Hint: He did his homework, then took himself to the other side of the debate.
Guest essay by David Siegel
My name is David Siegel. I’m not a climate expert; I’m a writer. Early in 2015, I became interested in climate science and decided to spend the better part of this year trying to learn what I could. It didn’t take long before it was clear that there isn’t likely going to be any catastrophic warming this century. What was clear is that skeptics are losing this battle, and I want to tell you why.
For thirty years, James Hansen and Al Gore have been building their PR machine along with David Fenton, the wizard of nonprofit PR. They understand that the messenger is more important than the message. People don’t easily change their minds. People get their opinions from “experts” and brand names like NASA, MIT, Harvard, TIME, The Daily Show, etc. Fenton knows the game is about credibility and repetition, not science. As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose.
So I did my homework and wrote a 9,000-word essay aimed at liberals who have a voice, who have access to media, and who might take 30 minutes to educate themselves.
I submitted my piece to every liberal publication, from the LA Times to the Atlantic Monthly to National Geographic to Huffington Post and many more. They all turned it down. Now I’m launching it myself and hope you will read it and help spread the word.
I ask you to help get the word out through social media, links, and the press, to the liberal audience I’m going after. Links really help. If you can help reach Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, and other influential liberals, I hope to help them understand that the science is not settled. I think this is the best way to tip the scales back to reasonable, impactful environmentalism. If you can help move it on Reddit, Voat, Quora, NewsVine, etc., I would appreciate that.
I’m going to ask people to leave comments here, rather than on my page, because I can’t manage the comment spam there. I will, however, read the comments here and will respond if I can.
My work is aimed at your liberal friends; please send them to read it.
Excerpt:
What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?
If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.
More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats. I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.Over the years, I built a set of assumptions: that Al Gore was right about global warming, that he was the David going up against the industrial Goliath. In 1993, I even wrote a book about it.
Recently, a friend challenged those assumptions. At first, I was annoyed, because I thought the science really was settled. As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems. I’ll start by making ten short statements that should challenge your assumptions and then back them up with an essay.
1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
3 There is tremendous uncertainty as to how the climate really works. Climate models are not yet skillful; predictions are unresolved.
4 New research shows that fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, at both long and short time scales.
5 CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
6 There is no such thing as “carbon pollution.” Carbon dioxide is coming out of your nose right now; it is not a poisonous gas. CO2 concentrations in previous eras have been many times higher than they are today.
7 Sea level will probably continue to rise, naturally and slowly. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level.
8 The Arctic experiences natural variation as well, with some years warmer earlier than others. Polar bear numbers are up, not down. They have more to do with hunting permits than CO2*.
9 No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people who eat them.
10 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface*.
Could this possibly be right? Is it heresy, or critical thinking — or both? If I’ve upset or confused you, let me guide you through my journey
You’ll find it at: www.climatecurious.com.
From my experience, as soon as you cross this line you will discover all of your previous friends clamping their hands over their ears and screaming “la la la la la” so they don’t have to hear.
Good luck with this, though!
I also started out believing the narrative, and it really only took a few hours of looking at data to realize it was a load.
I first got interested in the climate issue as a result of the media hype before the release of AR4. At first I took it all at face value, not having any reason to doubt the “thousands of climate expert scientists”.
Since I have science training I went straight for the data. I won’t pretend it only took “several hours”, it’s a huge and complex question but it rapidly became clear that it was not that simple. Nor were the papers and data sources verifiable. That is what first raised my suspicions.
At some point someone sent me a link to a MODTRAN interface on Dr David Archer’s site (now removed). It became clear that cutting CO2 would have negligible impact.
I’ve been interested in environmental protection since the 80’s, so is was biases towards accepting rather than rejecting the possible impacts of massive human activity.
That is why I’m particularly pissed off about the current stupidity that is distracting from and prevent action on REAL pollution issues.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t have the disadvantage of years of climate study to unlearn. What I saw when I first started searching for supporting evidence was what I now recognize as “weasel words”, and a subtle but powerfully overwhelming feeling of “greasiness” to everything related to climate.
With some of the personalities, who I won’t mention but you know who they are, I saw absolutely no credibility, and it’s a travesty that I didn’t see any.
Like the mine tailings in the river that polluted
the Navajo Nation.?
Followed by a Nuremberg type denial by the EPA..
I started out very skeptical that CO2 was driving global warming. Became even more skeptical when they changed it to “climate change”. And always had in mind that we are in an interglacial period, during which you expect the planet to continue warming…until it doesn’t, then back into an ice age.
Yeah, my Greenie sister said she wasn’t prepared to discuss it with me unless I had a PhD in Climatology. She has the Faith of a Torquemada.
Does she have a PhD in Climatology to answer your questions?
Having a PhD in climatology won’t help you understand climate as you would have to toe the warmist line to get one.
When I said it to one of MY PhD friends, he winked and said “Lots of people know it, but they agree with the political agenda so why let science get in the way of a good story?”
And just what is the political agenda that the friend agreed with? To concentrate riches and control in the hands of liars and leave the “unwashed masses” to rot on the ash heap of history, with nothing left to dream for and work for?
It is interesting that the intellectuals who grew up with the warnings from “1984” and ‘Brave new world” are the ones embracing totalitarianism.
Power Grab: They are convinced that all good things come from govt, therefore the more power they can get into govt hands, the faster utopia can be forced on the unwashed masses.
Climate models do not work. Ergo, PHD’s in climatology are useless.
Funny, I also have a greenie sister (vegan also), whom is completely sold that Al Gore is a saint and everyone not on board with the party line is an earth hater. Determined to put herself thru college in environmental sciences to reinforce the belief that we are all doomed and we have to act now….very sad as I am very much in the skeptic camp from applying common sense, critical thinking and many years of self education, much coming from the great group here that I am very grateful for.
Thank you Anthony et al., for the place of sanctuary, truth and integrity!
Tell Brian intellectuals read 1984 and Brave New World and saw opportunity not foreboding.
Exactly, CodeTech. I crossed the line in 2010, and that ended a whole range of friendships.
Bart Simpson with a bucket over his head comes to mind. “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”
In the end though, what anyone believes is irrelevant. The Climate will do what the Climate does, whatever the boffins of either side say.
But even that is irrelevant.
I was just reading Freeman Dyson on Dellingpole, and I saw “It’s like a hundred years ago, before World War I, there was this insane craving for doom, … ”
My point is that the Climate change debate is only a symptom of a much bigger and deeper malaise – as it turned out in my activist life time, it wasn’t Acid Rain, it wasn’t Overpopulation, It wasn’t Ozone Holes, It wasn’t Limits To Growth, It wasn’t the Tragedy of the Commons, It wasn’t Peak Oil, … and so on, and so on, and so on. And if it wasn’t Climate Change, it would have been something else.
Mr. Siegel might be able to change the mind of his liberal friends, but when Climate Change dies in the arse, as it inevitably will, it WILL be something else all over again, until the death wish of the West is fulfilled. We are watching a culture that has run out of ideas, and is committing suicide.
( I take my text for today from Oswald Spenger – The Decline of the West)
Can I make a reply to my own post?
I think the point with Paris is that there is not one economy on the face of the earth that has enough money to make the slightest difference to the climate – but they might have just enough money to destroy their economies.
Its a question of whether they have the will to do it. That remains to be seen. Will they have the committment to destroy their own country, in the vain hope that others might survive?
Very succinct. Except – We haven’t run out of ideas. We have run to an ancient idea and embraced it. You call it suicide, but it is really murder, at least murder-suicide. Your list is a list of all the evil man has done to the earth. A young college student, a girl, an environmentalist, said to me over thirty years ago; “Sometimes I just wish all the people would die because of the violence we do to the earth” Its an old, old story – death and sacrifice for the atonement of sin.
Recycling and reducing our carbon footprint has become righteousness. Skeptics have become heretics. Belief and faith in the ‘orthodoxy’ of scientific consensus has become the definition of truth.
Nietzsche was right: “I’ll tell you where God is,” returned the madman. “God is dead! God remains dead. And we have killed him.”
God is dead, but man is still religious. Evidently, man isn’t capable of believing in ‘nothing’. So – we pick our poison. Perhaps we are making a big mistake. I liked the old juice better.
Yeah–maybe all the “activists” will have go grow up and get real JOBS!
No, it’s not that we wish to commit suicide and it’s not about religion and it’s not about concern that we have violated poor Gaia, it is now and always will be about one group holding power over the others, to force others to bend to their will. It is, now and has always been, that group of people that place themselves above the totality of humanity and want to rule it. This is just another avenue attempted, and with mass media spanning the globe, it is far more successful since the attempt is to conquer the entirety at once instead of having to do it piecemeal by wars.
Agenda driven, yes, but the only concern for the outcome is that those who believe they should rule by whatever reasoning they use to assume superiority, are making a move against the entire population of the planet at once, and with the media, aka ministry of propaganda, firmly in their grasp, they are succeeding because they are working from the top down, securing the government support and will crush the useless eaters out of existence in the process. We can argue the science until hell freezes over, and it won’t make an iota of difference, because this is not about science, this is not about climate, this is not about the environment, it is about winning the war for control once and for all. The sooner the population of the planet wakes up to that simple fact, the better their chances of seeing grandchildren migrate to the stars instead of working in a sweat shop or field scraping out a living kissing the feet of those that hate them.
Bingo.
You are correct. It’s the underlying premise of State of Fear, by Michael Crichton. Ought to be required reading.
Hey! Great list of Western cultural death-wish fantasies. But, why leave out Y2K??
Yes, Crooks, you have it exactly right, a craving for doom, a pervasive mental illness among intellectual elites, of which, I suppose, I am a member, being a Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. in the quasi-scientific field of social psychology. We studied a lot about what scientific method and science really was in psychology because we craved the status of science. My 2011 book, “Acceleration,” (Prometheus Books) was written to expose the many reasons why humanity is actually on the rise, thanks to science and technology, but that tightly reasoned and well-sourced book was hardly read by anybody, I think, because not only was the Malthusian doom meme not in it but was contradicted in my text at every turn. So-called “futurists” who I thought might be interested, dismissed my arguments out of hand. It is ‘obvious’ to them that we are running out of all resources, despoiling the previously apparently pristine environment, and over-populating the earth. The leaders of the professional science community have swallowed the “climate change is real” dogma because they have been inoculated with the Malthusian meme, and they dare not question. Why bother, since the fundamental truth of growth limits, (=”sustainability”) is so “obvious.” There is no other explanation why the leadership of the scientific community is so blind to the reality, so dismissive of those who would even question the validity and reliability of the data put forth, and so willing to trash the reputations of those who try to raise their voices. It is a scandal of science so massive and so unbelievable that it is no wonder that it is not believed. I don’t see a way out, certainly not by falling in line with reactionaries and religious zealots on the right.
Ronald G. Havelock, Ph.D.
It’s way worse than that. You will be viewed as a conservative, in the pay of fossil fuel barons, or a troll.
I second CodeTech’s experience…..
Not trusting any government entity at all (as per Orwell: Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind), especially of such as the EPA, FDA, NIH CIA, etc. etc and their cohorts, ADA, AMA, MSM etc.etc. (my untrust based on the many reversals & lies over the decades) I had little difficulty in processing data contrary to “the line” and coming to the same conclusion. However most of the public are naive of logic, forgetful of abuses, prone to authoritarianism and just plain mentally lazy, which will make any improvement a major uphill battle.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful…” reminds mr o a George Carlin line …renamed the jungle rain forest.
“In ‘1984’ Orwell introduced us to the words doublethink and newspeak. A word he DIDN’T use – but which combines the two – is doublespeak” ( http://www.orwelltoday.com/dblspkthennow.shtml ).
“Doublespeak” is synonymous with “equivocation.” An “equivocation” is an argument in which a term changes meaning in the midst of this argument. Though an equivocation looks like an example of an argument having a true conclusion aka “syllogism” it isn’t one Thus while it is logically proper to draw a conclusion from a syllogism is logically improper to draw a conclusion from an equivocation. To draw such a conclusion is the “equivocation fallacy.”
I run into trouble whenever I get into it with family and friends. I’m going to start the convo by saying “I’ve planted close to 2 million trees with my bare hands, any opinion I have is well within my rights, your anger going forward means nothing to me; I care about the science and the politics and that is it.”
People will try to shut down the convo by pulling out the 97% crap. To which I say” I agree with the 97%, only a fringe of that 97% beleive the doom scenario.”
Your argument assumes the “truth” of the premise, and it should not.
You should say:
“Do you know which 97% of scientists that study refers to? It refers to 78 of 80 climate scientists at a Global Warming conference. If I asked 80 Nazis if they thought Hitler was a righteous dude, I’d get the same percentage. Duh. But ask the Poles, the French, the Fins, the Dutch, and the Brits what they thought of Hitler, and the numbers change dramatically. Were you aware that over 80,000 scientists have signed a petition questioning the Climate Change Orthodoxy?. Yeah, I thought not. Look it up. So get back to me when you want to talk about real science. The socialist media has tricked the dumb masses into believing something that guarantees more government control. Given how well they can’t even prosecute those Wall Street hedge fund managers for taking down our economy, And given how many billions they are throwing out to prove how much they ought to control all parts of our lives, you’d have to be an idiot not to be skeptical of the whole Climate Change agenda.
“Besides, when Clinton, Obama, Gore, and Pelosi start living like its a crisis requiring drastic change, I’ll start to consider it deserving. But they’ve only enriched themselves and live lavish lifestyles of profound consumption while the middle class suffers. So again:Duh! it’s not a real crisis. It’s all about their control of you.”
