People send me stuff. In this case it is a video by Dr. Ben Santer from the execrable online course on ‘climate denial’ aka Denial101x taught by cartoonist turned climate activist John Cook. I have made it a point to ignore John Cook’s state-sponsored hatefest on this website, but this was just too good to pass up:
I find a lot of humor in this, because it shows that WUWT has an effect. If Dr. Santer has to devote so much time to suppressing WUWT in his interview, I’d say that’s an improvement in his demeanor from the pre-climategate days:
I’m really sorry that you have to go through all this stuff, Phil. Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted. –Dr. Ben Santer, Climategate emails
In light of recent developments, Santer’s unfortunate missive pretty well sums up the left’s view of climate change thought – “submit or succumb”.
Here is the video:
Based on the number of view so far, it looks like WUWT will be providing the most views for this course, rather than John Cook’s sycophantic students.
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We also see a “pause” in TLS since around 1996, so where’s the human “fingerprint” in that one Ben ?
He pretends to do climate science — I pretended to watch the video. All-in-all it worked out well! 🙂
Online how-NOT-to-do-science-101
You have a monotonic rise in CO2 . So you draw a striaght line through any other data you can find that has large variability, call it a “trend” dismiss the difference a “noise” and pretend it matches the monotonic rise in CO2 .
Voila ! FINGERPRINTS everywhere.
It works for Roundup use and autism. Glyphosate fingerprint! GMO fingerprint! “Monsatan” fingerprint!
(It works for organic food too…)
“…call it a “trend”…”
Time is never an explanatory variable. If you can put a straight line through a time series and the regression program says it is “significant”, all it means is that something happened during that period. It could be ANYTHING – including a step-change or a random walk which happened to diverge. The proper term for a series which is neither obviously periodic nor obviously completely random is SYMPTOMATIC, not “trending”.
“13000 is the ‘official’ Cook/UQ estimate touted in SMH. Maybe most are not doing their homework.”
Latest figures reported by Bob T shows about 60 views for each video. According to Cook’s counting methods that comes in at around 97.2% of those who signed up.
Pretty solid consensus building going there.
“Comments are disabled for this video.”
How appropriate.
Of course they disable comments, they don’t have editorial control on youtube.
The can’t delete comments by people they disagree with, they can’t edit what they wrote and pretend they never said it.
They’d be crazy to allow comments.
Where I live was a km deep in ice just a few thousand years ago, Vancouver BC. Does he think Yosemite was contoured by wind?
The problem is these modlers have no frame of reference. There is no persice record of sea or atmosphere temps, or CO2 for that matter that extend back in time. Proxies are only proxies. He, Schmidt, Jones, Mann or other alarmists have no real paleo data, only weak proxies.
I’m currently enrolled and sitting through this “course”. In week one i learned:
1. There’s absolutely no doubt about the science. There are magical ‘fingerprints’ that prove dangerous global warming beyond all question. In week three we’ll learn all about these mysterious dabs.
2. Doubting dangerous climate change is really a kind of personality disorder. Anyone with a conservative bent is particularly at risk.
3. It’s a coincidence that climate sceptics are called ‘deniers’ and it has nothing to do with holocaust denial.
4. Climate deniers are heavily funded by big business line Exxon and the poor climate scientists are David to that wicked deniers Goliath.
I’m not sure I can stand the full seven weeks, but I’ll at least get through week three.
Pat
Thank you Sceptical Pat,
I would appreciate it very much if you could indicate which claims were made by whom.
(I only watched Santer, but couldn’t bring myself to listen to Oreskes, wich was the next youtube-clip … can’t imagine that she has anything novel to contribute, never had)
Sorry, I missed one: Mr. Cook explained the consensus is really, really important because many Americans don’t believe in dangerous AGW, but are likely to be influenced by consensus. Consensus, therefore, is a marketing ploy, with nothing to do with science.
A superintendent at an oilfield where I worked once said to me, “Crozier, if you don’t shut up I’m gonna wipe a booger on you.”
I was 18 at the time. After watching this corny video, I finally understand how he felt.
I just wanted to give Ben a pacifier while watching this video. My goodness. What a thin skinned baby he comes across as. Oh and BTW, when you write that there is a discernible human fingerprint on global warming and there isn’t, then it is likely that many will be critical of your “science”. head/desk, repeat.
It appears that Cook’s Q&A on reddit was nothing more than a shameless plug for his online propaganda YouTube course.
Re: Santer’s video, he would be destroyed by any competent trail attorney if he were crossed on any of his wild, unsubstantiated, speculations.