Social science provides a lot of useful insight as to why logic and data rarely convince warmists.
Guest essay by Matt Manos
Many of the posters and readers at WUWT have expressed frustration at convincing warmists. Using facts and logic seem to fall on deaf ears. There are some interesting social sciences theories on why warmist are unresponsive. I know the social sciences aren’t a favored science with this group but if you’ll bear with me, you’ll hopefully see how social science can be useful in describing why warmists are unreachable. And possibly, what to do about it.
In their latest speeches on global warming, Obama and the Pope weren’t trying to convince skeptics that CAGW is real. Instead, they were sending signals to their supporters on what “all right thinking people” should be saying. This is classic in-group/out-group communication. Obama and the Pope were setting up the talking points for their in-group members to use to determine who can be considered part of the tribe and who should be rejected for being outside of it. This is a process called Othering. Othering turns political foes into non-beings. Others have no value. Others can be discounted and ignored. Others can be mocked.
Obama and the Pope are examples of bellwethers; the sheep with the bell that the other sheep follow. Bellwether is not a derogatory term, it’s a descriptive term. The job of a political bellwether is to indicate the position that their followers should take in their everyday conversations. Obama and the Pope’s latest speeches function as position papers for the delegates of all right thinking people. You meet these people at work, church, school, at the coffee house, etc. The delegates will mirror the words that the President or the Pope used to identify other in-group members, normalize beliefs and mock out-group members. One of the main themes of both speeches was shame. Shame on those who aren’t right thinking people. Shame that they aren’t as intelligent and capable as “us.”
That type of smugness is almost impossible to penetrate. When a skeptic questions a warmist’s view on global warming/climate change, the warmist hears something vastly different than what the skeptic is saying. A skeptic might say, “The models don’t match the actual measured results.” What the warmist hears is how stupid deniers are because that’s what John Stewart told him he should think. If the warmist doesn’t prove that he thinks skeptics are stupid then he might be confused for a denier! And no one wants to be identified with being a denier because they’re mocked, don’t get tenure and don’t get invited to the right parties. No amount of science can penetrate the ROI the warmist has internalized in believing in CAGW.
Many of the warmist are running on pure rational ignorance. Rational ignorance is a belief that the cost/benefit to researching every issue is so low as to be a net negative in time utilization. Thus the ignorance is rational and everyone utilizes this mental process on certain topics. People who are rationally ignorant about global warming look to bellwethers that support their gut stance. Rationally ignorant warmists would look to world leaders, mockutainers and warmist scientists for guidance on how to communicate their position on global warming.
Penetrating rational ignorance is tough because the position warmists have taken isn’t based on logic. Their position is actually based on an appeal to authority. To question the rationally ignorant warmist is to question the field of science as a whole (to be a science denier) or to question the leadership of their favorite bellwether personalities. This will cause the rationally ignorant warmist to become defensive and try to stand up for their favorite bellwether. The rationally ignorant will also point to their favorite bellwethers and say, “Who am I to doubt all these intelligent people?” It’s intellectually offshoring. It’s lazy. It’s human nature.
The scientific method rejects outright in-group/out groups, Othering, bellwethers and rational ignorance. A scientist is supposed to follow the results on an experiment even if the results don’t support his hypothesis. The scientist is clearly not supposed to rig the data to ensure he gets invited to a party with the right people or continued funding. But science has a poor track record on controversial topics. It often takes decades to accept new theories that are clear winners (e.g., continental drift).
Scientists are still social animals. Social animals follow hierarchy and incentives. If you really want to win the debate on global warming, change the opinions of the bellwethers. Change the economic incentives for the global warming scientific paper mill. Otherwise you’re stuck debating only the people who are unable to change their minds because it would cost them personally to do so. Rare is the person intellectually honest enough to bite the hand that feeds or is willing to violate social norms to speak the truth.
Oh dear, this is going to get a few tongues waggling.
Here is one.
Matt Manos is mostly correct. I think the only significant element he forgot to mention is that the same description applies to many “deniers”.
Most deniers are basing their disbelief on sound science and facts, not emotions!
Most Deniers are following sound science not emotions!
“he forgot to mention is that the same description applies to many deniers.”
It is unlikely he forgot it, but you are correct. Sheep come in many colors.
Brute is correct. But that doesn’t make CAGW real or scientifically accurate.
The fact is most people are not thinkers, including people reading this blog and posting here. Most people are followers, and it costs them socially to step out of line. This includes CAGW believers and CAGW non-believers. In fact, historically most people who have spoken up for logical truth, in any area of life, science, mathematics, politics, or religion have been left out in the social void – with many dying friendless and penniless – even if their philosophical position was correct.
So, the the title of the article could be changed to “Why it’s so hard to convince someone to switch sets of heroes.”
To say that trolls are a tiresome lot is obvious. Just read any post by Brute. For further proof, read them all.
To say that warmists, in general, are ignorant is factually true.
And to say that “skeptics” are, in general, ignorant is also factually true.
Just read the comment sections on this and similar blogs.
What a sad comment. Akin to blowing raspberries.
Studies have shown that 97% of people who promote catastrophic anthropogenic global warming smoked a lot of pot in high school and college, and don’t think it damaged their neurons.
Take obie, for example. He admitted in an interview that 7th grade math stumped him (that would be pre-algebra), from which we can reasonably deduce he didn’t take hs physics, nor any physical science in college , and he admits to being a “choom gang” member in hs. To him the “science is settled. He doesn’t know what math beyond 6th grade level is, nor science, but he’s sure that fossil-fuels, whose extraction is run by capitalists, is a problem that can only be addressed by socializing ownership of fossil fuels, that is by transferring their control to pot smokers. So groovy.
Brute,
My favorite question to Global Warmists is, “show me one piece of evidence” (that has not been disproved i.e. Mann, et.al, or been provably altered……i.e. Land based temperature records).
I have yet to see one piece of said evidence…….care to share?
“the same description applies to many “deniers”.
The only deniers there are are science deniers like you, sunshine.
Which is easy to do when the science is constantly contradicting itself…
It’s like Obama’s campaign, you could hear want you wanted to hear….because he would say one thing one time, and the total opposite the next
WUWT just posted two contradicting papers almost back to back…
..one said the Pacific had cooled for the past decade, unlike the Atlantic that stores heat….
…and the next paper said the Atlantic had been cooling for the past decade
Well, Brutus, you got me there; until I hear one convincing explanation by any warmunist about how the crappy Climate Models are supposed to overcome their own, obvious, shortcomings to develop ANY predictive skill. Until that happens I will continue to CHERISH mocking idiot warmunists.
I think this “situation” is well established by Prof. Lindzen in his “Global Warming – Sensibilities and Science” https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/richard-lindzen-3.ppt Slide 3 “David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, discussing Republican Party reformers, claims that “they tend to take global warming seriously, not only on its merits, but in the belief that conservatives cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated classes and the entire East and West Coasts.”” and slide 23 summes it up good ”
“In a normal field, these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming/climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own – quite removed from science. One can reasonably expect that opportunism of the weak will lead to efforts to alter the data (though the results presented here have survived several alterations of the data already). Perhaps most important, these results will of necessity ‘offend the sensibilities of the of the educated classes and the entire East and West Coasts,’ and who would want to do that.” They have been “educated” by policy based science and admitting that will make them look and feel stupid?
Prof. Lindzen is a crank who stubbornly clings to his long-debunked “iris hypothesis” to explain global warming, because he just can’t admit to being wrong no matter what the data shows. He also, even at this late date, refuses to admit that smoking causes cancer, so his persistent wrongness is in no way limited to global warming.
How many skeptics does it take to change a warmist’s mind?
None, He has to want to change it himself. I speak from experience on that as a recovering liberal.
Like most of that dreary tribe, I was utterly convinced of my intellectual and moral superiority. We liberals were always right on the big issues, weren’t we? Vietnam, woman’s right to choose, civiil rights, etc.
So what changed? Dunno. Climate-gate had something to do with it. Al Gore’s patently false piety The fact that the MSM never, ever wrote that surely for some people in northern latitudes, global warming wasn’t an entirely bad thing.
Slowly I woke up. I’d also say that the change isn’t been with me so much, but with the progressives. They’ve become authoritarian, anti-free speech hypocrites. What’s going on in today’s universities is a tragedy.
When Barak Obama says the world not only continues to warm, but does so even faster than the most dire models predicted, he’s telling a lie. Plain and simple.
And I voted for the guy.
Twice.
I think that arc is one that many of us have followed. I was fortunate to be trained as a civil engineer so my walk away from liberalism and the left was quite short and intense. Like you it was the lying intolerance that I encountered amongst many of my peers on the left and the obviously destructive social and economic policies they espoused that resulted in my conservative principles today.
As for climate change, well I don’t believe you can spend any time observing the real world and believe man is having much of an impact at all. My career has been in dam design and construction of all sizes and types and the study of rainfall has been important in ensuring my dams didn’t fail. They don’t and that is largely because there is nothing supernatural going on with the climate. Almost 50 years in the field and still using much the same data as the guys who trained me.
Don’t get me started on sea levels either. Something that may or may not be going on and at a less than glacial pace is supposed to be scary. Puleeze! Man Made Climate Change is a political business built on a very trivial bit of actual science that the warmists want to use to rule the world. ( Dr Evil wicked laugh follows )
It’s largely a problem with the media, who have gradually weeded out the conservative voices among them. They’ve been acting as gatekeepers, ensuring that the really, really inconvenient facts didn’t reach you. I know an otherwise very intelligent man who didn’t read the Climategate Papers because, “They said on Huffington Post that there wasn’t anything in them.”
aneipris,
While I understand what you’re trying to say, the problem is precisely that of non-factual endorsement of catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming as a function of political viewpoint.
Or in shorter words, that AGW is a liberal cause.
AGW should be a scientific subject, not a political one. I object just a strenuously to being labelled a conservative because I am a climate change skeptic as I object to AGW being “liberal”.
Writes ticketstopper:
When referring to the milk-and-water socialists of America who call themselves “Liberals,” I refuse to let them fly that flag of convenience under which they perpetrate their piracies.
And they’re “progressive” only in the same sense as we in medicine describe a malignant disease which, after being subjected to prevailing standard of care in the effort to destroy it, has resumed aggressive growth and will almost certainly kill the patient.
That’s a progressive cancer.
I would offer those reading here an opportunity to look at an essay recently (9 March 2015) published by economist Walter Williams, titled “Global Warming: Debate is Only Settled For Fanatics,” from which I quote:
Winston Churchill was really a Whig all his life (in the British sense, not the American sense), but unfortunately for him Whiggism in Britain died when he was twelve. He never fundamentally changed, but he had to shift as best he could in the party system which existed in his adulthood.
They’ve become authoritarian, anti-free speech hypocrites.
It is not limited to any particular “side”. The war on cannabis users is proof of that.
My personal trouble is that I don’t have a “side”. I believe CAGW is bunk. I believe that cannabis is generally good. And arms in the hands of citizens is more beneficial than otherwise.
I am also in that small minority that believes government should leave people alone. That having so many “enforcers” is a bad idea. It gives people ideas. Like “there ought to be a law.” Well no. We already have too many laws.
“Welcome to the other side of the wall :)”
The wall has many sides:
“When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
A miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily,
Joyfully, playfully watching me.
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.”
Sad 🙁
This is an old story.
A guy from central America gave his version:
If you are not a Communist when you are young, you are a son of a *itch.
If you are a Communist when you are old you are a fool.
So many nice fairy tales of my youth have been jettisoned.
And, once you learn about the deceitfulness of government, and the madness of crowds, disbelieving the official line comes easily.
@Menicholas
You’re sure welcome. I was quite familiar with the quote, but had no idea who first said it… so when I thought that was likely the quote you were referring to just based on context, I went digging around a little out of curiosity. :0) Thanks for the additional link tracing it!
The quote I remember hearing is, “If you’re not a liberal by age 20 you have no heart. If you are not a conservative by age 40 you have no brain” I’m not sure what I’m quoting here. I thought that was Churchill quote.
Rational,
I had not realized that that particular quote was mis-attributed.
I came up with this. Thank you:
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/
“When Barak Obama says the world not only continues to warm, but does so even faster than the most dire models predicted, he’s telling a lie. Plain and simple.”
So true – they see they are failing to convince people so the whoppers get bigger and bigger – like his statement in South Africa, “if everybody’s raising living standards to the point where everybody’s got a car, and everybody’s got air conditioning, and everybody’s got a big house the planet will boil over,” it just makes him look foolish.
So glad you finally came around.
@Menicholas
Is that the one that goes something like: “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by 40, you have no brains” ? Variants use different ages, e.g., 25 and 35, or 15 and 20, etc. Anyhow, a statement along those lines is commonly but incorrectly attributed to Churchill when apparently no record can be found of him making such a statement.. Here’s one source that traces the sentiment back to John Adams: http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/25/john-adams-said-it-first/ “Thomas Jefferson preserved this quip, writing in a 1799 journal that Adams had said: “A boy of 15 who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at 20.””
@charlie,
Classic liberals still exist – we’re almost all fiscal and constitutional conservatives, TEA party supporters, and Libertarians. We vote primarily Republican (but loath establishment Republicans). The modern day liberal/progressives are anathema to classic liberalism, as is the Democratic party. In the early 1900’s, they called themselves progressives – when that term became a ‘dirty word’ to the general public, they relabeled themselves ‘liberals’ in a very very Orwellian fashion. Now that ‘liberal’ isn’t viewed so favorably, they’re shifting back to ‘progressive’ or at least toying with it. They’re essentially totalitarians, creatures of the far left who believe that we need big government with the elites deciding what all us lowly creatures should be doing with our lives and our earnings because we’re not bright enough to do a good job of deciding for ourselves. They push socialism/fascism. In the 60’s they rebelled against the man – but really only because they weren’t “the man” themselves. Now that they are in some positions of power, they’re pushing FOR the government, instead of against it. So if you really want classic liberalism, then you want to seek out TEA party supporters, etc.and ditch the left entirely.
Well how many times have we heard/read that; “I voted for him twice.”
I just watched the “start” of the Indianapolis 500. Well they called it a start, but they were actually racing before they even waved the flag, and once they did, they hadn’t even made it 60% of the way round the track, and one “race driver” decided he could pass the guy in front through a gap between him and the wall, that was narrower than the car.
I guess he had a good reason for doing it; but that didn’t include any consideration that he also took out the car in front, that he couldn’t possibly have passed there.
So just remember, how many you took out with you, when you voted twice for an incompetent boob, with an agenda.
Sadly, the very same people will become apart of history by voting for the first woman President of the United States. They too won’t consider the consequences for everyone else.
Winston Churchill has a memorable quote regarding the conversion from liberal to conservative with age.
What happened to classical liberals? You know the people that believed in live and let live and not bowing to authority? Now we have social justice warriors and people that feel comfortable witch hunting people with opposing views. We also have the war against the rich and the business oriented. My liberalism is hanging on a very thin string these days.
and to show you what good people we gun-totin’, whiskey drinkin’, rootin’ tootin’ right wing nut jobs can be…..I forgive you……twice…..have you read C. Lander’s STUFF WHITE PEOPLE LIKE?……pretty funny
But at least you can’t vote for him again
And did they get you to trade heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? Cold comfort for change? And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
Welcome to the other side of the wall 🙂
So where is the fundamental change internally, that will prevent you from enthusiastically embracing the next pseudo-scientific scam? GK
As a man who voted for New Labour here in the UK 20 years ago, I am now a staunch Conservative. Another recovered liberal who saw the fallacy of the CAGW scam and the intolerance of the Left.
I have encountered many liberals who became conservatives and warmist who became sceptics, but none who did the opposite (sceptic to alarmist, conservative to liberal). Is this because as we grow up we learn to see through the BS?
While I agree with the post in all its detail, I respectfully suggest that it greatly understates the “hard-headed “, obstinate imperviousness of the ostensibly “carbon-phobe” good-comrades to rational, persuasive discourse. Remember, “warmists” believe that carbon-emissions THREATEN THE VERY LIVES OF BABES YET UNBORN!!!!, that CO2-spew IMPERILS THE VERY SURVIVAL OF THE POLAR BEARS!!! And yet, these very same “warmists” are not moved by their own concerned-nerd, worry-wart, scare-mongering belief in the CO2-peril, to bother to reduce their own carbon footprints–a reduction they could easily achieve through a zero-carbon video-conferencing of all those non-stop, brazen-hypocrite, swinish, carbon-glutton, frequent-flyer eco-confabs of theirs.
I mean, like, can there be anything more scandalously, pig-headedly, and shamelessly defiant of moral and intellectual suasion than that? I mean, like, let’s be frank–when we’re talkin’ about the difficulty of convincing “warmists”, we are, of necessity, talkin’ about about an “I-can’t-hear-you-I-can’t-hear-you!” mentality, on the part of our greenwashed-betters, that is, at bottom, a trashy, “got-mine”, self-indulgent trough-seeking of the lowest-character. A mind-set that can, indeed, be further characterized as an infantile, parasitic, spoiled-brat sense of entitlement, that, in turn, springs from a lefty-collectivist conviction that the purpose of society is to serve as a hovering, smothering-mummy, lactating “tit”, ever there to assuage the immediate-gratification whiny-needs of the hive-tools, in on the deal. I mean, like, what a bunch of creep-outs, these two-faced, “warmist” flim-flammers are!–not to mention the ever-corpulent Al Gore’s unsightly flab.
Although I am of the opinion that trying to “convince” the “Hive Bozos” of anything, is a waste of my valuable time, I am prepared to offer them a proposition:
When you “warmists” start LEADING FROM THE FRONT AND BY INSPIRING PERSONAL EXAMPLE IN MATTERS OF CARBON-REDUCTION!!! and begin PRACTICING WHAT YOU PREACH!!!, then I’ll undertake to sass-back at my trusty, little B. S.-detector when it “reads” your greenwashed, Gaia-freak agit-prop, as it always does, as a “SCAM!!! RIP-OFF!!! CON-JOB!!! DON’T TRUST THESE DORKED-UP ASSHOLES!!!” (that’s an exact quote from the digital display), to the best of my ability. Deal, guys?
Enjoy your little, carbon-wallow blow-out at that COP-21 hive-swarm you’ll be holding in Paris, later this year, comrades!
Organized criminals learned a long time ago that you do not arrange “business” over electronic communications. So a teleconference is right out.
Not only that, but even more egregious is the fact that they utterly ignore the impact CURRENT expenditures and programs ostensibly aimed at reducing man’s CO2 emissions are having on people. Those programs are literally responsible for killing people NOW. They push the cost of food drastically higher, which has resulted in starvation and death in some areas. They also cause increased fuel poverty which results in far more deaths too.
But those pushing AGW True Belief totally ignore those facts and the harm they’re doing to people alive today, all based on the speculation that maybe possibly perhaps someday many decades in the future there might possibly maybe be harm from global warming. All while also ignoring all the potential benefits that global warming might bring, such as increased crop production, increased forestation and healthier growth and greater drought and pest resistance of all plants, areas previous too cold to farm or reasonable live in opened up to increased wildlife, farming, living, etc., etc., etc.
Neil, if you listen to the warmistas carefully, they nearly always make mention of the future of THEIR OWN children and grandkids.
They could not give a tiny rat’s ass about yours or mine.
Epic ranting Mike!
Bravo.
Gums
Come on Mike, tell us how you really feel.
I would bet you have lower “carbon footprint” than 90% of the warmunist group
One good way to reason with a warmunist was detailed at the end of Clacy’s “Rainbow Six”.
Gums sends……
hard stuff, mike, raises a smile!
But you aren’t up to conversations. Negotiatians?
Reaching warmists with hands cupping their ears?
What’s the thread’s on.
Greetings – Hans
” “I-can’t-hear-you-I-can’t-hear-you!” mentality” In my experience it’s more a “I will not hear you” mentality.
Yet those same warmists who are so worried about the yet to be born babies, can’t get enough PP slaughterhouses built to rid the world of those pesky clump of tumor parasitical hanger oners (insert any dehumanising term for an unborn baby that are normally used by the pro-choice crowd) that are going to over populate the world and destroy the environment for the poor animals. I think I have the argument down pat, yes?
Mr. Manos,writes:
“People who are rationally ignorant about global warming look to bellwethers that support their gut stance. Rationally ignorant warmists would look to world leaders, mockutainers and warmist scientists for guidance on how to communicate their position on global warming.”
That fits almost all warmist/AGW believing people I encounter, at the large Facebook Climate Discussion Group,where they do this all the time, it is an appeal to authority. My responses there have been almost 100% based on what the available science has on a particular discussion,often using the “official” data to contradict what they are saying and to show how bad the IPCC projected forecasts have been over the years.
My brother use the usual horrible media outlets as his source of warmist propaganda, while I would point out what they omit or mislead in their claims,using the “official” data with actual science research that have been considered credible by time. He counters with consensus, argument from Authority and says who am I to say scientists are wrong, when they have education in the field and I do not.
Why just this morning,THIS very guest essay was posted in Facebook,here are the replies by the very people Mr. Manos is talking about:
“David Walters we’re not convinced of what? that 97% of climate scientists are wrong?”
“Mark Albert If it walks like a Duck.Acts like a Duck.Talks like a duck and leaves footprints like a Duck..97% of my friends are telling me it’s a Duck.. Why should I believe the 2%, that don’t say anything, or the 1 % that is telling me it’s a Chicken?”
“Mark Albert WUWT again?! hahaha they’re site sucks and they know it…LMAO..sorry I still need my coffee..”
“David Walters Playing word games again Torsten.”
“David Walters only in your mind. Peer reviewed data was provided. You have shit…”
Mark Albert then post an article about a heat wave in India, thus leaving the topic entirely.
The rest of the still short comment section here,
https://www.facebook.com/groups/climate.discussion/453351604833004/?comment_id=453477704820394¬if_t=like#
The next time one of your friends or acquaintances pulls the appeal to authority, just share my listing of skeptical scientists with ’em. Start it off by pointing out that it is a logical fallacy to use appeal to authority, but that if they insist on doing so, they ought to at least get the direction right… vastly more scientists have put in writing that they do NOT believe any significant AGW is occurring than the number who’ve put in writing they think it is- and that includes some of the most eminent scientists of our times, some Nobel Prize winners in the hard sciences, and even some IPCC authors. Then launch the list below. They’ll likely come back trying to ridicule the petition project while ignoring the thousands on the other links (other links which, even without the petition project, have more signatures than anything the AGW supporters can point to)… but such attacks of the petition project are also false and grossly dated. Early on AGW True Believers put a handful of obviously false names on the list to try to torpedo it. So they started over and got hard copy signatures from each scientist and verified their credentials. The list is sound. Anyhow, hope this helps.
**1350+ peer reviewed research papers supporting skeptical arguments http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
**100 eminent scientists including Nobel winners and IPCC lead authors contesting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW-e.g., human caused) who wrote the U.N. http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=d4b5fd23-802a-23ad-4565-3dce4095c360
**31,000+ scientists disavowing AGW, including over 9,000 Ph.D’s
http://www.petitionproject.org
**Over 1000 scientists worldwide disavowing AGW signed onto USA Senate report http://hatch.senate.gov/public/_files/USSenateEPWMinorityReport.pdf
or
http://www.climatedepot.com/2010/12/08/special-report-more-than-1000-international-scientists-dissent-over-manmade-global-warming-claims-challenge-un-ipcc-gore-2/
**100 plus scientists rebuke Obama as ‘simply incorrect’ on global warming, March 30, 2009
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/9764
[ Note: Many of the scientists are current and former UN IPCC reviewers and some have reversed their views on man-made warming and are now skeptical. Also note Nobel Laureate for Physics Dr. Ivar Giaever signed. Giaever endorsed Obama for President in an October 29, 2008 letter. See: Portfolio.com]
**In 2012, 49 former NASA astronauts and scientists wrote to protest against the anti-scientific, alarmist position being adopted by Hansen and Schmidt at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). They wrote: “We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.”
or: 49 Former NASA Scientists Send A Letter Disputing Climate Change
**Sixteen Concerned Scientists: No Need to Panic About Global Warming There’s no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to ‘decarbonize’ the world’s economy.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html
**Professor Lindzen has systematically destroyed every CAGW argument:
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02148/RSL-HouseOfCommons_2148505a.pdf
**This one NOT scientists, just the general population of the world, across the board: UN Poll Reveals: Global Population Not Convinced by Climate Change Scaremongering A global poll of more than 6.5million people has placed climate change at the very bottom of a long list of priorities, with the finding being consistent across both genders, almost all age ranges, all education levels and in most regions of the world. (h/t Watts Up With That)…
Back to scientists:
**“The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity. The pain and suffering it is inflicting on families in developing countries must no longer be tolerated.” – Patrick Moore, Ph.D. and Greenpeace co-founder. See also: Why I am a Climate Change Skeptic
**Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”
**eminent “Prof. Hal Lewis resigns from the American Physical Society, writing:
“The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.”
from: NoTricksZone by Pierre Gosselin http://notrickszone.com/
**One of the fathers of Germany’s modern green movement, Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book together with geologist/paleontologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning. Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, “Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?”
Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Well-connected to Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne [The Cold Sun] cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.
Conclusion: Climate catastrophe is called off. The science was hyped.
**Dr. Lawrence Solomon, once a believer in AGW, realized belatedly, that he was wrong, because he found out that there were too many eminent Professors, who were skeptics and he decided to write a book, titled: “The Deniers” and he explained that he was sad about the enormous corruption among the doomsday “scientists”, especially when they were in the management of institutions like universities and weather-departments. http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/06/23/lawrence-solomon-supreme-skeptics/
**Joe D’Aleo, executive director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project and first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel, is not surprised by the peer reviewed published survey results of Meteorologists who are also TV forecasters, showing that only 1 in 4 American Meteorological Society broadcast meteorologists agrees with United Nations’ claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming. He says:
“AMS has tried very hard to brainwash broadcast meteorologists by forcing them to attend conferences and teleconferences with one-sided presentations where global warming evangelism is preached,” D’Aleo said. “Broadcasters send me notifications they get from AMS telling them they must attend these conferences where only the alarmist point of view is preached. This survey shows that broadcast meteorologists are not swayed by these one-sided presentations.
**Like Professor Emeritus Robert Tennekens, a Dutch professor in meteorology, who after a 10-year stint lecturing in the U.S. was asked to lead the Dutch meteorological department in the Bilt, Holland. After he found out about the corrupt way his staff was following the I.P.C.C.’s computer-modeling, he tried to stamp this habit out, but because too many of his staff and colleagues had powerful friends in the then Dutch government, he was sacked from his job.
**Professor Bellamy the British botanist also received the sack, when he decided to speak out against the AGW corruption on B.B.C. That is not science, that is corruption, when honest people dare to speak out for the truth and then get sacked from their job/career.
**Professor Tim Flannery who was appointed by the Australian Prime Minister and who is paid Audlrs. 180,000 in tax-payers’ money to advise her on climate change, predicted over and over again for the last 5 years, that Australia by 2009 would be a total arid and barren place, with all the dams in the major cities totally empty. Well, since last year a number of states saw huge floods destroying their properties and crops as dams in Queensland overflowed and the same now is happening there and we in Sydney, New South Wales experienced the coldest days in our summer since 1916! [text from last three items copied from another commentator]
And on and on and on – the list is nearly endless, I’ve just pulled a small number of such quotes to post here.
So in summary, warmists are just thick.
Well, thick, perhaps, but more specifically, arrogant, full of hubris. The problem is pride – “I am right and such a brilliant light, but you are completely wrong and stupid, and I will happily bend the world to fit my world-view, even if the world completely breaks and shatters in the process, because I am GOD (!!!) and all viewpoints must agree with mine! My view is right so it cannot be changed. I know all there is to know and have no need that you tell me anything.”
THAT is the real problem – at the heart is a self-idolator. They call it “assertiveness”, but it is nothing more than arrogant, self-worshipping pride. The infant that never knew discipline and never grew up.
Many people have the sycophant gene. In the past , people like that were referred to as ‘lick-spittles’. It happens on both sides of the ‘climate fence’. As a deviant, lacking that gene, I’ve had to deal with some real BS in my life.
Is it a recessive or a dominant gene?
Are you homo or hetero (zygous) for that trait?
,-)
Urederra, how did you wink with only one eye?
I, frankliy, don’t have a clue. I just can’t stand ‘suck-ups’. Never could. Someone agreeing with me simply because i am ‘someone’, makes me want to puke.
As far as breeding is concerned. I decided long ago that I am too intelligent for that. Human race? Not my problem.
I am not gay, if that is what you are asking. I would probably prefer to be ‘bi’. It’s a damn nuisance that I only have an interest in half the human race
On second thinking of your comment , I think it is dominant. My grandfather was executed because he wouldn’t bend the knee. I’m kinda proud about that. Showing the middle finger and demanding proof is part of my nature. I am probably lucky (or clever) to have survived this long.
I speak to many people about many things, but one that get’s many “spooked”, especially those of a religious bent, is the word zygote.
Patrick
May 24, 2015 at 6:21 am
“I speak to many people about many things, but one that get’s many “spooked”, especially those of a religious bent, is the word zygote.”
That’s funny. I spook those of an atheist bent by calling them lumps of meat.
Patrick
May 24, 2015 at 6:21
calling them lumps of meat.
Dangerous heritage, Patrick.
Politically correct NSDAP speech:
Lumpen Pack, Relativisten, Vaterlandslose Gesellen!
: Your’s not to think, to reason – Your’s to believe* in the Führer, to believe in the Partei, in the Volksgemeinschaft!
mod – sigh! Hans
*to believe the Führer is on the best for the Volk – not to sacrifice it to a revenge WWII.
Mike Bromley,
How to wink one eye? Easy, when it is a brown one.
Thats where we are all from. Disprove the biology.
Going back even further, we all started with a random and randy thought in the minds of two (or maybe just one?) people who knew nothing of us at the time. So what?
“DirkH
May 24, 2015 at 7:19 am”
Nah, not really. I know I am a lump meat…in fact in some cultures “we” are called “Tall Pig”. But zygote get’s the “goat”. All humans are zygotes after fertilisation. Single cell undivided. And, unsurprisingly, the anus forms first. I guess politicians are really big zygotes!
Alex,
Niccollo Machiavelli devoted chapters in The Prince to warning about “flatterers”.
There are flatterers (suckups, lickspittles, sycophants, etc.) that gather around every source of political power. The sad thing is, lots of folks in charge are susceptible to the sycophants (servile flatterers) that always appear and surround them, telling them what they want to hear. The flatterers get a payoff, too.
Machiavelli warns strongly against them. But not too many read The Prince these days.
Not so much bellwethers as bellends…
where do I send the bill for cleaning Earl Gray off my laptop screen?
More bedwetter than bellwether might be more accurate…
Well said. Pinched my comment. May confuse some of our American cousins….
Easy enough to google. I love the British language and slang. Very colorful. U.S. Language is so direct it’s boring. The phrase with the same meaning here would simply be d**k-head.
Well we should start by calling them “chicken littles”. They call us deniers and we call them warmers” How lame of a response is that? Let’s get to the heart of their thought process. “chicken littles”.
I tend to refer to the worst of them as “AGW True Believers” – it’s their religion after all, and all who question it are instantly labelled heretics who should be burned at the stake. That or “Watermelons” – Green on the outside, Red in the middle (e.g., socialists/communists/leftists bent on control, power, wealth redistribution as they see fit, etc.) The AGW True Believers, are, of course “useful idiots” (h/t Hitler & Stalin) for the Watermelons.
