cold.
Like many others, you can’t see the BIg Lie. Not because you’re stupid, but because you want to believe it.
Poor db, your name calling always reminds me of grammar school children.
What with the salt in your wounds, I guess this isn’t the time to bring up the pending record low max up north…
opps.
“opps”?? What is this “opps”?
Good thing you’re not in .edu, or you would understand spelling/grammar.
And:
…the pending record low max up north…
In only 7 words, two major errors:
1. “Pending”? Are you making weather predictions now?
2. “Up north”? You still don’t understand that the ‘climate paradigm’ refers to GLOBAL warming? Oops.
No, you just drive by, taking potshots like that. FYI: global warming has stopped. But you can’t accept that fact, can you?
Wow. No names. Good job db.
But look at this, just in and on google news, maybe my “pending” is now not so pending.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
It’s a new new record (although there are still cases where the ice extent jumped in the ghosts of late March past, but I am thinking that maybe the arctic scientists know something about the weather forecast that I don’t)
Sort of fits in with the statically warmest last year (2014) and the almost record Feb.
and the Jan-Feb 2015 combined record.
What with the all the records, it’s interesting that there is no El Niño powering this one. I am thinking it sort of wrecks the Tisdale hypothesis of El Niño powered GWing. Either that, or we are in for a 44 figure walk back of his position. (That’s a joke, Bob)
Anyway, db, not sure how your “big lie” is playing out. You should be more skeptical of your position, I think, like I am of mine.
Really.
trafamadore,
You need to change your last sentence. “Really” is not part of your world.
I did read your link, and I note the blatant cherry-picking in your comment. Your link refers to “satellite” data. Does that mean you accept satellite data now? If so, then here is current satellite data for you:
Regarding [Arctic] ice, once again: the discussion is about global warming. Referring only to Arctic ice disregards half the planet, and is simply more of your alarmist cherry-picking — because global ice cover is right at its long term average. Charts on request.
Finally, Arctic ice is the same now as it was a decade ago:
You don’t have a leg to stand on. But since you have no skin in the game and you use fossil fuels just like every other green hypocrite, I suppose we can discount everything you say.
DBStealey (correcting trafamadore)
Arctic sea ice (at maximum) is 14 millon sq kilometers, the whole planet is 510 million sq kilometers.
He is ignoring 97% of the planet by looking only at Arctic sea ice.
Wow.
You people (db and ra) like to zero in on my arctic observation when my major claim is on global temp? Look, the _globlal_ temp is up in Jan and Feb this year, higher than the entire year last year, which was record, and the arctic ice reflects this. (and db, switching to some other web site than the nsidc is silly, and you know it.)
The antarctic doesn’t, for reasons that are different, even though the total amount of antarctic ice is lower. But it doesn’t matter, this is a false augment.
The main pt is that you ignore my major claim. Which says something, doesn’t it.
trafamadore,
Your comments are becoming more and more irrational and disjointed. You really got nothin’. Do you? Nothing but your baseless assertions, and your beliefs.
Certainly you have no understanding of the climate Null Hypothesis, which has never been falsified. It shows that there is nothing either unusual or unprecedented happening. That is supported by this chart of long-term global ice cover:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
As we see, there is nothing unusual or unprecedented happening. Global ice is right at its long term average.
Face reality, mr. alarmist: exactly none of your scary predictions have happened. Every one of them has failed, just like your pathetic arguments. You keep wishing and hoping that the planet goes into runaway global warming or some kind of climate catastrophe, so you can say that you were right.
But you are wrong. The planet itself is showing that you’re wrong. And if it were not for your refusal to face reality, you would admit it, too.
To add more empirical information, here is the Antarctic ice accumulation record:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
Notice that 2015 is on track to be one of the highest ice years on record. The Antarctic holds about 10X greater volume of ice than the Arctic, so really, the Arctic doesn’t much matter.
The ONLY reason the alarmist cult hangs its hat on the Arctic is because Arctic ice declined for a short time. But that’s in the past now, as Arctic ice is naturally rising again.
The believers in the ‘disappearing ice’ narrative are… on thin ice. The real world is debunking their entire belief system. Don’t ask me, though. Ask the planet. She will show us who’s right, and who is wrong.
“I would answer yes to #1…” ? Do you mean all three (rising, falling & stable temp) have existed during post 1800’s?
I would answer falling. Since the HTM 8,000 ybp, temperatures have been generally downward.
Yes.
At this point in the warmists’ dilemma, with data and observation not on their side, all they have left is their models. That those models fail scientific rigor is inconsequential as long as the broader public is not aware of that failure, I,e. they remain scientifically illiterate, and think science is akin to a popularity contest. Hence the parroting of the 97%consensus lie is part of a disinformation campaign.
From the perspective of the Green Socialists, the GC models must now be protected at all cost. The very foundation of the IPCC’s AR rests on the circular logic built into those models. Reputations and literally Trillions of dollars are at stake.
Skepticalscience.com’s hacked emails show that the results of John Cook’s and Dana Nuticelli’s survey of abstracts was known in advance; Cook acknowledged the importance of promoting the concept of a consensus prior to the project; similar to statements made before the Rio conference, truth isn’t the issue; the focus is on what people believe.
Transient stuff, beliefs…
Indeed one of the great unanswered questions , along with what would disprove CAGW, is if you take away the models what proof do you have ?
We can guess the answer to that is little if anything , hence has you write the need to defend that which is indefensible.
I notice the trolls who occasionally pollute this blog are noticeably absent from this discussion.
doesn’t leave much room for their lurking
Maybe the short bus is late today.
The “short bus” is an offensive,obnoxious saying that reflects negatively on those who use it.
I too have noticed this lack of trolls with some disappointment.
The fact is that the post was written so skilfully that it is easy to miss it was also written “defensively” (as we say in academia), leaving little room to find wrong with it even if you disagree with it. It is a tactic that Ridley could use… unless his purpose is to provoke, of course.
kami,
Haven’t you noticed mr t @5:17 above?
+++++
[markl: I didn’t know what a ‘short bus’ meant, so I went online to look. There are lots of different meanings, not all of them what you’re probably referring to. The most common meaning seems to refer to a mentally challenged person.]
My apologies to markl (and all) for lapsing into a midwestern redneck. Yes I meant the mentally challenged. A poor analogy, in retrospect, of those who refuse to open their minds and learn.
Dawtgtomis commented:
“My apologies to markl (and all) for lapsing into a midwestern redneck.”
Accepted. I’m sensitive to remarks like that because my wife volunteers to help those “short bus” riders several times a week. Some have brilliant minds trapped in unforgiving bodies. Stephen Hawking?
dbstealey commented on Anatomy of a Collapsing Climate Paradigm:
“[markl: I didn’t know what a ‘short bus’ meant, so I went online to look….The most common meaning seems to refer to a mentally challenged person.]”
I had to look it up as well and when you put the phrase in the derogatory context it’s been used (a couple of times) on this forum it’s making the analogy that the targets were mentally deficient….like those children that get picked up on the “short buses”. Which 1. Isn’t necessarily true as some have physical problems, and 2. Is in very poor taste to use some people’s natural condition as a slander against anyone.
Agreed,as the brother of an autistic occupant of a group home, my skin must have gotten too thick about the mentality of said remark when it was used around me. These are the most well-adjusted of all souls and are a lesson to the rest of us when it comes to the important stuff.
markl,
I’m not arguing with anything you wrote. [I never get into heated debates with folks on the skeptic side anyway.]
For the record, my wife has her Master’s degree in Special Ed, and teaches mostly adults who have cerebral palsy [for those who don’t know, it’s what results when the umbilical cord gets wrapped tightly around the neck in uterus, cutting off oxygen; the result is a child that never progresses beyond 1st or 2nd grade intelligence].