I had an advantage in that family background and training in geology and archaeology pretty much squished any tendency to “believe” anything. You can’t really even understand a debate or a controversy until you can argue for both sides, or all of them if there are more than two. In the ’90s I based my initial views of global warming on the simple laboratory physics – CO2 absorbs LWIR. That seemed to be clear enough. Then some time later my son, an engineer made an observation about the way water becomes cloudy for a bit when heated (it is gas being driven out of solution), AND I was looking at ice core data from Vostok and noticed a lag between temperature and CO2.
Considering the increasingly loud argument over anthropogenic climate change, I toddled off to Real Climate or some similar site and posted a query about the lag. The response was – well – ignorance driven. RC, or whoever it was, responded that the “lag” was unimportant. Effectively, I was told that once the CO2 genie was out of the bottle it drove “climate.” Effectively the character that responded made a perpetual motion argument for how CO2 acts. Trying to ask for a clarification lead to my comment being “dropped.” Up to that point I had thought AGW was at least a slightly reasonable idea.
I’ve come to the point now where I am not at all convinced that “climate” is even a useful concept. Considering that “climate” studies need decades of weather data before “climate change” can be addressed analytically, and that such “scientists” then turn around and try to argue that “climate” drives weather, I can not see any strong utility to “climate,” – well not beyond contemporary grant chasing. In geology and archaeology we talk of “climate changes” based on visible changes in sediments or pollen assemblages. Even there the results are that weather patterns changed, creating changes in erosion, deposition, vegetation and animal populations. Those changes are what we label as “climate” changes.
So, is “climate” really a useful concept scientifically? I think not at least some the the time.
Thank you Duster.
I’ve been analysing climate data – mostly temperatures and assorted indexes since about 1992 and so believe I have a good grasp of what the doomsayers appear to believe and propagate. |My work, all private, has convinced me that the establishment climate scientists are more interested in their publications – which dominate the fight for funding – that in real scientific truth. If you try to publish articles that demonstrate the baselessness of the establishment position your work with end in the WPB. Ergo, belong to the establishment or commit career suicide..
Hmm…speaking as an amateur geographer, I’d say that the Köppen-Geiger climate classification system is, for instance, a pretty useful tool. (Granted that one is prepared to acknowledge that geography is science, that is; it seems to be an eternally ongoing debate. The jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none nature of geography doesn’t always work to its advantage.)
Climatic zones and changes in them are relevant for the study of cultural and natural geography alike; but maybe more so for the social science aspects of economic geography like population distribution patterns over time, changes in the cultural landscape, the trading of and production of goods etc.
robinedwards36, My academic professor friends say exactly the same thing, publishing papers is the name of the game when it comes to funding. And it makes sense to publish stuff that you think others will agree with.
As you discovered, ‘Climate’ is a semi meaningless term which seems to say something but exactly what is very hard to pin down. It is thus useful to the warmist propaganda because the readers think they have an idea about what is meant. It doesn’t, and never will. ‘Global Warming’ is very similar.
Duster et al,
I am pleased to see a half dozen fellow “climate doubters” (as per AP style book).
We often see the defensive assertion “nobody denies climate” but, actually, I kinda do; much as you, above, have articulated.
Climate is a perfectly useful concept in everyday life, however.
mebbe:
My view of the linguistic scene follows. The “climate” is is the name of the physical system that produces a time average of each weather-related feature of the Earth and its atmosphere in a specified period of time; conventionally the length of each such a period is 30 years. That the “climate changes” means that the values of these averages change with time. Nobody doubts that the climate changes.
Ideally climatology is devoted to producing knowledge of this physical system. Thus it is an example of a physical science. In a physical science, models are built from facts and logic. A “prediction” is a kind of proposition. A model that is “scientific” makes “predictions” of this kind. If a model of the climate were to make predictions of this kind this would make it possible for governments to regulate the climate to some degree.
The field of study that I’ll call “global warming climatology” cuts its tie to logic through failure to interpret “prediction” as a kind of proposition or to make “predictions” of this kind. This field is pseudoscientific and useless for its intended purpose of supporting regulation of the climate. Replacing logic in drawing conclusions from arguments are fallacies of several kinds. Existence in the language of global warming climatology of pejoratives such as “climate denier” and “climate doubter” is indicative of application of the ad hominem fallacy in drawing conclusions from arguments. Global warming climatology is dressed up to look like a science through applications of the equivocation fallacy which, for example, fail to distinguish between “projection” and “prediction.”
Koppen was first and foremost a botanist, and the climate classification scheme that bears his name divides up climatic regions according to broad measures of the type of vegetation that predominates within each of these regions…hence A climates are those that allow palms and other tropical species to thrive, etc.
But the system has some valid criticisms for being overly broad, and not granular enough. Example: Categorizing, as it does, South Central Florida in the same zone as Cape Cod, MA and central Kansas is a stretch, to say the least.
http://koeppen-geiger.vu-wien.ac.at/pics/KG_USA.gif
me too. started more with reading on socialism and free markets, but eventually got to climate scam and other liberal dogma.
My experience is that as soon as I bring up data, and question the orthodoxy, people as not nearly as kind as just no longer listening. the evil in them comes out. Can’t have no disagreement with the “collective”. Gotta demonize, sue under RICO, prosecute or even burn down their house, sometimes just figuratively.
A good piece of work.
We need to put pressure on those who mistakenly accept AGW and have significant status and persuasive ability.
Up to now the sceptics have been cautious due to self doubt and diversity of viewpoints but the Earth’s climate has shown us that it is not going to obey the models so a change in strategy to a more confident, strident approach is called for.
Yes a VERY good piece of work. I applaud the author.
My only disagreement would be that I really do not think those sceptical of the Alarmist hype are losing.
Yes there are ever more desperate mutterings about silencing sceptics and removing free speech from those who dare to challenge the dogma. But like all totalitarian ideas – they are doomed to failure – unless society degenerates into something akin to North Korea.
The very notion of restricting other peoples free speech causes disquiet at least and anger at best in those that value the freedoms our past generations and current generations fought for.
The Alarmists are so divorced from reality that they really do not understand the Streisand Effect when they try to put a lid on what they see as dissent and the rest of us see as simply questioning highly dubious “science”.
As for the “famous names” now being rolled out…………..
Anyone who saw the debacle of Charlotte Church making a total idiot of herself trying and failing to steer Question Time (a UK Current Affairs discussion programme) towards the notion that the Syrian conflict is a result of Climate Change would realise that the actions of the panel in ignoring her utterances spoke volumes. And this was the BBC!!!
Emma Thompson spoke total bollox and was applauded for her sense of “Urgency” by Dana Nutter-celli in the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/sep/07/what-emma-thompson-got-right-and-wrong-on-climate-change
If you want a laugh over the weekend – try reading this. Best not to do so while drinking anything tho’
“My only disagreement would be that I really do not think those sceptical of the Alarmist hype are losing.”
I think you’re right. However, when you consider the very long time it has taken for the medical community to even begin to seriously consider that guide lines for food and nutrition might have been wrong since at least the 1970s, and the enormous weight of lobbying money spent by the industrial food businesses, which currently fights against such changes, then turning the boat around for climate may take a long time. The situations are so similar that they are well worth comparing.
I disagree with the OP that vegetarianism or veganism are “better” for the environment. There is a wealth mistaken assumptions in that view. They are better than the current “industrial” production of battery chickens and feed lot meat, but not better than properly raised and treated chickens and meat animals. Properly handled herds and flocks actually can improve soil and have been very successful restoring soil in areas where mono-crop production badly degraded it.
@ Duster: I am in complete agreement with what you said.
I would add that the persistence of the prominent lying movies, journals and books makes it harder to turn the ship. Once the originators have left the scene, their highly lauded works will continue to soil the landscape, causing low-information persons who might wish to do their own research to find those lies more easily than products of valid discussion, such as this blog (in the event that the internet finally disappears).
It’s not unlike the situation with the top-down dietary recommendations that have led to today’s obesity epidemic. Even though word is slowly getting out that fat and cholesterol are not evil poisons, and the government erred when they pushed that high-carb food pyramid on everyone, reruns of TV shows or movies made in the last 30 or so years will continue to repeat the mantra that low-fat is more virtuous than other ways of eating.
One more comment about diet: People are not all the same. The world is a big place. Food varies a lot across the globe. People have a history of figuring out how to eat to stay healthy and have healthy families without the intervention of doctors and meds. And those ways of eating can be very different, depending on where you live. The last thing we need to be doing is dictating what everyone has to eat.
IMHO, if the way you eat helps you “keep on keeping on” and avoid throwing away a large amount of your hard-earned cash on doctors and meds, then you’re probably better off than simply “treating a number”.
I’ll visit your site and read in detail tonight.
However, a quick thought for now:
There are many ‘believers’ who spent time looking at the evidence and became sceptics. To be honest, that’s probably the situation for most of us who visit WUWT.
However, there are very, very few sceptics who became ‘believers’. And no, Richard Muller doesn’t count.
I’m not convinced that Muller was ever a sceptic. Of course, he did make a savage – and true – assessment of Mann’s hockey stick back in 1998. But, in theory at least, it should be possible for an AGW believer to still see that MBH 98 was junk and close to scientific fraud.
Chris
Mann’s hockey stick in 1988 was the thing that made me a skeptic. Before then I was willing to entertain the argument, afterwards I knew it was a con job and dig into every report to see what real-world data the doom is based on. The problem is, whenever and wherever I look, the doom is based on computer games and the worst ones take the real collected data and run that through a model to get their result.
I agree that Müller was never a skeptic – just an opportunist. What gives him away is his decision to completely ignore satellite temperature data and go with the falsified ground-based data from the IPCC.
Satellite data clearly show that in addition to the current ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ there was one that stopped global warming warming for another 18 years in the eighties and nineties. IPCC has decided to disappear it and are showing a fake warming in its place. It even has a catchy name – “late twentieth century warming.”
This warming is a complete lie – it does not exist. But Müller and his BEST gang show it as part of their regular temperature curve. So much for having been or being a skeptic. He is fully in the arms of the climate change criminals. We need RICO to investigate how that hiatus got over-written with a non-existent warming.
Muller was never a skeptic.
Pure misdirection.
If you want proof just say so. I will post convincing evidence of such after work.
Agreed Muller was a fake skeptic, a Trojan Horse.
I personally believe that those illiberal elite climate gangsters with influence know the facts that thoroughly refute their climate agenda but deny it in exchange for the ” greater” cause of indoctrinating their political ideologies into the masses.
Your cause is a valiant one but it won’t change the minds of those most influential in sufficient numbers to change the course of climate fraud sold to the world. In short they don’t really won’t to talk about the science. They just want to implement their political agenda.
I am more cynical.
More often than not, their “greater cause” is fat stacks of government cashola, and a chance at some personal fame.
If you can call it that.
For those who already have stacks of cashola (like that term) there is also the opportunity of buying sanctity, rather like wealthy merchants in the middle ages building a chapel.
menicholas,
“More often than not, their “greater cause” is fat stacks of government cashola, and a chance at some personal fame.”
Perhaps so . . more often than not, but don’t you think there is a “they”, who are implementing their “political agenda”? And that “they” are knowingly exploiting the “more often than not” crowd’s desire for cashola and fame and such?
Metaphorically, do you think there is a man behind the curtain?
Nonsense, the CAGW “hypothesis” is rubbish and will not endure. It will endure much longer if we keep silent.
If the atmosphere is getting warmer, then the oceans are warming also.
Can some warmist explain how the concentration of CO2 is increasing in the oceans without any significant increase in atmospheric pressure?
A very brave and honest expose. Add “11 Nobody has been able to clearly define the
“perfect climate” from which the present climate has changed, nor said who, once that was figured out (it hasn’t been) gets to decide for the rest of us just when that “perfect Climate” occurred, and how we propose to get back to it and prevent it from being a bad little climate and changing again. And perhaps in a different direction, like sideways….if some geoengineering fanatics ever get their way.
Thanks for your efforts, Mr. Siegel. The skeptics may not be winning in a traditional sense, but they are creating a circumstance where the believers increasingly make fools of themselves and call for draconian methods of censorship or punishment for opposing their views.
That’s not the skeptics winning, as much as the Climate Sect LOSING; like a game of billiards when the man behind the eight ball scratches his cue ball and loses the game.
I was a long time supporter of Greenpeace. A big anti right wing Leftie! I came out of the Climate Change closet just over two years ago. Welcome to the denier pride parade!
I like that “Denier Pride Parade”! Maybe ditch the parade, and just have a gathering…
Ha! That’s great! “Denier Pride!” I can image the cow the left would have with that one.
I realize you have likely lost the respect of many of your Leftie friends with your denial status, and I applaud your courage. Perhaps your observance of how governments are using this issue in an attempt to grab more power and control over our lives will give you cause to consider why many of us are on the right to begin with – to reign in and shrink governments so they can not succeed in these efforts.
The real issue is whether mother nature will do the job for the sceptics.
So far, whilst tons of money have been poured into climate science (and wasted), the ordinary man (and woman) has not yet felt the financial impact on his pocket, nor yet the curtailing of a life style that he takes for granted. This will change over the course of the next 15 to 30 years.
There is a switch from the developed West to the developing East. This will continue a pace. already, China emits more CO2 than the US. But in 2030, the dynamics will be far more stark. It will be easy for the average American to see that whilst the US (and Europe) etc are cutting back on their CO2 emissions this is pitiful due to the industrialisation and electrification of developing countries. It does not matter what the developed West does, it is clear that CO2 emissions will rise for the next 20 years.