I have been using the phrase, “reality denier,” in hope that someone will ask what I mean. Then I state that satellite data show that temps have not risen in over eighteen years, despite what a government agency has been claiming with their records. Usually, they are not familiar with satellite data, but very familiar with the ever-growing incompetence of government agencies (at least in the U.S., and from what I have read, the UK as well).
Listened to chatter on the BBC yesterday about AGW, and each speaker (pro AGW) reinforced the next speaker with cheering from the audience. I was trying to get a handle on this groupthink and concluded that, as it gathered pace, it was like some sort of religious awakening where logic and counter argument would have sounded quite alien.
This ‘Saving the planet’ meme is resistant to logic, another dominant section of our collective brains is operating here.
In my opinion, I believe that approx half of the population have the “sheep gene”. Seriously.
They will always obey authority and try to do whatever is fashionable. This compliance probably has had, and still has?, survival benefits. Their brains are shut down and they do not care, they do not reason, they just follow and appeal to authority. They also win when voting.
50% ? I think you are being over optimistic….
Yea, more likely between 70% and 95%, in my humble experience. It might vary per subject, but I doubt it somehow.
Please look up the work by Stanley Milgram on the prevalence of the sheep gene in humans…….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Perhaps they simply do not realize they are losing when the vote for the “sheep leader.” They are mostly blind to the axe falling on their necks from the one they vote for.
Very true, but according to my personal experience, the usual majority of “sheeple” might be a good deal bigger than only 50%.
And I think, your suggestion “This compliance probably has had, and still has?, survival benefits” is even true in extreme societies as e.g. Nazi-Germany or Stalinist Russia, where the uncritical regime followers were probably less often killed proportionally in WW2 than dissidents, who had to fight usually in Penal Battalions as cannon fodder or were killed by their own countrymen in concentration camps. And after WW2, it was the majority of “sheeple” (in Germany or Japan) who could swap their ideology most easily according to the demands of the new rulers in order to continue their civil careers most successfully again…
The same degree of “survival benefits” for conformist people does exist in today’s Science and Politics as well, and that is the main reason for the astonishing success of the CAGW cargo cult in the last 2 decades. But an ideology can collapse quickly when its base crumbles. So, after some years of significant global cooling with further rising CO2 concentrations or a very rough economic global crisis, the CAGW religion will be “a thing of the past”, and then of course, the main bulk of its followers will claim that they have been always skeptical of it in their private reasoning… 😉
Thank you Jones, that experiment is exactly mirroring my experience.
Only it showed 65% obediance to authority, but in a group not representative to population.
The sheep gene hypothesis also explains why the collective left believes in AGW,, their leaders told them to.
The individual right, if there is a such, is more on the fence perhaps.
If you take a pair of shears to the sheep you can call them sheep with no clothes on and have two metaphors for the price of one! : )
It is the Psalm 23 Principle
Tis’ 97% lambies when climate scientists. 🙂
Bjorn: ” I believe that approx half of the population have the “sheep gene”. ” It must be much more than that how else would you explain the popularity of religion?
Religion is explained by Darwin. For whatever reason, No society absent a religion ever survived. Some religions provided the right moral principals for building a large, thriving society. Off-hand, I cannot think of a single successful culture in history that was not based on a diety of some form.
Genesis 48:15
“May the God before whom my fathers
Abraham and Isaac walked faithfully,
the God who has been my shepherd
all my life to this day,
Indeed Jtom it is in our genes since it gives survival advantage and thus explains the popularity of the CAGW. Therefore 50% is a too low estimate.
Jtom: I think we’re on the verge of proving you’re right.
Keith Minto
Do some research on the medieval universities founded by the Catholic Church. You’ll find that the ‘argument/counter argument’ method was one of the main ones in use. Oh, and they also studied logic. Shame, isn’t it when facts get in the way of prejudice.
As in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Apologia. Christian apologetcs is based on a point counterpoint formula.
Now, if you’re talking Islam, which has no apologetic component, well…..
Universities were by far the exception, not the rule. Various religions have a very long history of doing all they could to consolidate and keep power, not to foster a questioning skeptical attitude.
From personal experience, I know it’s extremely rare to even consider that one’s opinion on a “Big Issue” might be wrong, or might not have been properly formed in the first place. Then it takes a lot of conscious effort to re-evaluate with a fresh, open mind. And personal research takes time. So it makes perfect sense that changing minds is almost impossible, especially when the mind is your own.
Has anyone conducted a poll or survey of people who–like myself–changed their opinion on the subject of CAGW from “believe” to “reject?” It seems like a smart research psychologist could pick out common threads/contexts/trigger events, etc., in the stories, and propose methods to help spark the conversion in others.
Worth a shot? Or pipe dream?
I’m another one. An average sheep.
I took all my friends to see An Inconvenient Truth. Was sold on AGW, until a friend pointed me to a few contradictory facts & results of cap & trade.
Now I try to keep an open mind … in both directions (sceptic vs denier):
– is GW caused by A? How much?
– is GW happening?
– local/regional climate does Seem to be changing and the Internet has given us much greater awareness & ability to gather info & evaluate….
– if GW is real, what’s the best way to prepare?
– should one support AGW to end fossil fuel pollution (50% of USA states have mercury warnings from coal; was my mother’s Alzheimer’s caused by living downwind of Nanticoke Coal Generating Station? I’ll never know, but the air is cleaner with less asthma now that it’s closed)?
– should one support Renewable Energy to rid us of the terrible legacy of unaffordable, uninsurable, unstorable Nuclear electricity?
– and several more …!
You still have a ways to go. You start off talking about “open mind” and “both directions”. Yet everything that follows is AGW speek. “Unaffordable, uninsurable, unstorable” LOL. Real scientific.
“…Unaffordable, uninsurable, unstorable, Nuclear Energy…”
You obviously know nothing about nuclear energy and are still drinking the coolaid. Nuclear has a bad reputation for the same reasons that global warming is a fad.
You MUST be joking. Commercial nuclear power in fact has one of the best safety record of any industry, and in fact on a per unit energy produced life cycle basis, is by far the safest method of producing energy – safer than coal, oil, natural gas, wind, solar, and hydro. You are, in fact, safer working in a USA commercial nuclear power plant than you are in your own home (darned all those ladders to fall off of at home, kids toys to trip over, etc.).
Nuclear is also far cheaper than any of the “renewable/sustainable/green” energy sources, again, on a per unit energy produced life cycle basis.
Nor is there any problems with insuring it – in fact nuclear power plants self insure without problems, and as a backup the government provides additional coverage – coverage which has never come close to being needed.
Nor is there any problems “storing” nuclear power. I’m not even sure what you mean by that… it’s incredibly easy to take a nuclear plant offline – in a split second in fact if needed – and the energy production ability is still all there and it can be restarted easily. Or if you’re meaning waste an or by-products, again, there is no technical or scientific problem with storage. Only political problems.
And just what “terrible legacy?” The one where it’s produced roughly 20% of our entire nation’s electricity for many decades now more safely than any other commercial scale method of producing energy? And roughly 80% of France’s – and they not only have about the cheapest energy in Europe as a result, but export huge amounts of electricity to other nations, all thanks to their nuclear program.
Not to mention nuclear power has a tiny environmental impact compared to all the other commercial scale electrical production methods.
So I do hope you just suckered me in with Poe’s law and were being sarcastic in your wording, and not serious – because if you were serious, you were also dead wrong on all counts.
You would also have to do the research on those who changed from ‘denier’ to ‘believer’ and check for cash incentives or fame incentives on both.
I think that many who change positions on a “Big Issue” convince themselves they did not “really” change sides. We fool ourselves all the time — after all, preventing us fooling ourselves is a large reason for the scientific method, no?
I knew man-made global warming was junk science when I fist heard of it in the 70s. The Kiehl and Trenberth energy budget of the late 90s is so physically impossible that I just knew that the game would be up when rational people saw it. But here we are nearly 20 years later and it is still dogmatically believed by alarmists and luke-warmers alike. I don’t think we could even get people to believe “Heat is the transfer of thermal energy between two bodies that are at different temperatures, and is not equal to thermal energy” which was written in an old textbook of mine.
I saw a guy write at Goddard’s site some time ago that a photon from some ice on the surface of the earth could radiate to the sun and make it hotter. (paraphrased of course) My hand before God, I swear that this madness will end someday but it might be in the far, far future.
It is the net radiation. And yes the ice does make the sun hotter. None the less the flow is still from hot to cold.
Do a thought experiment –> two bodies. Hot and cold. Now heat up the cold. Keep heating until they are the same temperature. Think about the radiation between them. And the “net” radiation flow. The “net” gets smaller as the cold body temperature gets closer to the hot.
Since radiation goes up as T^4 once the temperatures differ significantly the cold body can be ignored –> for most problems.
You were probably not a sheep in the first place. Examine your thought processes on other major topics and you probably consider many angles before coming to a decision.
I too was originally convinced on global warming, but that was before I had heard any reasoned opposition.
I used to take it for granted that it was true, but I never thought it was very important.
I have changed my opinions on many things over the years, almost never to an alternative view which was available off the shelf. My current worldview is so unusual that I have had to create my own terminology to describe it. I can confirm that thinking for yourself is not a route to happiness.
This type of thinking also pervades much of the climate science community and the entire science establishment.
This intellectual laziness, intellectual offshoring, is one of the reasons its so important IMO that its important to emphasise demonstrable flaws in the bellwethers.
Forst, the intellectual “offshoring” IMO is likely an evolutionary survival trait. If we burn all our precious energy revisiting decisions we’ve already made, thoughts we’ve already had, we won’t have much time left for other important activities like finding food. Just my hypothesis, but it fits in nicely IMO with all the other energy conservation optimisations exhibited by the human body.
So how do you get past this automatic response?
You bring automatic responses into conflict.
For example, Pachauri’s ghastly behaviour while head of the IPCC, in which he has been accused of being a sexual predator. Decent people have an instinctive loathing of sex predators.
But the bellwether response is the IPCC is beyond reproach.
So by forcing people whose instinctive response is that the IPCC is beyond reproach, to consider the fact that Pachauri, head of the IPCC, allegedly got away with being an odious sexual predator for several years, you bring two offshoring automatic responses into conflict.
What happens next is very similar to what happens in a computer if it detects a crisis – the automatic responses can’t handle the situation, so they send out a call for help, and force people’s brain to engage and start thinking, start reevaluating the situation, to discover a resolution.
And in the case of Pachauri, the only sane resolution to this conflict, is that there may be something very wrong with the top management of the IPCC.
I agree that Panchauri’s behaviour was reprehensible, but the story was quickly buried by the media. Without an objective, questioning media, the road to common sense is going to be difficult. The left press are pushing the right press into seeming to be extreme, the reasonable middle ground is being lost. I am thinking here of how Fairfax is characterising Andrew Bolt as extreme, and therefore as not worthy of attention.
Is there a serious right-leaning TV information channel in the US?
Define “serious”.
After all, is there a serious left-leaning TV information channel in the US?
serious means not Fox-like
Fox is bad, indeed, but on par with all others.
Or, which would you say is a serious left-leaning TV information channel in the US?
“Fox is bad, indeed, but on par with all others.”
No-go-zones inside Paris (Paris intra muros) bad?
Well, at least Fox said the info was baseless.
The TV channel Canal+ (who led the email fight against Fox) said UKIP was “far right”, on par with Front National (= anti-immigration anti-Europe anti-free trade socialist and nationalist party, more left than the Parti Socialiste). C+ will not apologize about that statement!
I don’t watch fox because I don’t have television subscription, but when I did watch I didn’t see much difference between them and the msm, except there were some conservative opinion shows on the network, which weren’t available from the msm.
A question for the simple tourista, Is there something specific about fox news that has given you this opinion. My reason for asking is I see people online saying stuff like “fauxnews” or “it’s all lies from fox news”, which I find hard to believe that nothing said is true.
Let me digress: Why is it so hard to convince a reopen911-ist?
I think reopen911 stuff is an excellent exercice from all POV.
And why do so much people accept the official NIST-backed explanation? I think that few people believe CD (controlled demolition) of WTC because few people have been explained this theory.
Perhaps we are not be in “belief equilibrium” here (ie debunking the reopen911 may increase the website’s audience and increase the number of reopenists).
We cannot assume people reject CD because it’s a crazy theory, that is unscientific. Some people accept the NIST explanation because the gov says it is the correct one, period.
I like this stuff, because it’s actually pretty simple.
Maybe reopen and WTC theories are a model of something?
And don’t forget economy of ignorance: there is so much stuff I don’t have time to review myself, doing a bibliographic study is so costly, etc.
Ignorance (which is free) is sometimes the optimal choice.
The problem with 9/11 stuff is that you are asking people to choose between trusting the government to trusting a conspiracy theorist. Not exactly a great choice. Having delved into both I’m inclined to believe neither, however as the government is the only one of the two that has actual power, they’re the only ones whose falsehoods I care about.
Lets nix the off-topix 911 stuff please
YAH, STOP IT
“off-topix 911 stuff”
What stuff? Alternate theories or beliefs in alternate theories?
I’m personally happy with the WTC explanation – two giant planes full of jet fuel slamming into tall buildings, a huge out of control accelerant fire, buildings simply aren’t constructed to take that kind of treatment. Its a wonder they didn’t collapse immediately. As a British mate said, it was a sucker punch – a surprise attack which worked because it had never been done before.
I flew Emirates Airlines October 2001, that flight was full of the scariest people I’ve ever seen – Russian mercenaries on their way to the Middle East, oil workers, a few utter freaks of nature who were obviously doing air marshal duty. If some idiot had pulled out a boxcutter and said “I’m taking over the plane”, they would have needed to identify him by his DNA.
Normally no, but the wtc buildings 1 and 2 were EXPLICITLY designed with that risk in mind. It was one of the design requirements.
You’d better be careful getting into this subject since it’s a taboo here. Let’s just say that you seem to be suffering from some of that intellectual “offshoring” you were referring to.
I’d suggest you try to resolve your “automatic response conflict” elsewhere than WUWT but it is a good illustration of the social problem as you correctly pointed out.
Then again, Building 7 was not hit by anything and fell over anyway. It fell in the way that people will pay demolition experts a lot of money to make happen.
Forgot #7.
Buildings are designed with high wind and storms in mind, but that does not mean a tornado, hurricane, or even a freak straight line wind will not cause severe damage to one.
I have studied the relevant information, and all of the silly videos…the planes caused damage which led to the collapse.
Steel does not need to melt to lose much of it’s strength, and the mass of the parts of the buildings that were hit made it inevitable that if there was the slightest movement of that mass, that nothing could possibly stop the pancaking.
There is no “there” there.
Please not conflate CAGW and (t)ruther…ism, they have nothing in common.
…the mass of the parts of the buildings ABOVE the parts that were hit…
Building 7 was not hit by anything, except the flaming wreckage of the largest structural collapse in history.
Seriously, reopen911 is to “false flags” detection what Lewandowski is to sociology. They can find a proof of A and explain its proves not(A).
I can’t believe real sceptics (sceptics about everything) are taking them seriously. Half-sceptics (= I distrust everything from the gov and trust every else), however…
Confronting reopen is a training of real scepticism.
I am sorry we can’t discuss reopen here because it is a real world experience of people scepticism (unlike Lew’s silly studies).
*rolls the eyes*
The problem with this essay is the you can as easily substitute “skeptic” for “warmist” and the observations are as sound. “Rational ignorance is the belief that the cost / benefit to researching every issue is so low as to be net negative in time utilisation” Of course it is, I have been at it for 9 years and am still ignorant though I beleive , relatively, still rational. The reference to the “scientific method” is simplistic. “Continental drift” Is a poor descriptor of plate tectonics and is intuatively a large bite to swallow. Not until the data on magnetic reversals confirmed that the altlantic was spreading from the ridge was the theory ascendent. The last paragraph on financial incentives implies that the sceptics should bribe the warmist scientists! Sorry, at the moment I’m short of a few bob.
The problem with your equivalency is your ignoring the point made about observation versus belief and fudging data to reinforce that belief. If the data and the results of recent research supported AGW and its impact on T (historical as well as present day) most here would accept the hypothesis. In the absence of hard proof what you have is skepticism. Show me the money :-).
Continental drift is indeed a good example. Any school pupil could see at a glance how the continents and other land masses seemed to fit like jigsaw pieces. Rock samples and other geological data showed the theory was feasible. Yet, prior to about 1970 all sorts of crazy ideas were put forward to explain the obvious. The magnetic record did kill those ideas but for a long time any theory of moving land masses was derided despite other evidence.
My high school geography teacher did mention this weird German guy’s idea of continental drift, and noted the close fir of Africa and South America. He thought it had at least a superficial plausibility. I was dubious, because I thought the continents were firmly attached to the rest of the Earth’s crust, including the bits under the sea, and I couldn’t think of anything to move them anyway.
On the other hand, I found the theory for the production of fold mountains totally unconvincing. (That was the “weight of sediment leads to die ways pressure” theory.)
Sideways pressure. Bloody self-correct software can’t read my mind.
I read a book about continental drift in 1969 at the age of eight and immediately knew it was true.
Beside for the close fit of the coastlines (they fit better when the continental shelf is matched, rather than the parts above sea level, as would be expected), there is the overwhelming weight of fossil evidence, which are imbedded in matching geologic strata. Alfred Wegener knew this well over a hundred years ago. Not knowing the mechanism for something which is obviously true is a poor reason to doubt it is true…rather, it is a good reason to search for the mechanism.
No you can’t, because the “in group” is warmist throughout the democratic world.
All major political parties are warmist. All the government and supranational bureaucracies are warmist. Most of the prominent news organisations are warmist (in the UK the BBC has over half the news market and breaks its charter to remain biased). All the prominent science publications are warmist. To a close approximation all the funding for research is allocated by warmists. All the committees in the world’s major scientific organisations are warmist: note that the very few who ballot members don’t find such views reflected by any overwhelming proportion of members.
Sceptics are marginalised, despised, mocked and threatened.
I wonder, are you aware that you are exaggerating?
Brute, I see no exaggerating from Doubting Rich. That’s exactly the way it is.
Which specific statements do you claim are exaggerated?
diogenese2
May 23, 2015 at 11:46 pm
“The problem with this essay is the you can as easily substitute “skeptic” for “warmist””
But skeptics come in two forms:
Skeptics who simply follow a script, yes, but thinking skeptics who actually demonstrated that the CAGW theory was away overblown, no. It’s easier for unthinking people to go along with one side or the other, but skeptics who have come to a position through seeing forecasts/projections are wrong, the science and statistics are improperly applied, that data has been manipulated, selected and rejected to fit….
I started by not having any reason to think there might be an agenda or that the science was jiggered. At a glance, it made sense that clearing all that land and using all that energy could have a significant effect. However, the ‘pause’ focused my attention on the issue. The earth systems seemed to be much more complex than advertised. The earth’s air and seas seemed to be able to counteract the simply understood linear science being applied. It became clear there was skulduggery afoot with the data. It became clear that critics were been vilified and marginalized rather than debated with.
As a geologist (and engineer) I already was aware of the swings into ice ages and warm periods (I don’t subscribe to the modern definition of ice ages being the whole works – that’s sloppy, confusing terminology). I was also aware that some day we were going to slide back into the cold so thought a little warmth added was a good thing. As it turned out, it was good in more immediate ways, too – better harvests, greening of the planet, etc.
My study of the issue revealed to me that mainstream climatologists were ‘learning by doing’ and didn’t seem to have a clue about past warm and cold periods that were put forward by skeptics. They were, after all, mainly astronomers, physicists and biologists who got the ball rolling. All the other phenomena put forward by skeptics were not welcomed until the dreaded ‘pause’ that falsified the doom scenario. Then they accepted reluctantly that ENSO, PDO, AMO etc. were important (they needed them to try to explain the pause and to shore up a tattered theory). To go too far with this acceptance, though, would mean neutering the theory. This led to more and more focus on climate sensitivity and its ultimate reduction to less scary levels.
Once serious warming proponents had gained a more rounded knowledge of their subject, indeed with the help of skeptics, any attempt at debate stopped and the real “DNile” set in – no more debates, just ad hominems, threats, and, as a psychiatric patient reacts to a reality they can’t face (a career wasted on phlogiston)etc. they take refuge, ironically in “DNile” – a long standing term used by therapists and the climate depression diagnosis was born (although post normal psychology refuses to diagnose this – they say sufferers are down because they can’t convince people that they are trying to save the planet – in an earlier generation this would have been seen by the layman as delusional!).
Precisely. Wegener’s Continental Drift hypothesis was (quite properly) rejected because he required a mechanism which logically could not happen – for the lighter continental rocks to plow through the heavier oceanic rocks like ships through water. The discovery that the rocks far from the mid-ocean ridges were a lot older than the rocks near the ridges was the clue that was needed to make plate tectonics comprehensible. (Not just the magnetic domain/reversal, which was a big help). New crust is being formed continuously along these ridges, which then came to be recognized as rifts. All this huge change happened during my career as a geologist, which meant I picked a really neat half-century for my career!
There you go, making the same error as everyone else.
Just because you cannot explain how it happens, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Darwin could not explain how parents passed on different traits to their offspring. Genes hadn’t been discovered. By your reasoning, evolution should have been rejected out of hand.
Our stone age ancestors, who, by selective breeding, created all of our modern crops and domesticated animals, didn’t have a clue to genetics. They thought about blood lines. So wrong. But they didn’t care. It worked.
“The problem with this essay is the you can as easily substitute “skeptic” for “warmist” and the observations are as sound”
It isn’t a problem with the essay. The essay applies general principles to warmists. One could just as well apply them to conservatives, anti-evolutionists, football fans, militant atheists, or any other ideological grouping. It is a problem of human nature.
When you think of ideological groups you conjure up conservatives but not liberals? Interesting.
Following on from Jtom … and atheists but not theists? RoHa simply takes a majority view as being “moderate” and a minority view as being “immoderate”: such is the way of the sheep – always aim to be in the middle of the flock.
Why would anyone think they can change the minds of global warming alarmists about “climate change”. Alarmists rely on propaganda not real world observational data on climate. It does not matter what evidence you can produce to them. As far as they are concerned, they remain like Obama … narrow minded, ignorant and climate change zealots. I know… I’ve tried to open their minds to valid published data. They just don’t care.
‘… and finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake …’.
======================================
That’s from a 2009 essay by Richard Lindzen, cogent and eloquent as always and well worth reading (again):
http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria/
It is the vanity at the core of progressivism that explains why they are so immune to facts. It’s not just climate science, but virtually all political, economic and social issues.
See for example:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/418811/why-gay-marriage-study-was-faked-and-why-we-should-expect-more-it-ian-tuttle
“The conclusion was known from the start, and the study was fabricated to bolster that conclusion, because the conclusion was unquestionably, incontrovertibly ‘right,’ and if it’s right, and the other side can’t and never will understand that, there is no reason to waste time debating. The insidiousness of this act of force is that it pays lip service to ‘reason,’ masquerading as an ’empirical,’ ‘data-based’ contribution to a debate — because the desire to ‘start a conversation’ remains the great palliative of American political rhetoric.”
Whenever a progressive says he wants to start a dialogue, he really just means he wants to launch into a soliloquy.
It’s really political science at play and not some deep neural imbalance. Vanity, arrogance, narcissims, et al simply hide the underlying motive.
Suppose a person says they like a color and describe how it’s based on the fifteen primary colors. When confronted with the reality, simply state “everyone knows there are fifteen primary colors and here’s why” so you’re wrong and I’m right. However, if the person then uses government to mandate everyone must acknowledge there are fifteen primary colors, make it part of school textbooks and require specific colors for each type of structure (defined by them, of course). The person simplies wants to impose their will, are extremely motivated and will any means. If we define totalitariansim as a psychosis, then it fits all of them.
Vanity is just one of dozens of socially acceptable monikers that are used to explain the psychosis.
peer group pressure is very strong so anyone who bucks the fashionable in- view has to be very strong as I have found there is very heavy social price to pay. The point being that a rebel threatens social cohesion
What is interesting is how across countries it is the same social group that adheres to politically correct views They are often university educated in law social sciences( but few economists ) teaching or in other symbol manipulating professions but not may engineers One particular favorite is belief in the need for and the value of foreign aid – despite overwhelming evidence that the now successful developed formerly poor nations (eg Japan South Korea and now China) all lifted themselves up by economic development uwithout reliance on foreign aid.
Of course the big issue for all right thinking people is global warming yet in my experience none of them has read any IPCC report nor can they give a coherent explanation of how the theory of global warming is supposed to operate.
One believer even argued with me when I told him water vapor was the most significant GHG (it said to be so in IPCC report no 4 )
Try and tell them there has been no statistically significant global warming in 18 years ie the pause (even accepted by the UK Met Office)
Lets face it we are talking about a quasi religious cult where belief and feelings are more important than facts or analysis
To conclude these views are particularly strongly held among the green left who congregate in the inner centres of Australian cities and it has to be remembered that only 50 years ago the left had a strong emotional attachment to Marxism and the Soviet Union
With both those gone the void of the need to believe in some creed has been filled by belief in CAGW and no logic is ever going to shake a belief
The left STILL has a strong attachment to socialism/Marxism/communism – even when they’re not educated enough to realize that those are the sources of the ideas they’re supporting – nothing has changed in that regard in 50 years, unfortunately.
Rational Db8
We are sufficiently educated to know that “socialism/Marxism/communism” are different philosophies and cannot rationally be lumped together.
Richard
And the Right still has a strong attachment to the Progressive policy of prohibition. Long after the Progressives have given it up.
@Richardscourtney
They’re so closely related in terms of how they’ve historically been implemented that it’s quite easy to lump them together as compared to classical liberalism/TEA party/fiscal & Constitutional conservatism, Libertarians, etc.
@M Simon
You’ve got to be joking. While there may be some merit in claiming that about social conservatives, it certainly doesn’t even begin to apply to fiscal and Constitutional conservatives – and the left has hardly given up the idea of prohibition – they’re into trying to regulate every single aspect of our lives right down to what lightbulbs we can and can’t use, what types of cars we can drive, appliances we can have, types of houses we can build, what we can even park in our own driveways, etc., etc., etc. The left is quite heavily into prohibition of all sorts, far more so than the segment of the right that are social conservatives.
Every part of Thomas Sowell’s ‘Intellectuals and Society’ resonates within me as I read this article. I encourage everyone to give it a look, if only for a laugh (at the woeful track record of progressive thinking).
I think we need to consider vaccine science in parallel with climate science is one of the deepest and most interesting mystery for me. We should resist vaccine academentia just like we resist climate academentia. (It’s obvious many professors are losing control when you dare discuss vaccine safety in front of them.)
Why do so many people in the climate sceptic community accept flawed vaccine science? (Rejection of vaccine scepticism in the climate sceptics community may be a sign that a large part of the community is not sceptic at all but has “motivated” something as Lew puts it.)
Climate science is not just radiative physics and vaccine science is not just the concept of immunisation.
Decrease of vaccine preventable disease is not the same as proof of efficiency of vaccines (better treatment protocols vs. better immunisation).
The signature of the flu vaccine is missing (successful vs. failed flu vaccine)
Many climate realism points are obvious metaphors for vaccine realism points.
French scepticism history is interesting: the roots of widespread scepticism about consensus vaccine science comes from just the hep B vaccine. This rejection of academic consensus led to the pathetic failure of the pandemic flu AH1N1 mass vaccination program.
I’ve pointed out to people just how similar the shutdown n putdown of anyone daring to speak out re vaccines is..exactly the same as the refusal to consider anything going against the climate experts..
who like the AGW are agenda and income driven.
in bigpharmas case even more money, for a chosen few.
in both cases you can show actual data, or, lack of, and still be called denier.
funny how that word ot picked up really fast by the pro vax/mandatory vax mobs here in aus
also
once again we mugs are the test bunnies for what america plans
rfid as one case
gun removal as another
now enforced vax or removal of child support and care in aus, followed very fast by a rush of enforced vax senators in america
curious isn’t it?
I suspect both of you must be under the age of sixty. We older folks lived through an epidemic called polio. At the beginning of the 1950s, several hundred thousand kids a year were getting it in the U.S. (and our population was much smaller then). A classmate of mine loss the use of her legs because of it. Then the vaccine was discovered. The rates plummeted to the hundreds in just three years or so, then to single digits. It did NOT follow the decline rate of viral epidemics, but abruptly terminated the epidemic. It’s rather absurd (that’s not the ‘a’ word I want to use, but it will suffice) to spout ‘better treatment’ when there was no longer people needing treatment! That made firm believers of vaccines out of my generation, just as our parents had become believers by the smallpox vaccine.
Then when the ‘research’ concluding that vaccines caused autism turned out to be a flagrant fraud to perpetuate a get-rich quick scheme, we became very intolerant of those who question the effacacy of vaccines.
No, I don’t think every vaccine is golden, each must be examined on its on merits, but anyone who disparages vaccines in general must be regarded as a fool, ignorant of history.
“we became very intolerant of those who question the effacacy of vaccines.”
That was my point.
Vaccine science = cult
I considered replying to each of your points, but life is just too short. Believe what you want. Why should I expend energy and time trying to argue rationally with someone who appears to think irrationally. I might as well spend my time talking to a brick wall.
Maybe ad hominem has its place. Trying to debate intelligently with an idiot is a fruitless game; quicker to just call them an idiot and move on. Fortunately the world cares little for what idiots think.
So anyone who you disagree with is an idiot? Wow that iis arrogant.
But think about this…to an insane person the rest of the world appears insane wile they themselves appear normal. If you are thinking the rest of the world is comprised of idiots and you alone are intellectually superior then in all likelihood you are the idiot.
Ian, what is your evidence that “the world cares little for what idiots think”? I am under the impression that quite a number of people care what Obama and the Pope think.
Not everyone I disagree with is an idiot. But there are idiots that I disagree with. That is what we are looking at in this case.
Rationally arguing with someone requires considerable effort. If that person is clearly so far off the deep end that it seems highly unlikely they are open to rational argument then this is all going to be wasted effort. In that case deciding not to argue with them is an entirely reasonable approach, especially if you think the person is so far off into lala land that nobody is going to care what they think anyway.
It is a triage approach. Save rational arguments for those who are rational and worth arguing with. For those who are clearly hopeless cases the best thing to do is probably to remind them that they are idiots (in case they have forgotten) and tell them to go away.
When faced with this steaming pile of nonsense about vaccines I just had to throw my hands up in horror. Where to even start! But then I realised that since the person was so clearly an idiot there was really no point in me wasting my time.
“Maybe ad hominem has its place”
Fascinating trolling
Nice attempt at trolling. We all see your ploy…
Then tell me what it is…
When weighing evidence there is preponderance and beyond reasonable doubt. The viability of Evolutionary theory is beyond reasonable doubt. The effectiveness of vaccination programs are beyond reasonable doubt. Both have had missteps along the way to being established but missteps does not alter the overwhelming evidence in their favor.
Climate science has yet to meet preponderance of evidence. In order for inductive reasoning to be valid, it requires valid or proven premises. Climate science uses unproven premises and then disingenuously claim their logic is irrefutable. Logic to be useful needs to be more than just consistent. It has to connect to reality.
The best you could say is that AGW theory and it’s attendant scenarios are inconclusive. Maybe like with plate tectonics evidence will come along to propel their theories forward. Maybe not.