I see from Dawtgtomis’ response that he meant no harm. I agree with him that those folks “…are the most well-adjusted of all souls”. They are. So let’s all have a big group hug, and forget it. We’re no the bad guys here. ☺
dbstealey commented:
“I see from Dawtgtomis’ response that he meant no harm. I agree with him that those folks “…are the most well-adjusted of all souls”. They are. So let’s have a group hug, and forget it. We’re no the bad guys here. ☺”
I’m already/been there. Just pointed out that it’s an obnoxious term and shouldn’t be used. So far everyone agrees. I’m not militant, just vocal….. 🙂
Beers for both of you on me, if ever…
To dbstealey, Your wife might be happy to hear that one of my brother’s friends is a 60-something woman with CP, who drives, works and takes care of her elderly parents. Incredible person to meet.
Of course since you’re a geologist you must be in the pay of “Big Oil” and they’ll discount anything you say regardless of the facts you present.
The Koch brothers are now the US Left’s primary bogeyman.
Heartland isn’t far behind…
Every Big Brother needs an Emmanuel Goldstein.
Funny, I saw a post on an article from CD stating that models can be used even if they aren’t making good predictions because there is no such thing as a “Bad model.”
It’s easier to win if they discount your facts and move the goal posts.
He been in ‘good company ‘ has so is the IPC, CRU and a lot of ‘the Team’ , but I guess that is ‘different’
Thanks for the revealing dissection and good, hard work.
This might be my new favorite chart:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353056/Kerry_01_zpsgdfkz0oa.png
That 64 is very generous – it’s the total before subtracting the abstracts written by psychologists and economists and the ones that explicitly disputed AGW. The problem is Cook’s poor experimental design; his search term should have been “unconditionally support all IPCC global warming predictions”, rather than ‘global warming’ and climate change’.
It’s obvious that global temps have recovered since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, so, yes, the earth has warmed about .8C over the past 164 years.
Since CO2’s forcing effect is (5.25*log(400ppm/280))*(.31 Stefan-Boltzmann constant)*(.5 negative cloud feedback)= about .3C, I’d have to answer, yes, to the second question, as CO2’s contribution to total warming (.3C/.8C) is roughly 37% of total warming, which is “significant”.
BUT…the most salient question is whether or not 0.018C/decade of warming (.3C/164 years) is anything to worry about, and the answer to that is a definitive NO; especially since CO2 forcing effect is logarithmic..
To the contrary, .3C of CO2 warming over the past 164 years has likely been a net positive phenomenon, and if you include the roughly 16% increase of crop yields and forest growth from higher CO2 concentrations, it’s been a huge advantage to the environment and humanity. Moreover, it’s irrefutable that cheap fossil fuels have contributed incalculable positive economic and social benefits to humanity since 1850.
Moreover, China’s first test thorium reactor goes online THIS YEAR, with the goal of having a large-scale commercial LFTR design ready for rollout by 2024… By 2050, most of world’s energy will come from thorium, so this stupid CAGW hoax is moot anyway.
CAGW is dead.
It all hangs on the feedbacks. I can come up with anywhere from 0.2 to 0.4°C of anthropogenic contributions.
David- Yep. It’s all about feedbacks. The CAGW hypothesis is 100.00% dependent upon a “runaway positive feedback loop”, which clearly doesn’t exist.
CAGW advocates feigned ignorance of negative cloud feedbacks is their get-out-of-jail-free card. When the CAGW hypothesis ends up in the trash bin of failed ideas, CAGW advocates will blame their “ignorance” of cloud formation/feedbacks for CAGW’s demise. Since all IPCC AR reports clearly state CAGW advocates are clueless on how clouds are formed and their net effect on climate, they’ll point to this feigned ignorance to explain why their models were so useless…
The physics and empirical evidence now show ECS will be around 0.5C~1C by 2100, which isn’t a problem… In about 5~7 years, the discrepancies will be 3+ standard deviations off from reality, over a 25-yr period, which will be sufficient criteria to toss this CAGW scam on the trash heap of history.
The start us date has been set back. Still time for the US to enter the race for safe nuclear…
http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2012/10/30/completion-date-slips-for-chinas-thorium-molten-salt-reactor/
Thank you for such a clear essay. It’s a shame that it will not change the minds of the great unwashed green/left. I taught the “greenhouse effect to my students for some years; semi believed AGW as well.
Thankfully, this belief lasted but a brief time. All it took was a short length of 4×2 across the back of the head – it focused my thinking to the truth.
Well done 🙂
David a fabulous article, as a geologist myself, with similar experience, I have been screaming much the same things for years. There are so many parts of your article I would love to comment on but don’t know where to start.
This stupid notion of “consensus” is just so unscientific to be laughable.
The idea that peer reviewed publications are somehow correct is also nonsense, all that says is that the reviewer thought “this looks interesting let’s put it out there”.
Your comments on what is a “climate scientist” are very good and I couldn’t agree more, I have been asking this for years.
Computer models are also another gripe of mine, anyone who has tried to model the natural environment knows they only give a poor approximation of reality.
This really is a great article and as a geologist, it summarises everything I see as wrong with “climate science”‘ you should try and get it out more widely.
And also, again, as a geologist, political leanings don’t come into it, I am and always will be left of centre in my political beliefs, but bad science is bad science.
Again great article, sorry for the rambling.
Well, I freely admit that “I once burned out a clutch during a Paradigm Shift”……
For the younger folks; a clutch was once an essential part of evil fossil fueled motor transport vehicles, it was a necessary component to perform a “shift”, once you “burned it out”, you had to resort to “alternative transport”, i.e. you walked…..
Cheers, KevinK
Same thing happens when you run out of gas …you walk.
The warmunists are so intellectually impoverished – they don’t have a paradigms to rub together.
When I see the word paradigm, I think of two shovels…
I think that’s paradig’em.
Question #1 does not point to a theory but instead asks if our ability to observe global temperature is credible. It is questioning our ability to observe not explain.
Question #2 again does not point to a theory, but instead asks what is you opinion of a vague hypothesis. What does”significant” represent, what does “contributing” mean relative to other factors and so on. It’s basically a stupid question to ask a scientist. Like intelligent design belongs in a religious philosophy class these questions are a better fit in a political science class.
No Schist indeed.
In science a theory represents the apex, the highest form of explanation for observations after having been consistently and repeatedly proven, substantiated, supported, and documented. Theory of relativity, theory of evolution are good examples.
The survey does not ask about a theory but asks politically motivated questions instead to get to a imagined scientific consensus. Making me wonder what exactly is climate theory? It would be sad if climate theory was no more than arm waving and a vague potpourri of hypothesis cobbled together in super computers. Maybe someone could explain where climate theory is defined, again the scientific version of theory, not the Al Gore version of theory nor the “Let’s take a poll” version.
Yep. It’s the Family Feud version of a scientific theory.
A scientific ‘crisis’ occurs when there are in your face observations and analysis results that unequivocally indicate there are fundamental errors in the basic theory or theories. Scientific paradigms change and breakthroughs occur when a field enters a crisis.
It appears (there is multiple recent observational evidence to support the mechanisms and the assertion that the change has started) we are going to experience the once in 8,000 to 10,000 year solar change that causes Heinrich events, which is the same mechanism that initiates and terminates interglacial periods (a climate event of a similar magnitude to the 8200 BP cooling event or the 12,900 BP Younger Dryas abrupt cooling event). If I understand what is currently happening to sun, the correct new stellar model, how solar cycle changes modulate planetary temperature, and the mechanisms that regulate and change the level of atmospheric CO2 – Planetary temperature and atmospheric CO2 are going to abruptly drop.