During this time, it will become more and more self evident how useless renewals (wind and solar) are. It will become patent that they cannot provide reliable and dependable energy as and when needed. Presently their penetration is small, but even so it is causing problems with the energy grid. This will exacerbate as time goes forward. Energy will get far more expensive and it will begin to become rationed, and or unreliable.
And here, mother nature may play its part. many warmists are saying that there may not be a return to warming before 2030. If over the next 20 to 30 years, there is no increase in temperatures (despite rising CO2), cAGW is going to become very difficult to sell no matter who the messager may be, no matter how much respect one may have for the messenger. To add to this, the public is losing respect with institutions and politicians. The public are becoming more cynical and the message that they have been duped by an elite will attract many, and it will then become easier to persuade them that there is nothing of substance in cAGW and it was used to as an excuse to transfer power and make the rich richer etc.
And if it begins to cool over this period, the above will become even more blindingly obvious. With ocean cycles tending towards a negative phase, and sun goes quiet and if a quiet sun (for whatever reason) is a harbringer of cooling, then I consider that mother nature will do the job for sceptics. In these circumstances, the simple argument that it is simply natural variation becomes very attractive. The ordinary man (and woman) will be able to see this being played out in front of their eyes.
It hasn’t occurred to them that they might win and win until they lose. They think all they need to do is win in Paris, etc., and they’re home free. It hasn’t occurred to them that there might be pushback after that, as the impacts of their measures start to bite, as their futility becomes more apparent, and as their predictions and promises are exposed as empty.
Re the 5 trillion hope
I’d have said that a bigger chunk of a vanishing quantity is a vanishing quantity
Winning and losing are concepts of ego and control. They have nothing to do with the pursuit of truth.
I think the Europeans have more on their minds at the moment than global warming; something to do with an invasion.
Another Trojan horse?
I am very inclined to agree.
AJB
“Winning and losing are concepts of ego and control.”
(Said the spider to the flies ; )
“They have nothing to do with the pursuit of truth.”
Perhaps not the concepts, but if real live people with real live egos seeking real live control, win . . ego and control will have a great deal to do with the pursuit of truth, I’m thinkin’.
And I caution against conflating things like the concept of ego, with ego itself. Ego is a wonderful thing, in moderation, that keeps us alive, and independent thinkers. If a supposed wise man from the east says otherwise, suspect he is an idiot or a con man, I suggest.
Another thing they haven’t thought through: Once they are victorious, they’ll no longer be the sympathetic underdog, the scrappy Greenpeacers in their tiny boats standing up to huge factory ships. Instead, they’ll be the new Goliath, and disbelievers will be the new Da
(Cut off)—. . . the new Davids.
Dear Richard,
I agree with your post.
Just on a financial point …
Ref:- “… the ordinary man (and woman) has not yet felt the financial impact on his pocket, ”
Here in England, for electricity domestic usage, we pay 14% EXTRA (every day and night) towards the “solar and wind power subsidy farmers”: it’s an offensive tax, so it DOES HIT US IN THE POCKET.
Regards,
WL
Unfortunately, you pay a lot more than that.
UK electricity bills are more than twice as high than they would have been had there been no deployment of renewables.
A couple of years back the outgoing chairmen or financial director of SSE explained that the cost of energy supply is less than 50% of the bill. Some 25% of the bill is infrastructure upgrades. This is connecting the windfarms to the grid (and possibly managing the grid with backup diesel generation). About 25% of the bill is green subsidies; the green deal (subsidising home insulation, double glazing, boiler replacement etc) and assisting those in fuel poverty (and probably also provision for bad debts which is increasing as energy gets less and less affordable).
Of the 50% that pertains to the cost of energy supply, this too is more expensive than it needs to be since included in the cost of supply is the carbon floor tax put on coal/gas, and the fact that the energy supplier has to buy wind/solar when available at the high guarantee strike price paid for such energy. If there had not been the deployment of renewables, and coal had formed the bulk base load generation, it is likely that the cost of supply would be at least 10 to 15% less than it now is.
The government are not telling you the full story as to how the energy price is made up.
Yes, and so far this month our (UK) approx 6,500 commissioned wind turbines have contributed a pathetic 5% of total consumption. We need to frack and go gas. At least this I will keep the lights on.
Richard says: “If over the next 20 to 30 years, there is no increase in temperatures (despite rising CO2), cAGW is going to become very difficult to sell…”
True in theory. A rational person could have wondered that about the last 20 of a total lack of relationship between CO2 and temperature. And yet here we are watching state-employed gatekeepers like Tom Karl replacing data to fit the agenda.
They are following a simple maxim: If the truth doesn’t work – lie
Many thanks indeed Richard: I am much obliged for the incisive, extra information.
Excellent stuff.
Regards,
WL
“Forecasts are mental constructs; they are not properties of the physical world.”
“Whatever mechanism causes sunspots could be part of the picture, but there are several different solar cycles at work. A single predictive model is still years or decades away.”
“No one knows what will really happen. We can’t see the future.”
The first and third quotes are false, and both contradict the second quote.
Hmmm
If you believe Forecasts are properties of the real world kindly show how these properties can be measured
If you believe We can see the feature please let me know which horse will win the 2.35 race at Ascot tomorrow
sorry for the typo that should be future not feature
Feature is more appropriate for horses, so good typo, look for the one holding its head higher. Planetary ordering of solar activity can provide forecasts for teleconnection variability at essentially any range at weekly scales. From extrapolations of the resultant oceanic mode responses, regional climate forecasts can be potentially generated.
Taking a guess , even an educated one, and being occasionally correct is not seeing the future, or knowing what will happen.
The scale of science and engineering needed to get us to the point where we can project short term trends with passing skill has been enormous. And so models used carefully can be valuable. But in long term projection they hard deviate with observation. Period. But even if model’s projected 20 to 30 years into the future with skill, we would still have to varify our volumes and values, otherwise we are baking a chocolate cake with different ingredients. And even should we master the ingredients…its still a simulated cake…although a useful one
No I’m talking about discrete solar based forecasts for NAO/AO positive and negative episodes at any range, not guesswork, not projecting trends. From forecasting the weather scale noise, the trend forecasts can be generated, given the correct understanding of sign of ocean modes versus NAO/AO phase, which some seem have backwards.
@Ulriclyons
“Planetary ordering of solar activity can provide forecasts for teleconnection variability at essentially any range at weekly scales. From extrapolations of the resultant oceanic mode responses, regional climate forecasts can be potentially generated.”
Is this from a script for an energy bar commercial?
I don’t answer facetious questions from the anonymous.
Yet you did.
Firstly, Ulric, I checked out your agwbs website, and I commend it for what I see as some fine turns of phrase. Makes for good reading. Al Gore throwing a “gimme” at POTUS, indeed.
Secondly, please explain what is the difference between your planetary-solar forecast system, and Piers Corbyn’s sunspot based system?
Oksanna, agwbs is not my site. The fundamental difference is that I forecast discrete periods of solar forcing of atmospheric teleconnections based upon daily to weekly scale heliocentric planetary ordering of the solar signal, whereas Piers employs analogue years based upon theoretical solar-lunar cycles for his forecasts. He doesn’t have the means to forecast the solar signal, I do.
A very good initiative.
It is important to realise that it is not just a question of some black/white ; left/right political allegiance. Most of those claiming it is are probably not capable of anything more than binary choice in their political opinions.
Many left-oriented individuals are capable of finding the facts behind the BS, many right-oriented people have been sucked in and believe the AGW PR.
From the author’s page:
The fact water vapour is THE most important GHG and is 4x more important then CO2 needs to be stated more clearly. Just slipping it in as “after water vapor” will probably not get noticed or seen as a confused mistake.
This is the KEY fact about climate: it is water in all it’s states and by its changing state that controls climate . NOT CO2.
Mike.
Agreed, but you forgot the two magic words “latent heat” that the alarmists ignore.
The alarmists also measure temperature not heat, even though it is heat that they claim is being ‘trapped’. The measurement of atmospheric heat content should all be in Joules per kilogram. They won’t do that of course as ‘temperature’ is easier to use to convince the voters. The spectacle of people claiming they have PhDs in science happily mixing temperature and heat and using common imprecise vernacular instead of scientific engineering terms is unedifying. It is one of the things that convinced me that they were better at dissembling than science.
Water vapour only 4x more important than CO2?
Mike October 16, 2015 at 1:10 am makes a good point about the importance of water vapor as a greenhouse gas. It is far more important than people realize as Ferenc Miskolczi has proved. According to MGT, his greenhouse theory, water vapor and carbon dioxide form a joint absorption window in the IR whose optical thickness is 1.87.
It so happens that this optical thickness is invariant when the amount of carbon dioxide in the air changes. If you should add more carbon dioxide to air (as we do) you are going to increase that optical thickness. But since the atmosphere maintains a constant optical thickness (and has done so for the last 61 years) water vapor srarts to act immediately. Its amount in air begins to diminish and it will rain out. This lowers atmospheric absorption for CO2 and the original optical thickness is restored.
But the greenhouse theory of Arrhenius says that addition of carbon dioxide to air warms it by its greenhouse effect. That is what IPCC has been telling us. This however cannot happen because the reduction of water vapor has lowered the optical thickness and this blocks the extra absorption from added carbon dioxide that is needed to cause that greenhouse warming. This is why constant addition of carbon dioxide to air for the last 18 years has not caused any warming.
The prediction of warming for this period by the Arrhenius theory, used by the IPCC, is plain wrong and invalidates the theory. The only greenhouse theory that correctly predicts global temperature is the MGT theory. The IPCC should get rid if that Arrhenius and start using the MGT to get correct predictions of global temperature.
Likewise, model makers using the Arrhenius theory should get rid of it and start using MGT if they want their model predictions to be accurate. MGT proves first of all that no greenhouse effect is possible during a pause/hiatus, in accord with observations for the last 18 years.
There was another pause/hiatus in the eighties and nineties and together with the current one they block out the greenhouse effect starting in 1979, the beginning date of the satellite era. That makes this period greenhouse free.
I support the effort here, but not necessarily the logic of the note.
David Siegel begins by saying that winning the public debate is about credibility and repetition, not science and facts, and proceeds to set out a number of facts relating primarily to the science. I thought he would offer some useful insights about how to build credibility or how it is that celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio become such useful idiots serving the alarmist cause (or, even better, how they might be “turned”.)
When engaged in a debate on this subject, I try a different approach. After making some factual points about the science and IPCC’s modelling, I then switch to explain the consequences of accepting the IPCC’s policy prescriptions.
The IPCC insists that all countries must reduce their GHG emissions by 60% from 2010 levels by 2050 and that the wealthier “developed” countries must lead the way by reducing emissions by 80% by 2050. I then show how this would require most of us to stop using all coal, oil and natural gas within 35 years, thus losing access to most modern energy services that support modern lifestyles and allow us to feed ourselves.
For those who actually take the time to think about it, their conclusion is that this is unacceptable and probably impossible. Most, of course, just stay with the alarmists’ most tried and true tactic – the ad hominem attack. I am developing very thick skin.
That’s where the IPCC has lost and will continue to lose. They may win people’s confidence via the “pollution is bad mantra”, but the fact remains that meaningful CO2 reductions are crippling and will remain so for the foreseeable future via every method except nuclear and hydro power.
The alarmists will get lip service and scraps, but no real sacrifice from everyone. Unfortunately this plays right into the hands of the corrupt, who will get rich off the meaningless actions taken, but at least it will protect the rest of us from too much damage.
For those who actually take the time to think about it
Well, there’s the problem.
Off topic – but has anyone seen this Guardian article.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/15/philippe-verdier-french-weatherman-question-climate-change
It seems some TV weatherman has written a book which questions aspects of climate change. He’s effectively been sacked – or sidelined at least
There’s already been a WUWT thread on the topic:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/15/frances-top-tv-weatherman-suspended-for-criticising-climate-dogma/
That was covered on Watts Up With That twenty-four hours ago.
link
Seems the warmists are running out of fingers to plug the holes in their constructed CO2 dyke.
Welcome to the other side!
Great to see you really trying to change people’s mind, but people fall for the ‘precautionairy principle’. Your arguments don’t make them change that feeling imho. They may even confirm them in their believes.
The science promoted by the IPCC is seriously flawed and biased. That is what must be exposed. Anything else is futile.
Unfortunately, in all fields of science there a few who deliberately alter data in order to prove their theories.
Where climate science differs from all other fields of science is that this practice is so blatant and widespread it has become acceptable and even praised. From Mann’s Hockey Stick to GISS’ historic temperature statistics, everywhere you look in climate science, you find data manipulation/torturing tn an attempt to prove a false theory.
As a geologist, I can tell you it is self-evident if there was the slightest bit of truth in CAGW theory it would be in the geological record and we would not be here. The truth is CAGW can only be found in computer climate models, which are either pre-programmed to find CAGW, or represent a very poor reflection of how our planet’s climate functions.
The scary thing is the ‘science’ of climate alarmists is continually being exposed for the hoax it is, but this is largely ignored by the mainstream media. I guess being outspent by a factor of more than 1,000 to 1 also does not help.
Very interesting. Welcome to the world of daily abuse for voicing an opinion.
I was genuinely interested in the science of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming in 2007/8 but things did not quite seem to add up so I tried to ask some questions:
Why did it warm as much in the early 20th Century as it did in the late 20th Century?
Why was there as little ice in the Arctic in the 1920’s as there is now?
Why were past century floods and storms more violent than they are now?
Why do we start from a period called “The Little Ice Age” to measure a temperature increase?
Why were there 5000 polar bears in 1950 and now there are 25000?