Meanwhile it would be nice if someone told them they look like idiots projecting out to a century temperature to hundredths of a degree, climate and weather patterns and the state of earths ecology using unproven premises.
And yet evolutionary theory as it stands has some very serious flaws. I am not saying evolution is not possible nor am I a religious nut but just pointing out a few simple facts always seems to get the groupthink people wound up. I could go on to tear the theory apart point by point but it would be a waste of time because those who believe in the theory of evolution as it stands will not listen and just brand me as a religious extremism nutcase because that is easier than accepting that a belief they hold dear may be flawed. Thus there is no serious work on evolution because to start it would be a career ender.
Alx says “The effectiveness of vaccination programs are beyond reasonable doubt.”
If this is true then almost all reasonable people have already been persuaded, and all skeptical questions from unpersuaded reasonable people are cheerfully answered with indisputable logic and evidence, leaving only religious zealots unpersuaded in the end.
An example would be programs to persuade people they should stop smoking and brush their teeth.
Counterexamples would be AGW, certain types of particularly suspicious vaccination programs (e.g. MMR and Flu), and government narratives about virtually all historical incidents.
Like Tim, I do not want to get into a ridiculous argument over evolution theory. But note that it is the theory of evolution and not the law of evolution. The theory seems plausible when it is limited to explaining changes WITHIN a species. But there is nothing in the fossil record showing failed, let alone successful, examples of one species turning itself into another. Natural selection, adaptation, survival of the fittest, are all helpful ways to look at the development of a given species. But one thing I find interesting is that the most fervent believers in evolution seem to be progressives and the same types who grant certainty to AGW. But when it comes to actually putting their actions in alignment with their stated beliefs they fail miserably when it comes to embracing their stated beliefs in terms of human development. If they followed through on their beliefs then they would see the futility of punishing the successful in society by stealing their wealth to redistribute to the weak. They would let the weak fend for themselves and allow natural selection to work its process.
Anyone on the right who advocated allowing the evolutionary process to work itself out is accused by these evolution theory zealots of being a social Darwinist! Isn’t that what they, themselves, should be if they are true to their theory? Or do progressives always get to pick and choose what is relevant and what isn’t whose ox needs to be gored at the time?
@Tim
Sorry, but there has been and continues to be reams of research on evolution, and such research is in no way a “career ender.” The problem is with your claim that there are supposedly “very serious flaws” to evolutionary theory. In fact there isn’t. I’ve seen such claims time and again, and while you might surprise me and come up with something valid that way, so far all I’ve seen time and again are claims about irreducible complexity or a failure to ever see a case of actual evolutionary change — those sorts of false claims which prove that the person making them simply isn’t aware of the actual research that exists.
@Pseudo Idiot
MMR questionable? Sorry, but several extremely large extensive studies show pretty darned clearly that the claims of “questionable” w/ regard to MMR don’t hold up. Then also consider the following:
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/05/07/404963436/scientists-crack-a-50-year-old-mystery-about-the-measles-vaccine
Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine
MAY 07, 2015 8:58 PM ET, MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF
Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.
But something else happened.
Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.
Scientists saw the same phenomenon when the vaccine came to England and parts of Europe. And they see it today when developing countries introduce the vaccine.
“In some developing countries, where infectious diseases are very high, the reduction in mortality has been up to 80 percent,” says Michael Mina, a postdoc in biology at Princeton University and a medical student at Emory University.
“So it’s really been a mystery — why do children stop dying at such high rates from all these different infections following introduction of the measles vaccine,” he says.
Mina and his colleagues think they now might have an explanation. And they published their evidence Thursday in the journal Science.
Now there’s an obvious answer to the mystery: Children who get the measles vaccine are probably more likely to get better health care in general — maybe more antibiotics and other vaccines. And it’s true, health care in the U.S. has improved since the 1960s.
But Mina and his colleagues have found there’s more going on than that simple answer.
The team obtained epidemiological data from the U.S., Denmark, Wales and England dating back to the 1940s. Using computer models, they found that the number of measles cases in these countries predicted the number of deaths from other infections two to three years later.
“We found measles predisposes children to all other infectious diseases for up to a few years,” Mina says….
@spren
Sorry, but that’s simply not even close to true. There are in fact a huge number of ‘transitional’ fossils known for all sorts of different examples of speciation.
@spren
Pushing a theory like evolution into the social arena and using it as the basis of social policy is dangerous. Evolution, like all science, is about reality and not morality. And you can’t leave morality out of politics and social policy.
Furthermore evolution is about who has the most babies, not who has the most money. Since the people in our society who are the most prolific procreators are the poor, it is the poor who are fittest in purely evolutionary terms.
“The effectiveness of vaccination programs are beyond reasonable doubt.”
Which ones?
@Rational Db8,
The MMR vaccine is not the measles vaccine. MMR is a Franken-mixture.
I believe you’ll find that the measles vaccine is no longer available in the U.S.
No studies about the measles vaccine can be said to have any credible relevance to the MMR vaccine, any more than a study about pasteurized skim milk would have any credible relevance to raw whole milk.
@ Pseudo Idiot
MMR is a combination of measles, mumps, and rubella. It unquestionably drastically cuts the rate of measles infections. And had you bothered to read the article I linked to, you would have seen that the decrease in other diseases is a direct function of NOT being infected by measles. In other words, any vaccine which keeps kids/people from getting measles drastically reduces all sorts of other infections that would likely occur in the next several years if that person had gotten measles. So yes, MMR unquestionably is part and parcel with the research I linked to.
@Rational Db8
Stop being silly
@simple-touriste
What you mean to say is that you disagree with the position stated, but you are entirely unable to articulate any sort of cogent, meaningful, rational response supporting your own position. You therefore resort to the logical fallacy of an attempt to ridicule, trying to create the appearance that you’ve won absent any logic or facts.
“What you mean to say is that you disagree with the position stated,”
No, I mean that your inept messages contain no argument whatsoever and that you are being silly.
CAPISH?
@simple-touriste May 26, 2015 at 4:43 pm
Your failure to understand clear information is not my failure to make an argument.
What information?
There are several good reasons not to conflate other topics with CAGW.
Whether it is GMO tech and safety, vaccines, twin towers stuff, or whatever, if you attempt to make your point re CAGW by referring to anything else you are using a logical fallacy every bit as invalid as appeal to authority.
The subjects are not related.
In fact, vaccines and GMOs seem to be among a very few topics of widespread contention in which the adherents do not seem to break across the usual political lines.
And even with CAGW, there is only a rough correlation with political affiliation.
BTW and for the record, I am not registered with any political party.
“Whether it is GMO tech and safety, vaccines, twin towers stuff, or whatever, if you attempt to make your point re CAGW by referring to anything else you are using a logical fallacy every bit as invalid as appeal to authority.”
Not exactly. The overlap occurs when power and money is routinely observed to suppress and ridicule opposition studies and knowledge to protect grants and industry income. If you think for an instant that ANY government entities are beyond this (including the FDA, NIH, DEA and many others) you would be ignoring (per this article) many easy to find examples. But since you claim to be knowledgeable in the medical field, I will just provide one example, the basics of which has been known for a very long time but for which results will only come to fruition with great difficulty for reasons of protection described.
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jul-aug/13-how-pig-guts-became-hope-regenerating-human-limbs
My point is that claiming one is true therefor the other has merit is without basis in logic.
Not whether those who believe in one or another of these should hold similar views across the gamut of them.
And not whether or not there is some overlap.
And just how to go from what I said here to “If you think for an instant that ANY government entities are beyond this”, is… well…beyond me.
I said what I said.
One should be careful to expand the thought and assume that I meant the expanded thought as well.
“My point is that claiming one is true therefor the other has merit is without basis in logic.”
Again that would be incorrect TO THE EXTENT that there is merit when it has been shown that the entity cannot be trusted based on previous actions where there is no readily available information to cross check and one has to accept the story as provided. In this case, when the climastrogolists are caught fudging and rigging the data then why trust them on anything else. When a president openly and blatantly lies about one thing, his credibility is ruined on many others. If the FDA is caught suppressing data concerning inexpensive treatments over ones promoted by the pharmacutical industry, then why take anything else they say at face value. This explains why many (rightfully so) don’t trust such entities concerning vaccines GMO’s (or even 911).
“Again that would be incorrect TO THE EXTENT that there is merit when it has been shown that the entity cannot be trusted”
The entity?
The point I was making had nothing to do with government. You keep bringing up extraneous details that were not part of what I said and implying that I was making a point about whether governments can be trusted. I explicitly said that I was not making a point about any such entities.
I was making a point about the logical fallacy of believing that the objective veracity of one controversial topic has any bearing whatsoever on that of another separate topic.
Like when warmistas try to use the straw man argument regarding cigarettes and cancer, or flat earth believers.
I also pointed out that for some of these issues, there seems to be a correlation between political affiliation and what one might believe, and that for other topics there seems to be less correlation.
If you are hung up on the aspect of whether governments tend to lie, then that is fine with me. You can be hung up on that. But I said nothing in that regard.
Now, for the record and because, for one thing, this begins to grow tiresome, I interjected where I did because I believe it is one of the more egregious tendencies among the warmistas to let fellow adherents to their meme say ridiculous and patently false things, make fallacious arguments, and never say boo. Few on the warmistas side have ever called out even the most preposterous and over the top scare mongering, to cite one example, such as James Hansen claiming the oceans would boil if fossil fuel usage was not immediately and drastically curtailed.
Another reason I said what I did was that a few people were attempting to make the point that such things as trutherism and vaccines are subjects on which skeptic agree. I do not hold with such views as were being expressed and, what is more, I believe that to make such conflations damages the credibility of climate realists in general. Particularly if no one says anything when someone else makes what I see as an erroneous comparison.
Just in case anyone is wondering, I do not think GMOs are an evil scourge that must be banned, and I do not think vaccines are either, and I certainly do not believe any truther nonsense, except perhaps that warnings were ignored.
But the government gets decide who can practice medicine and who can experiment on people (or even do a simple survey).
This is why 97% of studies show that vaccines are effective, safe, and make you sexier.
It is funny how americans seem to be naive and credulous WRT the medical field (not Big Pharma, but Big Medicine). It is less so in France. The “97 medical doctors say you need surgery” would not work so well here, most people would laugh.
As reliable as medical “science” means unreliable.
“logical fallacy every bit as invalid as appeal to authority.”
You just don’t understand how this stuff work or even what YOU are doing.
Every time you cite anything, this is an appeal to some (contestable) authority. We aren’t cross-checking, recomputing, validating each-others findings all the time.
Every time you reference anything, you are implicitly saying that you trust a network of peer- and crowd-review and eggs-on-his-face and peer pressure against unsupportable claims.
Science used to work this way. (And no, peer review was never intended as a replacement for peer pressure. It is a pre-filter.)
When silly claims are made and never criticised, when the gov backs up obviously flawed research, we have a problem.
When the “elite” stop asking unpleasant questions, we have a problem.
It is my detailed knowledge of immunology and of epidemiology, not to mention knowledge of the history of diseases and of medicine, that convince me of the value of vaccines and the validity of the science that guides their development and usage.
Nothing else.
Not a conflation with other topics, not a political belief, and not because I love or hate governments, powers structures, being told what to do, or anything else.
Are all vaccines equally efficacious against all diseases and all people in all circumstances?
Of course not.
Every infectious disease is unique, and the variety of ways in which they are unique is astounding.
As is the complexity of the biochemistry of the human immune system, and the number of ways each of us may differ from each other in our own unique biochemistry.
Best to stick to the topic at hand.
Well said sir.
Having worked and published in the field, I can say that some vaccines work incredibly well, others not so well.
I’ve seen experimental vaccine candidates where the adjuvant (immune system stimulant) worked better than the adjuvant plus the vaccine candidate. Simple immunology, just like simple physics, not quite so out in the real world.
And with your detailed knowledge of immunology and of epidemiology, how much deaths are caused by vaccines? How much disability? How do you explain the explosion of MS and other neurological diseases where Hep B mass vaccination is done?
simple-touriste: “How do you explain the explosion of MS and other neurological diseases where Hep B mass vaccination is done?”
Funny thing, I was always taught that correlation does not imply causation.
Clearly you were taught different.
You’re not very good at this sort of thing, are you?
“Funny thing, I was always taught that correlation does not imply causation.”
So you admit you have none.
“You’re not very good at this sort of thing, are you?”
You are pathetic.
You want me to humiliate you?
I am not your researcher or fact checker. If you have a point, or something specific to say…then say it.
Translation: You have NOTHING except the usual PR stuff (hep B bad, vaccines good).
You get extra “points” for the Spanish flu, it’s a classic of ineptness, but you had to do it.
menicholas is right, the vaccination issue is at best only slightly relevant to the article.
Over all, vaccinations have saved many times more lives than they purportedly cost, or even affect. BUt do we need yet another law, mandating that everyone must get vaccinations?
Those objecting to having their children vaccinated should be allowed to withhold the shots. The reason is simple. You do not need 100% of the population vaccinated in order to protect the sub-group (the school, neighborhood, country, etc.)
Smallpox was completely eradicated from the planet. Fewer than 70% of the population was vaccinated, but that was sufficient to eliminate the disease. The numbers vary by disease, but if the large majority are vaccinated, the population is safe.
Parents whose conscience prohibits vaccinations for whatever reason constitute less than 1% of the population. It doesn’t matter, but when the lines are drawn (as with the runaway global warming hoax), many people are not convinced no matter what the arguments are.
Finally, measles is almost never fatal. I got measles as a kid, and just about every kid I knew did, too. We all survived the itching. My personal problem is when the government butts in and requires vaccinations across the board. No tolerance allowed. California is passing such a law right now. What’s next, requiring everyone to get a flu shot?
“menicholas is right, the vaccination issue is at best only slightly relevant to the article.”
menicholas is wrong on pretty much anything unrelated to his own personal existence. menicholas is so self-centered that he only view the world in term of heros and antiheros. Medicine = hero
This is extremely relevant. Physics = hero. Physics gave us … pretty much everything I have using right now.
Vaccine science = crackpot pseudoscience based on intimidation, anecdotes, fear, heros, antiheros, coincidence is proof when it’s good for us, anecdote is not data when it’s bad for us, silly attempts at doing stats by throwing pvalue in people’s face (just like the whole biomed field)
Climate is not weather, but bad weather events are climatic events. A girl dies just after a shoot is anecdote, some other girl is in a wheelchair is anecdote, some disease decreased after mass immunization is “data”? Are you for real?
And you think biomed is off topic, too?
Biomed is an absolute disaster. “Let’s hope we never get the money to try to reproduce all these results” said somebody.
Many fields of science may be ruined by the “mine is longer, mine is bigger” mentality. (You see what I mean.)
How could it be of topic?
How can “S” and “N”, the big players of the mine is bigger game be off topic?
Are you for real?
“Over all, vaccinations have saved many times more lives than they purportedly cost, or even affect.”
How do you know?
DB, Everyone I know got measles too. And mumps, chicken pox, and German measles.
However, this very high rate of infection multiplied by the rate of serious adverse consequences add up to very many debilitating brain injuries from high fever.
Consider too the effect of immunization on overall death rates from other causes.
This was an unanticipated benefit that saved many live and injuries.
When the numbers are run, measles adds up to being the cause of more vaccine preventable deaths than any other disease.
And the measles outbreak last year demonstrated that the threshold of herd immunity has been breached for measles. Too many children are unvaccinated, or lack sufficient antibody titer to confer immunity.
Touriste, you are too rude and ridiculous to converse with.
“Touriste, you are too rude and ridiculous to converse with.”
translation: you know the vaccine PR, but nothing else. You can’t answer the most important questions. You don’t know how vaccines are evaluated.
I rest my case.
If “your case” hinges on my willingness to answer your inane whining questions, then yes, you can rest your case.
So you admit you don’t even know the regulatory regime of vaccines.
Thank you
“It is my detailed knowledge of immunology and of epidemiology, not to mention knowledge of the history of diseases and of medicine”
and that knowledge is based on what? Time machine? Thin air? The work of others?
Vaxxers typically don’t get history of the Hep B in France vaccine. That’s very recent history in a country which is not remote or in a war. And yet, they can’t seem to figure it out.
Vaxxers also usually don’t get the history of the said “pandemic” “pig” flu AH1N1, which is neither a pandemy nor a disease of pigs.
Vaxxers have almost zero understanding of the regulatory burden of vaccines.
You obviously got your information from these guys.
A commonly repeated comment on the demographics of anti-vax’ers was that the rate of non-vaccinated children correlated with the proximity of a Whole Foods store. I would imagine that someone who regularly shops at Whole Foods is much more likely to be a CAGW believer than a CAGW skeptic.
One of the problems of trying to convince the CAGW believers with scientific backgrounds is that fair number of the CAGW “skeptics” have an obviously poor understanding of the physics. The same is true for the converse situation as a lot of the CAGW believers have an obviously poor understanding of the physics as well, especially the bellwethers.
FWIW, my take on the AGW issue is this: The 1C temp rise from the first order effect of a doubling of CO2 sounds reasonable, but the large positive feedback terms promoted by the CAGW crowd do not sound reasonable. I think there is a very strong and very non-linear negative temperature coefficient that kicks in when sea surface temperatures approach 30C as water vapor will be 4% of the air in the boundary layer and that percentage increases rapidly with temperature, which means it will be a huge driver for convection.
To bad someone doesn’t do a survey of scientists on the safety of GMO foods. I suspect a large percentage would vouch for them. Maybe that would cause the a Whole Food shoppers to reject all science, including AGW.
Eh? “Rejection of vaccine scepticism in the climate sceptics community”? Does that come from Lewny’s silly survey? I’ve been reading the skeptical blogs for five years and have seen .0001 sign of it.
Oops–I misunderstood your point.
Sorry, but you’re barking up the wrong tree with regard to vaccinations. I and many others have dug deep into the anti-vax claims – e.g. to both sides of this debate – and the anti-vax claims simply don’t hold water. The history and epidemiology clearly shows a massive benefit to vaccinations with very very little harm.
History only shows a doubling of MS in France the years after mass Hep B immunization, must be a coincidence, lol.
And since when is the flu vaccine safety tested? (Hint : safety testing takes years, not weeks)
Hey, it is simple…if you are more concerned about the safety of the flu vaccine than you are of the flu, do not get the frickin’ shot!
But spouting off baseless claims about vaccines being an evil plot will have the effect of scaring a certain number of people.
We do not allow people to cry fire in a crowded movie theatre, and likewise, people must be accountable for what they say regarding matters such as this.
That one fraud case nearly twenty years ago has resulted in many people needlessly dying or becoming gravely ill.
It sounds like you are spouting a bunch of exaggerations, misplaced fears blown out of proportion, and belabor under several misapprehensions due to a failure to consider all the facts.
Vaccines are known to cause bad reactions in a certain number of people, which is thankfully very low or virtually nonexistent for some vaccines. But the number of side affects and bad reactions is a tiny number compared to the deaths and crippling and debilitating illnesses that are prevented.
Like many thing in life, it is a tradeoff.
Anyway, like someone else said, life is too short to waste on clowns who are so smart they are really stupid.
Please explain why vaccines are not expected to follow standard pharma procedures
Merely saying some stuff, statistics, or whatever, is a good way to be ignored. Please provide references for your assertions if you want a response.
You are way off topic. And out on some fringe.
So you have no knowledge of vaccine regulations, vaccine protocols, or vaccine evaluation whatsoever.
QED
I called your bluff.
We are done now.
And you call me self centered?
Yes.
Why are you telling us about your personal life?
You must be great at parties. You sure are a barrel of monkeys on a discussion thread.
I am curious if your abrasive way of conversing actually succeeds in engaging may people. Not curious enough to care about the answer though.
What you think you have proved?
“What you think you have proved?”
The fact you are actually an ignoramus.
Without taking sides on the vaccine issue, I perceive the difference from the Climate discussion is that there exists DATA for either side upon which to base their pro/con vaccine arguments. Climate scientists have models and an ever expanding horizon upon which they tell us we
will eventually see the TRUTH of their pronouncements.
Most people are extremely ignorant of vaccines because they have been fed academia-blessed pseudoscientific vaxxer garbage.
“that there exists DATA for either side upon which to base their pro/con vaccine arguments”
There is plenty of “temperature” data, lol.
For vaccines there is plenty of useless data too (like data showing people who get the flu vaccine have less diseases than people who don’t). There is almost no data on the safety of vaccines; you need to do studies, and have funds and permission to do that.
The System does NOT want to see such studies done.
HPV vaccine usefulness is based on a model where HPV causes “precancerous” lesions, and then “precancerous” lesions become a cancer.
Now with new vaccines it’s proxies all the way. And models.
Of course vaxxers can explain you all day long how the stuff is supposed to work, just like climate scientists can. But they have no data to prove that it does indeed works.
And when it fails, they CANNOT explain why. And they will tell you it CANNOT and does NOT fail, until the days when they tell you they KNEW all along it could fail, and the risk is acceptable.
I am surprised anyone here takes virologists seriously. They sell fake “science”. (Well, the whole medical field is based on a lot of science theater and the pseudo-scientific “statistically significant result” nonsense.)
In a field where so much people obviously have no idea what they are doing with statistics (“yes dear, I have read your paper, there are so much p-values in it, it’s p-painful”), it’s hard to take anyone seriously.
simple-touriste says:
Of course vaxxers can explain you all day long how the stuff is supposed to work, just like climate scientists can. But they have no data to prove that it does indeed works.
Oh, please. Vaccinations have been done since the 1700’s. Cowpox secretions were scratched into people and they went a long way toward either immunizing the recipient from smallpox, or of making smallpox much less serious if contracted. (Cowpox is very mild by comparison.)
Smallpox can even be prevented by a vaccination after it is contracted, if done promptly. How much ‘proof’ do you need? Do you really believe that there is no data on the effectiveness of vaccines? If you believe that, there’s no use trying to convince you.
“Do you really believe that there is no data on the effectiveness of vaccines? If you believe that, there’s no use trying to convince you.”
Impressive rhetorical device. Either you are a believer or I won’t give data.
(Also, define effectiveness.)
We have all encountered trolls like you many times, touriste.
Making ridiculous statements, and when challenged, you rudely demand information that would fill an encyclopedia.
You can make as many declarations of having won an argument as you want, but you have not said anything.
Being obtuse, asking for information that you strongly imply you already have, expressing indignation when your rude manner is given short shrift…
You have said enough to have given yourself away though.
911 truther, vaccines are a hoax, biopharma is a bunch of hot air, medical science has no merit, no one knows anything except you…and you have all the “correct” information, if only everyone would listen.
Nice touch of ad hominem, increasing in shrillness with every new post…my guess is your panties are two sizes too small.
“We have all encountered trolls like you many times, touriste.”
I called you bluff, crackpot. You have nothing. I have humiliated you, end of story.
“911 truther”
And now you are making up stuff.
Typical.
You. Are. A. Fraud.
“We have all encountered trolls like you many times, touriste.”
I called your bluff, end of story.
And stop making up sh*t about me. Not a very effective communication device!
Anyone can scroll up.
“Let me digress: Why is it so hard to convince a reopen911-ist?
I think reopen911 stuff is an excellent exercice from all POV.
And why do so much people accept the official NIST-backed explanation? I think that few people believe CD (controlled demolition) of WTC because few people have been explained this theory.
Perhaps we are not be in “belief equilibrium” here (ie debunking the reopen911 may increase the website’s audience and increase the number of reopenists).
We cannot assume people reject CD because it’s a crazy theory, that is unscientific. Some people accept the NIST explanation because the gov says it is the correct one, period.
I like this stuff, because it’s actually pretty simple.
Maybe reopen and WTC theories are a model of something?
And don’t forget economy of ignorance: there is so much stuff I don’t have time to review myself, doing a bibliographic study is so costly, etc.
Ignorance (which is free) is sometimes the optimal choice.”
Yes indeed. Anyone with half a brain can see you are either a fraud or incredibly stupid.
I rest my case.
Simple-Touriste,
I have very little clue what you are even talking about.
Here in the US, most objections to vaccines center on a fear that the vaccines can cause autism. Other objections center of the concept of being forced to do something. There is no widespread belief that vaccines are some sort of hoax.
No one is forced to vaccinate their children. The issue is herd immunity, and the fact that some people bought into a lie, and became afraid to have their kids vaccinated. This resulted, after a critical mass of such unvaccinated children was reached, in outbreaks measles.
Re flu vaccine, I wish your command of English was better, because it is difficult to discern your precise meaning. Signature? Missing?
Human Influenza virus is known to be highly variable and rapidly mutating. There is no mystery as to why flu vaccines are not 100% effective. Anyone who thinks there is has very little understanding of the underlying issues.
Question: How much do you know about the Spanish Flu epidemic?
Hepatitis B is a serious illness. The vaccine must be administered in two to three shots at a certain interval to achieve the desired titer of antibodies in the recipient’s bloodstream.
The best practice protocol for those at high risk of contracting HBV is to confirm that the vaccine has conferred sufficient immune response. A certain percentage of vaccinated individuals do not respond to the initial inoculations, for various reasons.
What is your specific beef with this vaccine
I think there is only one reason that there exist people who are willing to forgo vaccines, and that is because they have been so successful in eliminating a variety of diseases, that people have no awareness of the good that they do, being that widespread outbreaks of fatal or debilitating infectious diseases are now so rare that most people in developed countries have never lived through one.
My father was a medical writer and publisher, published a newsletter focused on infectious diseases among animals, and was on the faculty and was an administrator and an innovator at a large teaching hospital. I heard stories on a near daily basis, while growing up, that would make a person’s blood run cold. I have been steeped in the history of medicine from an early age.Back then it was not theoretical, it was a real life miracle that was occurring in the world, as the elders in my family had grown up watching people drop like flies from awful diseases. Polio is one, but people rarely thin about tetanus, a truly horrifying disease and a nightmarish way to die. People used to die horrible deaths from getting a small scratch. Today it is unheard of in the US, except to get a booster shot if one gets cut while outdoors.
I myself was in a terrible car accident when I was a younger man, and barely survived my injuries, one of which was a ruptured spleen. My spleen was removed in 1982. In years past, a person without a spleen could be expected to die within a decade or perhaps two fro one or another pneumococcal or meningococcal infection. Today we have polyvalent vaccines for these diseases, which is the likely reason I am alive to write this. Such is the comfort level we all feel, that I did not even remember to mention this until just then when I wrote it.
Vaccines are one of the greatest stories in human history.
Anyone who does not know this is simply guilty of willful ignorance.
I am not intolerant of such people, but I support laws to prevent unvaccinated children from attending schools and potentially infecting other children needlessly.
“No one is forced to vaccinate their children”
Is that your last word?
No, that sentence was near the beginning of my comment.
“I have very little clue what you are even talking about.”
Yes, I know that.
“Here in the US, most objections to vaccines center on a fear that the vaccines can cause autism.”
No, that the only objection Big Medicine wants you to know.
You appear to have zero knowledge about the risks of vaccines, the (lack of) evaluation of vaccines, and the link between hep B vaccine and MS.
Also you are repeating PR lines like Hep B is terrible, when actually nobody knows how many people get Hep B with no symptoms (just like influenza, BTW).
Nobody even knows how many people get influenza each year and how many died from influenza.
In France, last year was a terrible year for influenza : officially 86 death. Average influenza death is around 6000, when the vaccine is effective.
See? Bad = 86, Good = 6000. Official expert stuff…
The same experts now claim that the Hep B vaccine caused a dramatic INCREASE in the number of Hep B contamination. You couldn’t make this up.
And they don’t even KNOW they are saying that. They are climatists without knowing.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anti-vaccination_movement
http://rationalwiki.org/ is pure BS
Here is how things like this end up:
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/anti-vaxxer-mind-7-kids-whooping-cough-article-1.2187390
Enough is enough
Hey, but there is good news: Soon they hope to put the genes for the vaccine for HBV directly into plants, so everyone can be inoculated via food! (I am sure you already know that people are being inoculated against polio via drinking water…old news.)
I knew you would want to hear about this, so I passed it right along.
🙂
I am reading John Ralston Saul’s “Voltaire’s Bastards” at the moment and it occurs to me that “Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists” is that we are talking about the same people generally. A disconnected cadre of academics and managerialists (managerialism being like a fungal infection in any large institution such as universities and the public (dis)service) has latched onto CAGW as vector for power and control, to remove actuation of as many levers of power as they can from democratic mechanisms and into their office suites.
These people are ignorant of the science as they are ignorant of the real processes of industry, of the military of hospitals etc, They are deaf dumb and blind in the very frequencies that define such activities yet arrogantly claim to possess essential knowledge about how they work. A similar disconnect exists with “climate science” (even the real, objective, skeptical, evidence based practice), in fact with virtually all true science and engineering. To cover their backsides they engage whore ‘experts’ to write the sort of drivel that appears to justify their ‘preferred’ decisions.
The courts have rigorous rules for expert witnesses regarding their role and objectivity. They firmly assert, even emphasise, that they are there for the benefit of the court and not the side engaging them. Of course the practical dimension of who pays the piper is part of the realpolitik of such matters but professional ethics and court rules are a significant counterweight. Such rigor seems to be all but missing in any objective sense when it comes to the unholy alliance between managerialist and rent seeking climate ‘expert’
Saul take aim repeatedly at the Jesuits as the first instantiation of this cult in the recent half millenium or so and the parallels between CAGW orthodoxy vs “Denialism” in our times and the Inquisition is more than passing. The response to deviance from orthodoxy is not as violent or as brutal as it was ( well unless you listen to the greenshirt street mobs) but the direction remains the same. To renounce, denounce, vilify, sack, sanction, demonise, disbar etc are just the tools of trade on the workbench of the new administrative ‘inquisatorial’ chamber.
Houston, everything is fine and rational here on the Moon but it seems that perhaps you have the real problem down there.
What you describe is decadence. Nancy Pelosi thinks bread comes from the grocery store. Yes, “ignorant of the real processes of industry.”
I would leave the courts and the subject of the reliability of expert witnesses out of the discussion.
Recent admissions concerning the validity of experts concerning the forensic science behind hair analysis, and a separate but equally damning one regarding forensic arson science a few years back, throw cold water on the idea that expert testimony on such subjects is objective, scientific or reliable. In other words, that such people are experts at all.
Paid whores is a good analogy, but the morality of locking someone up on made up evidence and fake surety makes the comparison a undeserved smear on the good name of prostitutes.
Another worthwhile book is “The Master and his Emissary”. The author shows that we have become overly reliant on the logical part of our brain. In the process we ignore the part of our brain that puts knowledge in context. (Being slightly rude I call it the BS filter)
The thing that really got my attention is what happens to people with right brain damage. Such people will believe anything as long as it is not self contradictory. They tend to be over optimistic and are usually disappointed with the results of their efforts.
The author, Iain McGilchrist, makes the point (very similar to that of Voltaire’s Bastards) that our society acts like it has a damaged right brain. It is over logical, over regulated, and the people will believe anything that isn’t blatantly wrong.
“people will believe anything that isn’t blatantly wrong.”
Some comments on this thread make it clear that some people believe things that are indeed blatantly wrong, IMO.
Furthermore, they often believe them full force, with great conviction, and create elaborate justifications for their beliefs.
And it is not based on logic that people do these things. They may invoke such in their efforts to persuade, but in reality they often are engaging in logical fallacy.
George DeVries Klein – welcome to WUWT comments. As a geoscientist many of your papers are familiar.
Rejection of climate “science” may be “motivated” as Lewandowski puts it (Lew provided inept answers but still asked some interesting questions IMO), but what about contra-motivated rejection of rejection?