An abrupt cooling change in planetary temperature is only possible if the majority of the warming in the last 150 years has due to solar changes rather than the increase in atmospheric CO2 and similarly a drop in atmospheric CO2 is only possible if there are much larger natural sinks and natural sources of CO2 than believed and if there is a non-fossil fuel source of low C13, CO2, which there is.
There is a mechanism related to the observational fact that the solar heliosphere density has dropped by 40% (the observational fact that the solar heliosphere density has dropped 40% was discussed at the November, 2013 AGU meeting) due to the solar cycle 24 abrupt change, that is delaying the cooling of the earth. This delay, temporary inhibiting of the mechanisms by which solar changes modulate planetary cloud cover and wind speed, has enabled the solar change to progress without cooling, hence when the inhibiting mechanism ends, there will be sudden cooling. In terms of the inhibiting mechanism the two hemispheres are different (it is a charge mechanism, the difference is caused by the difference in impedance of the continental crust as compared to the ocean/ocean floor and the relative different amount of continental crust and ocean floor in the two hemispheres, the massive movement of charge is the reason why the geomagnetic field intensity is now dropping at 5%/decade (ten times) faster than possible for a core base geomagnetic model.) High latitude cooling has started in the Southern ocean which explains the record Antarctic sea ice and indicates the mechanism that was inhibiting the solar modulation of planetary cloud is starting to abate.
It is important to remember there are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleo record where the same regions of the planet that warmed in the last 150 years warmed when solar activity was high and then cooled when the sun changed. The cycles or warming and cooling were not caused by cyclic changes to atmospheric CO2, there were caused by cyclic changes to the sun.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/05/is-the-current-global-warming-a-natural-cycle/
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/davis-and-taylor-wuwt-submission.pdf
Most probably 97% of climate scientists agree that funding for support of climate studies should be increased and that their budget in particular should be increased. Does that make the idea a good one?
You’ve identified the true cause of CAGW: climate scientist funding.
” 97% of climate scientists agree that funding for support of climate studies should be increased and that their budget in particular should be increased. Does that make the idea a good one?”
100% of IPCC environmental scientists say it’s a winner.
Climate scientists can also make money on a falling global temperature. The one thing that scares them is the infuriatingly stable temperatures we’ve seen since about 2002. As soon as we’re in an identifiable cooling trend, they will shift gears to catastrophic anthropogenic global cooling,CAGC. The politicians will change the threat, but the solution will be the same, Marxism.
“Every measure of pre-industrial carbon dioxide, not derived from Antarctic ice cores, indicates a higher and more variable atmospheric concentration.” …
http://s16.postimg.org/e721t7nrp/Stomata.png
Composite assembled from here.
There are issues with accurately determining past atmospheric CO2 concentrations. For example, Greenland ice is subject to wind-born dust deposition, which can and does bring carbonates, contributing CO2. Stomata are leaf “breathing holes” that admit CO2 to accomplish photosynthesis. If CO2 is higher, these holes become smaller and/or less numerous. However, the same stomata also promote the loss of plant water. And in a drought, these holes lessen to preserve plant moisture, even if it means plant metabolism slows. Desert plants are an example. Also, chemical methods of measuring CO2 over a century ago gave erratic and often erroneous results.
As for forming gas bubbles in ice cores, I have wondered if gas fractionation occurs between CO2 and N2 because of the greater affinity for CO2 to adhere (chemi-sorb) on ice crystals. Even so, I tend to think Antarctic ice bubbles give our best estimate of distant past atmospheric CO2.
A geochemist’s opinion.
Stomata studies can actually be controllled for precipitation and other non-CO2 variables.
Greenland ice cores and plant stomata yield much higher frequency CO2 signals than Antarctic ice cores; therefore have far higher resolution, albeit with lower signal to noise ratios.
In our business, we don’t discard noisy high frequency data because it doesn’t fit a paradigm defined by lower frequency data. This would be akin to pitching sonic & density logs because they reveal things not apparent in the seismic data.
I have posted a link to this article a number of times in different threads but it is so appropriate to this topic that I must post it again. It is an excellent read that explains, at least in some case, the bell curve of a scientific paradigm – how it becomes dominant and then how it yields to another paradigm. And, while it doesn’t mention climate science at all, it does deal with both hard and soft sciences.
I’m referring to a Dec 13, 2010 New Yorker article called “The Truth Wears Off – Is there something wrong with the scientific method?” http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wears-off
The article is excellent and would make a superb multi-article series here if Anthony or a mod gained permission from the author to repost it. I believe it deserves reading far and wide in the climate science community.
As a teaser, here are the first two paragraphs:
“On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects’ psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company’s top-selling drug.
But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren’t any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. “In fact, sometimes they now look even worse,” John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me”
If you can’t find it with any of the above you can google “The decline effect and the scientific method” it should be the first link. And if that doesn’t work, I archived it here:
http://www.webcitation.org/6SgCvSc3w
Enjoy – it is well worth the time…
I also like the argument that your kids should be vaccinated because I don’t want your unvaccinated kids to give the disease to my vaccinated kids.
Apparently you don’t understand the concept of community immunity.
As long as most kids are vaccinated, the unvaccinated get a free ride. But when too many go unvaccinated, then they are at risk. It’s not the vaccinated kids who are in danger, but those who aren’t vaccinated, once they become numerous beyond a certain low level.
Vaccines don’t always work in everyone and not everyone can be vaccinated.
I imagine that if a disease becomes endemic, it is also more likely to mutate and defeat our immunities.
There is nothing wrong with the scientific method. The problem is that it is so often violated and corrupted these days and indeed under attack.
In physics there is the “observer effect” where the act of observation will make changes to the phenomenon being observed.
For example, once we have measured some system in quantum physics, we know its current state and this stops it from being in one of its other states. This means that the type of measurement that we do on the system affects the end state of the system.
Just as the interference pattern phenomenon seen in the double slit experiment scales up from photons to large molecules – (and who knows – maybe even baseballs) – so also the observer effect phenomenon may scale up to cause the “decline effect.”
Reply to NOAAProgrammer and Catherine Ronconi:
The article is not an attack on the scientific method. It is a discussion of the failure of the paradigm today within which science is conducted – the process of scienctific research. The title of the article in that sense is misleading.
While the “observer effect” may scale up to explain some of the decline effect, there are other causes, rooted in human nature for why, as Catherine says, the scientific method, “is so often violated and corrupted these days.” The article does a good job of discussing the forces and factors that lead to that “corruption”. I quote that because I don’t believe the corruption is as wide-spread as perceived, even in climate science.
That is one of the benefits of familiarizing yourself with the article. Frequently when discussing climate sciene I find myself confronted with an “appeal ot authority” argument that goes something along the lines of ‘how could 97% of scientists be wrong?’ or ‘sure – the entire climate science community conspired to create a hoax’. With the examples in this ariticle, conspiracy, corruption, and hoax can be taken off the table. It makes clear that the problems in climate science are not limited to climate science. They are pervasive across many scientific areas of study. The reason they have polarized climate science is because of the politics and vast sums of money involved.
The focus of this WUWT piece is a paradigm shift in climate science. To the extent that’s happening, “The Decline Effect” helps explain why that may be happening, and the reasons go far beyond the reluctance of nature to conform to model forecasts. It presents a strong case for a paradigm shift in the scientific process as implemented today to help protect against human nature.
On publication bias:
Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University
On replicability:
Leigh Simmons, a biologist at the University of Western Australia:
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University:
On selective reporting and a-prior beliefs:
Richard Palmer, a biologist at the University of Alberta:
On random results:
It’s not the method, it’s sample-selection-bias. Whenever you select a small sample it will be, by it’s very nature, biased. Notice the term “select a sample.” There is no criteria, except for absolute randomness, to obtain a sample that does not have some of the researcher’s proximal notions built in. Unfortunately much of the discussion on experimental design implies that you don’t need a purely random sample to provide evidence of an effect. There’s some truth to that, as long as your sample selection process is designed to exclude moderators, variables that may interact, etc., etc., but there’s been almost no discussion about how to avoid such impacts.