Why are there signs of farming under the current ice field on Greenland if it had not been warmer before now?
I went to such places as Sceptical Science to ask !! I received such a torrent of abuse that I was shocked. So I tried different sites. I very soon realised that there were gatekeepers in play. The abuse was remarkably personal and tonally similar. Not once did I get an actual answer to my genuine questions.
Having lived in the age of rampant communism I could see the pattern. It does not take many readings of Animal Farm or Fahrenheit 451 to understand what is going on. Then, having researched the existence of Maurice Strong and Agenda 21 it all becomes very clear. They don’t go away. They just change the uniform, get a new vehicle and start again. You cannot fight them with facts. You just have to wait for them to commit economic suicide. Hopefully without the deaths of 100 million people this time.
Welcome to the proletariat.
Always remember the thing about socialism:
‘100 years of failure proves nothing’
Go over to the Ars Technica site and try and ask science question sin one of their climate change threads which are common.
You get the same gate keepers, that will attack you ad homminum, swear, what ever it takes to make you uncomfortable and leave so their commentary can remain CAGW purre.
funny how it never happens face to face though does it ? the twenty rico clowns look like they could not punch their way out of a paper bag,as do the rest of the warmists. never a truer saying than the meek will inherit the earth. almost unbelievable that the same peoples that won battles and wars allow these people to have any influence on their lives whatsoever .
a few centuries ago they would all have been burnt at the stake long before now.
John Finn,
Yes we have.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/15/frances-top-tv-weatherman-suspended-for-criticising-climate-dogma/
Congratulation Mr. Siegel for your courage and efforts. Frankly, I was disappointed by your article. As you say, we are loosing the battle and simply re-stating facts to prove our point is not working. So I was hoping you would present a new way. But you aren’t. I don’t see how you hope to win. To win, a different approach is evidently needed and I was hoping to get that from your article. I however wish you the best of luck!
Give it time..
Your point is picked up by a number of other respondents further down.
If there is to be a “new way” then it needs to focus on a couple of issues:
1. The false economics of pursuing a Carbon Dioxide control strategy needs to be promoted to lift the understanding of the disasters that will flow if such a policy is adopted nationally or internationally. The cost to the taxpayer is huge. Electricity prices will climb. Costs of subsidizing wind and solar will climb. People will die of cold and hunger. Unemployment will grow. Industries will disappear. Living standards will fall. The undeveloped world will suffer.
2. The United Nations is controlled by powers that are not acting in the interests of the disadvantaged and the poor. The redistribution of wealth from the OECD countries through the corrupt UN agencies, especially the NGOs, to the even more corrupt and incompetent undemocratic states that are lining up to receive their share of the proposed $100 Billion per year via the UN’s Green Climate Fund is not about CO2 mitigation but about power, control and money. The socialists have subverted the noble objectives of the UN.
3. The “science” of global warming and climate change is still in its infancy. There is more unknown than known. The models are incompetent for the purposes of policy development. The IPCC is demonstrably biased and has been subverted by a clique of people who have a hidden agenda. The observational data is being corrupted through opaque adjustment and homogenisation practices. Weather is not climate.
The American Senate had it right in 1997 when it unanimously passed the Hagel/Byrd resolution that kept the USA out of the Kyoto farce. Democrats and Republican acted in unison to protect the American people from economic disadvantage. That’s how it should be. In the end it’s got to be about the politics first. While the science is clearly uncertain at the moment it will take some time yet before the science bodies such as the Royal Society and the USA equivalents accept that the CAGW hypothesis has been falsified. That, in itself, will probably require the removal of the incumbents and their replacement with true scientists.
Sam says: “1. The false economics of pursuing a Carbon Dioxide control strategy needs to be promoted…”
Good luck with that! We seem to live in a society that is kept illiterate about economics. When half the population votes for economic strategies that promise to improve the economy by borrowing money- you know it’s going to be hard to explain that inefficient energy is bad.
I like what you’ve written…except for “The socialists have subverted the noble objectives of the UN.”
It is banksters who created the UN, after they’d created two world wars. There was never anything noble about the objectives of the UN. To its creators and promoters, peace will come only when they are in absolute control.
Did the UN ever even have “noble objectives” to begin with? Maybe only on paper!
imoira and Barbara,
I think it did initially as outlined in its Charter, although Article 1/3 is where the socialist subversion found its way in. Now the UN is a waste of space (and money).
Dave in Canmore,
I’m not saying it won’t be a difficult to promote. However, the “hip pocket nerve” is far more sensitive than the “feel good” green nerve – in my experience. The significant adverse economic impacts of the green dream need to be pushed on every occasion we write about this abomination called CAGW. Perhaps we need to get started in the financial pages of the media by making sure the finance commentators and journos get the good oil first.
“If there is to be a “new way” then it needs to focus on a couple of issues:”
no, there is only one argument that wins and so there is only one argument thta matters.
fighting and winning are completely different propositions, yo.
so think- what is the argument that wins?
what do they use to justify the agenda? rights of the poor? rights of the unborn?
what gets your kids taught to regard fellatio as an act of courage? gay rights?
what gets a cop off the hook for murder? the right to feel safe from 12 yr olds?
what gets you to give up your rights? anybody else’s.
you have no right to stifle their speech. you have no right to interfere with their actions.
and if you fail to defend your own rights, you lose them.
when the day comes that you grasp the nature of the problem, you will be able to shut them down instantly by asserting your rights. there is no other matter and no other way.
a person has the absolute right to do as he pleases with his own property.
he has absolutely no right whatsoever to touch yours.
until you understand this, you are prey.
there is no debate.
and it’s not rape when you negotiate.
gnomish:
I have a sincere question: Do you believe that your comment makes a point that is decipherable by an average reader?
Did you intend for it to do so?
I try to constantly remind myself that just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean it can’t be understood.
I can give you one way which sometime works with my Democrat friends: many of them are warmist-alarmist believers, but don’t like Agenda 21. So putting the seed in their mind that the IPCC is essentially the climate arm of the Agenda 21 initiative sets them thinking… and that often helps!
No 12. What is the optimum level of carbon dioxide.?Based on our plants it is in excess of 1200 ppm. Great synopsis.
Whilst plants would like this level of CO2, today’s animals have evolved in a low CO2 atmosphere, and it is not clear to me that animals would like CO2 at that level, especially if there is little time to adapt..
I can’t see that there is any harm in a doubling of CO2 say to 800 ppm (and that will bring considerable benefits), but whether CO2 at a level of 1200ppm and above is a good thing for animals would need considerable testing. I have seen some articles regarding CO2 on submarines in which it is suggested that CO2 at about 1500ppm can cause a loss of mental ability/faculty so I guess that there is a happy balance between what is good for plants, and what is good for animals.
Richard,
“CO2 at about 1500ppm can cause a loss of mental ability/faculty”
It seems unlikely given that nuclear attack subs operate at an average CO2 concentration of 4,100 ppm with a range of 300-11,300 ppm . There’s a WUWT post with links to the National Academies of Science on the subject at the link below
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/17/claim-co2-makes-you-stupid-as-a-submariner-that-question/
It is all verifiable. No need to guess. Your experiments will not need statistics. You will find an atmosphere containing .008 (8,000 ppm) CO2 has no discernible negative effects on man or mammals. http://junkscience.com/2014/12/31/revisiting-the-scare-about-carbon-pollution-yes-ninnie-you-exhale-co2-40000-ppm/
I did read that post and some other articles on this, and I stand by the thrust of my comment that there is a happy balance between what may be good for plants and what may be good for animals.
In the WUWT article you cite, it stated:
“On nine scales of decision-making performance, test subjects showed significant reductions on six of the scales at CO2 levels of 1,000 parts per million (ppm) and large reductions on seven of the scales at 2,500 ppm. The most dramatic declines in performance, in which subjects were rated as “dysfunctional,” were for taking initiative and thinking strategically. “Previous studies have looked at 10,000 ppm, 20,000 ppm; that’s the level at which scientists thought effects started,” said Berkeley Lab scientist Mark Mendell, also a co-author of the study. “That’s why these findings are so startling.”
Berkeley Lab researchers found that even moderately elevated levels of indoor carbon dioxide resulted in lower scores on six of nine scales of human decision-making performance. While the results need to be replicated in a larger study,….”
///
Now I am not sure what is a critical level. large scale studies have not been undertaken on man and animals.
All I am saying is that there is no doubt some happy balance, and we would need to carefully investigate matters not just for us, but also for other animals if CO2 levels become substantially elevated in a very short time frame.
Your exhaled air contains 4% – 40,000 ppm – of CO2. As long as CO2 in the inhaled air is well below that, there will be no consequences of any kind.
… “decision making scores” is not a metric I would use to test for physiological effects of CO2.
@ richard verney
My questions for you are, …… 1) did the test subjects know beforehand what the “test” was being conducted for …… and/or …. 2) did they know what the level/concentration of CO2 was going to be during their testing?
If the answer is “YES” to either one, ….. then said testing was bogus.
Knowing anything about the “testing” can result in a “placebo” effect in the minds of the ones being tested.
Richard
come on, what’s the level in your lungs at any given point in time north of 10,000 ppm as high as 50,000 PPM? This is just stupid and you should see right through it.
just curious –did the “indoor studies” also consider the reduced O2 levels that would be part of a stagnant air study of increasing CO2 levels???
In addition to all the intelligent comments replying to Richard Verney, I might add this:
If CO2 were to double from the current ≈400 ppm, no one would even be able to tell without the use of very sensitive instruments. Only plants could tell.
CO2 is still just a tiny trace gas, measured in parts per million. It is as essential to life on earth as H2O <–(that's water, for the IPCC's head-nodders).
The problem IMHO is that the government education industry has dumbed down the population to the point that a word like "carbon" is meaningless. People don't know that we are carbon-based life. We exhale CO2. We imbibe it whenever we drink a Coke, beer or champagne.
Yet government bureaucrats in the EPA have connived and colluded with federal judges to declare CO2 a "pollutant"!
The general public doesn't object, because they don't understand. I can excuse stupid. Maybe it's not their fault. But I cannot excuse mendacity — and that applies to most of the defenders of the 'climate' scare who post here. They are deliberately lying, for various reasons. But still, they are lying. Anyone who reads this site for any length of time must know better. Ignorance is no excuse.
Comments were closed on the CO2 is bad for brains thread, so I will have to put my insight here. The study that found CO2 bad for brains tested students used to low levels of CO2 at much higher levels all on the same day.
The studies showing no harm, to submariners or others, were done on people adapted to high levels. There is something called “CO2 tolerance.” Buteyko breathing techniques increase CO2 tolerance.
As an animal physiologist, I believe life expectancy will increase as higher levels of outdoor CO2 help us become more CO2 tolerant. A paradoxical reason why is that today’s very low CO2 levels require very shallow breathing to maintain blood CO2, which is in the form of carbonate HCO3-. That shallow breathing means that we are deficient in oxygen.
This report suggests exposure to 5000ppm CO2 for 8 hours a workday is acceptable.
http://www.blm.gov/style/medialib/blm/wy/information/NEPA/cfodocs/howell.Par.2800.File.dat/25apxC.pdf
NASA is happy with 5000ppm 24 hours/day for 1000 days
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20090029352.pdf
I suspect that NASA would not be keen on levels that affected crew performance
“I submitted my piece to every liberal publication, from the LA Times to the Atlantic Monthly to National Geographic to Huffington Post and many more. They all turned it down.”
Seems mainstream media has had it up to here with de ‘skeptics’ and that WUWT is becoming an ever more consolidated voice for such views
Yes. Unfortunately, the number of alarmist idiots is being funneled here, too.
Yes because sceptical thought is winning.
More poor desperate true believers being thrown into the fray.
Why would they bother unless they do sense how shaky their own positions are?
Bureaucracies take 7 to 10 years to correct from glaring criminal errors, decades from smaller ones.
CAGW is a bureaucratic scheme, slow build, boring middle and fades away into the filing cabinets.. no one to blame, not my department..
I see the desperation building as Paris approaches , the Parisites lash out at every questioner, then they wonder why the general public has lost interest in being stampeded and is more amused by their shrill hysteria.
Truth is finally getting its boots on.
Village Idiot, am I mistaken in my assessement that alarmists need me to bend to their will and just believe them, where as I just want people to understand what my research is saying about the science, and how the science needs to be seperated from politics?
Do you see the difference? Why do we not “get a seat at the table”? Just because you think we are wrong, does not mean we don’t get to speak. It is my understanding that it is you that are wrong, but I would still let you speak. Your actions betray you, IMHO.
Your theory has dissipated like our atmosphere dissipates into space. Face it.
David Ball says: ” like our atmosphere dissipates into space”
..
Well, David, the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and so far the atmosphere hasn’t dissipated very much.
…
Steve Jones October 16, 2015 at 11:38 am says;
Well, David, the earth is 4.5 billion years old, and so far the atmosphere hasn’t dissipated very much.
Steve displaying his ignorance not only in reading comprehension, but also on how the outer dimensions of the atmosphere are configured.
8^D
As well as dodging the gist of the post. ( I am laughing so hard!)
David Ball is showing that he does not understand the meaning of the word “dissipated”
David Ball is correct:
From the Mirriam-Webster dictionary, copied verbatim:
dissipate
verb dis·si·pate \ˈdi-sə-ˌpāt\
: to cause (something) to spread out and disappear
That’s what the atmosphere does with rising altitude.
Choosing to continue avoiding the gist of my post,…..
I have played these games with many other here on WUWT. You don’t get to direct the discussion.
dbstealey October 16, 2015 at 9:21 am
Yes. Unfortunately, the number of alarmist idiots is being funneled here, too.