Everyone understands motivated rejection of something known to be true.
The mind can react with the rejection of motivated rejection.
People would feel guilty of having motivated thoughts, and reject these thoughts to avoid falling the trap of easy and irresponsible choices…
The SUPREME Damocles sword is deadly space electricity, to be repelled with (Boeing patented) Laser-Plasma-Shielding Earth eventually!!! National Space Weather Strategy Released for Public Comment | NOAA / NWS Space Weather http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/national-space-weather-strategy-released-public-comment http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/images/u33/_2015_SWW%20Agenda_with%20ABSTRACTS_FINAL_050715.pdf https://ShieldEarthFromSpaceDisasters.wordpress.com
I’m sure you could change ‘Obama’ and the ‘Pope’ for two prominent skeptic leaders and change ‘warmist’ for denier and find this article lapped up by those very same people.
Can you name two “prominent skeptic leaders” that people unpersuaded by Chicken Little rhetoric seem to rely upon for instructions in a catechism of “denialist” beliefs?
Excellent comment! To be a climate skeptic in the first place you need to be the sort of person willing to notice that the emperor has no clothes. Thus there are a lot less blind followers in the ranks of the skeptics. However the OP is probably correct that Lewandowski and ilk think otherwise.
It is such a very human reflex : refusing to look at facts which clash with preconceived ideas. Galileo also encountered that phenomenon. He wrote to Johannes Kepler that his adversaries refused to even glance through his newfangled telescope to see Jupiter’s moons with their own two eyes! He asked Kepler, “Shall I laugh or shall I cry?”
Uhh . . . one eye.
A nice description of the inner workings of a religion.
Ignorant and proud of it.
It’s the reason I like humanity. Predator or prey. I get hungry sometimes and sheeple are delicious.
ROI ???
I hate acronyms – I think I will find something else to read.
Return on investment. That’s what I always thought it meant. Could mean something different now
It should be written RoI. When one reads RoI, in English, we know it to mean Return on Investment. I was stumped by posts with “POTUS” in them until I realised it mean President of the United States, so the acronym should be PotUS. Well that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it!
TPOTUS. The TelePrompter is in charge.
It’s actually the TOTUS Twins.
DirkH, are you referring to how he can’t look us straight in the eye when he reads lies to us?
Yeah, “ROI” sent me off to Google to try and figure out what was being said.
I wrote TOT (The Other Day) that PWUA (People who use acronyms) are snobs who think it MTLS (Makes them look smart).
I would suggest that if you consider that the radiative model is sound, and hence that an increase in greenhouse gases leads (inevitably) to warming, there is only one aspect upon which it is possible to convince warmists, namley that climate sensitivity may be lower than they think, whether because feedbacks are not as positive as they think or because natural variation is stronger than they think such that warming in the period of the late 1970s to 1980s was overestimated ans some of that warming (or a greater part thereof0 was natural not CO2 driven.
If you consider that the radiative model is sound and hence that increasing levels of greenhouse gases must result in warming and since factually CO2 levels have increased since the 1950s it follows that their theory provides that the globe MUST be warming (unless counteracted by aerosol emissions), and hence if the observational data does not show that to be the case, then warmists have to question the validity of the data.
If they were to accept that the observational data is sound then this data shows a fundamental problem with the theory. Of course they can come up with mad cap ideas that the heat is hiding in the oceans without explaining how the properties of CO2 and/or the atmospheric physics changes such that pre 1998 increases in CO2 went to warm the atmosphere but after 1998 it goes to warm the ocean, and/or how heat finds its way to the deep ocean without being dedected on its way down, or that long tem warming leads to short term cooling etc but this is just desperate denial not to face realities.
It should be clear by now that either there is a fundamental problem with the thoery (possibly fatal), or that climate sensitivity is low (at least with no net positive feedback). But given that water vapour is a greenhouse gas, it is difficult for them to accept that climate sensitivity is low and not amplified as this too strikes at the very heart of the theory itself.
The radiative model really cries out to be re-examined. It would appear that radiative movement of energy below TOA is only a bit player, and on planet Earth (below TOA) it is convection, conduction, and latent energy changes with the phase change of water that dirve and distribute energy around the planet and within the atmospheric system. It would appear that the warmists have not got to the bottom of the selective surface nature of the oceans, and do not understand and appreciate the implications of this.
Some of the recent articles on this site are pointing to the warmists only beginning to appreciate the role of the oceans. It is the oceans that drive the climate (the winds are largely driven by oceean temperatures and currents below, including of course the difference between eqitorial/tropical oceans and the poles, and the spinning nature of the globe), and the key to understanding climate science is to understand the oceans. It is unfortunate that ARGO was not rolled out at the same time that the satellites were launched for atmospheric temperature measurement since the land based record was never fit for purpose and the land based thermometer record should have been ditched long ago.
We agree on this 110%. I blockquoted to emphasize your words. I wanted to write up a small post looking at some of the competing theories that make more sense and submit it, but I soon realized that it would sound to supportive of a group that is banned here so decided to forget it. Perhaps you might consider expanding on the above quoted bit and submit it for a post. I think it would be valuable coming from you.
AGW radiative theory fails to realise that the lower is a radiative molecule within an atmosphere the higher its temperature needs to be for it to be able to radiate to space at the S-B temperature through the barrier presented by conduction and convection.
They think that a surface at 288K must be emitting photons commensurate with a temperature of 288K at the boundary of space. It isn’t.
For Earth, the surface at 288K emits 255K of photons upward and the other 33k is locked into collisional exchanges that keep the atmosphere aloft.
The blocking effect of GHGs applies to the 255K but is cancelled by convective changes that remove the blockage. I have explained the detail of that elsewhere.
All one really needs to know is that CO2 has been much higher in the past with no correlation to global climate regimes.
Or:
All one really needs to know is that it has been warmer in the past without any runaway warming due to water vapor feedbacks.
or:
All one really needs to know is that CO2 has not led, but has in fact followed, temperature in the proxy records.
That the earth has remained in a stable range hospitable for and amenable to the continuation of life is hard to doubt…we are all here.
That this range has been maintained despite a great many shocks and inputs from all manner of perturbations is equally hard to dispute.
On an entirely different mental track, it seems that a large number of people have always had some seemingly inner need to believe that the end is nigh, and that the evil must be punished, and that those who will not believe as they do are causing all the ills of the world.
In short…’twas ever thus.
Well said.
‘Right-thinking’ orrrrrrrrrrrrr is it actually ‘LEFT-thinking’?
Definition of a “wether”:
A castrated ram….
Ah, thank you !
The reason why there is even a debate about the climate “science” is because, at this point in time, it does not come up to a standard of a science for different reasons. There are deductive sciences which from a few axioms discover new and interesting relationships that hold by the laws of logic that most of us accept as universal. Then there are inductive sciences, such as physics etc which climate science would be a member of. In those sciences we have to formulate a hypothesis about the real world and find by experiments that the hypothesis is not disproven. We can’t ever prove a hypothesis, just observe that it is never disproven. We might trust Einsteins theories as unchangeable laws of nature, but what we really know is that the universe seems to behave as he said at the moment. Who knows, maybe it will start behaving differently next Thursday due to characteristics of the universe that we do not have any knowledge about.
We must verify and try to disprove our hypotheses in an inductive science by experiments in the real world. Physicists have spent billions and billions to collide particles just to see that they behave the way that they are most certain they will. Often they can confirm exactly what they know in these experiments, but there will also be new unexpected results that trigger further questions and yet more hypotheses and this is how science advances.
Here’s where the first big failure of climate science occurs. It is of course obvious to everyone that it is impossible to conduct planetary scale experiments about how CO2 affects climate. Due to some strange reasoning climate scientist have come to the conclusion that they can computationally simulate the world well enough to enable a “no discussions/the debate” is over kind of results. It’s only at the year 2100 we will know for sure how the climate will look in 2100. So we’re back in the same realm of uncertainty such as for economics, politics etc. We have devised a democratic system and public debate to try and handle those things. I would suggest we keep doing this for climate “science” and the proposed political solutions.
Indeed.
Imagine if there was a “no discussion the debate is over” rule in physics?
Copernicus, Galileo and others questioned the science of their day and even though the consensus was that those science was true, that old science has since been completely discredited, so much for having a consensus. Newton and other great minds and those that followed went on from there to create what we have now, a science that seeks knowledge and understanding because it cares not were the study leads as long as it follows the facts, seeks truth and is able to stand up to criticism.
Climate science, and I use the term science loosely, cares little for facts, seeks political results and uses a mythical consensus to limit debate and bully critics into silence. If Galilao were here he would shake his head in wonder at it. We have come full circle and have let a pseudo science rule us with an iron fist. Pathetic eh?
You remind me of a statement by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a supporter of President Obama in the last election. When he publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS), it was with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?” [emphasis added]
“In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”
Hear ye!
I am particularly taken with long and involved papers on such topics as how the universe evolved during the first ten to the minus 18th of a second after the Big Bang, or discussions of whether ‘branes slamming into each other can cause new multiverses to spontaneously form, or the range of possible values that the fundamental physical constants can have in other separate universes created during other Big Bangs, being that they would almost surely not have the same values as in our happy little universe.
What I never hear discussed, but would like to, is just what lies beyond the edge of the universe, and what the expanding universe is expanding INTO?
Hmmm, my brain is itchy now…
My blood runs cold when I read this story. Isn’t this what the NAZI’s did in Germany 1930’s. If you don’t know about what they did from 1930’s onward educate yourself. I was lucky enough to be a member of a extended family who took in refugees after WW2, what I absorbed as a child has stuck, big time. I learned to question what I was being told, and also to question my own self belief, which I try to apply to the best of my ability. Remember part of global warming used to be sea level rising,. Found myself in an argument about why the sea was high in the Maldives and not in Australia, bullying me about my knowledge of sea level’s, finally made my point by upending my glass of water on the table, and making the statement “water finds its own level”, observe.
Everyone knows about the Nazis, but all too few know what the Soviets were doing at the same time, or what Mao did later on.
Philip Arlington: “Everyone knows about the Nazis, but all too few know what the Soviets were doing at the same time, or what Mao did later on.”
It’s not that they don’t know Philip, it’s because they are Socialists, and their motto is “there are no enemies on the Left”.
After all, what are a few hundred million speedbumps when you’re building the road to the Socialist Workers’ Paradise?
What they are reluctant to acknowledge is that Hitler was a Left winger too, of course.
Whoa. Off topic.
But, note that the Nazi’s did their atrocities during the war. The Russians did their’s before, during, and after the war. We made common cause with the Russians. Go figure.
Typo alert in 5th paragraph.
“Rational ignorance is a belief that the cost/benefit to researching every issue is slow low as to be a net negative in time utilization …” should read “is so low”.
Very interesting. People want to belong almost as much as they want sex. In fact belonging probably leads to procreation.
So who are the bellwethers we need to convince.
What I see in the university where I work is that “Science” is seen as a particular set of dogmas, not as a method of arriving at truth.
That is to say that what they say when they claim to believe in science is not that they believe in impartially examining the evidence and using the facts to build a hypothesis which is then tested by experiment. What they mean is that they have a particular set of beliefs that they accept, and a complimentary set of ones that they reject.
So they use the phrase “science supports climate change” in exactly the same way that a Catholic says, “the church supports transubstantiation.” It’s an article of faith, not a considered opinion. Evidence and reason are irrelevant. Science is their god, and their god has spoken. Questioning it is blasphemy.
This is close to what I think.
The best analogy to warmista beliefs is religion.
Observations will trump Bellweathers.
Bellweathers are not going to change what is currently happening to the sun or what is going to happen next to the earth’s climate. A plateau of no warming for 18 years can be ignored and/or explained away with heat hiding in the ocean or a half dozen other incorrect explanations.
Significant abrupt cooling cannot be hand waved away with a sciency sound bite. There will need to be an official response to reduce public panic in response to observational evidence of abrupt cooling. I am curious how the different fractions and political parties will respond to observational evidence that the entire scientific premise of the IPCC was incorrect.
Observations continue to support the assertion the solar cycle has been interrupted. An analogue of what to expect next is the 8200 BP (before present) abrupt cooling event. It is difficult to even imagine abrupt climate change.
The 8200-year Climate Event
http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/geos462/8200yrevent.html
“Observations will trump Bellweathers.”
I don’t think you caught what the poster was trying to say. Facts, observation, and logic are not what these people are guided by. It will take the cooling event you mention plus a new generation coming up whose natural rebellious attitude might cause them to question the dogma. The Catholic Church is slowly dying so perhaps even “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” caused by the Demon Magic Molecule CO2 will also pass away. (but don’t count on it in your lifetime)
A mile of ice over all of the northeastern US would help overcome cAGW, but not guarantee the demise of the theory.
Isn’t it obvious what the response to abrupt cooling would be? We had it laid out for us back in the 1970’s when the climate activists thought the world was starting to cool. Back then they agitated for more political control over fossil fuel production so that we could conserve them — burn less of them right now — in order to have enough in the future to stay warm as the world got still colder. No matter what the scare is, their solution is the same: More power for me and less for thee.
Truly abrupt and dramatic cooling may end the debate because people will be too busy surviving to debate much of anything in a polite way.
AGW alarmism is a substitute religion for those who cannot live without moral suspenders, plus a means of power and control for those who cannot live without persecuting their betters (out of fear for the survival of their outdated kind).
Fraction of the population able to successfully resist mass hypnosis, in most countries, is about 11%. (Note that in the USA home schooling is done by approximately 11% families. 11% of American population doesn’t watch TV.) These are the owners of the future.
A good read, Mr Manos.
Invites to the right parties aside, I’ll add
For about thirty-four years now, I’ve been observing the “We’re All Gonna Die!” catastrophe caterwauling clowns in this category – the flatly contrafactual premise that anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide can possibly have any adverse impact upon global or regional climate by virtue of the “greenhouse gas effect – and I’ve come to the conclusion that their motivations are predicted upon prejudices determined by subjective primary and secondary gain, and have nothing genuinely to do with objective, verifiable, mensurable reality.
There is no surprise whatsoever in the observation that this bloody nonsense is being pushed almost without exception by the political left.
Not that the political right is markedly better, but the leftards are far more reliably prone to espousing nothing that is not evil, stupid, or insane.
The interesting thing is that all warmist arguments are the same as if it is a mantra. Today on TV a comment that the world has paused for at least 15 years is answered by “13 of the last 15 years have been the hottest “. This ridiculous answer says absolutely nothing about the future or the trend. It’s like a person who lowers his golf handicap when he first learns to play from 27 to say 10 in 5 years. The next ten years the handicap barely moves. When someone points out that his handicap hasn’t moved the warmist replies that the last ten years have been his hottest golf years ( ie his lowest handicap) and on that basis unless we do something dramatic like amputate his arm in ten years time he will play off scratch and be a pro golfer.
Warmist arguments are just as stupid.
Ha ah I like the analogy. Makes sense. (no sarc)
In short you cannot win the argument by using facts , when its not fact based argument in the first place.
Its seems to be part of the industrial scale of protection, along with claiming sceptics are all conspricy nuts , we see from the warmest that they claim sceptic’s views are no based on facts but emotions, while in pratice the whole ‘ no time to lose and social justice ‘ approach seen form the warmest has nothing but emotion behind it in the first place .
So if you wondering why poor science and worthless data means nothing to those pushing ‘the cause’ ,included those working in climate ‘science’. It is because these are not highly rated in the first place . The support anything things to the CAGW dogma is the prime means to measure its value, along with strength and firmness of belief in ‘the cause ‘ of those promoting the idea . If all those lie up then it really is ‘facts be damned’
“Its seems to be part of the industrial scale of protection…”
There is more truth to this statement then you may understand, and its why the whole “appeal to authority” logical meme has so much persuasiveness..As animals, we can only interpret our environment through our senses. Through the experiences of life and the grace of evolution, our senses have the capacity to “fill in the blanks” with presumptive data, when real data is missing. To the extent our experiences allow. we achieve comfort in our environment through this infilling of experiential data.
When our minds can’t in-fill, we first try to rationalize our environment through rationalization of what we can directly observe. For each of us, there is a finite limit to the degree in which we can achieve a comfortable rationalization. As a species, the bar is relatively low, hence we depend on our social interactions to complete the rationalization process. For some, we can successfully interpret our observations and life carries on on our own, local, terms. For many, (and anecdotally, this appears to be more prevalent in those of us further “removed” from our “natural” world, i.e. urbanites) we can’t complete the rationalization to a point of local comfort, so we lean on others whom we perceive at being better at the task (appeal to authority). Challenging that puts us back into uncomfortable territory where we have to again rely on our own sensory interpretation, and we believe we can’t. We therefore defend our “authority” because we don’t believe we can do otherwise. The failure to believe is a symptom of our incomplete rationalization.
Of course, a segment of our population understands this behavior and has learned how to exploit it, for all the same reasons: to be individually comfortable in their immediate environment. By keeping that group “comfortable”,, i.e. protective, the rest of us remain comfortable ourselves.
Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists (but not impossible)
Headline on leftist Australian Fairfax Media flagship The Age:-
“Cost of household solar has outweighed benefits: Grattan Institute report”
WOW! That is not your usual Fairfax headline in this area!
then it goes on
“The cost of installing and maintaining more than one million household solar power systems has outweighed their benefit by more than $9 billion, a new report has found.
And by the time generous federal and state government subsidies run out, households without solar will have subsidised those that have made the switch to the tune of $14 billion.”
The big question is, has Fairfax sniffed the wind? Is yesterday’s headline ‘Deadly Storm Threatens Town’ tomorrow’s (Town Saved From Deadly Storm’ (Annie Proulx – The Shipping News). Is tomorrow gonna bring “Economy Saved from Monstrous Rip Off!” ? ….
Not that it was actual news but it’s encouraging that an ‘independent think tank’ which is not known as ‘conservative’ is writing arriving at such conclusions.
In the bigger world, most people don’t know anything about climate. It’s a boring subject to them and not something that they are at all interested in. If they do have a view it would be predicated by politcal belief. Just start with evil big oil and the thinking stops there. Why are skeltics generally conservative and warmists liberal?
This issue will remain that way until it actually plays out in the future. Suppose some of what we here about comes to past. A solar minimum or weaker solar cycles kicks in along with AMO PDO cool phases. It’s possible in the next decade. An actual reversal in trends for a long enogh period is the only way this will change the perception on this. If instead the pause ends and temperatures rise it’s game over for skeptics.
The big problem is that world governments are spending huge sums of our money in the name of AGW without really understanding that the science is NOT settled…Or if they do know the truth, it is for political and monetary gain / position.
That is a good point. If they end up unable to convince people if temperatures reverse trend they’ll have to jump ship and find a new vessel. Evil big oil will still remain a good target so maybe nothing will change. This issue may also be decided by the economy. If we have another big downturn that many expect that may override a lot of things. I don’t know if they will be able to convince people that their catastrophe is much worse.
It is not really a case of convincing the bellwethers, it is a matter of destroying them. History is alight with examples of this phenomenon and almost invariably they have to be removed physically from their sphere of influence. We find a few examples, mostly in the Evangelist camp of “leaders” caught dipping their wicks in the wrong bowl of oil and they are remarkably good at recovering their flock. Clinton is a fine example in the USA, the criminal and ex minister Huhne in the UK. It took Russian soldiers beating on the doors of the Reichstag to convince Hitler it was over. Stalin kept his power up until his death.
Pauchauri has received a hit but he will be back. The MSN rallied by not reporting his demise and his followers will sweep it under the carpet and give him a clean bill of health. The victim will be sacrificed in the process but all will be well with the status quo. He will get a UN job and a big stipend, perhaps not a big stiff end anymore as he would have liked.
I would suggest that the Climate claptrap will not end until they lose their political power and everything they do re-inforces the controls on that power. It may be that Putin sees things differently as does Xi Jinping. They are taking advantage of a weak and ineffectual President of the USA to expand their empires. I do not suppose that weeping over a warm day is going to stop them now.
Paris has all the makings of a total farce. You cannot impose sanctions on the third most powerful country in the world and then expect it to play your silly games. Still, in the event of a crisis, Britain can put up 64 battle tanks, 30 fighter aircraft and an Oxford 8 with a starting cannon on the front.
Ramble over.
“Pauchauri has received a hit but he will be back”
Not if he’s convicted.
There are many similarities of AGW alarmism and cult behavior:
http://www.csj.org/infoserv_cult101/checklis.htm
If people reach an unjustifiable viewpoint without the use of logic, then they tend to be impervious to you using logic to get them out of it.
https://thepointman.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/la-la-la-i-cant-hear-you-im-not-listening/
Pointman
IMHO you will not be able to convince the bellwethers of global warming of anything, no matter how rigorous your science is. Its for the same reason you can’t convince a feminist that the ¢.77 pay gap between men and women is a myth even tho the studies are clear that it is. They have an agenda, its called Marxism, the rest are just useful idiots.
Warmers can’t be convinced. This will happen eventually as the man made global warming theory is shown to be false. Mother nature has to convince them. Better to direct efforts at those who are on the fence and those who question the theory. Many smell a rat, doubt the theory, but may not know the basis behind their feeling. Supplying them with facts moves them from the center and into the skeptic’s side. Giving good information to those who already are skeptics, makes their skepticism even stronger and perhaps will make them more determined to resist the warmers.
How are you going to convince science students when the majority of their tutors are warmists? One of my cousins asked his warmist environmental studies tutor if he could give him the names of any books/articles on lunar nodes, and how the Moon may have an effect on our climate. The tutor’s answer was that he’d never heard of lunar nodes, and it was impossible for the Moon to effect Earth’s climate in any way.
If this is what’s being fed to university students, and they are buying into it, there’s no way an ordinary person is going to believe you when you tell them that there is no GW. Having said that, luckily, most ordinary people don’t really care about it one way or another. They just get on with their lives. It’s the nutcases who get so worked up!
Belief structures are difficult to “dislodge” weather it be religion or whatever. The current monotheistic religions have been around for ~2000 years or more. Islam arrived ~700 years after Judaism. Paganism spans well before that. I am hoping AGW alarmism is a cult and not a religion like belief structure because we know cults don’t last that long.
‘Rational ignorance is a belief that the cost/benefit to researching every issue is slow low as to be a net negative in time utilization.’
: warmists run on heuristics.
to preferred endings.
Hans
” warmists run on heuristics.”
Exactly!
Yep – Thanks!
Boris Alotovcrap once famously commented about this subject at Zero Hedge:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-02-05/us-unveils-climate-hubs-war-aga…
“In cave in rural France is painting circa 5000 BC, and is tell story. One day is rain much and lightening is loud and scary. Leader of cave community is explain danger of lightening and is predict end of world if citizenry is not work hard for stopping of lightening. Every citizenry of community must bring it portion of berries and meat for sacrificial god and make incantation. Leader of cave community is so very smart, is not help hunt and gather, but is must make strategy and “guide” community for self-preservation technique. One day, citizen is look up and see is still lightening, but is look around and is still alive. Other is still alive. Lightening is come and go, and community is survive. Citizen is make comment at cave meeting and next day is fall in tar pit.
Leader of cave community is explain danger of tar pit and is predict end of world if citizenry is not work hard for prevention of tar pit…”
“It often takes decades to accept new theories that are clear winners (e.g., continental drift).”
True that. And once climate change was a new theory. It took decades to accept the evidence for glacials and interglacials. It proved a winner. And once human-induced climate change was a new theory. And again it took decades and decades. Read all about it here:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
AGW has not been shown to be a clear winner.
400/280=10/7 or 3/7 increase of CO2 of anthropogenic origin in the atmosphere. Climate response until now about 0.8°C. Taking into account the logarithmic relation, adding another 3/7 from present day levels, or 400*10/7= about 571.5, or about a doubling of CO2 compared to preindustrial levels, would add another 0.8°C. That makes about 1.6°C of TCR.
About the simplest calculation I can come up with (too simple to be true therefore). Clear winner in any case.
“400/280=10/7 or 3/7 increase of CO2 of anthropogenic origin in the atmosphere. Climate response until now about 0.8°C.”
But half the “response” occurred before before the forcing was strong enough to have had an effect.
@ Wagen
It would only be that simple if you could show that if CO2 had stayed at 280 ppm the temperature would not have gone up or down, which of course you can’t. Temperature on earth has always changed due to a variety of reasons and will continue to do so regardless of what man does or does not do. All of the IPCC modules have failed to accurately predict future temperature increases based on the premise that CO2 is the driver of increasing temperature change. The only thing clear here is that the science is far from settled.
Roger,
Would you like me to repeat the calculation starting somewhere in the 70s?
Wagen; the quantifiable expression of the theory of CO2AGW are the Climate Models. They have failed. Therefore the theory in its still promulgated form is already falsified.
When the climate scientists come up with a revised theory, and express it in different models, it would be wise to test the models for 3 decades, and only if they show predictive skill after that, start to throw billions of Dollars away.
CO2AGW in its current form is the most expensive blunder of Western science ever, and threatens to sink the reputation of science as a whole. Non-warmunist scientists might consider expressing their dismay about their charlatan colleagues.
@Wagen
Your assertion would be correct if you could prove that if CO2 stayed at 280 ppm the temperature would not have increased, which you can’t. Since we know that the earth temperature has been warmer and cooler than today long before the industrial revolution what was the driver for the temperature changing before the industrial revolution compared to now? Remember correlation does not equal causation.
Dirk,
I have just shown with the simplest possible calculation I can come up with that the quantifications of the warming response are in the right ball park.
Then you come along and say they are ‘falsified’. What’s your definition of falsification?
@Vanguard,
I gave this link in my first comment here:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm
And I explained that glacial/interglacial changes happened and needed to be explained. So what is your point telling me climate changed naturally before? However, humans influence climate now.
‘that if CO2 stayed at 280 ppm the temperature would not have increased’
They would have decreased.
The point I was trying to make is that first (long ago) the idea that climate does not change had to be disproved by evidence. This took decades. Then there was the idea that humans change climate as well by burning fossil fuels on a large scale. Also this needed to be shown by evidence and it took decades before the science mainstream was convinced by it (see the link).
@dean,
Please, see my answer to Vanguard. In addition
‘All of the IPCC modules have failed to accurately predict future temperature increases based on the premise that CO2 is the driver of increasing temperature change.’
As I have demonstrated they are in the right ball park. The models (I assume modules is an autocorrect malfunction) are not only dependent on CO2.
@ Wagen
Well I am glad you agree climate changed before man started burning fossil fuel. May I ask what you believe was the natural cause of this warming and cooling?
I have not seen any conclusive evidence that man made CO2 has caused the temperature to increase as you imply in your calculations. Again just because CO2 went from 280 to 400 ppm and the temperature during that time increased 0.8 C as you assert, it does not mean that the CO2 was the reason. Correlation does not equal causation.
@Vanguard
‘Well I am glad you agree climate changed before man started burning fossil fuel.’
Well I said so in my first comment that got this thread started…
‘ May I ask what you believe was the natural cause of this warming and cooling?’
Milankovitch cycles? There are surely a few uncertainties here and there.
‘I have not seen any conclusive evidence that man made CO2 has caused the temperature to increase as you imply in your calculations.’
Well, my calculations did no such thing. They only showed the models are doing quite well. For evidence of atmospheric CO2, man-caused or not, influencing climate, I refer you to high school physics text books. (Am I now a sheeple who refers to the pope and Obama?)
‘ Again just because CO2 went from 280 to 400 ppm and the temperature during that time increased 0.8 C as you assert, it does not mean that the CO2 was the reason. Correlation does not equal causation.’
Nobody said it did. But there is physics. We know the link between one and the other.
@Wagan
Sorry, but you’ll have to do FAR better than that to even come close. Temperature has varied far more than 0.8C in similar time periods many many times historically long before man was ever emitting CO2 or greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel burning.
Long overdue to learn that Correlation is not Causation. CO2 levels don’t even correlate well with temperature changes, and to the extent it does, it follows temperature, not drives it. But regardless, a major tenet of science that any decent professor pounds into their students is: Correlation is NOT Causation. If it were, then all we have to do to reduce suicides is make people drink at least two cups of coffee a day (half the suicide rate), and we’d all know that darkness causes crime, as does wearing sneakers/tennis shoes (and prolly the same for hoodies). And pirates – well actually a LACK of pirates, is clearly responsible for global warming. This has been conclusively proven by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Open Letter To Kansas School Board. Oh, and the outcome of the Washington Redskin’s games determines the outcome of presidential elections http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2009/10/regression-abuse.html . All sorts of other examples can be found showing just how silly it is to try to rely on a correlation assuming that it somehow proves causation.
[Blockquote]400/280=10/7 or 3/7 increase of CO2 of anthropogenic origin in the atmosphere. Climate response until now about 0.8°C. Taking into account the logarithmic relation, adding another 3/7 from present day levels, or 400*10/7= about 571.5, or about a doubling of CO2 compared to preindustrial levels, would add another 0.8°C. That makes about 1.6°C of TCR.[/Blockquote]
@ Wagen
I read the above mean you are implying that based on the temperature rising 0.8 C with an increase of CO2 from 280 to 400 ppm that adding an additional 171.5 ppm of CO2 for a total of 571.5 ppm would thus increase the temperature to 1.6 C.
You’re directly implying correlation between CO2 levels to temperature increase and yet there has been no observed increase in global temperature for the last 18 years while CO2 levels have increased so that would mean your formula / model is not correct and thus why all of the IPCC climate models have all projected higher temperatures than what we are experiencing. The science is not clear and the conclusions not validated.
@Wagen
A chess player can be in the same ballpark as the world’s best home run hitter – that doesn’t make the chess player a good baseball player, let alone a world class home run hitter.
@Wagen
“Milankovitch cycles? There are surely a few uncertainties here and there.”
Sorry, but Milankovitch cycles cannot explain the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, Roman Optimum, Holocene Optimum, Minoan Warm Period, Dark Ages, etc.
And the “few uncertainties here and there” are so massive that they very easily encompass the relatively mild and essentially linear warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age – about half of which was every bit as rapid and large BEFORE man was producing any significant CO2 as after.
Nor does your claim that “climate models” have performed fairly well come even close to holding up – in fact they’ve performed abysmally. Your simplistic calculation isn’t a “climate model” – it’s a sad attempt to claim that a poor correlation is magically causation when it is nothing of the sort.
STILL Epic Fail: 73 Climate Models vs. Measurements, Running 5-Year Means
Climate Scientist: 73 UN Climate Models Wrong, No Global Warming in 17 Years
New AWI Research Confirms: Climate Models Cannot Reproduce Temperatures Of The Last 6000 Years
Climate models outperformed by random walks
Climate models aren’t good enough to hindcast, says new study
New peer reviewed paper shows just how bad the climate models really are
Graph: Climate models vs. actual ocean temperatures
Nature [journal] on the failure of climate models
Separating signal and noise in climate warming In order to separate human-caused global warming from the “noise” of purely natural climate fluctuations, temperature records must be at least 17 years long, according to climate scientists
Day of reckoning draws nearer for IPCC According to Dr. Clive Best, A key prediction from the 2007 IPCC WG1 report fails statistical tests
Current empirical temperatures almost falling outside the 95% certainty level at this point:
http://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/841/9401/original.jpg
IPCC’s Global Warming Hypothesis Fails Ultimate Test – No Tropical ‘Hotspot’ After 17 Years of Immense CO2 Emissions
@rational db8
“Temperature has varied far more than 0.8C in similar time periods many many times historically long before man was ever emitting CO2 or greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel burning.”