When you’re dealing with human subjects it’s pretty common for the second researcher to mimic the procedures of the first researcher who finds an effect. It’s the easy way to get published, and also very lazy. So we tend to have a bias toward the bias, and that’s the way that many dumb-ass ideas are perpetuated. In almost 40 years of working with humnan subjects I can count on one hand the number of effects that don’t get substantively diluted when the measurement is extended to a broader population.
And that’s all I have to say about that
I’ve followed the CAGW story for ~10 years and I get the distinct impression that climate scientists like Hansen, and those of similar ‘weightiness’ have grudgingly actually been on a journey of learning about climate from the most humble of beginnings. Hansen looking at Venus had an epiphany about how the world was going to warm. After his “discovery”, UN opportunist.- in.- chief Maurice Strong (high school ed. marxist) gave Hansen and his colleagues the job of determining the extent of damage caused by humans about 35years ago (he realized that to recruit them he had to have the cash put out by governments, UN etc and to hold “conventions” in exotic places and to fete and decorate with awards (the nobel com. were already in his pocket and of his ideology). They were ignorant of the large body of knowledge already possessed by geology, history, literature, glacial research, etc. They didn’t know that someone knew that there were periods of great warmth and great cold that had low carbon dioxide and high carbon dioxide respectively. They didnt know there was an LIA, MWP, and all the other cold and hot periods that needed to be gotten rid of. They appeared not to know about Hannibal’s soldiers and elephants crossed the Alps – a feat only possible during a warming period. They didn’t know that 1/3 of Finns died of starvation, the Thames, New York Harbor and even the Bosphorus froze over during the LIA. Pause brought them knowledge of ENSO, the sun, the PDO, AMO, in their desperation to muddle a rescue effort for their tattered climate sensitivity…… This has been a very expensive journey of discovery.
And someone has been sabotaging CRU and NOAA and NASA and NCDC and GISS and Al Gore and Obama by putting LSD in their water supply?
So they were government “experts” then?
Real scientists are fighting Marcuse (demand to be allowed to express minority views, then when your ideas are accepted by enough people, silence the opposing views; when these views disappear from public discourse, people will only harbor thoughts we (who are correct) want to be thought…this totalitarian crapist was given a professorship at UC San Diego!). Real scientists are fighting Alinsky (ridicule your opponents, show them no civil courtesy, get them to believe you have more backing than you have ((“97% consensus)), terrify people with threats, go after people not institutions, and hurt them).
These two men were bent upon destruction. Those of us who are healthy experienced people when we were growing up who were fair, even generous, and people who were unfair, who tried to get more from us than they gave us.
Most of the people at WUWT decided, sometime in childhood or adolescence or early adulthood that treating people fairly and even generously was a better course than advancing their own interests by taking advantage of people.
The UN IPCC is comprised of people who want to advantage themselves by disadvantaging other people. See Raj Pachauri…was he offering to marry his underling whom he was trying to convince to hop in the sack with him? He was on a mission to save the planet. Riight. How about saving the planet from dirty old men who want to ruin young women?
A quibble:
“It seems to me that climate science is currently dominated by computer modelers…”
As a software engineer I find the computer modeling done by climate scientists to be poor quality, exhibiting poor understanding of either the underlying physical processes or the difficulties of computer modeling. To call them computer modelers is a slur to my profession.
That certainly was not my intent. Generally speaking, the computer models are fine and reflect very well on those who designed them.
The problem is with GIGO and the non uniqueness principle.
David
Not sure I understand your comment “the computer models are fine and reflect very well on those who designed them”.
Given the models purport to represent physical reality, the strange (to everyone except modelers and true believers) focus on CO2 is laughable when compared to real-world data (i.e. temperatures). This isn’t GIGO, it’s a design problem. However, I do agree these (seriously flawed) models do indeed reflect on the modelers.
…maybe I missed the /sarc tag.
@Chip,
General circulation and other climate models are very good at what they are: Heuristic tools. They are learning tools. No one should have ever misrepresented them as predictive tools.
However, tho so-called consensus insists that the models are robust and demonstrate predictive skill… And this has become part of the AGW paradigm.
Its worse than that , the data quality control seems to range from bad to awful , so before they even get to the models they have issue with the data .
Very detailed article, preparing for a paradigm crash. Thomas Kuhn would have been happy.
Thanks David Middleton.
It was well worth the time. Thanks thallstd.
My daughter-in-law and two sons have thrown the “97% of scientists” line in my face. They’re smart kids, they don’t use drugs. But this is what the MSM spouts.
On the issue of abstract reviews, the scientific method would be to have panels of AGW skeptics and AGW proponents contemporaneously review abstracts and derive conclusions. For disagreements on what abstracts impute, conference calls should be made to authors to get their responses to
Question 1:, “Do you hold the certain or nearly certain conviction that your published research demonstrates, beyond reasonable doubt that global warming since 1900 is mostly attributable to fossil fuel burning, or do you hold the opinion that your research is reasonable compatible with natural cycles of climate change being potentially the cause of most of the measured global warming since 1900?” (Answers of “I don’t know, I can’t really answer that question” get a new category,”Scientists don’t know.” and get thrown out of the 97% consensus.)
Question 2: Did you hear at any time that grants were being offered to show that global warming had adverse effects on the environment? Did you ever hear of grants being offered to show that global warming didn’t have adverse effects on the environment?
Question 3, 4, 5, 6 for the “beyond reasonable doubt” Yes answers:
Question 3: Have you applied for or have you taken an equivalent-paying job at an equivalent university located 600-1500 miles north of where you live or previously lived to protect your family from future global warming?
Question 4: Have you moved into a smaller home since 2000 to conserve household energy?
Question 5: Have you declined to use jet travel to attend meetings,on the grounds that you don’t want to contribute to fossil-fuel-burned climate disruption?
Question 6: Have you taken jet travel to attend meetings but felt bad about it?
“My daughter-in-law and two sons have thrown the “97% of scientists” line in my face. They’re smart kids, they don’t use drugs. But this is what the MSM spouts.”
Besides all the points made in this WUWT piece, the 97% consensus figure can be found all the way back to 1959, attributed to publication bias.
I highly recommend you review my comments above at March 18, 2015 at 8:01 pm and March 19, 2015 at 6:21 am (assuming that post makes it out of moderation with the same time stamp), especially this quote from the article cited from Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University:
A few observations (we formally published most of these conclusions in 2002 – we’ve known this for a long time):
1. CO2 is the basis for all carbon-based life on Earth – and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are clearly CO2-deficient.
2. Based on the evidence, Earth’s climate is insensitive to increased atmospheric CO2 – there is no global warming crisis.
3. Recent global warming was natural and ~cyclical – the next phase following the ~20 year pause will be global cooling, starting by about 2020 or sooner.
3. Temperature, among other factors, drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. The rate of change dCO2/dt varies ~contemporaneously with temperature and atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature at all measured time scales (published in 2008).
4. Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of modern society.
5. Green energy schemes (scams) are responsible for driving up energy costs and increasing winter mortality rates.
_________________________________
I suggest that most of the above statements are true, to a high degree of confidence.
All of the above statements are blasphemy to warmist fanatics.
It is truly remarkable how the warmists could get it so wrong.