I will thank Steve Jones (loved your playing in the Sex Pistols, by the way ) for verifying dbstealey’s comment.
[Snip. Sockpuppetry. ~mod.]
David Ball,
“Steve Jones” cites Mirriam-Webster, but he doesn’t give the definitions. Actually, there are a number of related, but different definitions for ‘dissipate’. But the very first one (and thus the most common definition) is:
“To cause (something) to spread out and disappear.”
That is what the atmosphere does with increasing elevation. It is the altitude that causes the atmopsphere to dissipate. Eventually it goes away completely once you get far enough away from the earth.
But don’t let the “Steve Jones” sockpuppet bother you. He is fixated on my name, so any time I comment it spins him up. That’s fun for me to watch, especially when he nitpicks an irrelevant factoid like a perfectly appropriate word. In this case he’s clearly wrong, just like he is most of the time.
[Snip. Sockpuppetry. ~mod.]
As you leave the planet, there is no boundary layer between our atmosphere and space. This is from you own link:
b : to cause to spread thin or scatter and gradually vanish
c : to lose (as heat or electricity) irrecoverably
Now go away since you cannot deal with the body of my original post, and I have important things to do.
In 4.5 billion years our atmosphere has not ” gradually vanished”
….
Nor has it been lost ” irrecoverably”
…
Is English your 2nd language?
[Snip. Sockpuppetry. ~mod.]
“Steve Jones”,
Go argue with the Mirriam-Webster folks. Their #1 definition explains exactly what the atmosphere does with increasing altitude: it dissipates, until there’s nothing left of it.
Tell them their dictionary is wrong, and that you know better. Report back. We can use the amusement. ☺
Dr Ball did not state that our atmosphere dissipates into space all at once, indeed, he did not specify a speed or rate of dissipation at all. So your entire argument with him is either based on a ridiculous assumption of what you THINK he meant, or an issue of truly minuscule semantic import.
Kind of like me saying that since you believe that our atmosphere does not “thin out and disappear” into space, you must be claiming that our atmosphere does the OPPOSITE of dissipate….it “accumulates,collects,gathers,hoards”. You’re saying that our atmosphere today, is made up of ALL the atmospheric particles that existed the day our atmosphere developed millions upon millions of years ago AND every single atmospheric particle that developed afterwards. I could ask you questions like “What holds it all in? Do our rockets punch holes in it when they launch them into outer space? (You’d think the first one would have sent us reeling across the universe like a popped balloon!) How does the pressure of our atmosphere remain constant from the ground to your envisioned atmospheric boundary, you know, perfectly “thick” and consistent so that the whole thing doesn’t explode from all that additional atmosphere being added to it?
But those questions are stupid because the presumption that anyone would believe that is stupid. Kind of like your presumptions about Dr. Ball’s statement.
[Snip. Sockpuppetry. ~mod.]
Odd, that you are lecturing someone on their command of the English language. At dictionary.com, they have a little index rater widget and when you type in the word rarefy, it states “Few English speakers likely know this word”. Maybe because it originated during the Middle Age in Europe and never made it into the modern English vocabulary?
Kind of like how we don’t use any of the following words any more, or the word means something different in modern english:
kirtle-a long gown or dress
illuminator -artist who applied decoration including gold to a manuscript
quarrel -short square headed bolt or arrow used in a crossbow
vice-a spiral stairway
[The mods note that most people trying to quarrel about kirtles in a vice trip in the poor illuminator at the bottom of the stares. Unless their vise is very tight. .mod]
[Note: This commenter has been repeatedly banned for using fake screen names. Any future comments will be deleted. ~mod.]
“Steve Jones” has exactly the same style as these sockpuppet screen names:
David Socrates
Edward Richardson
Gordon Ford
Jacob Walters
beckleybud
John Kernan…
…and about a dozen or more additional fake names, most of whom have been banned here.
This is not “Steve Jones”. This is just a miserable and unhappy individual who is fixated on David Ball’s and my comments.
I’ve never once replied to any “Steve Jones” comments; I only reply when he sees a comment of mine and then posts his usual argumentative nonsense. He cannot refute the facts we post, so he deflects onto irrelevant side issues, like the definition of ‘dissipate’. And he was wrong there, as I showed using his own source.
But that has nothing to do with this article; it is only more of his incessant nitpicking, which he attacks with because he has no better argument. And it sends him ballistic when we point out facts and evidence. “Steve Jones” is just another climate alarmist who has been wrong from the get-go.
A moderator should really do some checking on this “Steve Jones” sock-puppet, because IMHO there’s no way it’s his real name. But I do get great amusement watching his impotent attempts to argue the alarmists’ narrative.
As the poster boy for the alarmist crowd’s failed conjecture, I urge “Steve Jones” to continue commenting. This site encourages all scientific points of view (which leaves out most of his comments), and that is why WUWT is so popular: people can read all sides of the scientific debates, and make up their own minds.
So “Steve Jones” is helping the skeptics’ arguments, whether he knows it or not. As the article here shows, alarmists keep coming over to the skeptics’ point of view in a steady stream — but I’ve never seen someone skeptical of the “dangerous AGW” scare become an alarmist.
Most of the undecideds eventually agree with those of us who are skeptical of the ‘dangerous man-made global warming’ scare. They have read all the arguments, and just like the subject of this very article they have decided that the global warming scare is a false alarm.
People like “Steve” are still desperately trying to keep the “climate change” dyke from collapsing; They are trying to stop the public from turning on the ridiculous “man-made climate change” narrative.
But they’re failing, as the headline article shows. And once their side loses the public, the alarmist crowd will never get them back again.
“Steve Jones” is helping the cause of skeptics, for the simple reason that he’s got nothin’. Nothing, except for his hate-filled comments overflowing with bile, sockpuppetry, scare tactics, deflection, and insults — while skeptics have verifiable facts.
No contest. ☺
Steve Jones October 16, 2015 at 1:30 pm says;
I’m sure he doesn’t need your help in discussing his misuse of English.
I wasn’t discussing this, but it seems you are unable to bring your mind to bear on anything else.
Pretty funny actually.
I believe Kent Brockman coined the apropot term “avoision”. Seems applicable.
[Snip. Sockpuppetry. ~mod.]
I am comfortable letting the readership judge for themselves. Have a nice day.
Aphan, thank you for your posts, however I must correct you. I am not a doctor.
Although growing up in Dr. Ball’s home required one to have at least a Masters level of knowledge on virtually every known subject or field of study, or remain silent during conversations.
He wasn’t a tyrant, though. Just wanted your best. Hands down the best father ever.
Nothing much is ever accomplished if one attempts to engage in an intelligent conversation with a “one-track-mind“.
Like the “repeating” of a broken phonograph record, it can not be “de-railed” from its 1st comment on the subject in question.
Mr.s Siegel: Caleb Rossiter lost his position as a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies about last year for becoming an apostate and speaking out against climate alarmism. There are three WUWT thread on the event. Here’s one–it has links to the other two, I think. (If not, use the search box for Rossiter):
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/06/20/caleb-rossiter-missing-in-action-johnny-come-lately-faux-victim-political-tunnel-vision-or-all-of-the-above/
rogerknights October 16, 2015 at 2:23 am,
It seems that us long term denizens of WUWT have seen this over and over.No wonder the majority will not speak up.
David, I apologize for unintentionally bestowing a Ph.D upon you! You are welcome to keep the title in an “honorary” fashion if you like. It’s all the rage these days to adopt imaginary honors for one’s self, such as Nobel Prize Winner, and Climate Expert etc, so feel free.
Cheers, Aphan. I have what is seen in today’s society as a character flaw; honesty. 🙂
The problem is, as it has always been, that the argument isn’t about fact. It’s about slogans. So if you repeat a slogan often enough, say the polar bears are endangered, everybody will treat it as fact. They will even take counter-evidence, eg a photo of a polar bear that’s just come out of the water (so it’s hair is laid flat) and claim that proves they are starving.
No amount of pointing out the real facts is ever going to change their minds. I don’t yet have a solution to offer, just the observation that more facts won’t convince people. You need to plug into their emotional circuits.
Fenton has been behind several scientific scams. He says it is easy to pay some poor broke scientist to step up and say nonsense, then support it with dodgy data. The trouble is that the politicians have been snowed because they lack scientific training.
A good place to start is the very basis of science in education, observation of a burning candle.
Another place is to return to logic in schools. A lot of the CAGW defies logic. It is PR nonsense coupled together with non sequiturs.
I followed the crowd until Climategate.
Also coupled with this was my feeling that if this was the worst crisis in human history, why were data not being released with a plea to the whole world to find something wrong with them? Instead we had FOI sagas, commercial interests being cited as reasons to keep this information from the world, and we even have defamation cases being issued and defended. Something is very wrong there.
The more I looked the more I found vested interests, politicisation of science, tribal “warfare”, “consensus as a stick to ruin careers and reputations, gatekeeping, pal review, politicians making a fortune, etc. etc.
Since Climategate I have read thousands of articles, papers, blog posts and I try and keep up. I am a confirmed skeptic. And I am grateful to all of the online resources that helped inform me, including this site.
You say “As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose” and then go on to present a multitude of facts. The sort of facts that WUWT and others have been trying to present for years. How is this different?
If you take the time to read his article at the original site, you may have noticed the really pretty picture he used for the “The Climate Consensus” – African herd animals. The picture that he should have used is a different type of herd animal – Sheep. Recently shorn.
Not intending to be critical of the author, but it would show the nature of the climate consensus animal so much better.
It’s a very familiar story, see
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/25/my-personal-path-to-catastrophic-agw-skepticism/
and the hundreds of comments on that thread.
“As I started to look at the data and read about climate science, I was surprised, then shocked. As I learned more, I changed my mind. I now think there probably is no climate crisis and that the focus on CO2 takes funding and attention from critical environmental problems.”
Yes yes yes. Been there, done that.
Sadly though, David’s call to “get the word out through social media, links, and the press, to the liberal audience I’m going after” is, I’m afraid, a bit naive. We’ve been trying to do this for years. David Siegel will continue to be ignored, as he already has been, by the left of the MSM. Of course the other side has also been trying to “get the word out”, with thousands of slick professional websites, propaganda organisations and most of the media on board, and they’ve failed too.
@ David Siegel – I would recommend you take a look at the link above, provided by Paul Matthews. I just spent a couple hours looking at the thread from that post. It’s amazing how many engineers chimed in about how their BS detectors went off when digging into the real facts of AGW. There are many interesting comments, and these were from over 2 years ago…just would recommend that you take a look. Good luck to you as a convert – you will likely lose some friends over it. (but you will gain many other friends, or let’s say like minded individuals). – JPP
I appreciate your essay, and the work you must have put into your independent look at the issue. As you say, the real problem in getting a clear message out is more one of influence and communication rather than facts. We humans have a tendency to form and hold onto our perspectives quickly, and it can be difficult to break through conflicting noise.
I’ll post links to your essay, wherever possible, and hopefully a few of those who see it will stop by and ask themselves a few questions, too. The interesting (and tragic) thing is that I saw much the same stubbornness in many of my colleagues on this issue. They were and are intelligent, and very scientific when it comes to their own disciplines (I am a retired physicist), but somehow, once the issue became politicized, the way they thought about the issue changed.
Horses led to water decide when they drink.
Humans are led by their leaders and told what to drink.
Till the facts have emotion attached they are not palatable
The fact that rare birds are killed every day by wind generators
Or that solar farms cremate birds on the wing.
That Co2 is actually good for the trees and cereal crops.
Say these things to believers of A.C.C. they usually reply.” I did not Know that”.
It has probably already been said here and in a better way, but I’ll say it again. It’s about power, pure and simple.
…I ask you to help get the word out through social media, links, and the press, to the liberal audience I’m going after. Links really help. If you can help reach Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Jon Stewart, George Clooney, and other influential liberals, I hope to help them understand that the science is not settled….
Do you think this hasn’t been tried? What do you think happens to the people who try to do this?
They get laughed at and ignored. They lose all their friends. They may lose their job, and certainly lose any hope of advancement.
If they are in the communications business, all access to communication links is barred. Just read about the problems Steve McIntyre had in pointing out an obviously wrong piece of science. You will have no ability to tell what you want to say, and if you create your own magazine/web site/whatever, it will be attacked 24/7 by disruptors, both paid and amateur.
If you still manage to survive, criminal activity might be directed at you, as it was by Peter Glieck against Heartland. And lying behind this will be cod academic papers purporting to prove that you are certifiably insane, and continuous lobbying from academic and pressure groups to have your views declared illegal, for you to be locked up and punished for holding them, and, in several cases, executed.
I think you are an innocent abroad in the climate change business. It is a very ugly battle of science against money and religion, and your approach would have as much hope of working as a pacifist walking out of the trenches into no-man’s-land the day before the Battle of the Somme, shouting “Can’t we just discuss this quietly like gentlemen?”
I was a convinced warmist until ~1998 even though my father at the time, an atmospheric physicist/meteorologist told me literally it was all c@@@, a tax grab he said. However it was only when I read Svensmark;s work (after my father deceased), on cosmic rays that I changed my mind as I recalled that that he thought the same but years ahead. He was involved with the WMO, NOAA and EU for setting up the cosmic ray counters in Chacaltaya, Bolivia in the 60’s. I do not think C02 has any effect on weather/climate, I mean literally 0 effect because it has been at 1000’s ppm during glaciations and at 0ppm there would be no life but climate/weather would probably be unchanged.