Please inform me of similar occurances in human history, and what it meant for the societies at that time. I’m eager to learn.
“Correlation is NOT Causation”
I’ll repeat (sigh…):
‘Nobody said it did. But there is physics. We know the link between one and the other.’
(What I answered Vanguard above)
@Vanguard
“would thus increase the temperature to 1.6 C.”
As the Transient Climate Response yes. Not the ECS. I also said my calculation was too simple to be true.
However, the estimate is based on present estimates of warming including the what you call ‘there has been no observed increase in global temperature for the last 18 years’. I assume you refer to surface temperatures. However land ice decreased and ocean heat content increased in said period.
Internal climate variability does exist. My calculated estimate may be the lower boundary because of this variability.
@Rational dB8
“Sorry, but Milankovitch cycles cannot explain the Little Ice Age, Medieval Warm Period, Roman Optimum, Holocene Optimum, Minoan Warm Period, Dark Ages, etc.”
And I was referring to glacials-interglacials, see my first post here.
@Wagen
Try a little research on the Medieval Warm Period, Roman Optimum, Minoan Warm Period, and Holocene Optimum. You’ll find that historically pretty much every time the Earth has been as warm or warmer than present day conditions, mankind absolutely flourishes – just as we are now. Then try looking up the cold periods such as the Little Ice Age, Dark Ages, etc. You’ll pretty much find that every time there’s significant cooling, we wind up with mass famines, starvation, mass migrations, war, and plagues. The genetic evidence also strongly suggests that the last glacial period nearly drove man into extinction – we were apparently down to all of roughly 2,000 to 10,000 people total, worldwide.
@Wagen
Sorry, I’d meant to address this in my last post also – “But there is physics” and “we know the link between one and the other” doesn’t even begin to cut it. Tell us what all the physics interactions are between cosmic rays and our atmosphere, and what effect that has on temperature. Same for the physics involved in clouds, high clouds, low clouds, what causes one type to be more prevalent over time than the other or shift the mixture and it’s effects on the Earth’s temperature. Same for soot. Changes in phytoplankton blooms in the ocean or total biosphere greening. Naturally emitted aerosols that change based on temperature. El Nino’s and La Nina’s. The PDO and AMO and other multidecadal or longer ocean cycles. What are all the physics interactions for all of those things (and the reams of other factors I haven’t even mentioned), and how exactly does each affect the global temperature? Knowing how greenhouses gasses act in the lab is moot when the issue is how much affect they have on the entire Earth when mixed in with all these other confounding factors.
@Wagen
No, Wagen, actually you were referring to the current relatively mild warming that has occurred since the end of the Little Ice Age also. And my point is that while you’re trying to pass off previous changes as due to things like Milankovitch cycles, clearly there are many other factors involved that have resulted in temperature changes as large or larger than the amount supposedly caused by AGW here recently. In other words, natural variation is a far better explanation for ALL of these temperature changes than AGW, and you trying to pass off past changes as somehow being “different” doesn’t cut the mustard.
As already commented, there is no evidence of man-made climate change on a global scale. Locally, yes, it’s evident. But science cannot presently determine the extent, if any of man-made “climate change”, or even its sign, ie whether net cooling or warming. But in any case, the global effect is at best negligible in reality.
“For the record:
I don’t “deny” climate change or global warming, it is clear to me that the Earth has warmed slightly in the last century, this is indisputable. I also believe that increasing amounts of CO2 in Earths atmosphere are a component of that warming, but that CO2 is not the only driver of climate as some would have us believe. However, what is in dispute (and being addressed by mainstream climate science) is climate sensitivity to CO2 as well as the hiatus in global warming, also known as “the pause”. Since I embrace the idea of warming and that CO2 is a factor, along with other drivers including natural variability, the label “denier” is being applied purely for the denigration value, and does not accurately reflect my position on climate.”
Blog owner just said this
Sorry, but there are also reams of examples of hypothesis that people hung onto for a very long time that never were able to be shown to be as good as other existing hypothesis. Thus far, AGW cannot even come close to natural variability for explaining all the known historical data related to Earth’s temperature. What’s more, key “fingerprints” of the AGW hypothesis have never occurred. In other words, it can’t even tie natural variability, let alone be shown to be the “winner.”
There is one thing that convinced scientists from ‘climate does not change’ to ‘climate does change’ (acceptance of glacials and interglacials) and the same thing that convinced them from ‘humanity does not change climate’ to ‘humanity does change climate’. This thing is called “evidence”.
@Wagen
There is no evidence that man’s CO2 emissions have done diddly to the global temperature. None. There are far too many possible confounding factors to be able to tease out how much effect our CO2 additions actually have versus the many somewhat understood other factors and the many not at all well understood factors (not to mention a number I’m sure we’re not even aware of yet). These are the same confounding factors that have caused temperature changes throughout history starting eons before man ever began burning fossil fuels.
Ugghh… I wish people wouldn’t use continental drift as an example of a “better theory” that took time to be accepted. Continental drift was thought up by the very people who opposed it. They thought it up and found it to be lacking. When they died off, it became the defacto theory because none of the other theories could explain the mechanism by which it works. Continental drift cannot explain its mechanism either. It fails to pass simple geometric rules. But this is handwaved away. The story isn’t over on continental drift.
You are suggesting the discoveries by the US Navy, after the theory posed by an amateur geologist, are all wrong? Interesting handwaving there!
The True Origin of Continental Drift
and
Challenge To Earth Scientists
The answer is deliberate, and precise, re-formation of the Earth’s landmasses. In fact, the entire solar system was re-formed in the great design event:
Challenge To Science III: The “gods”, the Design, and Man
Fuc&k me (Taking on my Gordon Ramsay persona). Creationists?
I never said or implied anything you’re suggesting.
Say what?
“Continental drift was thought up by the very people who opposed it.”
False.
“When they died off, it became the defacto theory because none of the other theories could explain the mechanism by which it works.”
Huh?
Incoherent and false.
Difficult to be both at once, but this sentence is.
“Continental drift cannot explain its mechanism either.”
False.
Plus makes no logical sense.
“It fails to pass simple geometric rules.”
Geometric rules?
Which geometry is that?
Silly.
“But this is handwaved away.”
Seems like it was handwaved into existence…by you…just now.
“The story isn’t over on continental drift.”
Finally, something which is actually true.
No “story” is ever over in science.
Leave for another time the lack of using currently accepted terminology, i.e. “plate tectonics”, in your post.
Continental drift (which is the term the op used) WAS though up by the very people who opposed it. Look it up. Blindingly sticking your head in the ground won’t get you very far. Everything I said is true.
Forgot the details but the paradigm is under significant challenge.
========
A precis, please. ‘Geometric rules’ tolled a faint bell, but apparently not for me. There are unexplained mysteries in the proposed mechanisms, I got that far when last I listened.
==========
There is being skeptical then there is being contrarian. Being skeptical is requiring adequate evidence before believing something is true. Being contrarian is claiming something isn’t true even though there is overwhelming proof that it is true. I am quite dismayed that some people here appear to be contrarian and not just merely skeptical. There are many aspects of global warming that one can and should be skeptical of, but not every aspect. However, while not every detail of plate tectonics is understood the evidence for it as a whole is overwhelming. I also put the vast majority of evolution in the same category, although not everything about evolution is understood, the evidence for it as a whole is overwhelming. There no convincing evidence to support any of the famous conspiracy theories . Yet some people insist on believing them despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. People who believe things in spite of the evidence are not the friends of skeptics, and skeptics would do well to reject them. I don’t want to create a conversation about conspiracy theories, but rather about the thinking that is required for people to believe them.
You’re taking things too far and jumping to conclusions. You need to take a breath or two and relax.
The essence of it is that it a belief based in emotion and, as any decent salesman will tell you, facts will never overcome emotion.
When my 3 children were small I taught them to question authority by every so often saying something so ridiculous, they questioned it. They are adults now and they will question superiors in their workplace and are probably the least sycophantic people I know. When I hear stories now of vulnerable children and adults bring abused by their “betters” any doubts that i had at the time of their upbringing have now gone.
“Experts” in my experience are far from being expert in anything. Our last but one (UK) government, decided that diesel cars were better for the environment than petrol, because they produced less CO2, so they encouraged motorists to buy diesel cars by having sky-high road tax on cars that produced more CO2. Of course the Law of Unintended Consequences kicked in because people were buying cars which were not appropriate for their personal use (diesel is only a good fuel if a vehicle is driven more than 15,000 miles a year with regular long journeys to allow the particulate filter to regenerate), if this does not happen the vehicle produces particles of carbon coated in oil from the exhaust, these particles are highly carcinogenic and cause breathing difficulties). The PF is expensive to replace, so not many people bother, the result is an estimated 7000 extra deaths pa from breathing disorders.
Another motoring related LUC was the study that found children in cities had lower IQ’s than those in small towns, they also had higher concentrations of lead in their bodies. Living in cities with more cars with lead on the petrol MUST be causing this. laws were passed to phase out lead in petrol. Cars became less economical and unleaded fuel contains a great deal more benzene than leaded, it is a 1000 times more toxic and is a carcinogen, but a price worth paying to have healthy children? Concentrations of lead in children were unchanged, why? Because the lead from burnt petrol was heavy and did not stay in the air for long enough to be inhaled. The lead actually came from water pipes, which were used in our cities but not in rural areas.
I personally feel that if CO2 emissions are limited by international law the LUC will go into overdrive in ways that we cannot comprehend. Our civilisation exists because of cheap, reliable energy,”renewable” energy is neither cheap nor reliable and in my view does not curtail CO2 emissions anywhere near as much as its proponents claim. The “sheeple” will bring down civilisation as we know it unless we can change their way of thinking.
Hey, andrewharding, maybe a CME will do it first, or an Ice Age…….:-)
It is not simply the bellwether gene that important but also (as this opinion piece points out), it is the time-cost-benefit of having to do your own research. Most don’t bother, because they don’t have the interest or the time, and so they have to depend on the bellwether whether (sic) they like it or not.
It like Christians. They believe because the bellwether says so. But if you ask how many have read the entire Bible from cover to cover, how many have? One in ten thousand, perhaps? From my experience, even most priests have not bothered to read every book and chapter, let alone every verse.
So whether you are a blind follower or not, you are often thrown onto the only option available – following the bellwether.
.
However, most leaders also follow the trends. A leader without followers is no longer a leader, and so when they see their flock marching off in a different direction they have to make it look as though they really did want to go in that direction after all – honest ! Its like prime minister Ca-Moron jumping on the ‘energy is too expensive’ bandwagon. That is not where he wanted to go, but that is where the electorate were heading and so he joined them.
R
excellent point – we must keep speaking out so that political “leaders” will slowly move their direction – I personally don’t think they believe is much of anything except themselves as leader
Thank you for a very helpful article. Now I understand why it is useless to try to convince CAGW believers of the truth, as supported by facts.
This thing of sheep following the bellwether led to the slaughter of millions in Europe in the 1930s and 40s.
‘If you really want to win the debate on global warming, change the opinions of the bellwethers.’
No one knows if Obama, Merkel really believe in CAGW; or even really care about. But in their respective ruinous political careers, resumees it’s the only field left to find widest, unquestioned, uncritizising support.
Regards – Hans
‘If you really want to win the debate on global warming, change the opinions of the bellwethers.’
semper et ubique:
No one knows if Obama, Merkel really believe in CAGW. Or even care about.
But it’s the only field left in their respective ruinous careers and resumees where they still find widest, uncritical support.
Don’t argue. Wait and see.
Regards – Hans
Sometimes you can change people’s minds but rarely can you change people’s hearts. This issue is religious virtue based not science based. The science is on our side and enough important people already know that. This too should come to pass with time. I just wish it wouldn’t take soo long.
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Tolstoy
‘What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires — desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.’
Bertrand Russell
“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks. But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.”
Festinger
“Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.”
Luke 18:17
What “latest speech” by the pope on global warming would that be?
This helps explain why some, such as myself were able to resist the Warmist siren song. Being part of the “In-Group” wasn’t a factor for me. Though I never got around to seeing AIT, I admired Gore, had read his book “Earth In the Balance”, and voted for him in the 2000 election. If anyone was primed for Warmism, I was. I come from a family of Democrats and I am still registered as one (simply because I haven’t bothered changing to Independent). I have always been wary of mob mentality, since it is based more on emotion, and is thus irrational. I chose an unusual line of work (or it chose me), and wound up starting my own business. So, independence and rationality are huge motivators for me.
When I first began researching manmade warming, I thought it would be a slam-dunk. The thought that the idea might be completely wrong never occurred to me. But, I needed to know what “the other side” was saying in order to be able to rationally refute it. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the wool had been pulled over my eyes, and that shocked and angered me.
I picked up Gore’s book shortly after it was first published and was in very prominent positions in all the book stores…. randomly flipped to a page, and started reading. He was carrying on and whining about being miles from the shore out in the ocean, seeing a single dead fish floating on the surface, and how man’s pollution was therefor obviously killing the entire ocean [as if fish never die of natural causes, predation, illness, etc., etc.!!!].
I put the book down, convinced that Gore was a scientific illiterate who didn’t have a lick of common sense either. He’s never managed to prove me wrong or even come close to bringing those conclusions into question.
You seem to be saying CAGU belief is a socio-political movement with a lot of momentum, I agree.
I like the word “othering”, this is a new word for me, it is quite similar to “confirmation bias ” which a measurable phenomenon. We all do it because we are social animals that pick up and empathise with what our peers think.
How do we change it? The answer is very slowly, without tantrums and with pockets of conversions. It is gradually becoming cool to be a sceptic of the CAGU meme. This is the slow process in action. As a science you have an advantage; science has rules that eventually are enforced, even on the up-hill slope against prevailing socio political beliefs.
Language is important. Invent the language that the debate is framed in and you are halfway to owning the battle ground. Attack others who use the D word because it is an anti-science word, introduce neutral words that others can adopt into their own mind scape, provide concepts with punch lines. The “18 year hiatus” has certainly harmed “the consensus” a word that is beginning to become frayed at the edges. We need to use our knowledge of these social forces to seed the debate with our language.
I should also have added visual language is very powerful. The lady with her fingers is very powerful, she should have a bubble saying “I believe in AGW, I believe in AGW, I believe in AGW”.
So is the image of a poor polar bear sitting on a floating piece of ice.
With a penguin!?
Most people are unaware that polar bears are perhaps the champion swimmers of all non-aquatic mammals, being able to swim for days on end across vast stretches of open and freezing ocean.
The entire IPCC , UNFCCC – AGW circus depends on the outputs of the GCMs
For a complete discussion of the uselessness of the IPCC’s modeling approach to forecasting climate see Section 1 at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Here are the conclusions
“In summary the temperature projections of the IPCC – Met office models and all the impact studies which derive from them have no solid foundation in empirical science being derived from inherently useless and specifically structurally flawed models. They provide no basis for the discussion of future climate trends and represent an enormous waste of time and money. As a foundation for Governmental climate and energy policy their forecasts are already seen to be grossly in error and are therefore worse than useless. A new forecasting paradigm needs to be adopted.”
If you stand back and view the climate data and possible driver data with the right time scale perspective and have a wide knowledge of the relevant data time series so that you can judge its reliability, periodicities in the temperature and orbital and solar driver data are clearly obvious These periodicities and their amplitude ranges can be reasonably estimated and projected forward and the relationships between the driver and temperature data may be reasonably well inferred without being necessarily precisely calculated..
The biggest mistake of the establishment was to ignore the longer term cycles and to project forward several decades of data linearly when we are obviously approaching, at or just past a peak in a millennial cycle. This is more than scientific inadequacy – it is a lack of basic common sense. It is like taking the temperature trend from say Jan – June and projecting it forward linearly for ten years or so.The modelers approach is analogous to looking at a pointillist painting from 6 inches – they simply can’t see the wood for the trees or the pattern for the dots. ( In a recent paper Mann has finally after much manipulation managed to discover the 60 +/- year cycle which any schoolboy can see by looking at Fig 15 at the linked post above).
The same post also provides estimates of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling based on the 60 and especially the millennial quasi- periodicity so obvious in the temperature data and using the neutron count and 10 Be data as the most useful proxy for solar “activity”.
One of the problems in convincing warmists that their views are wrong is that most skeptics generally frame the discussion using the same reductionist – modeling approach as the warmists but with different assumtions, parameters and algorithms. We would make more progress if we based skeptical arguments on the quite different natural cycle approach outlined in the link above.
Dr. Page,
I can tell you that my initial skepticism of the CAGW meme was based on by knowledge and understanding of past cycles and natural variations. As was my skepticism of individual points within the meme, like increased droughts, storms, etc.
They make broad conclusions based on short term trends and what I saw right off as a near complete lack of historical perspective.
Has the pope to believe in god –
as long as he holds on to the bible and gathers the ecclesie.
Nowadays people ”don’t need the church I’m with Jesus.”
the new pagan – when it’s the ecclesie jesus taught.
Hans
I am a warmist because I am a physicist who understands enough detail of atmospheric physics and climate change to know that CO2 emissions cause an energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere which must at some time be corrected by surface warming, whether now or later. And all the signs are that warming is resuming in 2015 because of the current El Niño.
It is noteworthy that those questioning climate change are almost always conservatives in English-speaking nations. And almost all are not trained and published climate science experts. That says to me that the doubt on AGW is primarily political and not scientific, especially since more than 3% of mainstream climate scientists are conservatives. Further the more a non-climate scientist gets to know about climate science the more they will tell you climate change is real and caused by humans. This isexemplified by the shift in attitude among meteorologists, 90% of whom now believe the earth is warming and we are responsible
So the reason why it is difficult to convince warmists is that they know that very few who are real published experts in the subject doubt climate change is real, including climateexperts who are conservatives, and they can readily see the cluster of doubt affects only one half of the political landscape of non-experts.
Well you don’t know about, adiabatic uplift and descent, hydrostatic balance within an atmosphere, past natural climate change, the effect of mass density involving conduction and convection on the rate of photon release, or the reason for the existence of a lapse rate even for an atmosphere with no GHGs.
Effectively, they show that radiative capability within an atmosphere does not require a change in surface temperature, merely a convective adjustment.
I suggest you do some studying.
Sorry Steve but all these things were covered in the atmospheric physics course I attended last term as an extra-curricular activity to my PhD
Last term. Now I get it! Ciao Pete!
Your course will have been based on the incorrect AGW assumption that the Earth’s surface radiates photons to space commensurate with a temperature of 288K whereas in fact it radiates at 255K with the other 33K engaged in collisional activity supporting the pressure gradient slope within the atmosphere.
Nor will it have explained to you how convective overturning changes speed to negate the thermal effect of GHGs blocking certain emission wavelengths to space.
Essentially, the blocked wavelengths become potential energy in uplift but are returned to the surface as kinetic energy in descent whereupon they revert to the full range of wavelengths and escape to space. Convection speeds up exactly as much as required to negate the thermal effect of GHGs.
Pete you should’ve said upfront that you are a phd student, you gave the initial impression that you were well studied in the field. So you are merely mimicking what your climate science profs are telling you. This makes sense now.
Convection from the surface stops at the tropopause. The reduced long wave emissions causing the greenhouse effect on average come from higher than this. So you are wrong.
Pete,
The stratosphere also has convection in the form of the Brewer Dobson Circulation and it is likely that the Mesosphere has something similar too.
There is a chain of system responses to any attempt at disruption by radiative gases.
Note that the concept of back radiation is flawed in any event because the declining rate of photon emission with depth means that every time a longwave photon is reabsorbed lower down the chances of re-emission decline so in fact DWIR from GHGs gets absorbed into collisional activity before it gets to the surface.
When DWIR is absorbed into collisional activity it distorts the lapse rate slope to the warm side in ascent but to an equal and opposite extent to the cool side in descent for a zero net thermal effect at the surface.
Interesting idea.
Please provide sources for your social statistics above. It sounds like a good thing to explore:
– is the anglophone world really more sceptical?
– 3%?
– 90%?
3% is just the reverse of 97% of climate scientists confirming Climate change. Feel free to put up a case that 97% of climate scientists would vote liberal if you think you stand a cat in hell’s chance of being believed.
The focus on the conservative Anglophile world is purely because that is where the right wing think tanks concentrate their efforts. What do you think would happen if they had a go in Germany? Laws. On disclosure of funding would hit the statute book before you could blink.
Ok, so these are your personal ideas/conclusions. There are No studies. One can imagine someone comparing blogs in several countries to see whether anglophone are more sceptical than French, German, Japanese, Chinese, etc. It would be interesting to see such a social science study.
However, your reversal of the 97% might be an error. I remember seeing a blog comment (on WUWT?) ~1 year ago which challenged the 97%. He noted that the 97% figure appears Only in the Executive Summary of the IPCC report, written by the Political masters of the IPCC report’s scientist authors.
The commenter had studied the report and advised that the IPCC scientists had readily acknowledged challenges in/to their research. As well, WUWT has that long list of scientists who have stated that they are Sceptical of AGW.
I presume your 90% was also a guesstimate from your perspective.
-/-
You do have a point about behind-the-scenes funding by vested interests. Canadians have long suspected that the Keystone XL pipeline hasn’t been approved because Pres. Obama is favouring one of his largest financial donors who just happens to own the BNSF railway that transports the oil at ~twice the cost (and risk). As well, it’s in the interest of USA oil companies to keep Alberta oil & gas landlocked – why not fund Canadian protestors to new prevent pipelines?
Oh my. What a complete waste of money and time your education was. You appear to have gained little knowledge after all those years. I can presume your science is of similar calibre. Maybe if you ask nicely, you can get your money back.
Hmmm Mr. Coppin, your comment sounds as if you have already Decided and are perhaps a Denier rather than a Sceptic.
Isn’t WUWT a Sceptic site dedicated to being Open to all possible causes of how climate changes? What if ClimatePete, a student of physics, has actually found Social Science research to document his declarations? Why would we not want to explore that?
Climate Pete
May 24, 2015 at 6:37 am
“What do you think would happen if they had a go in Germany? Laws. On disclosure of funding would hit the statute book before you could blink.”
Hey Climate Pete I’m German and I have no idea what you’re talking about. Guess you’re a believer in Naomi Oreske’s Big Oil / Koch Brothers slur.
That’s why I love to mock warmunists: They’re such gullible idiots.#
Now explain to us the fabled H2O feedback.
No chance, Paul. How do you think these universities can afford to send Mike Mann to all of these international junkets and pay him a kings ransom to teach one class a year?
ROFLMAO! Pete, Pete, Pete. If you’d bothered to take two seconds to evaluate the “97%” claim you’d know it’s blatantly false. So you’ve flipped a grossly false and unscientific claim on it’s head to assume that 3% of climate scientists are therefore conservatives? My my. Time for you to look up the logical fallacy of begging the question – along with confirmation bias. You falsely assume that conservatives are wrong on this issue, therefore the 97% must be accurate and must be liberals, and all the other 3% must be your ideological opponents, conservatives. You use the same utter lack of logic to try to claim that most of the skepticism is in the “anglophile world.”
Time for you to take a logic class, and learn a bit about the basic tenets of the scientific method too while you’re at it. I’d also strongly suggest you find a copy of a great old book called “How We Know What Isn’t So” and start learning about the logical errors that humans are innately prone to make. Some efforts along those lines might help you learn to not fall for such self serving assumptions.
@ Lorne White
With regard to your reply to Paul Coppin – sorry, but Paul is dead on the money. “Climate Pete’s” replies have shown such a gross failure of logic and lack of the most basic understanding of scientific inquiry that Coppin’s statements were well warranted. That has NOTHING to do with the issue of being a skeptic or a warmist, and everything to do with “Climate Pete’s” failure to rely on actual research, survey results conducted in a reasonably scientific method, and his use of blatant logical fallacies, assumption, confirmation bias, etc. Frankly I find it very hard to believe he’s even an undergrad in science let alone a PhD student in physics based on his failure to use rational critical thinking skills in his assumptions and conclusions presented here.
one could say the vast majority of climate alarmists are liberals listening to a small minority of liberal elites in first world western nations. I don’t believe for a second the third world as a whole buys this hypothesis regardless of political grouping unless they are government elite.
In countries like UK where I am and where climate change is not much politicised the conservatives have appointed a well respected conservative Amber Rudd who is determined to negotiate for a world agreement on CO2 emissions reductions in Paris in November. There is cross party support for this with only a few right-wing dissenters. USA is very different which is why climate change policy is science-driven in the UK And Europe and politics driven in the USA.
…so Climate Pete is a believer in the EU Kommissars Technocracy… Well no surprise there, Climate Pete.
People like you give me hope: The collapsing standards in the EU constantly increase the demand for the last remaining rational thinkers.
In my experience you have the same amount of skeptics in northern Europe as in the US. The only difference is that there are less in the government because Northern Europe does not have much balance in political leadership as of current. It would be political suicide for any northern European leader to proclaim a skeptical stance. The general public in all these countries is pretty split on this issue. The more research the regular citizen does the more skeptical they become in my experience.
Are you on “Not the Nine O’clock news”? Seems you are bit of an idiot…no, sorry, comedian! I get them mixed up sometimes.
Climate Pete
You say
Say what!?
‘Climate change’ is completely politicised in the UK. The global warming issue was converted from being a dubious century-old scientific hypothesis into a world-wide political scare by Margaret Thatcher. Read this and learn.
In the UK man-made global warming aka ‘climate change’ always has been a purely political issue. Indeed, the pertinent science has always been subordinate to politics; e.g. the Hadley Center was established to support the politics.
Richard
Sigh. And it never even occurs to you that the exact opposite may be what’s actually occurring – that you’re being fed the politicized view, and that the USA is more open to the actual science, and that’s why the USA is more skeptical. How very sad.
Charlie: ““In countries like UK where I am and where climate change is not much politicised the conservatives have appointed a well respected conservative Amber Rudd…”
Absolute, 24 carat arrant nonsense!
Stop making stuff up!
I didn’t write that though cat. Climate Pete did
In France there is no real right/conservative parties (Sarkozy was ~ Labour), but the most popular journal is the Conservative/center-right “Le Figaro” and it used to be slightly sceptical (but I think now it is becoming almost a center-left-green magazine).
The right press is more sceptical.
So yes, there is left/right “climate” gradient in some countries in Europe.
Charlie: “I didn’t write that though cat. Climate Pete did”
Sorry Charlie!
I know a lot of meteorologists and they all see the data that we are warming slowly in this interglacial and 0% “believe” we are responsible.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/04/14/study-broadcast-meteorologists-increasingly-convinced-manmade-climate-change-is-happening/
90% of meteorologists believe the world is warming and 74% will attribute at least half of this to humans.
WaPo = garbage!
Here we have “Climate Pete” using the consensus fallacy.
Ha ha ha
I see you fell for the revisionist interpretation of the data. Says a lot about our critical thinking skills. The survey showed 52% believed man was the *primary* cause of global warming. This means the other half thinks nature is responsible of about half the warming. If our remissions only caused half the warming this completely supports the skeptical viewpoint that there is no future problem.
@Climate Pete
First, so what if they believe the world is warming? The vast majority of skeptics and “deniers” also believe the world is warming. Has been ever since the end of the Little Ice Age, which occurred some 70 years BEFORE man was ever producing a significant amount of CO2, e.g., before AGW even supposedly started.
Next, that source is supposedly about broadcast meteorologists – a large number of which aren’t scientists at all – not scientists as you’d claimed. What’s more, when you actually go to the source, you find it’s not even about broadcast meteorologists, but about broadcast “weathercasters.” http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/report/national-survey-broadcast-meteorologists-about-climate-change
Next, the authors themselves note: “Changes in survey wording, however, make it impossible to say how significant the changes in views are. “We don’t know if the community has changed, or if we are now merely asking better questions,” Maibach said.” What’s more, if you look at the responses, a large majority of those who do think man has an impact say they expect MARGINAL changes in temperature, heat waves, cold waves, etc., over the next 50 years – not any significant changes.
In short, you know just enough about “the science” of global warming, as well as the issues surrounding it to remain an ignoramus without appearing to be one to those who already Believe.
So what precisely is your qualification in atmospheric physics and climate change.
Climate Pete, explain to us how the crappy Climate Models are expected to ever achieve any predictive skill, if you’re such a luminary.
Another one who falls back on the 97% fallacy. Plus a call to authority. Tsk tsk.
Climate Pete, please note that the warmists’ claim is for catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. And yet we have 18+ years of no global warming, much less catastrophic warming. Climate changes; it has always changed. Temperatures have been much warmer without resulting in runaway warming. Atmospheric CO₂ levels have been much higher during an ice age. The burden of proof is on the warmists; you have to show that any warming is real, unnatural—and catastrophic. Because, sorry, models don’t count.
Climate Pete, somewhere in your course notes there should be a reference to some body of climate physics topical source material which covers the subject of the earth’s natural operating temperature range at the earth’s natural CO2 concentration level, expressed as a range of expected Global Mean Temperatures at an assumed earth mean natural concentration of 280 ppm CO2,
Could you please take some time to look through your course notes and to inform us as to the range of expected Global Mean Temperatures which climate physics experts say the earth should be experiencing in the absence of elevated levels of CO2? (Thanks in advance.)
Your first paragraph is fascinating. You begin by throwing your superior understanding at us. And, frankly, for all I know, your understanding about such things is superior. But then, you throw it all away on what seems to me to be a completely illogical statement: “And all the signs are that warming is resuming in 2015 because of the current El Niño.”
That statement is illogical in two respects.
First, warming stopped with the Great El Niño, in 1998. That warming would resume with the next big El Niño, therefore, does not follow. Moreover, there have been two smaller El Niños since then, haven’t there? In 2005 and 2009-2010. Each had a warming effect that was short-lived. You can see that in this graph.
It seems to me that the case can be made that the Earth would be cooling distinctly were it not for the recent El Niños.
Second, an El Niño is a completely NATURAL force. You are, therefore, counting on a completely natural force to validate your belief in a MAN-MADE result. I don’t really have the vocabulary with which to describe how nonsensical that seems to me.
Let’s take it out of the issue at hand. Let’s say that some people claim that “Z” is the result of human activity “A”. But there is also a natural occurrence, “N”, that others claim is the real cause of Z. If the people backing A started pointing to N as evidence that their idea is right, what would you think of how they think?
You left out one variable: Assume as well that some portion of N and Z is attributable to “Y”.
The answer then becomes…
Where in the world are you getting your stats from? Let’s see actual references, especially for the claim that 90% of meteorologists believe man is causing significant AGW and since you’ve specified non-climate SCIENTISTS, be sure you keep it to degreed meteorologists. And the bit about how supposedly the more non-climate scientists learn about AGW the more they’re believers. Most skeptical scientists I know came to it after initially believing AGW was likely occurring because they gave climate scientists the benefit of the doubt, and were then horrified when they started actually looking into the actual science themselves. I’m a prime example of that – as are many others here on WUWT and elsewhere. Let’s see you prove the bit about 3% too, even though that’s a smaller issue than the other two.
“And all the signs are that warming is resuming in 2015 because of the current El Niño”
Excuse me, but AGW doesn’t posit warming caused by naturally occurring El Nino’s.
“So the reason why it is difficult to convince warmists is that they know that very few who are real published experts in the subject doubt climate change is real, including climateexperts who are conservatives, and they can readily see the cluster of doubt affects only one half of the political landscape of non-experts.”
Nice job of wrapping a bunch of false assumptions into a false conclusion that supports your confirmation bias while allowing you to vilify/diminish/other those who disagree with your opinion.