Regards, Allan
(Petroleum Engineer / Earth Scientist)
Allen,
The Useful Idiots (and I don’t mean they are stupid people; look the term up in Wiki, HG Wells is referred to as one, for example) simply want a Grand Cause to go with that fulfills them psychologically. The people at the very top aren’t “getting it wrong” in my opinion – they don’t care what the truth is. They simply want to implement certain social changes, and global cooling is as good as global warming is as good as climate change – they really don’t care what the mechanism is, and whether that mechanism reflects reality or not.
+googol, especially your comment “The people at the very top…don’t care what the truth is”.
For Frodo
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/30/what-are-your-fears-about-global-warming-and-climate-change/#comment-1847727
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
“The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”
“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
– H.L. Mencken
David gave an eye-opening report. It makes you wonder why the fear-mongerers try to tear down WUWT. If google can be brought in line, maybe WUWT will “disappear”.
“Think Local”makes sense to me.Has the climate changed to become intolerable, whee you live? I’ve noticed that people are still flocking to Florida and Texas from New York, Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois. Global warming isn’t on their list of things to avoid.
Cali is dumping gigatons of water into the sea, instead of conserving it. Freshwater for drinking and growing food, flushed into the salty Pacific.
I thought Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four were warnings. The leftists are taking them to be play books.
If the paradigm is crashing, does the current media tidal wave of blatant AGW propaganda represent Miss AGW’s “death throes”? Somehow, I doubt that. The old girl has managed to survive for some 17 years after her “actually warming” life support system was removed by our ever mischievous Mother Nature. That which should have put a stake through her heart only seems to have invigorated the patient.
Hooray for geologists! The last bunch to get sucked into the black hole. Maybe we’ll tarry at the event horizon long enough to escape. Great article.
I don’t see that there was ever a truly Scientific Paradigm representing CO2CAGW in the first place. All I’ve seen is a gigantic Propaganda Op which is intentionally anti-scientific.
JPeden
You must not have been paying attention when reasonable scientific practitioners were drummed out (i.e. lost their jobs) of academe because they flouted the paradigm.
Or, most recently, when former US Vice President Al Gore proposed “punishment” for scientists disbelieving AGW.
Chip, you’re right about that anti-scientific practice, and that’s exactly what I’m saying about the allegation that CO2CAGW was ever a true Scientific Paradigm. For practical purposes, it was never Scientific. At best it was a “conjecture”, amongst the many we all could think up at any time for free, 24/7. [h/t dbStealey]
A former prime minister of Australia said something like (I don’t have the exact words anymore):
‘All respectable and qualified climate scientists think that climate change is caused by humans and we need to do something about it. ‘
She withdrew the comment when someone told her there are in fact, respectable top notch scientists who don’t think so.
The beast won’t die till Barry O. leaves the Whitehouse.
Then it will.
Great article and comment thread. And no trolls. They aren’t smart enough to comment on this article.
They are currently huddled in conference, planning their witty and incisive comments .
Excellent presentation by David Middleton leading to a good comment thread.
O/T, but WUWT is closing in on a quarter of a billion views. The quality of the comments reflects the level of intellect of the viewers. This reflects on Anthony Watts and WUWT.
Environmental Journalists belong to the Society of Environmental Journalists, where they meet and learn from each other, and from Democratic Party talking points. Talking points include 97%, endangered polar bears, anthropogenic global warming with rising sea levels, warming polar regions with melting ice and melting glaciers, and are not challenged because nobody among the environmental journalists reads any science whatsoever. They read the talking points because they are familiar and comforting.
Excellent article! Permission to repost?
Great article, David Middleton, and thank you very mu;ch.
I learned the geosyncline theory in geography lessons when I was thirteen. I didn’t find it at all convincing. Our geography teacher told us that some German guy had a theory about continental drift, and pointed out the fit between South America and Africa. He seemed to think there might be something in it, but I wasn’t convinced about that, either. This was 1959.
No. Sorry. It is unprecedented for me to entirely disagree with a post but this is simply wrong.
That is not what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift. No Kuhnian paradigm shift is required to convince scientists of the falsity of most climate science.
At the very most, if there is a necessary paradigm shift, it is to make the majority of scientists brought up on the success of the linear models of the universe, to understand that the number of cases to which these apply in the real world are vanishingly small.
The problem is, in any case, not with science itself, but with non-scientific humans and their inability to grasp the metaphysics and the physics of science itself. They have to substitute understanding with belief. And belief is infinitely manipulable by the cynical.
What we see is not bad science driving political and economic decisions, but bad political and economic decisions driving science.
Personally I suspect that at some deep instinctive level, the population level of the world is invoking the sort of deep Trotsykite impulse to smash anything and everything and to revert to internecine warfare, which is probably a Darwinian mechanism that evolved aeons ago to deal with overpopulation.
Since everywhere I look I see rationalisation for hatred destruction and violence.
Climate-change-the-myth is not a scientific issue: It is part of a broader social, psychological and political issue that is probably the most dominant and crucial issue of the early 21st century. And that issue is the death of democracy and the so called working class engendered by the success of capital and technology in eliminating the need for Labour. Sure people have the vote, but the whole thrust of those who have the power is to make that vote meaningless. by both manipulating the perceptions of the population via mass media, and by subverting the political organisations so hat in t he end the unelected dominate the elected, and are all talking the same narrative.
That is a process that really started with the rise of Marxism in the early 20th century, and morphed into a huge exercise in deep propaganda, post WWII. Today the truth is politically irrelevant: all that counts is what people believe, and manipulating that belief is the fully paid job of the serried ranks of the professional ‘communicators’.
If you want a paradigm shift, it is to understand that the truth has all but vanished in society, and has never featured in any great way: That of and by itself is not always a huge problem – the right things can still happen for the wrong reasons – but today we are at an existential crisis point, and the wrong reasons are almost directly opposed to the Darwinian imperative of actual existential survival of cultures, nations and peoples.
Climate changers are not just wrong, they are really dangerous. And that is the story of just about every other modern social and political ‘progressive’ impulse today.
In their haste to sweep away the old and let the true glorious triumph of human nature that they feel must happen out of near anarchy, the Left is destroying all the conventions that bind cultures together, and the pessimistic view is that instead of Glorious Revolution to a bright new future, what will result is bloody destruction. Instead of freedom, enslavement to whatever ideology holds the most AK47s. Until the ammunition runs out, and the technology to produce more has be smashed by the Green Luddite tendency.
In the modern narrative, civilisation itself is an evil to be eradicated: And a return to a life that is ‘Nasty, brutish, and short’ – but ‘much more natural‘ is what is being engineered.
We are at war, but we are not yet sure quite who the enemy is..
Now THAT was a really good rant! VERY succinct and perceptive in my view.
What we see is not bad science driving political and economic decisions, but bad political and economic decisions driving science.”
Interesting how people here come to the same basic conclusions, starting with very different world views. To me, this nonsense started with the overpopulation movement – where things like genocide of entire peoples (for example, withholding food aid from places like India and Egypt and letting millions intentionally starve) was openly discussed in the 60s and into the 70s – very brazenly stated – to global cooling, global warming , and now “climate change” – the same movement for at least the last 50 years, just more and more devious w/r/t their underlying intentions, as time has gone on. The underlying principals are always the same – significantly increased governmental control in the developed countries, ‘cuz “they” know best and YOU don’t, coupled with significant population reductions in the 3rd world.
Dig into it, and some of the same ghouls – Ehrlich and Holdren are two perfect examples – are involved in all this for decades. You are right – the truth is optional, the ends justify the means, and it isn’t “scientific” in any meaningful way. I don’t throw around the term “evil” often, but this just might apply.
+googol.
That’s the second I’ve given on this discussion. Plainly I’m struggling to express the intensity of my appreciation for the comments.
Leo Smith,
You echo my concerns. It’s hard for a lot of people to understand why this is happening.