I think David Siegel should be a bit more skeptical regarding the Solar (Total Solar Irradiance, TSI) relationship with temperature. The graph he credits to Willie Soon does not correspond to other TSI datasets that I’ve seen. I don’t know the source of the discrepancy, but most people who have looked at the topic do not find such a clear correlation. David’s other graph, which gives BEST as a source, also comes from Soon (using BEST temps) (see http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/6/global-warming-fanatics-take-note/).
It’s been brought to my attention that there was a recent post on this very topic:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/08/a-short-summary-of-soon-connolly-and-connolly-2015-re-evaluating-the-role-of-solar-variability-on-northern-hemisphere-temperature-trends-since-the-19th-century/
Ruth, the underlying physics are undeniable. It would be quite an ignoramus that could deny that energy input would have an impact on energy levels, for which temperature is a crude proxy. It would be like saying that changing the knob on a gas stove doesn’t affect cooking time.
Having said that, once you have causation, the lack of correlation is not really a problem, given that it’s also well understood that there are significant and extremely complex physical and thermal dynamics involved and the input variations are relatively small.
It would be shocking from a system dynamics point of view if there were a clear correlation. Correlation does not indicate causation, and the lack thereof does not contraindicate causation.
Your reply to Ruth forthrightly assumes that radiation physics is the whole mechanism governing air temperature, VikingExplorer; as though convection and water phase-changes did not exist on Earth.
Once those mechanisms are included in one’s thinking about the problem, one sees that the evidence supports the high likelihood that the thermal effects from the radiation physics of CO2 may not show up in air temperature at all.
That makes the stove knob analogy hopelessly over-simplistic.
Pat Frank, you have completely misunderstood me. I would have thought that by now my reputation would precede me. The underlying physics are that solar input variation cannot help but have an effect on thermal dynamics.
Do you think that anyone who mentions “underlying physics” is an AGW proponent? It seems that people here have associated “science” with “pro-AGW”.
After 15 years of commentary, I would have thought that my position was clear:
I don’t believe that CO2 has ANY effect on steady state temperatures. NADA. ZILCH. NIL. Completely and totally ZERO. The effects of CO2 are transitory in nature. It merely changes the time constant by a negligible amount.
I’ve switched from a 13 mpg V10 Ford van to a Chevy Spark EV. I didn’t do it “save the environment”. I got tired of feeding the plants. By driving that behemoth around for 15 years, I’ve more than done my part for the plant kingdom. From now on, they are on their own. Find your own CO2 you silly green things.
You’re right, VE. It was about solar inputs, not CO2. My mistake, sorry.
When are these geniuses going to tell me the optimum average global temperature?
And if it varies from today, it means somewhere somebody has to get cooler and some get warmer. Now THAT will take a lot of meetings in Paris to figger out!!!
Excellent article. One query: I thought the hottest day of the year with the air conditioning turned off was the day of Hansen’s testimony to Congress, not the day Gore set up his committee.
My first thought was: “It won’t work” and my second: “We don’t know what will work, so let’s support every effort to get people off their backsides” (especially us liberals, or socialists, as we call ourselves in Europe). One day something will work. It might just be this.”
Good luck.
Things may not be at all that bad. The BBC has taken a neutral stance even criticizing me thinks the whole AGW dogma in this article
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-eu-34543588
Also its pretty amazing that the guardian even reported the story (also not pro agw, but neutral)
That cartoon …
Shouldn’t there be a lot of welcoming goldfish in the ‘cool’ climate skeptic bowl?
Not to mention at least a few fish floating belly up on the surface of the water in the ‘hot’ bowl. 🙂
Perhaps a few square and nerdy goldfish to welcome the jumper?
I knew that Global Warming was nonsense back in 2003, when a friend said: “do you know that there has been no global warming for four years.” (Now 18 years.) So I did a short investigation. I also knew that renewables were a load of tosh, so I wrote an article for WUWT outlining why, which was published in 2009.
But the clincher, if anyone ever needed a clincher to such an obviously idealistic fantasy as “governments can control the weather”, was the UK’s bedtime story advert. Yes, we all know that Grimm’s fairytales were – well – grim – but this New Labour grimmytale was in a league of its own.
And it does not take much political awareness to know that when a duplicitous regime like New Labour starts politicising and advertising science, there has to be something deeply wrong with that ‘science’. The moment that Kim Jong-un, Gaddafi, Saddam, Blair, al Gore or even Obama feel the need to make cast-iron pronouncements on science, the BS antennae should start twitching. And the twitching went off the scale with this advert — so Global Climate Warming Change Disruption could only ever be political propaganda.
ralfellis, aka sliver ralph, aka & etc.:
Your persistent publication of disinformation on a variety of subjects is annoying.
The AGW scare was deliberately created by Margaret Thatcher (i.e. an icon of the right) long, long before New Labour existed.
People wanting to know why and how Thatcher created the scare and why her political party (i.e. the Conservative Party) were willing to go along with it can read this.
Richard
The AGW scare was deliberately created by Margaret Thatcher (i.e. an icon of the right) long, long before New Labour existed.
__________________________________
So where do I say that Blair created AGW, eh? Nowhere. So your posts, as ever, are baseless rants based upon a curious and unfathomable hero-worship of the political wreckage of Communism.
However, the truth of the matter is that Tony Blair presided over a whole decade of AGW disinformation – the very years whan the majority of AGW promotion was devised and crafted. It was Blair’s nihilistic naughties that saw AGW transformed from an environmentalist curiosity into a global scam. And it was Blair’s amoral political spin meisters who tried to scare vulnerable children, so they would pressure their parents into feeling socially guilty and therefore accepting AGW as a fact and its increased taxes to asuage their social sins.
(Remember that it was Blair’s morally bankrupt government that said 9-11 was a fantastic day – to bury some bad political news in. Yes, that was the moral cesspit that New Labour had sunk into.)
The CO2 advert highlighted here was a disgraceful display of political disinformation, to manipulate the masses while witholding the true intention of the government. Thus Blair was advertising the fact that he cared nothing for the truth and nothing for the democractic process, as long as he could achieve his hidden political agenda. It was a disgraceful and shamefull display of political amorality, and anyone condoning his nefarious scheme deserves to be tainted with the same cloak of shame as Blair himself wears.
Ralph
ralfellis, aka sliver ralph, aka & etc.:
Why do you ask me
when I did not claim you did?
I correctly said
“ralfellis misled by being economical with the truth: in the UK – as in most other countries – the AGW issue is NOT an issue of ‘left vs right’, and ralfellis implied the AGW scare was a creation of New Labour. Indeed, he made no mention of the Conservative Party.”
and I explained that.
As is your usual practice, your comments only consist of baseless assertions; e,g. I don’t “hero-worship” “the political wreckage of Communism”.
I have always opposed communism in every possible way.
Please try to say something honest, truthful and not abusive. I know that is difficult for you, but I assure you that you will probably feel better if you manage to do it.
Richard
Richardscourtney
Thanks for the link. I’m ashamed to say I’d never come across your report before. Could you contact me at my blog?
Thatcher has been off the political stage for over 20 years. What’s happening now is what matters.
In the here and now, it is the left that has been pushing these schemes to use CO2 as an excuse to grow government.
MarkW:
You say
It is NOT only “the left that has been pushing these schemes”.
For example, Thatcher’s political party is NOW the UK government and is “pushing” the AGW scare.
The AGW scare is a bandwagon supported and opposed by people from all parts of the politicasl spectrum. I repeat,
Pretending the falsehood that the AGW scare is some kind of left-wing conspiracy is divisive of opposition to the scare.
Richard
“Pretending the falsehood that the AGW scare is some kind of left-wing conspiracy is divisive of opposition to the scare. ”
YES. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, YES.
EXACTLY.
CORRECT.
(Chances of getting that message into the brains of our fellow travelers: zero percent.)
Richard,
I think you’re correct that Thatcher’s political team came up with AGW or at least decided to capitalize on it as a way of making her science degree and the situation with coal mines into a political strength. This only proves that Thatcher was more of a politician than a dedicated scientist.
However, at least in this post, ralfellis didn’t dispute this fact. He merely said that the New Labor party was also capitalizing on a scientific fraud for political gain in a shameless manner. The ad makes this clear.
While remaining neutral on internal UK politics, I would speculate that the situation would be similar to what it is in the US, where there is no great abundance of honor or scientific integrity on either side of the political fence.
VikingExplorer:
I tend to agree with you when you say
But I disagree with the thrust of your post because it is not true that
ralfellis misled by being economical with the truth: in the UK – as in most other countries – the AGW issue is NOT an issue of ‘left vs right’, and ralfellis implied the AGW scare was a creation of New Labour. Indeed, he made no mention of the Conservative Party.
Pretending the falsehood that the AGW scare was a New Labour creation is divisive of opposition to the scare.
In reality, Margaret Thatcher created the AGW scare as a method to acquire personal political credibility: this was a successful tactic that was supported by her political Party (i.e. the right-wing Conservative Party).
The UK Government lost interest in global warming when Mr John Major replaced Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister. The flow of Government money began to stop for conduct of global warming research. UK scientists then began to speak out in denial of the global warming hypothesis. It seemed that the issue was dying a natural death. Then the ‘coal crisis’ arose in October 1992 when the public protested at the scale of pit closures. This gave the UK Government a new need to find an excuse for its policy of closing coal mines. Global warming fitted this need and so the Government committed £16,000,000 to an advertising campaign which scaremongered about global warming, and re-established the funding priorities for climate research.
Later, at the start of May 1997, the Conservative Party lost office to the New Labour Party and Mr Tony Blair became UK Prime Minister. The UK had initiated the global warming issue and a change of UK policy may have had a significant effect on the widespread imagined risk, but by then the global warming issue had become important in its own right. Many countries had a stated global warming policy, 122 of them had signed a declaration of intent to reduce CO2 emissions at the Rio Summit, and the Kyoto Summit was scheduled. The UK was one of the very few countries that had reduced its CO2 emissions since the Rio Summit because the UK had replaced coal-fired generating capacity by gas-fired generating capacity. This provided the UK with a position of authority in this international affair, and Mr Blair committed the new UK government to strict action to cut CO2 emissions.
Thus, by supporting the AGW scare, Tony Blair (and New Labour) put on the credibility that Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party had worked so hard to obtain by creating the AGW scare more than a decade earlier. The Conservative Party had worked to sustain the scare until New Labour gained office, and the Conservative Party still does work to sustain it as the UK’s existing government Party.
UKIP is the only significant UK political party that does not promote the AGW scare.
Richard
>> and ralfellis implied the AGW scare was a creation of New Labour. Indeed, he made no mention of the Conservative Party.
Richard, I take your point. It was misleading.
Like most people, I believed in global warming because they all said it was true. I didn’t bother to do any fact checking until Bush refused to submit the Kyoto protocol to the Senate for a vote.
I decided to learn about Kyoto and climate to see if Bush was a total jerk or what. Turns out Bush was a jerk. If he had submitted the protocol to the Senate, it would have gone down to defeat, since the Senate had voted 95-0 previously in a Sense of the Senate vote that they would not approve any treaty on CO2 which did not reduce CO2 emissions from China and India. Bush incredibly took all the heat for the USA not signing onto Kyoto. Naturally, the Democrats of the Senate were silent as Bush took all the hatred from the usual suspects eg, BBC Headline “FUROR IN EUROPE.”.
The more I read, the more I realized what a climate of oppression there was in this field. Imagine astrophysicists publicly belittling the importance of the sun in the Earth climate system, being nothing compared to the decisive impact of CO2, but asking for some research funds anyway. They crawled on their bellies. Public humiliation.
Climate historians changed history. “We will never know why the Viking colony on Greenland died out.”
They changed the data.
The corruption stank to high heaven.
The arrogance of my Democratic friends astounds me even to this day. “Even if it’s not true, we should cut back on fossil fuels (ie. give me my tax break on my new car), push renewables (build windmills someplace else ), and raise taxes on corporations (but don’t tax my pension). Oh, and keep paying me my state/Federal pension with COLA and health benefits.”
The most arrogant people I know are the most ignorant on this topic. They wear their ignorance proudly. It is a sign of ideological purity. They are true believers.
>>The most arrogant people are the most ignorant.
>>It is a sign of ideological purity.
>>They are true believers.
+10
I appreciate your efforts, Mr. Seigel. The more people that talk about studying the issue and discovering they were wrong, the better.
However, I believe your effort, by itself, will not be successful. I’m going to guess–based on the headline to this post, and your inclusion of autobiographical detail– that you are operating under a fundamental misconception. You believe that because you are “one of them,” liberal, vegan, etc., your words will have more sway. In private, and in public, the only thing that will change is your reputation. You will be the friend who “went off the rails,” (accompanied by an eyeroll). I can personally assure you of this.
It will take thousands more “conversion confessions” to change the public discourse toward truth. That, and a strict pledge by us skeptics to stop being self-righteous, moralistic, red-baiting sore winners all over those who have newly converted to skepticism.
Good luck to you!
(Note: veganism isn’t good or bad for the environment. Good and bad aren’t scientific terms. They are interpretations.)
Ask yourself WHY did you decide to read about climate science???
Was it a hot topic for your writing? Or could it have been something more?
Dear Anthony,
The HEADLINE is wrong.
Respectfully I suggest that it ought to say “climate SCARE proponent”.
No-one is a climate proponent.
Regards,
WL
Manmade Global Warming/Climate Change is a growing bubble which needs ever more pumped into it to stop it deflating away, until the point is reached where it will burst. There are enough examples of this phenomenon.
The real problem is the damage that is done in the meantime.