You’re arguing against yourself. If the warming resumes because of El Nino that means that CO2 has nothing to do with it. Logic much? The fact that you bring this up points to your confirmation bias.
Climate Pete says:
I am a warmist because I am a physicist who understands enough detail of atmospheric physics and climate change to know that CO2 emissions cause an energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere which must at some time be corrected by surface warming…
Well, after 18 years, are you ready to at least reconsider?
No:
…whether now or later.
Ah. “Now or later”. So you’ve got all the bases covered. No warming for 18+ years, but it might happen in another 18 years? Or more? It doesn’t matter, your mind is made up. The science is settled.
Then Climate Pete preposterously says:
And all the signs are that warming is resuming in 2015 because of the current El Niño.
Pete, you’ve just described natural variability.
Pete’s argument is the argumentum ad ignorantiam logical fallacy:
The fallacy of assuming something is true simply because it hasn’t been proven false. Pete is arguing that man-made global warming (MMGW) is occurring, because nobody has demonstrated conclusively that it is not. After many decades of searching, there are still no measurements of MMGW. But no matter, no one has proven it doesn’t exist.
That is a logical fallacy. Failing to prove that the global warming conjecture is false is not the same as proving it is true.
Alarmists like ‘Climate Pete’ try to put skeptics into the position of having to prove a negative: that something is not occurring. But skeptics have nothing to prove.
The onus is entirely on those putting forth a conjecture or hypothesis, to show conclusively that it is happening. This is normally done by basing predictions on the conjecture. If repeated, accurate predictions are made, that is strong evidence for the conjecture/hypothesis. But no one has made any accurate predictions based on the MMGW conjecture: no one predicted the 18 year stasis in global T, as CO2 rose steadily.
The job of skeptics is to tear down all conjectures and hypotheses, if possible. In that way science progresses. Without skeptics we’re back in witch doctor territory, where the village witch doctor declares what’s juju and what isn’t. And no one dares to question him.
Climate Pete is clearly wrong. His ‘dangerous MMGW’ conjecture has been falsified: despite a steady rise of CO2 there has been no rise in global temperature, which was the alarmist crowd’s central prediction. They were wrong.
Based on that failure, I’ve repeatedly asked this question of Climate Pete:
What would it take for you to admit that your CO2=CAGW conjecture is wrong?
I’ve never gotten an answer.
Oooh, can “I ask a physicist”?
I have 1 litre of 20C water and 1 litre of 30 C water. I combine them and get 2 litres of 25C water; easy. #1. How do I do that with water and air, or air and earth? #2. If the near surface glob.av. air temperature is 15C, what’s the glob. av. ground temperature?
Great. A trained warmer.
Tell me how a 3% increase of CO2 entering the atmosphere is going to do all this harm?
I really want to know.
I like this article – its a game changer, turning the tables on alarmists after 20 years of non-evidence obscuration and fantasy research. Are you a climate alarmist??!! No one belives in that anymore – whats you’re excuse!!! As stupid as this approach is these people fully deserve it.
Somebody summed up the psychology of all this in one sentence: “It is easier to fool a person than it is to convince one that they have been fooled.”
Unless you yourself have good knowledge in the subject (in this case formal training in atmospheric physics and climate science), how can you tell whether you are the one being fooled or not.
Ah, the good ol’ Appeal to Authority. That always works.
so how can you? have you been trained?
Yes
I am not a evolutionary biologist, but it was not difficult to read abstracts or summaries and summaries of the evidence that led me to believe evolutionary theory. Since Newtons and Einsteins laws are used to send probes to other planets that did not take much convincing.
When one watches a soccer match, they do not need to be a professional player, coach, or soccer strategist in order to recognize one team is better than another team, one player better than another.
In other words, unless you are a complete dolt or lazy every one has the capability to make a reasoned, rational determination of climate science outside of the appeal to authority argument.
Climate Pete – “trained”, perhaps, but did you actually learn anything? Perhaps not. Your responses suggest that you are still in the “Piled Higher and Deeper” phase of your education.
After 11 years of university study, I came away with three most significant revelations: one, acquired in the first few weeks, was that there were an awful lot of people here that sure seemed smarter than me, and two more when I left. Of these, I learned that I could never really be certain of anything, but I could be ok with that, and the other was that you could consume ungodly amounts of alcohol and field grade pharmaceuticals and still survive. Embrace your education – it just hasn’t happened yet.
Alx.
If everyone has this capability then why do virtually all the published climate experts agree that AGW is real whereas a lot of proclaimed non-experts here reach another conclusion?
And why do people tend to move to believing AGW is real when they learn more of the formal climate science e.g. Weather forecasters?
Climate change is an inherently tricky subject purely because random weather noise short and medium term obscures the smaller long-term AGW climate signal. So unless you have either a good grounding in the physical principles or a good understanding of signal processing techniques you have to resort to no better than a guess based on what sources you prefer.
The way to determine who is being fooled is to consider the basics of science. The climate models don’t match reality (check on regional predictions and not merely the global ones, where there is even more of a disparity). Real scientists grasp that when theories don’t match reality, any predictions they make aren’t “scientific”, they are leaps of faith unrelated to science. Those that bother to look into the topic at all grasp that there are myriad climate feedback loops (e.g. the albedo which impacts on that radiation balance changes based on clouds and other factors which change based on climate). There is no way to even attempt to make any prediction about the future without a model which embodies a theory which is validated against reality. Attempts to try to pretend otherwise are attempts to try to avoid science. e.g. claims about “climate sensitivity” as if we don’t need models to predict the future are making the unjustified leap of faith that there is a linear correspondence between CO2 and temperature that will hold over the long term, rather than at best a temporary vague linear correlation which long term records show won’t hold up since CO2 isn’t always correlated with temperature, there are many other factors involved. There are long term factors that have lead to changes in the data over the long term that we don’t understand and may have an impact (despite the leap of faith of warmists to assume they can rule out such things merely because they wish to believe that). I’d suggest that at the moment we can’t even rule out the possibility that human emissions are preventing a more damaging ice age from kicking in (even if thats unlikely), which calls into question the argument of reducing emissions “just in case”… rather than just letting things evolve without government intervention since we can’t know one way or the other if emissions are helping or hurting or neutral.
Even if humans can be shown to be causing warming, that wouldn’t necessarily mean action is warranted since there is no reason to apriori assume that today’s climate (or that from a few decades ago) is the “best” or “right”. Granted some folks wish to preserve the status quo, but such conservative approaches based on fear of change and a leap of faith that anything different is apriori worse aren’t scientifically justified but are leaps of faith. The assumption that prevention of change is less costly than adaptation is a leap of faith given the early stages of work on the topic and the inherent uncertainties involved in predicting future economic changes and rates of change of technologies.
Climate Pete
May 24, 2015 at 7:29 am
“If everyone has this capability then why do virtually all the published climate experts agree that AGW is real whereas a lot of proclaimed non-experts here reach another conclusion?”
Because that’s where the funding is, Grasshopper.
You must be pretty unexperienced. Never worked a job yet, right?
re: “why do virtually all the published climate experts agree that AGW is real ”
That claim is partly a myth, which those who have the slightest bit of scientific curiosity about the topic can easily find debunked around the net. However even if it matched reality it wouldn’t be a useful bit of info since science doesn’t depend on popularity polls and “argument by authority” of the masses, but instead on theories matching reality. Not long ago most medical professionals thought stomach ulcers were due predominantly to stress and/or diet, and now they view it as being mostly caused by a bacterial infection since the data for that matches reality well.
I’m sure all published homeopathic “experts” agree that homeopathy is real.. even if the rest of the medical and scientific world consider it utter nonsense contrary to many well demonstrated scientific ideas and published in “journals” with poor standards that don’t spot the flaws in their claims. Of course those journals won’t publish anyone who bothers to try to question homeopathy, the journals make their money by providing a market for homeopaths to pretend to be legitimate.
Science is a human process and as such can become dysfunctional at times in certain fields. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gave a talk (online around the net) on “cargo cult science”, fields which mimic the trappings of real science but lack a crucial ability to be skeptical enough of their own results and therefore don’t have a healthy self-correcting process which is crucial to the improvement of theories over time. The theory of paradigm shifts arose because in hindsight people spotted the fact that fields became stuck on dead end paths despite mounting contrary evidence until the insiders left the field. Or sometimes it is skeptics in related fields that need to step in and critique the field (subject to resistance by insiders who try to pretend that only an insider can dare comment, in order to prevent heretics from daring to question their belief system).
There is an evolutionary process that goes on in many fields where their focus shifts depending on who gets the funding. If two projects try to get funding (and there is only enough for 1 of them) and one says “the sky is falling, you should fund this just in case I’m right” and another says “nothing is wrong, this is just a cool thing to research”, then the project likely to be funded is the one that says “the sky is falling”. Then “group think” also sets in where new grad students who seem skeptical are less likely to be brought into the fold rather than steered to other niches. After a few decades of this it isn’t surprising if the researchers in a field take doom&gloom predictions for granted, those that are skeptical are pressured to keep quiet since they threaten their funding and status (even if they don’t consciously think through that aspect rather than merely having developed a group think culture that attacks heretics, rather than valuing scientific skepticism). Studies show in many fields there are a high percentage of results that are eventually overturned, or never replicated and ignored, partly science science is a work in progress. It has gone on dead end paths before.
Climate Pete, if you started with geology, a science that already had investigated past climates a long time ago, then atmospheric physicists wouldn’t have wasted 30 years to learn what was already known, that there is nothing particularly dangerous about today’s climate. The guru of the mess that is physicist-made climate science was an astronomer with no clue about geological knowledge on the subject and much of the thirty years has been spent learning by doing and having sceptics point out this stuff to them. Like you seem to have, they had too much hubris, to get outside the sterile box of physics that has much less to inform us about climate than you can possibly fathom. Sure, it is all physics, but a simplistic understanding has led us on a path that I hope we can correct before it destroys us. The BS about string theory and dark matter as patches to vulcanize holes in cherished theories is entertaining and harmless. Climate politics is not in the least.
Easy.
BTW, why do you suppose it is, that when it was proven that ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, the very last group to accept this were the doctors who should have known the truth all along, or at least been the first to understand when they were shown the truth?
A 5th grader can look at a temperature chart and see that there’s been no significant warming for a very long time. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from/plot/rss
Climate Pete
May 24, 2015 at 6:39 am
“Unless you yourself have good knowledge in the subject (in this case formal training in atmospheric physics and climate science), how can you tell whether you are the one being fooled or not.”
Because I’m a computer scientist and I know enough about modeling, numerics, and chaos mathematics to know when somebody takes me for a ride.
A non-expert can judge accurately if one side behaves disreputably. The warmists have exhibited lots of that behavior. Climategate. The Climategate coverups. The hockey stick. Temperature-record manipulation. Isotactic adjustment. Avoidance of debate. Pal review. Goalpost moving. IPCC corruption (see Donna Laframboise). Dishonest debating tactics. I could go on and on and on.
You’re really this dumb “Climate Pete”?
I have seen the few short term IPCC temperature projections be utter failures, when looking up the temperature data. It is really easy to do Pete, which does not require 4 years of University education to do.
Do I need a huge college degree to be able make simple checks on the veracity of projections/prediction made by a large organization (IPCC), that is accepted by plebes like you so uncritically, to do the obvious in checking the official temperature data?
The IPCC climate models has ALWAYS run way high on their projections from the very first report in 1990, with a revealingly large temperature range (Red flag) of over 3C. That stayed unchanged up to the last report, which tells me they have not improved their understanding of climate science as much as they think they do.
People like you are damaging science when you post crap like this,be snobbish to people who can read and think for themselves. People like me who can see through the warmist babble easily since so much of is STUPID!
If you are so smart about climate science,why don’t YOU write up a guest essay here,promoting the idea that the entire AGW claim is a valid hypothesis, explain when the long awaited and much talked about POSITIVE feedback loop will show up to augment the feeble warm forcing of CO2?
You stated in a reply to Alx, this baloney babble, “If everyone has this capability then why do virtually all the published climate experts agree that AGW is real whereas a lot of proclaimed non-experts here reach another conclusion?”
First of all you used the Authority fallacy, then you insinuate that non scientists or skeptics don’t accept the small warm forcing effect of CO2, when actually most DO! It is the Positive Feedback Loop (the other half of the AGW conjecture) that fails dismally to show up,thus no catastrophic warming is possible. The main reason why so many here think anyone still pushing the Catastrophic warming argument are loopy in the head,since there are ZERO evidence for it. There is ZERO warming so far this century, whereas the IPCC stated it was supposed to warm at least .20C and as much as .30C per first two decades. Despite the continuing addition of more CO2 into the atmpshere.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2015.4/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to:2015.4/trend/plot/rss/from:2001/to:2015.4/plot/rss/from:2001/to:2015.4/trend
Then you seem unaware that there are many scientistswho have published science papers: 1350+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skeptic Arguments Against ACC/AGW Alarmism
” Preface: The following papers support skeptic arguments against Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC), Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) or Alarmism [Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) or Dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (DAGW)].
Alarmism: (defined), “concern relating to a perceived negative environmental or socio-economic effect of ACC/AGW, usually exaggerated as catastrophic.”
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
You don’t impress me.
How do you know your training is correct? You do realize that much of science education eventually ends up to be wrong? Right? No? …. There’s a reason the article mentioned the problems geology had with plate tectonics. From what I can tell your views are 100% religious based on what you were told by your appointed priests.
Climate Pete says:
how can you tell whether you are the one being fooled or not.
It’s hard, Pete. Your lack of success is a case in point. Prof Richard Feynman famously said: “You are the easiest person to fool.”
Pete’s mind is made up and closed tight. Nothing can change it now. He’s decided the way things are. He thinks he understands. But he’s only rationalizing.
A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held.
.~ Georg Cantor
That’s a very good reply Sunsettommy – you articulate ideas well.
Climate Pete please submit an article to WUWT so that you can convince us. Be aware you are dealing with some very well informed and well trained people so you will have to provide substantive evidence. To my mind evidence (or a glaring lack therof) is the key reason as to why an increasingly large number of well educated and well informed people no longer support the runaway CAGW theory. If you have substantive evidence to the contrary that will challenge us or help change our minds please write an article and submit it.
@ Climate Pete: I’ve never set foot in a university, and you make me sad.
You say “Climate change is an inherently tricky subject purely because random weather noise short and medium term obscures the smaller long-term AGW climate signal.”
Now then, the average englishman has slightly less than two legs. That’s not a statement about any particular englishman, nor does it say anything about all englishmen: It is statistical in nature
and derived from observation of legs. Legs are real: I have two. Statistics are not real. A change in that leg statistic cannot in any way affect my legs.
Weather is real: sunshine, clouds, wind, rain, T air and T ground – all these things are real.
Weather is not random. Weather is not “noise”.
Climate is the long term aggregate of weather: its apparent reality – rainforests and deserts – arises entirely out of real, non-random weather.
Climate is not real, it is derived from real weather. Climate cannot change unless aggregated weather has changed. Climate cannot affect weather.
http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20120221/republicans-santorum-romney-gingrich-climate-scientists-scientific-consensus-skeptics-kerry-emanuel
Utter politically-motivated garbage, and a red herring to boot. Your troll horns are showing.
read that – don’t confuse special interests with sciences.
So, Climatepete, there is ONE republican climate scientist who is also a warmunist, and he is called Kerry Emanuel, according to your article? That’s AMAZING.
The same Kerry Emanuel, who went wild over the busy 2005 Hurricane season, THAT Kerry Emanuel?
The one who made all kinds of statements that this was the indication of things to come into the future. But alas Nature doesn’t agree.
Carry on Pete…….
Climate Pete
Whenever I see the words ‘AGW is real’ I know that the person using them is just a parrot repeating propaganda. You paid too much for your so-called education.
Remember how earth was once believed to be at the center of the universe? That was based on political claptrap, so was that article.
That was Mark Twain, IIRC.
rogerknights That was Mark Twain, IIRC.
I’ve already mis-attributed so many quotes I should have banned from the Internet long ago. I’m turning over a new leaf and now let other people decide who it was.
And “If I can get you to accept one false premise, I can prove anything – even a contradiction.” (Bertrand Russel, I think.)
I’m just completely delighted to have discovered that “the planet” is in no danger whatsoever, having done my own research as a lifetime “non-sheep.” In doing so, I found many other reasons to distrust the New Left as well. Now instead of getting depressed over the Imminent Demise of Nature and Civilization, I’m focusing on splitting wood for next year’s solar-minimum big winter.
The unenlightened can go on bleating as they please . . . not my circus, not my monkeys.
You seem to be saying that the debate doesn’t concern you. But unless you live in a cave somewhere, cut off from civilization, it most certainly does.
sometimes it seems that way, that the battle is really over, but it is not so.
while the left may like control, and attempt to gain control by appeals to authority etc, the reality is that they are not in the majority. they just like you to think they are. eg from the reporting you see on the tv of political views, you would think that there are no supporters of conservative thinking anywhere, but when you see the polls (especially first preference/primary votes), there are more supporters of conservatives than left.
it is no different here with this subject. the most important thing to the warmists is the 97% thing. nothing else. the rest, including the science, does not matter. just the impression that people will get. and just like the political scene, the sceptics are not 3%.
the problem here is that they have managed to play on the political leaders need to tax more and the many failures, obvious lies and deceit of some climate scientists/activists just go unanswered. the conservative governments now support spending stupid amounts of tax payer dollars on pointless hairbrained schemes. the majority do not support it. eventually the majority will get their way.
“I’m just completely delighted to have discovered that “the planet” is in no danger whatsoever”
Unlike every single warmista, who invariably become angry whenever confronted with evidence that their worst fears were unfounded.
I don’t debate the hardcore believers on Twitter to change their minds. I do it to stop them from infecting the onlookers, aka “lurkers ” , who outnumber the true believers about thirty to one.
has Nixon’s silent majority awakened?
It could be that the majority of people on both sides behave the same way with their tribal, entrenched views.
Anytime I see a piece related to weather or some other gw trigger on Huffington Post, I go down to the comments because I already know what the comments are going to say. Somebody will post “Queue the deniers in 3, 2, 1 …” or something like that to troll up an argument. A skeptic will take the bait, and almost immediately someone will post “97% of scientists agree that global warming is real and man is the cause” or something very similar to that. It doesn’t matter if the 97% meme is real or not: That is the talking point and it will be rolled out in response to any skeptic post.
It’s really weird to watch these discussions on internet forums because they’re not discussions at all: They more closely resemble dueling robots that are just going through their programmed scripts, rolling out the talking points cut-and-paste style one after the other. They don’t read what each other has written. They just scan each others posts to determine what side that person is on, and then they paste in the appropriate response: Either “97% of scientists agree … blah, blah” or something about the Koch brothers funding deniers or whatever. Those examples are warmist-type posts, but I think both sides do it. Posts are either made to pat like-minded people on the back and say “I’m with you brother! I’m in your tribe!” or to marginalize those are are in the other tribe.
It’s totally weird to watch such scripted internet battles play out, but it’s also strangely fascinating and I find myself peeking at them the way one peeks at car crashes while driving past.
No, not really. The two sides are not comparable. Generally, skeptics tend to have a much better handle on both the factual and political side of things. Also, perhaps you’ve noticed, the tide has turned decidedly against the Believers in these internet skirmishes. The CAGW troops are running scared. And well they should be.
Also there are very few Believers left on those pages. I’m often at the Guardian (being a lefty) and it’s the same three or four people making 97% of the comments.
Most people don’t care – which is strange as it’s meant to be the end of the world.
The exception are the sites that screen out all skeptical posts.
Sites like SciAm.
It is truly shameful, and transparent. Except to the credulous and conformist sheeple, and to the low information types, who are thus insulated from any real look at another point of view.
“Most people don’t care – which is strange as it’s meant to be the end of the world.”
I think that on most issues, even when one side is mostly obvious, the other sides debate team jumps in to confound and confuse the outcome (re Skeptical Science blog); then for many people it just becomes too much trouble to think it through. Which reminds me that I’m overdue at Star Bucks 🙂
You can say the two sides are not comparable, but nevertheless I see dueling robots in the comments of news posts. People, on both sides, just post their cut-and-paste blurb without evening reading or trying to address the posts they are responding to.
I’m not talking about forums like at WUWT. I’m talking about Huffington Post, Fox, Guardian, etc.
I’ve argued against warmistas online many times, and this article underestimates the problem. The problem is that warmistas can link to numerous “peer reviewed” articles and to websites run by NASA and NOAA. They can easily win the battle of links. We’re stuck arguing with logic. We have to convince them why the mainstream science is wrong…and that’s hard! We have to show them how people like NASA and NOAA are biased…and that ain’t easy! This has nothing to do with Jon Stewart.
But the best authorities are HadCrut and GISS for temperature – and they show the Pause is real.
And then there’s the IPCC. AR5 Box 9.2 shows that the models are duffers. That bats down every link they have, except that the Arctic sea ice has declined.
Which it has so concede that and ask them to show why it wasn’t recovery from the LIA.
Then push them, are they sure that the world is coming to the end?
Nothing makes extremists look so silly as forcing them to admit they are insane.
You’re only trying to persuade the lurkers anyway. The Believers are not rational in the first place.
Re sea ice…point to the cyclical nature of Arctic ice in the recent past, the recovery in the past few years, the Antarctic ice growth, or the silliness of the claim that a frozen wasteland becoming slightly less frozen and not quite as severe of a wasted land is a world ending calamity.
“In their latest speeches on global warming, Obama and the Pope …”
Could you please give a link to this speech by the Pope as I would like to read for myself what the Pope actually said rather than read third hand what somebody said somebody said he said.
My argument against Pete and others who appeal to the “authority” of published and pal reviewed literature would be…oh, I don’t know…..the long and growing longer list of published studies that have been proven, what’s the word again….oh yeah, FRAUDULENT. I believe Science magazine is currently dealing with yet another ooops, our bad.
Try this little excerpt from an op-ed in todays NYT:
Not surprisingly, the problem appears to get worse as the stakes get higher. The now-discredited paper on gay marriage — by Michael J. LaCour, a graduate student at U.C.L.A., and Donald P. Green, a political scientist at Columbia, who requested a retraction after his co-author failed to produce the raw data — had all the elements: headline-grabbing research, in a top journal, on a hot topic.
But dishonest scholars aren’t the only guilty ones. Science fetishizes the published paper as the ultimate marker of individual productivity. And it doubles down on that bias with a concept called “impact factor” — how likely the studies in a given journal are to be referenced by subsequent articles. The more “downstream” citations, the theory goes, the more impactful the original article.
Except for this: Journals with higher impact factors retract papers more often than those with lower impact factors. It’s not clear why. It could be that these prominent periodicals have more, and more careful, readers, who notice mistakes. But there’s another explanation: Scientists view high-profile journals as the pinnacle of success — and they’ll cut corners, or worse, for a shot at glory.
End of excerpt. Find the whole thing at the following link. I’mI’m on my tablet, so it’s a mobile link, sorry if you have problems with it.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/opinion/whats-behind-big-science-frauds.html?referrer=
Different idea: THe more prominent journals are keener on sensational findings. So they fall prey to conmen more often.
I just tell my customers, “Its the same bullshit half-cocked international luddite agenda as the glaciation scare in the 70s and the original ‘we’ll all be dead by 1993’ story that those people re-cooked from the 1800s when an idiot with too much education invented peak-oil AND greenhouse effect and predicted that both would destroy the world within 20 years before 1900. Politics is filled with people controlled by money and the old ‘The United Nations is gonna take over the world.’ thing is real this time.”
Usually lasts about 8 minutes beyond that, a few come up with the “but if it makes the world a better place” argument whom I point at the cost or maintaining a replacement part stream for the renewables EXCEEDS their value by several fold.
Seriously, if we’d spent all this money on research into Thorium (uranium) liquid salt reactors and the cannae drive systems back in 1996 we’d be ON Mars right now.
No, you would be on Mars now.
Stuck there, after the most difficult to achieve and expensive suicide in history.
I would still be here, on Earth, swimming in my ool, eating fruit off of my fruitfully bounteous fruit trees, and enjoying yet another gorgeous day under the hot sun and blue skies.
BTW, that was not a typo…my swimming ool has no p in it, another reason for my bliss.
:))
instead of psychological engagement, let’s pose some simple questions and then the flip:
If CO2 is so dangerous, why is it a commodity traded for profit rather than outright banned?
Just how will paying taxes control global warming?
What is your understanding of carbon based life on Earth?
Use their “what if we’re wrong emotional appeal” – Sure Scientists (love that) tell us that CO2 will produce some global warming, but Scientists also tell us that it has enhanced plant life – and therefore animal life – 30% or more over the past decades. So, perhaps it will get warmer, but should we take the chance and threaten the welfare of all Earth’s plants and animals?
Plants are very happy at 280 ppm of CO2. Animals do not care as long as they can eat plants. It is us humans that are going to be affected by rising CO2 levels.
You can have too much of a good thing. Think chocolate.
“Plants are very happy at 280 ppm of CO2.”
Hey, Grasshopper, here’s your homework; find out about the difference between C3 and C4 plants. Bonus points if you find out what happens to the CO2 level in the immediate proximity of a photosynthesizing corn plant on a non-windy sunny day. More bonus points if you find out about the function and density of stomata depending on CO2 content, and how this affects the plants ability to grow in semi arid conditions.
There will be fewer semi-arid conditions if CO2 levels are lower.
You’re obviously ignorant of how commercial greenhouses supplement CO₂ for the betterment of their plants. If I remember correctly, the sweet spot is around 1000 ppm. In reality, the increase in atmospheric CO₂ levels has resulted in the greening of the planet.
You call yourself a physicist and you can’t differentiate between carbon (soot) and CO₂? If you believe CO₂ is a pollutant, stop exhaling.
… said no plant ever.
Humans are animals, so your distinction between them w.r.t. CO2 levels is illogical. And you think 0.04% (400 ppm) CO2 is “too much of a good thing”? Your irrationality is obvious, and seemingly not constrained by any common sense. You are a blatant, self-deluded, “educated” idiot (miseducated, as 2 whole generations have been, by other educated idiots)–a bellwether (or classic example) of the climate alarmist group, which I (a lifelong independent and non-joiner, who nevertheless voted Democratic through 8 straight presidential elections, before the rise of the Islamic Manchurian Candidate, Barack Hussein Obama) know as “The Insane Left”. You are marching, like a lemming, toward real, general, and thoroughly unnecessary war, totally on behalf of the politically insane, and entirely by virtue of your scientific incompetence and unquestioning belief in what is merely your preferred dogma.
Here is the definitive evidence against your university brainwashing–the comparison of two detailed planetary atmospheres:
Venus: No Greenhouse Effect
And I agree with you about the strength of the consensus, only I would put it like this:
97% of climate scientists (and even skeptics) are scientific incompetents. There is no valid global climate science, and no competent climate scientists (because you all ignore or dismiss the definitive evidence).
Unlikely; there is a poor correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global temperature anomalies. If even there were a causal relationship, though,, the history of Bond events shows that cooling, not warming, is associated with aridification.
Mr. Huffman,
There are few absolute truths in life, and few statements which contain pronouncements of an absolute nature are valid.
(Apologies to Rocky Balboa)
Climate Pete
May 24, 2015 at 7:49 am
“There will be fewer semi-arid conditions if CO2 levels are lower.”
What gives you that idea? Do you think the Sahara only came into being once humans started exploiting rock oil? Think for a moment please.
Let us assume that your idea that rising CO2 leads to a higher surface temperature were correct (and ignore the fact that the last 18 years prove that idea wrong, at least for measly sub 1000 ppm levels).
So, higher temperatures would lead to higher evaporation, higher water vapor content (as even the warmunist modeler dolts say), a general acceleration of the water cycle – and obviously more precipitation, not less.
A warmer world is a moister world. Hothouse Earth periods in the past prove that. They also had way higher CO2 contents, coincidentally.
Well but anyway. You ignored my assigment, now go back to your studies.
You are fast destroying your credibility,when you make silly statements of this kind, “Plants are very happy at 280 ppm of CO2.”
Reality backed by HUNDREDS of published papers,and by the Nursery industry, showing plants far happier with much higher levels of CO2 than 280 ppm. Greenhouses regularly elevate the levels to around 1500 ppm.
If plants grows so much better and faster at 400 ppm ,than 280 ppm, it is clear that 280 was not high enough.
Pete,
If you understood elementary physics and chemistry, you’d know that warmer means wetter and cooler means drier. This isn’t hypothetical. It is what geologists and paleoclimatologists actually observe.
During the warmer than now Holocene climatic optimum, to take but one example, the Sahara was verdant. The Green Sahara, Neolithic Subpluvial or Holocene Wet Phase lasted from about 9500 to around 5000 years ago, or a slightly shorter interval within that range. It was interrupted briefly by the Younger Dryas-like cold event c. 8200 years ago.
Full glacial conditions are dry, as shown by the dust pile ups during those intervals, creating global loess zones, such as the one upon which I live.
Pete,
All trees and most other plants are far from happy at 280 ppm. Why do you suppose that real greenhouses keep CO2 at 1000 to 1300 ppm?
If there is an optimum CO2 for most plants, it’s 800 to 1000 ppm or more. Unfortunately, the world will probably not get over 600 ppm until the current Ice House phase ends millions of years from now.
“Plants are very happy at 280 ppm of CO2”
Oh really? Please explain why greenhouses pump in CO2 to about 1,200 ppm then. And while you’re at it, why the vast majority of plants have been shown to grow better, faster, needing less water and nutrients and with better resistance to most pests and diseases when CO2 levels are significantly higher than present day levels.
“There will be fewer semi-arid conditions if CO2 levels are lower.”
Oh really? Please explain how you figure that when warmer air is able to hold more water vapor. Also please explain how you imagine that happening when in fact over the past 30 years the planet has been greening, and major desert areas such as the Sahara have been shrinking, not growing.
Pete doesn’t listen to the shrieks from the asphyxiating plant kingdom. It’s a little like a rabbit in peril, but much higher pitched, and drawn out over millennia. Oh, the agony.
Someone, please stop the torment! The sun and the biome inevitably conspire to almost irreversibly sequester carbon from that same biome; the earth cannot sustain an adequate atmospheric concentration of CO2. It’s a turribul problem.
Well, no wonder the horror seems to recede with each increase in greening. Someone’s taken care of the job. How about a little thanks and gratitude for this incidental miracle worker. If man did not exist, it would be useful to invent him.
We are deities from the DNA machine, and Gaia adores us.
================
You mean like how the Sahara Desert is shrinking/greening? http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
Bubba Cow. USA pays billions in taxes to subsidise fossil fuel operations and the world pays trillions in taxes to clean up from burning them. China has hundreds of thousands of deaths each year from air pollution. US ten thousand or so. Use all these existing tax handouts to build pollution free renewables generation instead.
If you want to make it as economically efficient as possible just raise a net neutral carbon tax where the revenue is returned to individuals and companies as a tax rebate. Then you can leave market forces to do the rest as long as the carbon price keeps going up. Companies can plan ahead and select the best investment for them.
“USA pays billions in taxes” – that means me, not some abstract country.
Should we prefer to subsidize bird blenders – or excellent sources of plant food?
You got the semi-arid completely backwards.
Climate Pete, it is so good of you to come to this web site to educate us non PHD Physicists (expet for all the posters on here who are of course).
So can you confirm for us that you believe in AGW and CAGW, you know the Catastrophic version?