Of course, a big part of the reason is that the ignoratii are being directed toward anarchy. TPTB [the powers that be] seem to want anarchy. I suspect they intend to pick up the pieces.
In the U.S. it would be easy. As the American Patrick Henry warned us at the Constitutional Convention:
This Constitution is said to have beautiful features, but … Your President may easily become King. Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority, and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this Government, although horridly defective.
Where are your checks in this Government? Your strong holds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that our American Governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this Government are founded.
But its defective, and imperfect construction, puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men.
And, Sir, would not all the world, from the Eastern to the Western hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad? Shew me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty? I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.
If your American chief, be a man of ambition, and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute? The army is in his hands, and, if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him. And it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design.
And, Sir, will the American spirit solely relieve you when this happens? I would rather infinitely, and I am sure most of this Convention are of the same opinion, have a King, Lords, and Commons, than a Government so replete with such insupportable evils.
If we make a King, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them. But the President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke.
I cannot with patience, think of this idea. If ever he violates the laws, one of two things will happen: He shall come at the head of his army to carry every thing before him. Or, he will give bail, or do what Mr. Chief Justice will order him.
If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of every thing, and being ignominiously tried and punished, powerfully excite him to make this bold push? But, Sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not at the head of his army beat down every opposition?
Away with your President, we shall have a King. The army will salute him Monarch. Your militia will leave you, and assist in making him King, and fight against you. And what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue? [source]
I’m no smarter than the average person, and if I can think of this happening, certainly people like Obama and Ban Ki Moon can, too. As I tell my friends: stop listening to what they say! Watch what they do, instead. Their actions give them away.
So at the risk of being labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist’ [and not for the first time], I suspect that there are people deliberately fanning the flames of the eco-movement, of ‘racism’, and of class warfare in general.
There is no credible science behind the man-made global warming [MMGW] narrative, and I believe that everything happens for a reason. Draw your own conclusions; I have already drawn mine.
What puzzles me is that scientists have determined that about 95% of the atmospheric greenhouse heat effect (GHE) is attributed to water in the atmosphere, and that the remaining 5% of the GHE is attributed to the greenhouse trace gases of which CO2 represents about 72%, meaning 3.6% (72% x 5%) of the GHE is attributed to CO2 in the atmosphere.
What stuns me is the IPCC AR4 (2007) asserted that only 3% of the CO2 entering the atmosphere is from human activity. So assuming, today, 3% of the CO2 causing warming is from humans, it means only 0.11 of 1% (3% x 3.6%) of the GHE in the atmosphere is attributed to human activity CO2.
And the United Nations wants to destroy the fossil fuel energy system over this trivial human contribution of 0.11 of 1% to the GHE? Has the world gone mad?
Yes, yes it has gone mad.
Why be puzzled? If you ever supply direct links to the IPCC AR4 to moonbats as supporting evidence I guarantee you that they will change the subject to tobacco or Fred Singer honorariums or tell you that your excessive use of capitalization is a proven indication of low intelligence.
They will claim that ALL of the CO2 above ~350ppm is because of human activity. That the tiny 3% “extra” is simply “too much” for nature to handle it so it lingers in the atmosphere building up year after year hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles. That is the sophistry they use to then claim that ALL of the additional 50 ppm CO2 is from humans. Taken together with the lie that no warming would have happened if CO2 had stayed at 350ppm, human CO2 is therefore 100% responsible for all the warming. And no they are not required to discuss water vapor because no leftist media outlet has ever mentioned it and therefore it does not exist.
If we could just get the media on our side, and educate the deniers, then we should be able to reach 98% consensus. 😉
* “Immediate, deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary in order to stave off catastrophic climate change.”
I think that should be broken out. The idea that getting warmer is “bad” is an absolutely essential element of the paradigm all by itself. If people perceived that warming is better for life the entire paradigm would evaporate faster than Henry Waxman’s ice at the north pole.
Yes. The underlying presumption that warming is bad goes against all historical evidence.
“Why is the paradigm collapsing?”
I would add
– The accumulating recognition of homeostatic mechanisms operating within the climate, as e.g., here.
David
Thanks for an excellent article, from a fellow APEGA member.
Roger Dueck
wow, so bad I dont know where to begin.
Let’s start with a misindentification of the “paradigm”
The SCIENTIFIC paradigm is:
A) Human activities, primarily carbon dioxide emissions, have been the primary cause of the observed global warming over the past 50 to 150 years. ( 95 % certain)
B) The climate sensitivity to a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentration “is likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C,” possibly even much higher than 4.5°C.
####################################
Everything else
Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are causing the atmospheric concentration to rise at a dangerously rapid pace to levels not seen in 100’s of thousands to millions of years.
Immediate, deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary in order to stave off catastrophic climate change.
The scientific consensus regarding this paradigm is overwhelming (~97%).
is Not part of the core climate science.
1. Anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are causing the atmospheric concentration to rise at a dangerously rapid pace to levels not seen in 100’s of thousands to millions of years.
The key here is the word dangerous. That is value judgement. Further, It doesnt matter what past concentrations were. The key beliefs are foreward looking. Erase the paleo record and you lose nothing
of the core science
2.Immediate, deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary in order to stave off catastrophic climate change. This is climate ECONOMICS. While I believe in the science I think the economic projections are dubious at best.
3 The scientific consensus regarding this paradigm is overwhelming (~97%).
This is not a part of the science paradigm, it is part of the PUBLIC RELATIONS strategy.
4. The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration had stabilized between 270 and 280 ppmv early in the Holocene and had remained in that range prior to the mid-19th century when fossil fuels became the primary energy source of the Industrial Revolution.
This a peripheral component of the science. See above A and B. All you NEED is A and B.
everything else is unnecessary. nice to have, but not core.
###################################
so the first mistake you make is mis identifying the CORE science that would have to be replaced by a
new paradigm. The SCIENCE of C02 doesnt care about consensus. One man in 1896 knew about the
change c02 would bring. He didnt need any paleo to see this. Didnt need any record of past c02.
didnt need any economic predictions. He just needed physics.
To replace the old paradigm you will need to attack the CORE, you need to attack A & B
To attack A, its not enough to move the contribution of man from > 50% to less than 50%.
That is a minor adjustment. To get rid of the paradigm you have to show NO human effect.
To attack B its not enough to move the lower bound of sensitivity. Saying sensitivity to C02 is
.4 C as opposed the 3C, STILL OPERATES WITHIN the paradigm. To attack this, you have to
do something like Willis. he attacks the very NOTION of sensitivity.
In short, the AGW paradigm is flexible as a science. What is inflexible is the combination of that
science with economics and PR. You dont change a paradigm by attacking peripheral components.
That’s why your nobel prize awaits you if you can attack A or B in a fundamental manner.
Shifting values is not fundamental.
“you need to attack A & B” Not true if warmer is better. Just replace “catastrophic” with a word like “blessed” or “glorious” and we’re done!
“The SCIENCE of C02 doesnt care about consensus. One man in 1896 knew about the
change c02 would bring. He didnt need any paleo to see this. Didnt need any record of past c02.
didnt need any economic predictions. He just needed physics.”
Steve…
The physics are fine as far as radiative forcing is concerned, but not the climate.
The Earth is just a bit more complex than a jar of air.
The “paleo” is essential in understanding how CO2 and the climate were behaving prior to anthropogenic effects.
As far as the definition of the paradigm goes… What, exactly, is it?
If it is simply: Air + CO2 = an un-quantifiable increase in the Earth’s average surface temperature relative to what it would be doing without human input over an unknowable period of time, it’s not much of a paradigm or a scientific theory.
Is this the paradigm?