It should be remembered too, this is an entirely Western Government obsession really about Western hegemonic Planetary rule, until now unchallenged, but Russia is resurgent, then there is China and India too finding its feet.
I have always been a left-liberal-green environmentalist – and actually also a scientist and policy analyst with decades of experience in advisory work from UK local council level through national and EU institutions, all the way to the UN – mostly on pollution protection strategies, energy policy and renewable supplies and some biodiversity work – with two books out on the latter. I was Greenpeace International’s chief advocate at the UN for ten years, and then a special advisor to the International Maritime Organisation. We had many successes.
Between 2000-2003, having accepted and never bothered to check the atmospheric physics of CO2, I engaged with UK government agencies on ways of integrating renewable energy with other environmental objectives such as landscape protection, community and biodiversity. In that work I realised that ‘going green’ would create huge damage to the environment – all in the name of staving off rapid climate change. I decided to check the science and see how much time we had because decisions were being railroaded, with no impact assessment on their consequences.
I spent three years studying the science. Within the first month I was shocked at how ‘bad’ is was – many untested assumptions and models that contained no natural cycles. And crucially, data which did not support the conclusions of the IPCC regarding ‘most’ of the driving force being CO2. NASA data on the trends of short-wave radiation at the Earth’s surface clearly showed that from 1980-2000, there was a steady rise in SW radiation – and this was the dominant input in wattage to warm the surface – by about 3:1, and even then the CO2 component was not measurable, but estimated from models.
I wrote a long report in 2008 and visited some of my old Greenpeace colleagues. There was absolutely no feedback – no one wanted to engage in rational scientific discussion – with one exception – Professor Jackson Davis, (University of Santa Cruz)with whom I had worked on pollution issues. He knew my previous work and was willing to look at the data. At first, he simply said ‘Peter, you cannot possibly be right’…and then ‘These questions you have about surface flux must be answered before we can accept the models’. He endorsed by 2009 book ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ – and I also then discovered he was a drafting author of the Kyoto Protocol (that went on the book cover).
The silence was then broken. I was roundly attacked in all the left-liberal-green media, with critics refusing to read the book, instead focusing on my ‘mad’ beliefs derived from decades as a teacher of meditation and yoga (parallel to my governmental work, which was never mentioned!).
Jackson Davis began to study the science and by 2010, following a high level discussions on the science where we were received at top climate labs in the USA, he realised my analysis was correct. We have been engaged since then on analysis of climate cycles.
There are still no invitations to speak to environmental groups. All of the top groups – WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, even the bird protection organisations, woodland and wildlife trusts and development lobbyists such as Oxfam, are part of the Climate Coalition, and they brook no scepticism.
The problem – as this site well understands, is that ‘campaigners’ run the show – even newspapers that were once relatively objective, have become campaigners, and the BBC joins them. Vast amounts of foundation money and even EU grants are channeled through these campaigns.
And it is certainly the case that real environmental issues are comparatively neglected – as are, still, the environmental consequences of ‘renewable’ supplies – most particularly the from the import of biofuels.
Facts will not change things. Sadly. Even could they be given a decent discussion in the media. Even the ‘pause’ has been airbrushed out. Global cooling – which is likely over the next five years, might do it – but I would not bet on that not being manageable by spin doctors.
“The problem – as this site well understands, is that ‘campaigners’ run the show”
And David Siegel is a campaigner. He admits he’s a Liberal. Should he be successful with this campaign, he and his other Liberals will still be Liberals. Climate Catastrophe is a symptom of a bigger problem.
I have no interest in helping a Liberal; he is the problem.
Gamecock:
You write
No, the problem is bigots who refuse to consider any view other than their own. Such bigots exist among people of every political view, and your post (that I have here quoted) says you are one of them.
All people of good will – including me – have an interest in opposing bigots: you are the problem.
Richard
Richard, the result is that Liberalism persists. Don’t help them. They created the problem; let them fix it. By helping them fix it, Liberalism survives. We have a never ending cycle of Libtards making a royal mess, then conservatives help them fix it, then the Libs get back into power again, and make more royal messes.
I’m saying BREAK THE CYCLE!
Mr. Siegel has taken what he believes to be the truth to his cohorts, and they have rejected it. Instead of normal feedback – hey, there’s something wrong with those people that they don’t want the truth – he comes to us looking for help.
“Bigots” is trashy ad hominem.
“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue! ” – Barry Goldwater
Gamecock:
You made an untrue accusation that David Siegel “is the problem”.
I refuted that saying “the problem is bigots who refuse to consider any view other than their own” and pointed out that your accusation demonstrates such bigotry; it does.
My refutation is factual and NOT “ad hominem” of any kind.
Importantly, bigoted belief in AGW is “the problem” under discussion, and whatever it is that you mean by “liberalism” is NOT “the problem” under discussion in this thread.
Richard
richard, in your opinion anyone who holds the opinion that liberalism has created most of the messes we are trying to deal with is just a bigot and you refuse to debate with bigots.
Nice defensive mechanism you got there. Anyone who spouts the truth is to be ignored.
MarkW:
I correctly said said
If you think objecting to bigots is a “defensive mechanism” then remove the beam from your eye so you are not blinded to the truth.
Richard
Interesting and informative. Thanks.
Mr Taylor, congratulations. We need a few tens of thousands more, like you.
A person is known by the company he keeps. When you send a list of facts to your colleagues and they refuse to respond, you must be honest with yourself about their personal commitment to sound science. Ask yourself: what kind of person permits ideology to control how they relate to facts? Just the fact that you pressed them on this point has already affected your relationship with them. You had better be prepared to understand the difference between liberals and non-liberals, for anyone who loves the truth more than they love liberal ideology will be regarded as an enemy.
Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless (the social and spiritual consequences of socialism)
“The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.” Havel warns that socialist regimes create and enforce their own truth to maintain power. As time goes on, this truth diverges from factual truth and it increasingly forces those who support and depend upon the power of the regime to corrupt themselves to sustain the artificial truth.
In the end, people not only lie to each other, but they start to lie to themselves.
see:
http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML
Great analysis of the overall situation!
There are “paper trails” from one organization to the next. So many that it’s difficult to follow all the trails. However, there may not be all that many key players but there are plenty of foot-soldiers.
#1 Even I thought “What corporation is funding this ?”, cos the way the site looks very slick. However it is only 1 long page ..which he says is a one off essay.
#2 His survey has been filled in once.
#3 The hashtag has been used 2 times
Good luck the “Climate alarmist horses” have had the well of Good Skeptic info sitting right in front of them, but been refusing to drink… Alarmism is their cult/religion.
I always tempered my assumption that a whole field of science likely wasn’t wrong with a bit of skepticism, but I didn’t really look at it very much (because of course, I didn’t see it as the same looming crisis). But back in 2008, some friends pointed out there were some issues and I dug into the data. I was appalled. Since then I have watched as an already perverse adjustment of a dataset literally turned into an exponential curve.
It’s surreal knowing that these scientists are supposedly finding all this extra melt, extra expansion of the oceans, and yet there’s no increase in sea level rise. They ignore the fact that half of the “observed warming” since the spike in the 1940s is the result of adjustment. It was ridiculous watching a scientist get destroyed by a senator…after the scientist CLAIMED extreme weather a senator showed the actual data (which of course shows no unusual activity), forcing the scientist to back into pure faith with the assertion that the weather had become more extreme but not in a way that showed up statistically. It’s crazy how bad the supposed “science” actually is.
“It’s surreal knowing that these scientists are supposedly finding all this extra melt, extra expansion of the oceans, and yet there’s no increase in sea level rise. ”
Probably because the amount of melt we see per year we consume in a month. And as more desalination plants spring up, we might at some point slow or maybe even hault the rise…
I used to teach university students in their first year. In my lectures on climate change I started by asking the question: `who believes in anthropogenic global warming ?` (responses are in approximate %s). 80% said yes, 15% said `no`, and 5% said `do not know`. At the end of the lectures, which had set out the basic facts, the %s changed. 10% said `yes`, 80% said `no`, and 10% said `do not know`. This was carried out for several years and these were really intelligent kids. Imagine what the bulk of the population are susceptible to! At the recent UK general election, canvassers for different political parties called at my door. They all believed in global warming. Mr Seigel is right: it is only by ensuring that the real unmodified facts are made widely known that reality will prevail. Anything else will be spun by the political class for their own gains.
No car, but you’d fly thousands of miles to take pics of animals? Hey, look! You don’t have to abandon all your liberal totems to question CAGW? True, but unpersuasive. The rest they will recognize and reject.
Excellent post. Thank you. You listed very clearly the main points underlying my skepticism regarding the climate consensus.
And sadly you are correct. The climate loons are going to seek to outlaw cliamte skepticism and they are going to do it soon.
I have added David Siegel to my list of Converts.
Can you add me?
“Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural”
Does he have solid evidence of this and can he show valid references? I’m not sure ‘it has happened before” is a completely valid rationale. As for as I am aware there is no solid evidence either way.
Simply look at the UNADJUSTED history of Earths temps !!!!
Then as far as you are aware is not very far, Gareth.
Not very far at all.
There’s plenty of information available. I suggest you avail yourself of it.
“It has happened before” is a completely valid rationale for disbelieving CAGW. In fact, it is the core of the Null Hypothesis with regard to climate change (such as it is) and human influence thereon.
If it’s happened before, then before you can assert that CO2 is what done it, you have to prove that whatever caused it to happen before isn’t happening now. Commonly referred to as the null hypothesis.
Since we don’t know what caused it to happen before, we can’t prove that the cause of the previous warmings is not in operation now.
The warmists insist that most of the warming is caused by CO2, because their models, which were tuned to prove just that, have declared it.
David:
As you correctly indicate, ultimately AGW is a PR war. PR wars are usually won by who has the best, most publicized soundbites.
Sending out a 9,000 word essay doesn’t sound like a successful PR recipe: few sources will publish such a lengthy treatise, and even fewer people will read it.
I DO believe that this is about facts (i.e. the Science) — which is consistent with your belief that citizens are swayed by credibility. The problem is that although Science is almost universally held in high regard, almost no one actually understands what “Science” actually is. Self-serving agenda promoters are well aware of this dichotomy, and have gone to great lengths to exploit it. This problem needs to be addressed.
Feel free to contact me to discuss further at “aaprjohn at northnet dot org”.
John Droz, jr. physicist
CAGW belief is a mass delusion that outdoes previous popular delusions.
“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.”
Martin A:
You say
I beg to differ. Each generation thinks its situation is unprecedented.
CAGW belief is the existing mass delusion and it matches previous mass delusions.
Eugenics was the greatest mass delusion a century ago, and eugenics was then more widely accepted than CAGW is today.
Richard
Actually Richard, I see many aspects of Eugenics inherent in the actions and proposed solutions put forward by the Alarmed Ones.
The poor and especially the poor coloured persons of this planet are their targets or victims.
North American Progressives all claim they are the only hope of help for they selected client/victim group.
Where they have held regional power for decades, the people they claim to help, are never better off.
CAGW is Eugenics reborn and run by bureaucracy.
John Robertson:
I very strongly agree with you.
Richard
Fascinating how both of your examples were embraced enthusiastically by members of the political left.
MarkW:
You say
Yes, that is strange when they were both initiated by and were both most strongly promoted by the political right. The obvious explanation is probably the correct one; viz. both eugenics and the AGW-scare were bandwagons that people joined for a variety of reasons.
A coincidence of interests is very powerful.
Richard
CAGW is merely the nasty little sister of macro-evolution / abiogenesis. Macro-evolution / abiogenesis is the looniest science myth of all time. And, it is propagated and protected by a bigger, meaner, more illiberal mafia than CAGW.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
–
Worthwhile.
http://www.businessagilityworkshop.com/david/
Can’t at the moment, but I will read his essay soon. ( https://medium.com/@pullnews/what-i-learned-about-climate-change-the-science-is-not-settled-1e3ae4712ace )
He says skeptics are losing. Perhaps at the moment, but not for long. Most people don’t buy it. Soon the prominent and powerful will realize that nature doesn’t work that way, and they will stop talking about it too. They will drop it as soon as they cannot make money or wield influence with it. The more honest will drop it even sooner.
Sadly, global warming alarmism will still be pushed and still cause real problems decades from now after all of the science has moved on. It is a religious dogma now, and true-believers will remain.
If you haven’t found out already, Mr. Siegel, you’re about to find out just how tolerant and liberal your “liberal” friends and colleagues are.
Since 2009’s “Climategate” and up until just recently the other side was complaining that their message wasn’t getting out. That seems to have changed. It is as if some sort of high command has passed the word on down to get back on message AND to viciously go after the opposition.
The recent RICO episode and the French firing of a top weather man are two examples.
Seems to me some serious cognitive dissonance here. Siegel says:
“As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose.”
And then wants people to read his 9,000 word essay of facts to the contrary of what they believe.
Money trumps the common conversation, pro or con doesn’t matter, every time. As long as there is grant money, researchers will milk it. And universities are on board with milking money. We will have to wait on Mother Nature to decide this debate. And in the meanwhile, experience pernicious human folly foisted on us. How do I know? It has happened many times, up to the recent past. Scientists, through the addiction of grant money, have been mistaken about a lot of things, but those mistakes nonetheless, enter into mainstream decisions until the money dries up. Case closed.
The problem is that the legal systems put in place to fight the “problem” remain long after the politicians have lost interest in it.
CFCs are still banned.
You correctly state that climate change hyperbole is largely an emotional appeal and that citing facts is a losing proposition. Then you go on to cite facts (links).