Mr. Doctorpete,
Do you believe that receiving a tax deduction is the same as a “tax handout”?
In other words, that every dollar one does not pay in taxes is a dollar that is given to one by the gubmint?
And please provide a detailed accounting of the “trillions of dollars” that the world pays to clean up from burning fossil fuels?
Because otherwise, many would rightly think that you are, you know, just making stuff up out of thin air and off the top of your head.
Thanks in advance.
Where did you study physics? Universal Class? Ha ha…….:-)
Accelerated depreciation of capital expenditures is not a tax subsidy. You parrot things you know nothing anything about.
“The US pays billions to subsidise fossil fuel operations”?? “…the world pays trillions in taxes to clean up from burning them”. Someone much more cynical than me might conclude from those assertions that you are not educated by a university but by activist organizations such as WWF or GreenPeace. (Another homework assignment: look up the “linear, no low threshold” fallacy. If that assumption were true, we’d be stacking up Asthma patients in all the ERs as CO2 climbs, but fortunately the rates are actually reducing.) To paraphrase your earlier comment , “too much chocolate can be bad”; although too much salt will kill you, so will too little.
The same cynic might conclude from your remarks that you don’t understand the difference between CO2 emissions and particulate pollution. (The latter is very similar to the water pollution that occurs in China and probably will continue until at least 2030 based on agreements the IPCC and now the US President set with China.)
BTW, I’m sure you didn’t fall for the latest nonsense from the activists that a “subsidy” consists not of the dollars/pounds paid to the oil/coal companies, but rather the “uncollected” societal “costs” they impose. (Which again uses the logical fallacy of “begging the question” since it assumes that one agrees that CO2 is a pollutant and has harmful rather than beneficial impacts.)
Absolute rubbish!!! The Big Oil PAYS ~40% in taxes and then stockholders pay on the dividends a SECOND time. (The small oil exploring outfits would pay even more if not for rapid write-offs for their drilling costs.)
Federal government and Big Oil are PARTNERS. Throttling supply increases prices which makes more money for Big Oil and their parasite partner – federal government. It’s the whole basis for CAGW hoax IMO.
Forbes Magazine:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2012/04/16/which-megacorps-pay-megataxes/
The bit about subsidies is false. In fact on a per unit energy produce basis, “renewables” get vastly more subsidies than fossil fuels do. Furthermore, the vast majorities of what are often claimed to be “subsidies” are nothing more than the same tax breaks every other industry gets – or they’re payments to the poor who can’t afford energy. Meanwhile, cheap, abundant fossil fuels have raised massive numbers out of bare subsidence poverty and into the highest average standard of living in mankind’s history – not to mention saved vastly more lives than it’s ever taken from air pollution.
What’s more, “renewables” are from from “pollution free.” Try looking up what mining the required rare earths has done to China. Or consider all the concrete necessary to build them, and the space necessary to dispose of them once no longer safe/useful. They’re also vastly more expensive, far less reliable, and have a bigger environmental footprint.
Taxes can be thought as the “price” for a set of services (note the violation of antitrust principles, notably forced bundling of unrelated items) provided by the State.
What gov service does Big Oil need? The Navy?
Bellweathers can be changed. We have a democracy which enables a party that is failing to be replaced with a party that understands reality that proposes solutions that work. Bellweathers cannot convince the public to accept real scarifies for no benefits. People are confusing silly talk with real policies that have implications.
The Electorate, the Pope, and the next US president all want jobs rather than sky high unemployment (see EU where the average unemployment is 11.4%, no change year by year) which require an expanding economy. The EU policies are not connected with reality and are ineffective. The EU is failing. Spending money on green scams that do not work, is one of the reasons why the EU is uncompetitive, is one of reasons the EU is failing. German consumers pay three times more for electricity than the US consumers. German can pay three times more for electricity as they have hogged all the EU jobs, due to a common currency. Germany has the highest positive trade imbalance in the world. The US has one of the largest negative trade imbalances in the world. The US and most countries of the world do not have sufficient funds to waste trillions and trillions of dollars on green scams that do not work.
Abrupt planetary cooling coinciding with an abrupt change to the sun is going to be a top media story. Media competes with Bellweathers, changes Bellweathers. The Pope, the next US president, and the US electorate are not going to support spending trillions and trillions of deficit dollars on green scams that do not work when the planet is abruptly cooling.
To actually reduce world CO2 emissions by let say 50% would require a complete change of the world electrical generation to nuclear power and a banning of tourism air travel. i.e. Significant CO2 emissions reduction would require real sacrifices and changes that the public will not accept.
http://www.cfact.org/2014/12/16/germanys-energy-transformation-unsustainable-subsidies-and-an-unstable-system/
Germany Energiewend Leading To Suicide By Cannibalism. Huge Oversupply Risks Destabilization
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/02/08/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-167/
By Fred F. Mueller, No Tricks Zone, Feb 4, 2015
http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/04/germanys-energiewende-leading-to-suicide-by-cannibalism-huge-oversupply-risks-destabilization/#sthash.8tE9YRDj.PSllYaQF.dpbs
In 2006, I started selling Renewable Energy for homes & business. At that time there were ~5 methods to store electricity.
In 2013, the USA Dept of Energy released a report of ~50 different methods in varying degrees of implementation. The latest is Tesla’s home battery system, but my favourite is Underwater Compressed Air in huge balloons pumped full by surplus Wind & Solar then released during heavy demand periods.
As in all fields, invention is Rapid these days.
Germany also uses a method that uses surplus wind to make hydrogen to pump into their natural gas system (thus reducing dependence on Russia a tad).
We in the US elected Obama TWICE. Just sayin’.
Very good essay, though on ground I find disconcerting.
A scientist is supposed to follow the results on an experiment even if the results don’t support his hypothesis.
To wit, Fall et al. We went forward with publication even though it disputed our central hypothesis. The ability to adduce that fact has been a powerful weapon in the hostile context of my travels.
(And now we again dispute ourselves, but that’s what our new results are. As the prior grim expressions become relaxed smiles.)
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
“A skeptic might say, “The models don’t match the actual measured results.” What the warmist hears is how stupid deniers are because that’s what John Stewart told him he should think. If the warmist doesn’t prove that he thinks skeptics are stupid then he might be confused for a denier! And no one wants to be identified with being a denier because they’re mocked…”
Good read. Spot on.
I am a skeptic because I am a physicist who understands enough detail of atmospheric physics and climate change to know that CO2 emissions in theory cause an energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere which never have been validated through observations (the uncertainty in the measurements is larger than the quantity measured). This theoretical imbalance must at some time be corrected by increased heat emission to space thus reducing any surface warming, whether now or later. And all the signs are that no warming is to be seen in despite of the current El Niño.
It is noteworthy that those not questioning climate change are almost always liberals in English-speaking nations. And many are trained and published climate science experts with connections to Greenpeace, WWF etc. That says to me that endorsing and defending AGW is due to primarily political and not scientific findings, especially since less than 3% of mainstream climate scientists even mention their stance on AGW. Further the more a non-climate scientist gets to know about climate science the more they will tell you climate change is real and but less likely entirely caused by humans. This is exemplified by the attitude among meteorologists, 90% of whom believe the earth is warming (which all skeptics agree to as well) and that we don´t have a major influence on the climate
So the reason why it is difficult to convince skeptics is that they know that there are quite a few who are real published experts in the subject thinking the human factor is exaggerated, including climate experts who are liberals, and they can readily see that the uncritical worshipping of AGW only influences one half of the political landscape of non-experts.
Neat response to Pete 🙂
Well, ‘deniers’ deny catastrophic future warming, and affirm catastrophic present policy.
C’mon, they are dying by the millions from the green madness. It’s about time to stop that. There will be no regrets.
========
+1
“Many of the posters and readers at WUWT have expressed frustration at convincing warmists. Using facts and logic seem to fall on deaf ears.”
I have said it before but it apparently needs to be said again. It is simple sales 101. People do not change their minds to buy something or into something on facts and logic. They buy on emotion and what’s in it for me, especially those that are less informed. It really is that simple. Look at how we got to this point. The AGW crowd has done an excellent job of selling their side based on what? The emotion of fear, the emotion of helping save the planet, the emotion of making things better for “the children.” Add in that their side claims to be in the majority and you have the recipe for success. So by accepting their point of view a person gets rewarded with self importance and self worth. Only when the emotion and greed are overcome by disastrous consequences will people turn to facts and logic. In most sales the disastrous consequences is loss of money which can be overcome by making better decisions. But in the case of climate the disastrous consequences of the warmist’s folly will be real destruction of the human condition.
The only way I see to change peoples minds is to pound them with how financially destructive these anti carbon policies will hurt them personally. It must be made personal for each individual.
How to go about this is a matter for another discussion as it is now time for me to get going to the Nav-A-Gator Grill & Marina for an afternoon of tasty food, cold drinks and good music.
Enjoy – and let’s not forget to Memorialize. I think of my Dad (WWII) and Grandfather (WWI).
I have to go to town, buy liquid carbon, feed the tractor and mow the grass and dandelions (true renewables), put clippings on the raspberries … all this anthropogenic CO2 is turning Vermont into a jungle.
Yes, tomorrow my wife and I will attend a Memorial Day service in the AM at Veteran’s Park. I will honor my buddies lost in the early 70’s.
Not just personally. The impact of proposed policy on the UDCs is horrible to contemplate. Lay that one on too. And don’t forget to mention how much more destructive the UDCs are on the environment than the DCs — development by fastest means is ecologically imperative. Wind it up with the diminishing returns on CO2 forcing (a fixed amount per doubling — we may double, but we will never, ever redouble).
…..and to continue to point out how destructive the alarmist policies are to the people of the 3rd world.
I believe it boils down to a desire to control others. Beliefs that require others to be controlled are desirable to those with the type views of “I know what’s best for you”.
The population of humans has always been fairly evenly split between people who seek control and want to appropriate rent from others for their activities (the scribes) and those who create value through their actual value add activities (the farmers).
Those who create value through activities are always resistant to controls or restrictions placed on themselves and others – these people derive much self esteem and pride from their visible productivity.
Those who prefer to influence or control others usually are not productive in the basic working sense (on the farm) but derive value and self esteem from administration, advertising, writing (lawyers & journalists), politics, academic pursuits and teaching. The appeal of a “planet saving” cause is irresistible to these types as it hugely increases the value of what they do or say. It allows them to feel better about themselves compared to productive people (as there is always a nagging doubt that their role in society is not as visibly value adding)
Anyway these battles have been playing out for thousands of years. During times of strife these battles literally can be become real battles – persecution of producers or value add people or vice versa persecution of academics or intellectuals.
I have no axe to grind as both types of personality are necessary for civilization to function. The danger is when Barak Obama starts characterizing deniers as a security threat and nobody in the media & public seems to find this position unacceptable. This is one step towards totalitarian state and ultimately potential genocide of one side by the other. Not to say that we are anywhere close to the divisive extremes reached by Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and many others but just to say it is shameful that nobody is attuned to this growing risk. All that is required in the mix is a strife or a depression – like a financial crisis. Perhaps the next financial crisis (inevitable) will be so big that Qe4 and QE5 are unable to prevent severe economic depression and in this context the kind of statements by the leader of the free world start to sound like a rallying cry towards totalitarianism.
“.. both types of personality are necessary for civilization to function”
There is no compromise between the truth and a lie. I don’t care whether a person is a “producer” or an “administrator”, I want them to be HONEST! The fewer dishonest people there are – the better off we all are.
And really, the best administrators are generally those who have already demonstrated their ability as the best producers and are therefore even MORE productive directing others how to be their best. That is what sickens me the most about Obama, in 2008 he had ZERO demonstrated ability at running anything at all except his own mouth. Six years later it appears that on the job training isn’t working out so well either.
It is hard to convince warmists because it is near impossible to believe that the radiative theory could have a simple flaw at its heart. It has taken me 8 years to isolate despite having known the basic principles for decades. There has been so much obfuscation going on that the basic simplicity has disappeared from view.
Alarmists think that a surface at 288K must radiate photons upwards at a rate commenurate with a temperature of 288K even if there is ongoing conduction and convection.
They apply S-B to an interface sandwiched between the grey bodies of planet and atmosphere without taking conduction and convection into account.
S-B can only be applied to a surface from which the observer is separated by a vacuum so that no conduction and convection is involved. The appropriate location is therefore outside the atmosphere and from that position Earth does indeed comply with S-B by emitting at 255K.
The existence of the Dry Adiabatic Lapse Rate proves them wrong.
They think that a non GHG atmosphere will become isothermal, even Roy Spencer thinks that. In reality there will always be uneven surface heating leading to density differentials in the horizontal plane so convective overturning and a decline in temperature with height is inevitable even with no GHGs.
As one descends into greater density then conduction and convection reduce photon emission upwards. That is the defining flaw in AGW theory.
The decrease in probability of upward photon emission as one descends into greater density also puts a stop to any surface thermal effect from back radiation.
Every photon sent downwards by one GHG molecule is absorbed by the next GHG molecule beneath it and there is a reduced probability of re-emission.
The result is that as one moves downward any back radiation from GHGs is steadily reabsorbed molecule by molecule and integrated into additional convective overturning which converts that back radiation to potential energy within enhanced convective uplift.
In due course that potential energy returns to the surface as kinetic energy beneath the nearest descending convective column and is promptly radiated to space by the surface via the full range of wavelengths thereby by passing the blocked wavelength for the GHG that caused it in the first place.
The surface temperature never changes because the enhanced convective uplift cools the surface beneath it exactly as much as the extra potential energy in the descending column warms it.
But it is too little to measure in any event because the entire process is mass based and GHGs have very little mass as a proportion of the entire atmosphere.
One sees far greater changes from solar and oceanic variability.
You forgot one important heat transfer mechanism, convection with phase change. Evaporating water cools the surface, which convects to higher up in the atmosphere and releases heat through condensation.
In any water cooled nuclear power reactor, changing from heat transfer due to phase change to radiative heat transfer is a really a BAD THING.
I didn’t forget convection with phase change because I was considering non condensing GHGs such as CO2.
The interesting thing if you involve a phase change such as the condensation of water vapour is that the condensate radiates rapidly to space during ascent but exerts no influence on the DALR in descent because it has either precipitated out during the ascent or dissipated back to vapour during warming in adiabatic descent.
The difference from the non condensing scenario is that condensing GHGs distort the DALR in ascent but not in descent and in ascent the distortion below the point of hydrostatic balance from the GHG vapour is offset above the point of hydrostatic balance by the radiative capability of the condensate.
Admit it, Matt; You sent “climate pete” here to provide a textbook example of what you were talking about.
That thought did come to mind, however the column is mostly dealing with the typical non-scientists warmist so this isn’t really a “textbook example”. Unlike “Climate Pete” the average person doesn’t claim to be a physicist and to therefore supposedly have some understanding of the topic. Many scientists don’t hold views that are as rationally considered as they’d like to believe and do fall into the realm of what the column discussed, but that doesn’t seem to be the first assumption to make. At least in theory they might be more reachable via appeals to reason, or at least that seems like its something more worth attempting than it might be with the general populace.
Unfortunately it may sometimes be even harder to take such an approach since some scientists will hesitate to question what they have been told is the work of other scientists. If a scientist is competent and in a discipline with a healthy scientific process, they may be more inclined by default to give the benefit of the doubt to climate researchers to view them as being competent and in a field with a working culture that self-corrects problems rather than tries to dismiss them. They may struggle to realize the differences between climate research and other fields. They may also struggle to realize how much of an early work in progress climate research is compared to some other fields that have results that are more robust since they’ve been tested and beaten on for a long time (partly because they can be tested experimentally).
Of course in other cases someone claiming to be a “scientist” is part of the dysfunctional climate research community and doesn’t grasp its flaws, and may be “in denial” and not wish to face them.
I’m not smart enough to have thought of that!
GOOD article, it helps me understand the psychology of the warmist mind, how they compartmentalize the thinking, and we all do such things in different areas to varying degrees, it is being human. But the warmists are being hypocritical when they want others to sacrifice, but not themselves.
Why It’s So Hard to Convince Warmists?
Because the deep-seated need to believe that humans are inherently wicked and a blight on the Earth has served some fundamental function for millennia.
Climate Pete
May 24, 2015 at 7:13 am Please don’t tell the world that because the Conservatives have won the election that they are conservatives. They are small l liberals and the money is being made by the warmists who spread the panic and largesse to the subsidy farmers with the windmills. The most prominent politician’s father-in-law gets £1,000 a day from rent for a vast wind farm on his land. And that’ just for starters. The ordinary people away from the liberal elite are the ones who see through it and have a laugh about it down the pub. My considerable experience by meeting many, is that anyone with a PhD is entirely lacking in common sense. You see, Pete, none of Al Gore’s great forecasts of some years ago have remotely come true. The weather changes in the tropics are found to have happened because they have cut down the jungle or rain forest if you prefer. The new snobbery in the UK is that the Liberals are on top but can’t realise it that the great mass of people (like me) who knew the country when we had different values seventy odd years ago — are laughing at them. The GWPF spread plain common sense information without emotion.
I’ve been busy and didn’t realize WUWT had published my piece. Wow, what an amazing response. Thanks to Anthony for providing a forum and doing what he does so well.
Some interesting comments, some more insightful than my essay. I’m enjoying seeing people using the social science terminology. I hope we can now figure out the next, harder, step of how to shift rational ignorance and bellwethers against CAGW.
thanks for your piece
I had already copied your comments about this from the other day
Matt, thanks for your piece; its value can be judged by the number of comments. Although I agree with others that “Climate Pete” is just your insane alter ego designed to increase the comment count. (JUST KIDDING!!!)
SOCIAL SCIENCE??
That was social studies back when I left school.
A boring pseudo science attempt to ascribe motives to other peoples actions.
Never mind human nature, somehow this new touchy feely babble would change the world.
Well 40 years later it sure has.
We have all these opinion orientated pyscho-babble experts all claiming to be scientists of the first order, yet none seem capable of describing the basic scientific method and more importantly they deliberately refuse to define their terms.
The noise level has increased exponentially.
The level of information is approaching zero.
Social science needs to be replaced with the fairy tales it supplanted .
As the folk tales focussed on human nature as it is.
Social Studies imposes a filter of stupidity .
In my twisted opinion the only cure for the true believers of this Cult of Calamitous Climate, is to give them what they insist on.
People this gullible are now a demonstrated threat to society.
Every bit of leisure and wealth they accumulate is used to attack the productive members of society, in the name of doing good.
These are the financiers of the Green Gang .
AKA international extortion in the name of saving the world.
Gang Green are a blight, corrupt, dangerously stupid and absolutely convinced of their own divinity.
Warmists could be said to be the latest gangrene of the body politic..
Mopst young people tend to go for fads like AGW, socialism, ect. That’s why eventually AGW will simply fade away as people get older and wiser.
The main failing in this article is that it makes the inference that this behavior is in some way unique to the warmists. Of course, this isn’t true. There have been a few similar articles explaining why “climate deniers” are so difficult to convince.
Simply put, people make an investment into their beliefs, without regard to their validity. The more community support they get for holding those beliefs reenforces those beliefs and the investment grows. Once the investment is too great, the person will actively protect their belief despite any contrary evidence. Each time they successfully defend their belief, the investment grows. Eventually, it becomes impossible to even entertain the concept that the belief could be false, because to admit that the belief is wrong would bring shame and embarrassment in the same magnitude as the investment.
“The main failing in this article is that it makes the inference that this behavior is in some way unique to the warmists. Of course, this isn’t true. There have been a few similar articles explaining why “climate deniers” are so difficult to convince.”
I’m reminded of a Tolstoy quote:
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
I think in this specific case, his quote can be replaced with “All CAGWers are alike- they all defer to “politically correct” authority, each skeptic is skeptical in his or her own way”
For instance, Stephen Wilde’s post above seems to be making a “sky dragon” argument.
Others’, like Dr Roy Spencer state the greenhouse effect is real, but the results from increases in CO2 would be small., overwhelmed by cloud and water vapor changes.
Those articles would be classic examples of psychological projection then. The skeptic/climate realist argument is not a set of beliefs, but is rather one based on what is rational and follows scientific principles. The Warmist side is irrational, and based more on emotion.
What you wrote is true for religion but.. not for science. Science is not about “belief”, it is about empirical evidence and reproducible results. There is zero evidence that CO2, all CO2 not just our tiny contribution, is causing any significant increase to global temperature. The models are modeling something but it ain’t earth’s temperature.
Alan, I am most definitely not making a sky dragon argument.
I am accepting that CO2 has a thermal effect but that other features of the atmosphere change to negate it. My argument is based on standard meteorological principles that seem to have been overlooked.
Nor do I suggest that the greenhouse effect does not exist. It surely does but it is a function of mass density, conduction and convection and not the radiative characteristics of constituent molecules.
I agree with none of the alarmists, the lukewarmers or the sky dragon proponents and have put forward a perfectly correct proposition based on sound, established meteorological science which has either been forgotten or never learned by the current generation.
(Pssst… make better science), plus the remaining 2 cents…
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/05/how-to-win-an-argument-with-a-scientist.html
Cheers… M
I wish we would stop calling the warmist camp “liberal.” I consider myself, and many here, to be liberal (as outlined below) and resent it. Left, progressive, radical, green, elitist the warm flock may be but liberal? Never in our lifetime.
Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, social critic, political activist, and highly regarded and outspoken liberal. His standards posted earlier here, I think, are:
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness. . . . That falls a little flat. Here’s my cobbled together (plagiarized) alternate:
10a. “Do not trust any excuse that closes debate; it means the debate is raging and whoever is saying it is losing.”
Sorry, that’s Bertrand Russell. Haste makes, etc.
“Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, social critic, political activist, and highly regarded and outspoken liberal. ”
It’s too bad that Russell also was a Fabian Eugenicist genocidal nutter willing to sacrifice 10,000 of innocents for his beloved one world government dictatorship.
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/fid_91-96/943a_russell_lhl.html
Was he absolutely certain about Number 1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
The leftists appropriated the word “liberal” long ago. They used to call themselves “progressives” – when that term/identifier became widely looked down on, they relabeled themselves as supposedly being “liberal” in the most Orwellian fashion. They’re not classic liberals at all. And now that “liberals” are being looked down on by many, some are trying to play the rebrand game and are going back to calling themselves “progressives” when again, it’s Orwellian and they’re anything but progressive.
“If you want to anger a conservative, tell them a lie. If you want to anger a liberal [leftist], tell them the truth.”
Remember: A liberal [leftist] will always defend your right to your opinion – so long as it matches his own.
A really heavy threat.
What about critical distance.
About scientific objectivity.
Coming Thursday we have to cope with one another.
In real live.
Hans
Is this “Climate Pete Comedy Week”?
This article misses a key point about the complacent acceptance of “The World is Doomed” story.
It’s that most people accept it as True because it is Science.
And they can’t do Science. So they have to accept the experts view and cannot question it.
Yes, try to change the bellwethers. But the issue is now so ingrained that even if the bellwethers change then science itself will lose face.
So every institution is committed to sticking to their guns and hoping that climate sensitivity is high enough to be noticeable.
What we should do is offer a get out route for those institutions that could be about to lose status. They need a second viewpoint committee – and they need to be told they do.
Interesting. Perhaps one route to convince the scientific community is to change their incentives. Keep the funding in place for climate science, just shift the focus to be against CAGW. How would you do that? In the US congress could pass budgets that shift NSF priorities and funding. It wouldn’t be easy but it could somewhat mute the university-industrial complex complaints if they kept their funding.
Matt, the research and technology agenda is set in the White House.
Asking presidential candidates about that is essential.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp
GUILT. Don’t forget a very important driver for the willing acceptance of Bad Ideas and doomsday scenarios is ….. guilt. Guilt, in earlier times, was exploited by organised Christianity – “if you engage in any of these forbidden activities (most of which were both sexual so-called misdemeanours, and also deeply embedded, genetically inherited behaviour patterns) you will go to hell and suffer eternal blah blah blah”. Well, that was individual guilt for individual sin. It’s a bit outdated now. But it did have the magic ingredient – that you got to feel guilt about having urges that you had no control over.
DOOMSDAY: Then doomsday scenarios became part of almost everyone’s individual consciousness (and of the collective consciousness) in the 1950s when it when it was fairly clear to anyone with half a brain that we were all (at least the lucky ones among us) going to die in a nuclear holocaust in the very near future. It never happened of course (although I have a suspicion that if today’s imbecilic politicians had been running the world in the 1950s, it would have). The post-nuclear apocalypse was a horrifying concept, and most of us were only able to tolerate it by thinking about it quite seldom, and then only looking at it in short, oblique flashes.
GUILT AND DOOMSDAY TOGETHER! In the 1960s, the environmental movement got under way, and it quickly latched on to exploiting collective guilt for collective sins – and it learned to use the “imminent doomsday” meme (which was by now firmly implanted in almost every brain in the world) as a powerful tool for getting people’s attention – “if you don’t stop polluting the (you fill it in) we are all going to either die in a vaguely defined apocalypse or live in a post-apocalyptic world where you will shoot your next door neighbour for his half of a rotten potato”. The beauty of this guilt (for those promoting it) is that you individually feel the guilt but you are unable, individually, to do anything about it. At least in 1762, a young guy could choose not to masturbate, and thereby avoid going to hell (I’ve heard that it’s theoretically possible) but in those 1960s, you could start to feel guilty just about being a member of the human race – and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it. I remember it well; it’s a powerful emotion and it has an addictive quality – it’s almost as if there was a guilt-shaped hole inside me, just waiting for something to come along and fill it.
SURVIVING GUILT. Somehow, I managed to get over the guilt. It could be that repeated indulgence in psychoactive drugs played a role in that particular recovery, or it may have had to do with getting a good education. Whatever, I’ve done plenty of things to feel bad about (and I do) but that guilt-shaped hole remains empty. Lucky me?
AFTER THE GREEN: The trouble with the environmental movement is that, as Patrick Moore has eloquently pointed out, it was very successful. Every one of us is a green-eyed environmentalist compared with our theoretical alter ego from 1955. And governments have adopted all sorts of environmental laws and regulations, and industries do all sorts of cleany-greeny things that they swore would bankrupt them when they were first mooted. Governments caught on because they knew that the public mood was changing and (as we all know) politicians base their campaign slogans on what they think the public wants to hear.
WARMING HELPS GREEN TO GROW: So the environmental movement, which is now a multi-billion industry, needed new doomsday scenarios, and warmism gives it a really good one. It has the magic ingredient – “you individually cannot do anything to remedy the guilt that we are making you feel”. Somehow, warmism has metastasized far beyond the Greenpeace/Save the baby seals community and has thoroughly permeated governments at all levels, government agencies, media outlets and universities, throughout the western world. And I am fairly sure that guilt is one of the fertilizers for this rampant growth of what should be a pretty fuzzy idea set.
HEART-WARMING END OF THE WORLD? Another thing about doomsday nightmares, which might have a role here, is that they have become less terrifying. The nuclear doomsday of the 1950s was too painful to confront directly, and most of us did get by without confronting it directly, most of the time (I was there, I remember how it was done). The 1960s-era environmental doomsday typically involved the collapse of civilised society, planet running out of food etc., in addition to bad air and bad water, and that was something that was hard to contemplate, best not to think about it too long. BUT the warmist doomsday is really rather pale by comparison. What, the world will be 2ºC warmer in 20 years? OMG, sea level will rise 6 metres!! Did you hear? winters will be longer and colder!! (still don’t quite get that one). These are pretty tame end-of-the-world scenes, so if you are a believer, you can think about them as often as you want without losing your sanity. And you can still drive your SUV, fly to Vancouver for a meeting, turn up the air conditioner, and stroke your personal guilt as you are doing all those bad things. Perhaps it’s comforting to know how the world will end.
Deeply embedded ideas are hard to get rid of. Once they have a certain critical mass, they take over, then you’re a heretic if you criticise them. Perhaps all we can do is wait till they wither away, like Christianity, the kind that controlled you from cradle to grave, did. Or implode, like the Stalinism that promoted Lysenko, did.
By the way, I’m sick of this left-right business. I am a warming sceptic, and I’m also an old lefty who believes in a lot (not necessarily all) of public ownership of Important Things. I have watched with horror the progressive thatcherization of my old country, and take comfort in having moved to Canada. Where, by the way, we have a government that is doing as little as it can humanly do (basically: nothing) to confront climate change. Pity they’re a bunch of right-wing nutbars! I suppose we must take our friends where we find them.
Might it just be straight old psychological interdependence?
You know … “I’m told to recycle my plastic, glass, metal, paper, electronics, batteries” … because the world needs all of us (collective reasoning) to do the right thing for the environment. No one likes to do it really (being honest), except my friends that are perfectionists, and get all uppity when I fail to follow the code (being even more honest, identifying a fundamentalist core). THIS, in the context of being belittled by one’s ecologically right-thinking (self-ascribed) friends, goes a LONG way to describe why it is so hard to get thru to warmists.
To connect the dots: WHEN a person begrudgingly takes on recycling of everything, every meal, every day … for the “good of the planet”, then one really has been cowed into reciting the litany of the religion. It is a very, very short step from “and, 97% of scientists are agreed that Man’s dumping of vast wasteful amounts of carbon pollution are going to ruin what we’ve been working for with our recycling!”
See?
Its why my somewhat idiotic better friends censure conversations at dinner that venture into wondering what tangible effects of global warming we’re seeing. One doesn’t bring up Muslim theological ethics in a Catholic household over dinner. Same thing: recycling stuff, buying economical cars, investing in electric lawn mowers is the “daily prayer” of people who have no more idea whether AGW is true, than they have that Jesus was the Savior, or God is a Girl.
But boy, don’t EVER try to tell a religiously convicted person that their prayers are for naught, or that their god(s) is/are a myth, or that no loving god would condemn any bunch of mucks to death-by-pillars-of-salt. Nah… talking down AGW just undermines the religion. For that, a hundred tongue-lashes! Fingers in the ears. I can’t hear you, nyah, nyah, nyah!
GoatGuy
“But boy, don’t EVER try to tell a religiously convicted person that their prayers are for naught,”
Hey no probs with that. We are forgiving.
The Charter of Sarasota County Fl, now requires recycling. This isn’t merely a law that could be changed by the county commissioners, this is the charter, it is much harder to amend. I don’t necessary disagree with recycling, but there are arguments against it and if those argument become stronger the County commission would not have the option to stop the recycling program. That sort of group think is nuts.
Tom, It’s old, and perhaps dated, but you may enjoy reading this:
Recycling Is Garbage
By John Tierney
Published: June 30, 1996
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html?pagewanted=1
What does recycling have to do with CAGW?
I am as much of a climate realist as there is, but I recycle willingly.
Why not?
It just makes sense.
Similar to my use of energy saving light bulbs, switches, fans to enhance A.C., humidifiers to enhance heating, and other such things.
Some things make sense, and some things do not.
“It just makes sense”.
Recycling only makes sense for a very few things, like aluminum. For the rest of it, there is no return on investment (ROI) – it costs more to recycle the items than to simply bury them.
The use of disposable anything has come under attack by misguided environmentalists. Styrofoam cups, disposable diapers, and (so-called “one use”) plastic shopping bags are good examples of useful items that have been demonized by the superficial-thinking green zealots.
I think it depends greatly on where one lives and what use is made of the recycled materials, and other economic factors.
Here in Lee County Florida, I believe they are doing it right.
All recyclables are discarded in one container, with yard waste collected separately.