Human‐Induced Climate Change Requires Urgent Action
Humanity is the major influence on the global climate change observed over the past 50 years. Rapid societal responses can significantly lessen negative outcomes. Human activities are changing Earth’s climate. At the global level, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat‐trapping greenhouse gases have increased sharply since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel burning dominates this increase. Human‐caused increases in greenhouse gases are responsible for most of the observed global average surface warming of roughly 0.8°C (1.5°F) over the past 140 years. Because natural processes cannot quickly remove some of these gases (notably carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere, our past, present, and future emissions will influence the climate system for millennia.
Extensive, independent observations confirm the reality of global warming. These observations show large‐scale increases in air and sea temperatures, sea level, and atmospheric water vapor; they document decreases in the extent of mountain glaciers, snow cover, permafrost, and Arctic sea ice. These changes are broadly consistent with long‐ understood physics and predictions of how the climate system is expected to respond to human‐caused increases in greenhouse gases. The changes are inconsistent with explanations of climate change that rely on known natural influences.
Climate models predict that global temperatures will continue to rise, with the amount of warming primarily determined by the level of emissions. Higher emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to larger warming, and greater risks to society and ecosystems. Some additional warming is unavoidable due to past emissions.
[…]
http://sciencepolicy.agu.org/files/2013/07/AGU-Climate-Change-Position-Statement_August-2013.pdf
Steven Mosher says:
The SCIENTIFIC paradigm is:
That’s the “scientific” NARRATIVE, promoted by the media and certain self-serving scientists and organizations.
Heck, maybe ‘narrative’ and ‘paradigm’ are the same thing. Or, maybe a narrative is the grub form of a paradigm.☺
It is helpful to understand why pure science puzzles (there are least five major text book changing scientific breakthroughs connected to the science at the heart of the climate wars, of greater importance than the discovery of tectonic plate movement) are not solved and more fun/interesting rather than to talk in generalizations (about why the puzzles are not solved and about the competing theories) to look at a specific example, to set specific objectives for the discussion of the specific example (i.e. discussions are more interesting when the competing theories are defined in a scientific manner and when the key observations/paradoxes/issues are summarized in a document so one can re-look at the summary, which support or do not support the competing theories.
After the first steps in a process, one can move on the practical implications (what will happen next) and policy implications if one or the other of the two theories are correct.
I have worked almost 20 years as a senior specialist in private industry. I help specialists solve problems. In private industry one gets paid and promoted for finding and solving problems, not for writing papers and attending conferences.
There is an optimized method to solving scientific problems. Private for profit scientific investigation has structure, it follows an optimized methodology. Anomalies/paradoxes are summarized in review papers and are never ignored. In private industry one is paid to come up with new theories (look outside the box) and to re-look at old abandoned theories. That structured approach and forced/encouraged looking out of the box, leads to breakthroughs and is the same logical approach one would use to investigate a crime or an airplane crash. In private industry we get excited when anomalies/paradoxes are found, as that indicates there are one or more errors in the base theory/theories. In private industry we specifically look for anomalies/paradoxes as that is an effective means to find a breakthrough.
In private industry a person would be fired, if they were caught hiding or ignoring an anomaly/paradox that disproved their theory or their favorite theory. In private industry, theory belongs to the team, not to the individual. In private industry the senior specialist(s) is paid to ensure analysis and research is without prejudice, to ensure anomalies and paradoxes are correctly labeled as such, to summarize the analysis so it can be understood by a non-specialist audience, to explain without bias what are the pros/cons of the different theories, what are the unresolved issues. These logical steps help to solve problems, lead to breakthroughs.
The suggested subject for structured analysis (to illustrate a practical structured analysis as opposed to an argument, debate, or simple name calling which goes in circles and may never move ahead.) is the Nobel Prize winning astrophysics Thomas Gold’s deep core, extruded super high pressure CH4 theory: (See Gold’s book ‘The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels’, :published 1998 for details.)
Comment: The CH4 core hypothesis effects the climate war discussions in two ways. If it is correct, there is a much larger source of CH4 (‘natural’ gas is low C13) and hence CO2 (there is an entire deep earth biosphere which consumes a portion of the CH4 that is moving through the mantel, in the Continental crust) that is constantly moving into the biosphere which implies there is a much large sink of CO2 in the biosphere. The deep core CH4 hypothesis and modifications to the assumed carbon cycle explains Salby and Humlum’s paradoxes which indicate the majority of the recent increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to increases in planetary temperature rather than anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Secondly, the CH4 deep core hypothesis if correct indicates there are massive never to be used up deposits of CH4 (natural gas) which changes the preferred energy source for the future.
Gold in his book lists roughly 50 paradoxes/anomalies (there are at least 20 additional new observations/analysis results that support the deep CH4 core hypothesis and indicate that the late veneer comet theory is not correct) that logically supports the assertion that the source of the earth’s oceans and hydrocarbons on the surface of the planet is super, high pressure, liquid CH4 that extruded from the core of the earth as it solidifies. This super high pressure liquid CH4 (core pressure) breaks through the mantel and travels to the surface of the planet. As it travels, it picks up metals which explains why black coal and crude oil have heavy metals in them and why there are super concentrations of metals in the upper mantle. It also explains why the only commercial helium source is oil reservoirs. The movement of the high pressure CH4 liquid concentrates uranium and thorium which then decayed to produce helium. The super high pressure CH4 breaks the mantel to provide a path for the helium (which is a gas at all pressures in the earth) to rise up to the oil reservoir which the super high pressure CH4 is also the source of. The deep core CH4 theory explains why there is helium associated with oil deposits.
The transfer of core pressure by the super high pressure CH4 is the force that splits and moves the ocean floor underneath the continents. (The oldest ocean floor is 200 million years.) and is the force that breakups and lifts the continents.
Quoting from William Astley‘s comment at 10:42 AM on 19 March:
While I have not (yet) read Dr. Gold‘s book, I’ve had his theories in this area expounded to me by a number of popular writers.
I had also been informed by popular writers that those “super concentrations of metals in the upper mantel” had been the results of either hydrothermal/magmatic (could they be called “volcanic”?) processes or were astrobleme-related, possibly punched into the Earth’s crust by processes such as the late heavy bombardment.
But a helluva comment, and a great incentive to get off my duff and read Dr. Gold’s book.
While reading look up the expanding earth hypothesis, especially books by the late Sam Carey.
Dan Kurt
Very nice, but the weakness of the article is that it relies on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of a scientific paradigm, rather than on Karl Popper´s philosophy of science, ‘conjectures and refutations’; I think Kuhn’s model of paradigms is what is corrupting much climate research.
Erm, I’m not a mathematician, but if 97% of scientists are ‘warmists’ and the website Global Climate Petition Project shows over 31,000 named sceptical American scientists (one third PhDs), then the warmists must total over three million. Golly that’s many! Who polled them all and when?
I believe it was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who said: “One word of truth shall outweigh the world.” And he was right. Data trumps models and argument, always. The predictions of an incorrect theory will never come true, though it may take time for this to become manifest.
MJD, I agree, it will take time. This current paradigm is taking about as long to die as Peter Sellers in the opening scene of ‘The Party’. I suspect if it was mostly a within discipline shift (without the incredibly unfair onus of saving the grandkids) it would be much quicker … Tying the future of the planet to the issue (and a romantic return to hunter gatherer lifestyles) seems to have got a lot of people engaged and upset.
There is a quicker way, if within scientists were more aware of the reality that ‘science’ will be shaped socially and the broader public were similarly aware of the same, then the progression of this argument could be more critically received, Catastrophic > Alarming > Hiatis > Deep Ocean > EXTREME Weather etc.
It is a wonder how that realisation has not already come in the face of a barrage of ‘medical research’ backflips … We have changed our diet so much that the only hope is that variety is somehow beneficial.
Here is an emerging paradigm that requires much more funding to clarify and quantify:
The Danger Posed by Pickles
From a literary journal on dinosaurs, Univ of Chicago, 8 July 1979
+++++++
I spent the morning at the ROM going over files on the Lower Pleistocene Mammals of Ubeidiya (Jordan Valley) when I came across a light hearted journal that brought back a Proustian recollection of past Christmas dinners at my brother’s house and one of Cyrus’s main loves, pickles.
Here is the article:
Every pickle you eat brings you closer to death. Although leading horticulturalists have long known that cucumis sativus possesses an indehiscent pepo, the pickle industry continues to expand.
Pickles are associated with all major diseases of the body. Eating them breeds wars and Communism.
They can be related to most airline tragedies.
There exists a positive relationship between crime waves and consumption of this fruit of the cucurbit family.
1. Nearly all sick people have eaten pickles. The effects are obviously cumulative.
2. 99.9% of all people who die from cancer have eaten pickles.
3. 96.8% of Communist sympathizers have eaten pickles.
4. 99.7% of the people involved in air and auto accidents ate pickles within 14 days preceding the accident.
5. 93.1% of juvenile delinquents come from homes where pickles are served frequently.
6. All pickle eaters born between 1920 and 1930 have wrinkled skin, have lost most of their teeth, have brittle bones and failing eyesight—if the ills of eating pickles have not already caused their deaths.
Even more convincing is the report of a noted team of medical specialists; rats force-fed with 20 pounds of pickles per day for 30 days developed bulging abdomens. Their appetites for whole-some food were destroyed. In spite of all the evidence, pickle growers and packers continue to spread their evil. More than 120,000 acres of fertile U.S. soil are devoted to growing them. American per-capita consumption is nearly four pounds.
Best advice: eat orchid-petal soup. Practically no one has as many problems from eating orchid-petal soup as they do with eating pickles.
Can someone, among the mathgnoscenti here, help me out with this problem?
Mauna Loa’s CO2 curve, smoothed for seasons, seems to be nearly linearly rising. Arrhenius et seq, declared a logarithmic relation between CO2 concentration and temperature. Mann’s and “other independent scientists'” Hockey Stick iappears to be either an exponential or hyperbolic curve. Suppose we substitute CO2 in the x-axis for year, both are increasing linearly. The CO2 level didn’t start at 0 in 1900, it was over 250, so shouldn’t Mann et al’s curve shown a rise, but a diminishing rate of rise over time, rather than an increasing rate of rise over time (i.e. over CO2 rise in time), rather than an exponentially or hyperbolically increasing rate?
IPCC temperature projections to 2100 include an assumed feedback response over and above the known effect of CO2 alone (~+1C per doubling of concentration) due to increased water vapour, the most abundant ‘greenhouse’ gas in the atmosphere.
That enhanced ‘greenhouse’ effect should result in a ‘hot spot’ 9 – 12 kms over the tropics:
“The model runs shown in the above diagrams all suggest warming due to CO2 doubling to peak not at the surface in the tropics, but in the troposphere near the 200-300 hPa level, roughly corresponding to 12-9 km altitude. The main reason for the inter-model variation is that the amount of water vapour differs among the models. The expected warming above the tropics is 2-3 times larger than near the surface, regardless of the sensitivity of the particular model. This is, in fact, the very signature of greenhouse warming”:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/TempChangeWithAltitudeForCO2doubling.jpg
Go here:
http://www.climate4you.com/
I should add that no ‘hot spot’ has so far been detected.
This isn’t really true. As Isaac Held explained to me in a discussion here: http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2011/12/07/20-the-moist-adiabat-and-tropical-warming/#comment-397 the picture goes something like this:
(1) There are two feedbacks of interest here, the water vapor feedback, which magnifies global warming, and the lapse rate feedback that reduces it.
(2) Overall, the water vapor feedback is predicted by the models to be larger than the lapse rate feedback and hence their net effect is to magnify the warming due to other effects such as CO2.
(3) However, a lot of the water vapor feedback would happen even if the troposphere warmed uniformly. By contrast, the lapse rate feedback is completely dependent on this predicted “hot spot” in the tropical atmosphere.
(4) The net effect of this is that the additional effect of the atmosphere not warming uniformly, i.e., of their being a hotspot is a REDUCTION in warming. Or, to put it another way, if you compare an atmosphere that warms uniformly to one that warms with the predicted “hot spot”, the negative feedback due to the lapse rate feedback is larger in magnitude than the additional positive water vapor feedback you get with this hot spot.
So, at least, at the most basic level, an atmosphere that warmed without the hot spot should show a larger climate sensitivity than one that has such a hot spot.
It is also worth noting that the claim of the lack of a hot spot in the data is not robust: There is clearly the predicted hot spot for temperature fluctuations on, say, time scales of about a year (due to ENSO oscillations, for example). For the long term multidecadal warming presumably due to the greenhouse effect, the data (both satellite and radiosonde) vary considerably from one analysis of the data to another. The overall impression from the data seems to be that the hot spot might be missing or smaller than predicted, but given that this long-term trend in the data is the one most susceptible to artifacts, it is really hard to conclude much from that data and it is also hard to come up with mechanisms whereby the atmosphere would match the model predictions of a hot spot for the fluctuations (where they data is very reliable) but would not match the model predictions of a hot spot for the multidecadal trends (where the data is most susceptible to artifacts that contaminate what they call the “secular trend”). This is why many find the claims of the lack of a hot spot based on the data to be suspect.
Hence… Mann-made global warming… 🙂
Schoolsie,
Your assertion that “Mauna Loa’s CO2 curve, smoothed for seasons, seems to be nearly linearly rising” is not correct. A more careful analysis shows that it is indeed curving upward, with the rate of growth of CO2 more than twice as large in the 2000-2010 decade than it was in the 1960s. See here: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ , especially the one titled Annual Mean Growth Rate for Mauna Loa, Hawaii.
Science is about identifying causes and effects.
Political science is about achieving ends, and the ends justify the means. Anything goes.
‘Climate science’, at least in terms a cAGW, should really be called ‘climate political science’.
What is the current paradigm?
You failed to mention that planting trees is not an allowable means of CO2 sequestration. This is very important.
The missing third question:
What personal qualifications inform your opinion?
Good article.
Leftists could not go on living if they didn’t have a “crisis” that will end life on Earth as we know it, unless everyone does as they say, without question.
.
Fluoride in water supply.
DDT.
Hole in the ozone layer.
Acid rain.
Global Warming.
Global Cooling.
Climate Change.
Vaccinations.
whatever !
.
When one boogeyman stops scaring people,
another one will be invented, as sure as Al Gore
invented the internet.
.
And of course the result of not doing what the
pesky leftists say is always the same:
Life on Earth will end as we know it !
.
How many decades of wrong predictions before
people stop listening?
.
What really bothers me is this fact:
When life on Earth does end as we know it,
how will we know if it was caused by fluoride,
the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, global warming,
global cooling, climate change, vaccinations, or whatever?
.
The leftists have never ‘cancelled’ their ‘life will end’ warnings
for any of the boogeymen listed that I could recall since the 1960s
(there are many others) … so isn’t it a shame that we will all die
not knowing which boogeyman got us?
http://www.elOnionBloggle.blogspot.com
“The only climate blog with a centerfold”
Somebody really needs to get to National Public Radio. They keep harping AGW and it’s making them sound like bigger idiots every day. Stop pandering to the crunchymoms and try a little VERITAS already!
To quote: “Global warming did serve a couple of useful purposes. The issue has been a litmus test for our political class. Any politician who has stated a belief in global warming is either a cynical opportunist or an easily deluded fool. In neither case should that politician ever be taken seriously again. No excuses can be accepted.” Source and more at http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/global-warming-un-funnelled-from-famous.html