My understanding is that the materials collected are used to offset the cost of collection.
Example:
In many places, trash to steam could pay for trash collection, but the whole concept is/was quashed by NIMBY objections.
In other places, people who know what they are doing and make rational decisions are in charge.
One must look at the big picture. In some locales, landfill tipping fees make reducing the trash stream very desirable.
In some places, landfills are made into bioreactors, and recovered gas lowers the costs tremendously.
“One must look at the big picture.”
Exactly. The big picture is that feel-good green enterprises like wind, solar, and recycling cost more than they are worth, and so become a constant drain on our resources.
We can’t afford these bleeding wounds on our economy, which not only threaten the poor, but especially also our middle classes, which I think are the real target of the green agenda, because in the middle class reside many intellectuals, some of whom are much less likely to have the wool pulled over their eyes than are the huddling masses.
By the way, beware humidifiers, which can be nasty.
Dirty reservoirs and filters in humidifiers can quickly breed bacteria and mold. Dirty humidifiers can be especially problematic for people with asthma and allergies, but even in healthy people humidifiers have the potential to trigger flu-like symptoms or even lung infections when the contaminated mist or steam is released into the air. Steam vaporizers or evaporators may be less likely to release airborne allergens than may cool-mist humidifiers.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/common-cold/in-depth/humidifiers/art-20048021?pg=2
It is much simpler and more cost-effective to set out, or boil, some water to increase humidity in an enclosed space. I often have oatmeal for breakfast – the old fashioned kind with rolled oats boiled in water – and I occasionally enjoy a cup of tea. Bathing, showering, doing laundry or dishes, and other common household chores also usually raise humidity to a higher level in an enclosed space.
But to get warmer – in addition to having a cup of tea, or bowl of oatmeal – I put on more clothes first.
Things that cost more than they are worth are not such a great idea, on that we agree.
And it is also true that some things may not particularly cost effective to recycle, but at least combining them all for collection minimizes this. Metals are almost surely worth recycling, but glass is almost surely not worth it.
Plastic, I suppose it depends…they do sell that plastic lumber substitute decking and other crap made from recycled plastic for top dollar, so it may be that someone is profiting from it.
I am not really exactly sure about the precise value of certain types of scrap, but I do know it varies a great deal from place to place and time to time, even for the exact same material.
I have made quite a tidy sum recycling scrap metal that others just throw out. Especially anything containing copper, or copper alloys. Steel was getting a high price by historical standards back before the economic collapse, when scrap went from over $10 per hundred weight to less than a tenth of that. I stopped following the price of steel more recently, but it had gone below $80 a ton for a little while there at least, or so I believe.
For many years copper bounced around but rarely got above $1.00 per pound for very long, but it seems to want to gravitate closer to $3.00 in the past few years. At that price, even insulated wire and scrap motors fetch a price well worth the trouble of throwing your scrap in a heap until you have a few tons and then heading down to the yard.
As for aluminum, have you seen how many cans it takes to equal a pound these days? They have made them lighter and lighter, and aluminum is well under a dollar a pound, so an entire pick-up trucks worth is barely worth enough to buy a cold drink.
But here where I live, whether one wants to or not…you have to. They will not collect trash if they see recyclables in it, and will not take your recyclables if they note the wrong sorts of stuff mixed in.
But one of the keys to making scrap materials worth the effort of collecting them is to have a sufficient amount and a steady supply. Then the economics can change for items at the margin.
I think there are places that have programs I place to recycle, but no one is making sure that it pays to do so.
The situation is different here than where I used to live. For example, here in SW Florida, they collect yard debris for free, and then turn it into mulch and compost. The mulch they give away, although you have to go pick it up, but they sell the compost, and at a discount to buying it from nearly any other supplier. Many are unaware of these facts and so, as with many things, those in the know get a better deal in life that those not paying attention.
One man’s trash is indeed another man’s treasure. It just depends on who you are, what you know, and how shrewd you can manage to be.
Interesting essay. Man-made global warming/climate change alarmism is a religion. And just like the faithful followers of any religion, they all have the religious disease of certainty. To identify the infected ask them this question: If in 20 years or so irrefutable evidence is produced that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that human influence on our climate is insignificant, will you be pleased? If their answer is anything other than an immediate and emphatic “yes”… you’ll know they’re infected!
Most will not answer such questions as asked.
Unless they are a dim bulb to begin with, they will see what you are getting at and refuse to go along with your scheme to expose their hypocrisy.
Similar to how Galileo could not get his detractors to peek through his scope.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
– “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, Charles Mackay, 1841
I have yet to make up my mind with regard to global warming: Mostly because I have not done the necessary reading and, in a counter-point to the problem discussed above, am not going to jump to conclusions based on what e.g. Obama says.
Indeed, one of my personal main beefs with the current political debate in countries such as the U.S. or my native Sweden is the strong propagandizing of claims and ideas that I have over time understood to be at best presented incorrectly, at worst outright wrong. The realm of political correctness (in general) and feminism (in particular) is especially depressing: As a child I fully believed claims like “men hit women” or “women earn x cents on the dollar”. As an adult, I have seen plenty of statistics that show domestic violence to be a 50–50 issue and know that the “x cents” does not consider factors such as full- or part-time work, education, number of work-years, …
Like the boy who cried wolf, politicians should not expect to be believed in area A, when they are known to lie (or themselves be grossly misinformed) in areas B and C.
Like you at one point I was on the fence. I started with the theory “CO2 causes global warming” That took me to web site “Real Climate” which give me an over view of the “theory” Then I found an other web sites that poked holes in the “theory” and climate models such as “hot spot”, “amplification number” and “positive feedback” “heat trapping clouds”. Then I research on now and when “Co2 causes global warming” funding got started. I would have been more impressed if weather balloon data detected the troposphere warming faster than the surface temperature and somebody wonder why than a “theory” as to why Venus had a “run away Co2 induced warming” to its present day atmosphere. About that time I came across web site “Climate Audit” and the debate about the “hockey stick” graph which lead me to web site “Surface Station” and Anthony’s “new” web site Watts Up With That.
Thanks Anthony
1) What is a warmist? What are warmist convinced of?
2) What would you like warmists to be persuaded into being convinced of what is different from what they are convinced of now?
3) Where would the persuasiviness be of the argument to attain 2)?
(I guess you are actually referring to anti-warmists, i.e. those that are in favor of policies to reduce (too fast) warming.)
A Warmist is a person who has used the Precautionary Principle to claim that policies must be made before the evidence is obtained.
They believe that the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions will be harmful and irreversible. And that we must do something about them immediately as looking for evidence of the impacts will not allow us to prevent them.
In short, a Warmist is superstitious and scared. And the enemy of reason.
As such they propose very expensive and currently unjustified policies.
how about this for precautionary:
Sure Scientists tell us that CO2 will produce some global warming, but Scientists also tell us that it has enhanced plant life – and therefore animal life – 30% or more over the past decades. So, perhaps it will get warmer, but should we take the chance and threaten the welfare of all Earth’s plants and animals?
Richard,
‘A Warmist is a person who has used the Precautionary Principle to claim that policies must be made before the evidence is obtained.’
So basically an anti-warmist. Regarding precautionary principle, wiki says (1st sentence): “The precautionary principle or precautionary approach to risk management states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action.” On that basis I suspect:
‘They believe that the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions will be harmful and irreversible. And that we must do something about them immediately as looking for evidence of the impacts will not allow us to prevent them.’
to be wrong. Instead it is about risk management.
(Superstitious, scared, enemy of reason, I will not respond to, your characterizations.)
Actually, my point was that the original post here does not define what a warmist is and what they need to be convinced of (or what they are wrong about).
You gave your definition and that’s fine. I do not know if your view coincides with the view of the author of the post above the line.
For clarity, Richard does not begin with an M.
I am not RichardSCourtney.
I cannot say if my view coincides with the view of the author of the post above the line.
But I did justify my own view. The Precautionary Principle is a merely a pessimistic version of Pascal’s Wager.
It is zealotry. It is the fallacy of the excluded middle.
And it appears to be your view, Wegen.
I agree with M.
A Warmist is someone who has no use for cost/benefit analysis, either. “Carbon” is bad, no further discussion is necessary.
Wegen, you might be convincing if you could identify any global harm, or damage, due to the rise in CO2. But there is none. Therefore, as far as we know, CO2 is completely harmless.
You’re stuck on the “as far as we know” part. But that is a logical fallacy. As far as we know, there might be a flying saucer landing in Central Park tomorrow, ready to carry Leon Festinger’s Seekers off to a better world. As far as we know…
@MCourtney
I apologize for addressing you as Richard, my mistake, sorry.
However, as I see it (correct me if I am wrong), I see a risk analysis on one side that takes into account worst-case scenarios (and best-case scenarios of course) and you saying
“The Precautionary Principle is a merely a pessimistic version of Pascal’s Wager.”
You’re sure about that?
The Precautionary Principle is a merely a collectivist/socialist pessimistic version of Pascal’s Wager.
Belief in God is personal. Precaution is collectivist.
“What is a warmist? What are warmist convinced of?”
Really?
If you are seriously in the dark regarding what is meant by the term “warmist” (or warmista, warmunist, fear-monger, chicken little, alarmist, etc.), then you must be new to this site and climate blog sites in general.
Some may quibble about exactly what is meant as who is who, but in general everyone knows.
The big delineations in my view, are those who actively promote the CAGW meme, those who simply go along with it, those who sincerely believe it, and those who pretend to but know better, etc.
There is overlap between these categories.
Maybe someone could write an article spelling such things out, complete with charts and Venn diagrams.
So warmist = “those who actively promote the CAGW meme” according to you. Please name them. The above the line piece doesn’t do that.
Name them?
Ok, I will have the list drawn up post haste.
Wait here.
What this article doesn’t explain is why the warmists took their original stand. How they decided to be in the bellwether group. It explains their actions once in the group, but how did they decide to be on that side of the argument to begin with? And understanding that is really the only way to understand a warmists actions.
I think its because, even prior to ever hearing about global warming, most warmists were frustrated with the lack of environmental protection by our governments and were sickened by stories of what oil companies have done to the environment on their way to becoming billionaires. Big oil companies are the bad guys they want to bring down. But they have no means to take down such giants. Until global warming came along.
I’d say most warmists are idealists and most skeptics are realists. And when warmists heard about global warming, it was the tool they had always dreamed of to take down the big bad oil companies and bring us towards their ideal society. Clean energy, cleaner air, and big cigar smoking oil billionaires going broke. The theory of man made (more specifically, oil company made) global warming, and the need to stop it, is the “force” that would require governments world wide to shut down the oil industry, because if governments don’t act, we could destroy the planet. So goes the theory anyway.
How do you convince someone that a theory they want so desperately to believe is true is really not true? How much evidence would that take? Way more than you can ever provide.
An alternative explanation is that there existed a group of people who believed in population control, “social justice”, one world government, and (dare I say it), eugenics). By the way, some guy name Rockefeller was in this camp and gave his villa in Italy to a group that became known as the “Club of Rome”.
The global warming theory happily coincided with their objectives.
Othering happens in all cults, it’s how they control members. You see it in all religions that isolate themselves.
It’s time governments took over control of our universities and public broadcasters, and ban cult member from positions of authority.
Yew trine a be ironic?
Rich.
“It’s time governments took over control of our universities and public broadcasters, and ban cult member from positions of authority.”
Funniest thing I have read all day!
Isn’t it odd, that the Pope says that God is responsible for creating and maintaining the universe, but mankind controls the weather?
1) Not yet he doesn’t. There’s no encyclical yet.
2) We are made in the image of God and have stewardship of the earth so it’s not theologically unjustified.
3) We are commended to “Love one another” (Jesus Christ at the Last Supper) so caring for the people of the world is in the Pope’s remit. If AGW is bad for the people of the world then he has an obligation to address that.
I’m not a Catholic but it does seem strange that people mock the Pope for doing his job.
+1533
So yes, I agree with what you say, but think Galileo. The Pope needs to be right as well as authoritative.
Rich.
3) We are commended to “Love one another” (Jesus Christ at the Last Supper) so caring for the people of the world is in the Pope’s remit. If AGW is bad for the people of the world then he has an obligation to address that.
answer: Yes commended, not commanded. “If AGW is bad for the people of the world then he has an obligation to address that.” The Pope should look at AGW with both eyes open, if not he is doing a disservice to his flock.
Yes and yes. I would also like to argue that a poor sense of self-worth, fear of rejection, weak ego strength and weak sense of a personal identity comprise the personalities of people who are inclined to accept any kind belief system that must be unquestioningly adhered to. Unfortunately, there are probably many more people who “follow the crowd” for precisely these personal reasons than there are people who like to think for themselves. This fact makes the electorate easy prey for just about any political figure who is successful in getting a new or unique idea accepted, whether it is valid or not.
Fascism and Communism are two such formerly popular ideas that come to mind. These ideas were readily exploited by people like Hitler and Stalin who ultimately eliminated hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who may have disagreed with them, while the adherents to their political philosophies stood meekly by and watched. Yes. All too often the needs to belong, to be accepted, and to be affirmed as worthwhile persons are stronger than reason. In the final analysis, it is not so much because the human need for affiliation is so strong, but, surprisingly, because so many of us have such a poor sense of self worth.
Writes jbird:
Which reminds me of some reading I’d recently done:
Climate pete: I wonder what your PhD studies involve?
You mention physics and such, but you seem to be very keen on ‘stopping’ man made warming at all costs, or at the cost of billions. You do not seem to be focused on a narrow subject area that you wish to demonstrate you leading knowledge in, have PhDs become generalist now?
I believe they involve something to do with piling higher and deeper. Just a guess.
In other words, you can’t reason with a team player.
This discussion is neither interesting nor important. Instead WUWT should start discussing the falsification of the fundamental warmist theory, which you have swallowed hook line and sinker.
This theory states that back radiation of the CO2 molecules is the basic cause of the rise of global average temperature.
Global average temperature has not risen for say 18 years. CO2 on the other hand has continued to rise.
Hypothesis falsified.
You guys should hammer this home.
Sigh. The heat is hidden in the deep ocean, silly.
Hammer home instead the insignificant amount of CO2 humans add to the atmosphere, 3%.
Wow, it would never have occurred to me to attempt to influence what people should be talking about and how they should say it by first announcing them to be a bunch of boring blowhards of trivia.
Actually I don’t see a lot of difference between warmists with this “in group/out group” attitude and the religious extremists currently running amok in the Middle East. Both are impervious to logical argument; both are impervious to clear physical evidence that they are wrong; both are utterly intolerant of opposition and both would like to see that opposition completely eradicated to further their cause.
What’s the difference?
“This discussion is neither interesting nor important.”
388 comments would tend to argue otherwise.
Mr. Cobb the trivial is easy to discuss ad infinitum.
Empirical evidence strongly suggests that climate sensitivity is much lower than assumed by IPCC models, that’s the scientific issue.
Sometimes I wish those with alternative theories would ‘belt up’.
You know, I hardly have conversations about this anymore. But, when I do, I just say:
According to NOAA and the IPCC, humans contribute 3% of the CO2 entering the atmosphere each year. In any real world physical system, 3% of a trace gas (400 ppm) would be considered an inconsequential rounding error. So, how will this rounding error lead to catastrophic climate change?
Usually, what I find out, is that they are against fossil fuel (for some odd reason), and CO2 is just an excuse to ban it.
joel, there is no particular reason something being small should mean it is inconsequential. Relatively small things cause big changes all the time. Why should CO2 be different?
… because a half-doubling of CO2 has been shown to do the square root of f*ck all perhaps ?
If someone is standing on the edge of a cliff, a small movement can have dire consequences.
However, there is no evidence, none whatsoever, to indicate that preindustrial CO2 levels were on the edge of any cliffs.
In fact, quite to the contrary, there is a great body of evidence that far higher CO2 levels than currently exist had no correlation to global temperatures, over a period of tens and hundreds of millions of years.
Why should anyone believe that the present is any different?
Bingo. we have a winner. Since almost everything humans do will release CO2, it becomes the ultimate control mechanism in the world of “sustainability”. My question as been, why anybody in their right mind what to give that much control to unelected bureaucrats?
While I largely agree with this post, this cuts both ways. I’ve seen plenty of examples where people, at this very site, have behaved in the same exact way. The most striking example is how people here have embraced Richard Tol’s work on the economics of global warming despite the many errors, and even entirely nonsensical assumptions, in it.
Any person who actually examines Tol’s work, arguments and behavior will find it should never be accepted, much less embraced, by skeptics. But many peopor here will automatically defend him and his work because people likr our host have “signalled” that they should.
Which shows “warmists” aren’t really different from most people. They just happen to hold different views.
It shows zip, actually. Warmists don’t just hold “different” views. They hold what borders on a cult mentality, with no relation to reality. In short, they are whackos.
Bruce Cobb, given my example was offered to show people at this site do exactly what the post describes. It would be easy to dismiss you as a “cultist” just like you do to others.
Bruce Cobb, given my example was offered to show people at this site do exactly what the post describes. It would be easy to dismiss you as a “cultist” just like you do to others.
There are indeed parallels between the continued promotion of cAGW and the renaissance church’s refusal to allow the new heliocentric model of the universe to be accepted. The church thought that if Galileo’s proof that the earth was not central to the cosmos became public knowledge, then Christianity would collapse. In fact, a geocentric universe is not a prerequisite for Christianity to exist, so there was really nothing for the church to worry about.
The Greens today have focused so much of their attention on climate change that they face a similar dilemma, in that they fear abandoning it would spell the end of ALL support for their environmental work. Of course, that is also a false appraisal of the situation. Therre are plenty of people willing to support protection of the natural world, regardless of, or maybe in spite of, the climate alarmist drivel.
Agreed but then maybe the Pope has a different agenda?
Ian, I’ve long thought that the correction of man’s place in the universe by Galileo had greater intellectual consequences, but the correction of man’s place in the climate will have much greater social, economic and political consequences.
Even perhaps, greater religious consequences.
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We are, after all, watching an incipient religion strangle itself in dissonance, misanthropism, despair, and the embrace of evil methods.
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No, I did not mean Islam.
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Mr. Hanley when you don’t measure an increase in temperature what does that make climate sensitivity? Zero?
It could be negative I wouldn’t know, no-one knows, whatever it is it’s most probably much lower than the IPCC central estimate.
Chris The IPCC themselves say quite clearly that they do not know what the CS is , therefore there is no empirical basis at all for the climate forecasts on which the whole UNFCCC circus is based .
The IPCC has now even given up on estimating CS – the AR5 SPM says ( hidden away in a footnote)
“No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on
values across assessed lines of evidence and studies”
Paradoxically warmists still claim that we can dial up a desired temperature by controlling CO2 levels .This is cognitive dissonance so extreme as to be crazy.
Thanks Dr Page, I didn’t know that. Of course the SPM is a political document.
As the purpose of the IPCC was and presumably still is to investigate the human-induced effects on the global climate notably CO2 emissions, that after twenty five years and billions of dollars wasted they still have no idea of the central metric is, well, crazy.
Good thing they don’t need a figure for it anymore now that the populace has been stampeded into a chasm of ignorance, fear, and guilt. Who needs numbers? Do you deny we are at fault? How can you?
Here’s where I point out that every warming in paleontology has been beneficial, and every cooling detrimental.
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George Steiner,
Doesn’t it bother you in the least that there are no testable measurements quantifying AGW? That is crazy. The whole “dangerous man-made global warming” scare is based on nothing more than opinions!
To measure is to know.
— Lord Kelvin, physicist, 1883
DB, why do you spout this nonsense? No testable evidence blah blah blah. Does it not bother you that there is barely a climate scientist on the planet who agrees with you. Do you have such a high opinion of yourself that you feel ok sitting out on a limb all on your own? Even the skeptical scientists (Spencer, Christie, Curry) accept some of the warming is almost certainly ours. Of course you can’t put a percentage figure on it. It’s not a piece of string to be measured. But the evidence is there for all to see. The only question is how much danger/damage is ahead? In the mean time, careful how you move on that increasingly isolated rotten limb.
“But the evidence is there for all to see.”
Where Simon ?
Give us some bullet points.
‘The only question is how much danger/damage is ahead?’
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What, no future benefits?
After ~250 years of the current global warming phase, whatever the causes, Simon must think the climate has just about reached perfection.
Simon,, DB cannot be convinced.
there was a debate. DB was a no show. Most of WUWT was a no show for the debate.
Nic Lewis showed up for the debate. he got published. Parliament listens to him.
Judith curry showed up for the debate, Congress listens to her.
but the DBs of the world.. they missed the debate.
There are real issues int climate science.too bad 97% of all skeptics missed the opportunity to discuss them
Philincalifornia
Give us some bullet points.
Simple easy to read.
https://royalsociety.org/~/media/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/climate-evidence-causes/climate-change-evidence-causes.pdf
Chris Hanley
What, no future benefits?
Even smoking had minor benefits (no need to paint your ceiling brown…. cheap perfume was disguised). Doesn’t mean it was good for you in the long run.
@Simon
You know, simon, I’d be a whole lot more impressed with your appeal to the authority of the hive’s hired-gun, good-comrade, Gruber-clone climate-scientists , and their group-think Lysenkosim, if they’d just LEAD FROM THE FRONT AND BY PERSONAL EXAMPLE IN MATTERS OF CARBON REDUCTION!!!!, if they’d just PRACTICE WHAT THEY PREACH!!!
But what do we see in the actual behavior of your hive-hero climate-scientists, simon?–unrelieved, in-your-face, brazen-hypocrite carbon-piggery, with practically no exceptions, especially evident as they flit about the globe, attending one CO2-spew, frequent-flyer eco-confab, after another–hive-swarm gab-fests, it is emphasized, that could all be easily held as carbon-free video-conferences .
You know, simon, the spectacle of your famous climate-scientists in action is figuratively akin to that of some anti-smoking zealot, spittle-spraying fulminations against the demon-tobacco peril, while, at the same time, workin’ on an evil-smelling stogie, that hangs off the side of his animated pie-hole, and while, at the same time, blowin’ smoke-rings into his interlocutors’ faces.
Professor Gruber thinks us coolie-trash nobodies are all “stupid”. Do you think we’re all “stupid”, simon? Moi, I don’t think we’re all “stupid”–but that’s just one uppity peon’s opinion, take it for what it’s worth, simon.
Warming’s always been good. You could look it up.
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Simon, thanks yes, I’ve read that document before. You notice how they start with the conclusion? That should be your first clue.
philincalifornia… You notice how they start with the conclusion? That should be your first clue.
It’s called a summary. Read it, it is easy to understand.
Got it Simon. They start with the conclusions, and indeed, they call it a Summary and your deception is complete with one word of the report proper. Did you ever meet a pieman going to a fair perchance?
Agree with your second point too – Easy, facile even, but then it would have to be for Ed Davey to understand it.
Climate Pete: “Unless you yourself have good knowledge in the subject (in this case formal training in atmospheric physics and climate science), how can you tell whether you are the one being fooled or not”
You don’t need to be a cowboy to recognise the smell of bullsh!t.
A friend of mine own a trucking company. While driving on a country road, he told his daughter ” Smell that? That’s the smell of money.”
Regarding the municipal waste disposal discussion above (recycling vs. waste dumps and incineration), there is also the possibility of plasma waster converters:
http://www.westinghouse-plasma.com/waste_to_energy/
“A plasma gasifier is an oxygen starved vessel where various feedstocks can be gasified using the very high temperatures achievable with plasma. Rather than being combusted, the heat breaks the feedstock down into elements like hydrogen and simple compounds like carbon monoxide and water. The gas that is created is called synthesis gas or “syngas”.”
I imagine it takes quite a lot of energy to get the temperature up to 3000 degrees C. If this technology proves to be economically worthwhile for municipalities to invest in and operate however, this might be the
best answer yet to solid waste disposal. Since recycling is costly and energy foolish, plasma waste conversion could eliminate the need for it.
On the other hand, this technology might make way too much sense to ever get very far.
The technology doesn’t work. It was tried in Ottawa and failed for a host of technical reasons, mostly the result of inability to handle inconsistencies in the feedstock.
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/plasco-energy-group-files-for-creditor-protection
CGH:
I can’t speak for the reasons behind Plasco’s financial and technical problems that resulted in its failure in Ottawa, but Westinghouse appears to be having more success with its PWC technology according to the linked document below. They have successful plants running in Japan (one since 2002 and one since 2009) with two others under construction (in China and England). They report that they have been working out the glitches with the technology and will be incorporating the lessons learned in their new plants.
http://www.alternrg.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/WPC-SoQ_Jan_2014_NDA-Not-Required-Final.pdf.
If I were you, I wouldn’t judge the success or failure of a technology based on the experience seen with just one company in one city.
Who will “win”, Warmists or Skeptics, in Paris 2015 ? Anybody dare to share a prognosis ?
And being an Europeean, I Wonder if Climate-debate will be an issues, or create debate when election New President in US ….
So far, I’m predicting a replay of Copenhagen, where China covered their chagrin over the failure of the shakedown of the developed West by spouting outrage over the neo-colonialist manipulations of one Barack Obama.
Why would he give up the chance to make one last gigantic fool of himself. The Chinese know we don’t have the money, and could use the laugh.
Me too.
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Right you are, Galene.
I think they also believe that Detroit will come roaring back. Look at all those broken windows that need fixed, eh?
Oops. Sorry Galane. My bad.
“It often takes decades to accept new theories that are clear winners (e.g., continental drift).”
clear winners??
http://www.davidpratt.info/tecto.htm
Worry about checking the papers he uses to support his assertions and not about the fact he couldn’t get this published an a Consensus rag.
“I’m in with the in crowd. I go where the in crowd goes. I’m in with the in crowd. I know what the in crowd knows.”
We saw the same thing in cannabis “science” for a long time. The government only paid for results that made the “dopers” look bad. The Heath monkey study is notorious in that regard. Since the discovery of the endocannabinoid system that has slowly been changing. Real science is painting a different picture. And thus the in/out is changing. None the less I will be excoriated by some for posting this point.
It takes about 50 years for a change in social attitude to be fully integrated. Why?
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” – Max Planck
So why do attitudes formed in youth get locked in? Endocannabinoid production which makes the brain plastic declines around age 25. Thus the old “never trust anyone over 30”.
Well what do you know. I found one already and he has preceded me:
Schoolsie
May 24, 2015 at 2:34 pm
If smoking dope impairs thinking (every study so far has been discredited – it takes about 1 to 10 years typically) what does the body’s natural endocannabinoid system do to thinking? Well we do know about the foolishness of youth. So there may be something to it.
None the less regular use (about 25% of the youth cohort) peaks in the 15 to 25 year age range. The same years endocannabinoid production peaks. No one knows why. After the peak years regular use declines to about 10% of the population.
Well I’m about 1/4 way through the comments and so far not a bit about why humans generally “lock in” at around age 30. Well it is probably due to “rational ignorance”. It is to laugh.
A wether is a castrated ram, so a bellwether is a castrated ram wearing a bell that the shepherd puts into the flock to guide the ewes.
Are you sure that bellwether is not derogatory term? At the very least it seems to me to be apposite.
“Bellwether” is often used in the political arena to identify voting areas (ie, New Hampshire) that over time have tended to be reliable early indicators as to which direction a certain election, or movement, is heading. There is certainly nothing derogatory in that particular usage, and only a few linguistics experts remember what the original meaning of “wether” is.
is Rotschild a denier ?
ttp://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/22/weather-war/
Was this the derivation of the alarmists as DBs ? (Deaf to reason, Blind to facts )
I had a rather depressing exchange about GW with friends on Facebook this weekend. One fellow was posting something impassioned in support of a new carbon tax being discussed in Alberta now that the New Democrats are in control after a long period of having Conservatives form the government there. I did some back-of-the-napkin calculations based on the accepted wisdom about GW that you can find on Wikipedia – i.e. this is their own facts, nothing I cooked up. I said “For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right and CO2 is going to fry us all. Canada as a whole (not just the one province) produces 1.48% of the world’s CO2 emissions. This means that if everyone in Canada were to drop dead tomorrow, and every single activity that produces CO2 immediately came to a stop, that this would slow the rate of warming (by all of the accepted numbers) by 0.01184°C per century.” The response was “we have to be seen to be doing SOMETHING.” By the gods, there’s no talking sense to these kinds of people. Maybe it was my fault for not pointing out that that infinitesimal amount of heat is below any accurate means of measurement.
If you want to stop a Warmist in their tracks, just ask them two questions. The first being. What climate do you want? The second, based on their assumption we are living in a hotter world, how cold do they want that climate to be?
(Another wasted effort by a banned sockpuppet. Comment DELETED. -mod)
“Obama and the Pope were setting up the talking points for their in-group members to use to determine who can be considered part of the tribe and who should be rejected for being outside of it.”
I’ve been saying this for years in various contexts. DailyKOS isn’t read by its opponents; its articles exist to keep people in the fold and define appropriate beliefs. SkS is the climate politics equivalent; define what is approved and mock everything else.
The approach obviously works extremely well on sheep and they can be right-wing sheep or left-wing sheep. It’s who gets there first with the young sheep.
In all my life I think I have changed the opinion of only two people out of thousands on the topic of religion which is very similar to climatology insofar as a typical citizen is concerned who can neither prove the existence of God or Global Warming and takes both, one or none on faith.
Changing the opinions of bellwethers is even harder than their followers’. Bellwethers get major props and status from leading their flocks, and are especially resistant.
Excellent post.
Don’t forget the groundbreaking book “When Prophecy Fails”. The authors predicted that the inevitable disconfirmation of a prophecy would be followed by an enthusiastic effort at proselytizing to seek social support and lessen the pain of disconfirmation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
That raises the question, is “global warming” a cult?
Bjorn: ” I believe that approx half of the population have the “sheep gene”. ” It must be much more than that how else would you explain the popularity of religion? – Chris Schoneveld
The simplest explanation would be that there is a God. Your statement presumes that religion has no redeeming value except the need to obey, which would be a false presumption. People come to faith as a matter of free will….they are not ordered to believe. Most come to faith by finding wisdom in it which applies to their lives.
Read both Saul Alinsky books and you’ll understand why leftists appear to be so dense: They refuse to debate any subject, from income inequality, to the minimum wage, to climate change, because participating in a debate implies the opposing party has something of value to say. Not to mention that one could lose a debate, so why take a chance?
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Better to attack the characters of people who disagree with you, and ridicule them with names like “deniers” — that puts them on the defensive.
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Challenge his motives, and denounce his character enough, and even the most brilliant scientist with a PhD will not be taken seriously when he says the climate in the past 100 years has been perfectly normal.
I have found Warmists are usually Progressives. They are Authoritarian and Fascist. They are not good people who are open to ideas. They are bad people who want to ram their Authoritarian agenda down the throats of everyone else. If you voted for any of these people, particularly President Obama, it’s your own damn fault.
There are a LOT of Conservative Authoritarians too. The libertarian faction in the country is small. About 15%.
Writes M Simon:
True the former. The latter? Let’s say that “About 15%” of Americans consciously admit their adherence to the principles of libertarian political philosophy.
However, it’s a testable hypothesis that far more of our countrymen – particularly in the middle class – adhere to the non-aggression principle, and are therefore libertarians whether they’re aware of it or not.
Does the term “psychological projection” mean anything to you, Mr. Manos?
Is that bridge going to fall down? Your opinion is the only one that matters so – or is it? What about this lump, is it cancer? Again how much is your opinion worth? Oh that’s right your opinion is worthless – thanks