I might also note that the same people who embrace “the settled science” claim are the same ones who’d support an Orwellian one world socialist regime. So explaining that the ‘carbon scheme’ is just part of a political power grab agenda won’t change their thinking either.
Finally, pointing out the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of Leftwing thinking has never caused them to question their beliefs. It is more akin to a religion based on faith rather than reason.
All that said, I have no idea (sort of annihilation) how remedy the threat these people pose.
Instead of calling the public ignorant try explaining the situation to them from their own dictionary. Not the Scientific, Legal, Medical or any of the other guild dictionaries. Speak the same language, you might find comprehension.
Mike Henderson:
Use of the vernacular is supportive of applications of the equivocation fallacy as terms in the vernacular are polysemic. The literature of global warming climatology is plagued by misleading applications of this fallacy. Thus, the vernacular should not be used without disambiguation.
Terry Oldberg, I don’t know why you think I’m a troll but your smart-assed answer hasn’t done you a bit of good. The warmunists are fighting for the support of the unwashed masses and doing a better job than you ever will.
Now I’ll get the hell out of here so you aren’t inconvenienced by my trolling.
Mike Henderson:
The record refutes your claim that I called you a troll. I note that responding to my comment you failed to address the issue that was raised by it. Was stating this false claim a diversionary tactic?
David Seigel,
In your post you wrote this: “… I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is).”
In all due respect (I’m serious) sir, I’d like to disagree with your statement that being a vegan is better for the environment. There is a fascinating TED presentation by Allan Savoy on ‘How To Fight Desertification And Reverse Climate Change.’ I believe it was linked to at this site by Anthony Watts in a post sometime in the past. In his presentation Allan Savoy demonstrates how the cultivation of grazing animals (cattle, sheep, and others) can actually turn desertified lands into abundant grasslands. For people in these regions animal protein is almost the only source of food they have. Such grazing animals mimic nature and can actually improve the environment. The presentation is an eye opening watch.
Tom, the name is Allan Savory, not Allan Savoy.
Send this post and an executive summary of your essay to every declared Presidential candidate, and as well to all candidates for Congressional seats.
Let’s see how many are willing to stand up to the Alarmists and call for and end to the ‘climate’ gravy train, to the wasted money on ‘renewable-energy’ subsidies, and to the EPA’s war on CO2 and coal (not to mention to the EPA itself).
Cutting the ‘climate’ crap out of the Federal budget will take the wind out of the Alarmists’ sails. It won’t stop them from proselytizing and complaining about the coming Apocalypse, but it will mean they’ll have to paddle mightily to stay afloat.
So far I think Senator Cruz is the only Presidential candidate to come down on the side of real science.
/Mr Lynn
Good for you. I could have written this exact article– because it perfectly mirrors my own process of discovery on the climate issue (and how I shifted from being a believer to a doubter.)
It’s a lonely place for me here in New York City, being a “skeptic.” It would be great for me to be part of the popular view, but I can’t put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak. I can’t throw facts out the window and go back to believing/supporting the CO2-warming hypothesis.
Your article is very accurate, and well-shaped. Personally, I always add a point on CO2’s limited heat-trapping function– that it rapidly and exponentially fades as a greenhouse gas. In our atmosphere, CO2 is basically saturated at this point for heat-trapping function. (And when I explain this to people, they do pause for a split second before falling back on all the usual arguments. But at least it gets through to them, for a moment.)
The Marxist’s main enemy is our prevailing society. Their goal is to bring this prevailing society down in a bloody revolution, and usher in communism as the form of government across the globe; no more nations.
The Marxists almost single-handedly built the social sciences. This includes the work done to understand persuasion, attitude formation, media, and so on.
Knowing the skeleton of how each and any of us come to hold ideas and how we change our minds about things, they have progressed to use these tools on us.
Hence, emphases on things like repetition, reputation, ostracism/embarrassment, and virtue: be on the virtuous side, not the side of those evil polluting self-centered capitalists.
They know how to get individuals into positions in academia, in education, and in organized religion. They know the mechanisms of getting institutions to take stands and make policy positions. All little-by-little, all gradual.
And, they have known how to do this without the long-term campaign being so obviously engineered.
They have been successful by using us, the fundamental bones, the fabric, of our society, and using that knowledge against us.
Go look at ANY social science, and go see who the “pioneers” are. Then, look until you find the connection to Marxism generally, if not the Frankfurt School directly.
weber, comte, durkheim, dewey, fromm, etc.
That is how the scam has worked, and why it has been played.
Sadly for progressives almost all of their pet projects (from the Great Society to Socialism to Quantative Easing to ObamaCare to et. al.) fail when you make the switch from “feel good” to critical thinking.
Well said OK S. I particularly like the phraseology “switch from feel good to critical thinking.” Mind if I borrow your summation?
Mr Siegel, you say the messenger is more important than the message. In that case your part on who to trust and who not to trust should appear close to the top. I’m confused as to how you got started on this journey and you got to a point of trusting sources that are deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, at least in the view of the audience you are trying to reach.
On top of that, there are many errors in the document. Does Judy Curry describe herself as a skeptic? RealClimate does allow reader comments. I think William Connolley’s suspension ended a long time ago.
Seriously? The first source cited in point 1. is the NOAA website:
“It is premature to conclude that human activities–and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming–have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.”
What BIg Oil money are they getting? Is the NOAA not a trusted source?
And as most people here already know, RealClimate only allows comments that agree with their position. I know I’ve tried. The only time I had a post escape moderation there, was after ClimateGate, when Gavin was in PR mode trying save face. Skeptical Science is even worse. In their own words they admitted the censor and delete posts.
The person who did the edit on Wikipedia has last name Mann…
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/Climate%20evolution_zpsz6vstmdx.png
What we know about climate. What we know about where we are.
Feel free to use it to promote skepticism. Simple messages. Simple images.
Thank you, Mr Siegel, for publishing the story of your path to understanding climate change. I hope that it goes a long way in bringing others to a better understanding of the issue. Well done!
I applaud your honesty and willingness to change when the facts go against your belief. It is a very hard thing to do.
PS. To any vegan/veggie, make sure you get B12 and EPA/DHA. They are essential for health and are missing from vegan (and most veggie) diets.
I have said it before on this blog and I will say it again. This is simple Sales 101. People buy on emotion and what’s in it for them. Very few buy on facts. As long as the skeptic side relies on facts, even thought they are correct, they will lose the war. Remember the old saying,” You don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle”.
So, how do we touch the emotions of the low information population? That, my friends, is the correct question. Answers?
Renewbles double electricity costs. See California.
Renewables without adequate fossil fired backup cause blackouts. See, soon, UK.
Renewables are not commerically viable without massive wasteful subsidies. See US, UK.
India and China won’t play along. See COP21.
Ristvan,
You will need to rephrase the first two to get through to the low information people.
1) Electricity from coal will cost you half as much as wind and solar power. You will pay only $xxxx (whatever the going rate is) instead of $yyyyy.
2) You will have to put up with times without power, called blackouts, if there is no electricity produced by coal available. You might miss your favorite reality show.
The other two address facts:
3) Not sure if these people care because they do not perceive subsidies as money out of their own pocket. It’s OK if it is other people’s money.
4) These people don’t care what India and China do, climate is only secondary speak when sitting around a bunch of people trying to sound intelligent. Again they don’t really care unless they see it as something that will take money out of their pocket now.
Ristvan and all to save 0.01 degree Celsius.
U.S. House Science Committee – July 9, 2015
CHAIRMAN LAMAR SMITH: “On the Clean Power Plan, former Obama Administration Assistant Secretary Charles McConnell said at best it will reduce global temperature by only one one-hundredth of a degree Celsius. At the same time it’s going to increase the cost of electricity. That’s going to hurt the lowest income Americans the most. How do you justify such an expensive, burdensome, onerous rule that’s really not going to do much good and isn’t this all pain and no gain.
ADMINISTRATOR GINA MCCARTHY: “No sir, I don’t agree with you. If you look at the RIA we did, the Regulatory Impact Analysis you would see it’s enormously beneficial.
CHAIRMAN SMITH: “Do you consider one one-hundredth of a degree to be enormously beneficial?”
ADMINISTRATOR MCCARTHY: “The value of this rule is not measured in that way. It is measured in showing strong domestic action which can actually trigger global action to address what’s a necessary action to protect…”
CHAIRMAN SMITH: “Do you disagree with my one one-hundredth of a degree figure? Do you disagree with the one one-hundredth of a degree?”
ADMINISTRATOR MCCARTHY: “I’m not disagreeing that this action in and of itself will not make all the difference we need to address climate action, but what I’m saying is that if we don’t take action domestically we will never get started and we’ll never…”
Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/07/15/epa-chief-admits-obama-regs-have-no-measurable-climate-impact-one-one-hundredth-of-a-degree-epa-chief-mccarthy-defends-regs-as-enormously-beneficial-symbolic-impact/#ixzz3jxPsOENF
How about asking them “Which do you prefer; truth or lies”?
They can’t handle the truth.
Just what do you think we have been doing while you were happily going along with the status quo?? Every skeptic here has a similar story to tell, but has been slugging it out for years.
My question is: WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG TO JOIN THE PARTY and how much damage did you do before you opened your eyes? The information and data have been around for years. You have a lot of enemy flac to endure before your commitment is convincing.
Welcome to the front line. GK
Follow the money. It determines the direction. Change the money’s direction and you change society’s direction.
Wouldn’t it be nice if congress passed a law stating that BOTH sides of a scientific argument MUST recieve EQUAL funding !!!!
receive …oops !!
Since this is a political argument, the politicians will never vote for equality, unless they are on the low side of the equation.
In many arguments, there are more than two sides.
Václav Havel words and warning are thus shown to be true yet again. Havel was a playwright, essayist and a poet. He was also the last President of Czechoslovakia before it was broken up into the Czeck Republic and Slovaka.
Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless (the social and spiritual consequences of socialism)
“The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.” Havel warns that socialist regimes create and enforce their own truth to maintain power. As time goes on, this truth diverges from factual truth and it increasingly forces those who support and depend upon the power of the regime to corrupt themselves to sustain the artificial truth.
In the end, people not only lie to each other, but they start to lie to themselves.
see:
http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML
Kudos and congratulations. My path is similar – I saw Al Gore’s movie and got “terrified.” as a result I started digging into the research and skeptic sites (like WUWT) but the more I dug, the more I saw that there was so much research and information contesting the CO2/Global Warming meme that I had to revisit my thinking and ultimately changed my mind about the death, doom, and destruction that was and has been promised to occur as a result of manmade greenhouse gases by proponents and acolytes.
As has been mentioned above, you may become a pariah among your (former) friends who are staunch believers of the Catastrophic Global Warming/Climate Change dogma. I lost two friends who despite being highly educated and intelligent individuals, took it personally and were offended by my challenging their belief system. Perhaps I was mistaken in my appraisal of them.
“So I did my homework and wrote a 9,000-word essay aimed at liberals who have a voice, who have access to media, and who might take 30 minutes to educate themselves.
I submitted my piece to every liberal publication, from the LA Times to the Atlantic Monthly to National Geographic to Huffington Post and many more. They all turned it down. Now I’m launching it myself and hope you will read it and help spread the word.”
It will have more effect as your manifesto of resignation from polite society and especially your ex-peers. You are now their enemy. You are a “dissident'” and will be treated as such. You can love truth or love your friends, but if your friends hate the truth they will hate you.
Where is research that shows the optimum climate for our biosphere? The first question must be: where is our current climate and trend in relation to this finding.
Strangely, nobody seems interested in this vital comparison. Not so strangely, the solutions that are frequently demanded in the most urgent voice, all converge on a socialist worldview: statism, bigger government, higher taxes, less personal liberty, even fewer people. That bigger picture tells me all that I need to know about “climate science”.
I would guess that the “optimum” climate would be the one that has dominated this planet’s history. And that would be one that is substantially warmer than the one we have today.
I believe it’s a fair statement to say that for the majority of its 4.5 billion years of existence, the Earth has been a COLD planet, even frozen solid at times.
You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that humanity can exist under conditions much warmer than the present. But another ice age will cause most plant life to disappear and agricultural practice to fail… Will we still possess the ingenuity to survive? Or will resourcefulness have been selected out of our gene pool, leaving our species to starve like deer in an endless winter?
It would be interesting to see a statistic that shows and compares the number of people that have moved from alarmists to skeptics relative to the number of people who have moved from skeptics to alarmists.
@ David Siegel
A noble action, ….. but IMHO, …. of little to no practical value.
The primary problem is, …. the US Public School Systems have been dedicated, ….. for the past 30+- years, …. to the Teaching and Testing of the claimed “dire effects” of CO2 causing Anthropogenic Global Warming climate change …. and thus they are per se “graduating” more adamant believing “CO2 warminists” each and every year than you or anyone else can possibly re-educate in/on factual Science.
State School Boards, the Department of Education and/or County School Boards might be a better “target” for sending your “submitted commentary” to ….. because they have “the power” to change the Science curriculum in the Public Schools.
I grew up in the 90s watching TV shows like Captain Planet and other mainstream media that demonized CO2. So naturally I believed all of the hype. But as I grew older and wiser, I began to queation it all.
I’ve watched and read many documentaries on all of the environmental destruction humans are doing across the globe yet it’s all being ignored by the powers that be.
From GMOs that force produce to release pesticides all year round (instead of just during spring is killing off huge amounts of insect popuplations that are critcal to pollination) to the toxic rivers of China and all the way down to the deforestation of the Amazon.
The real issue is with the environment and not the climate. We need to pass policies in protecting the natural order of life from ourselves and not corporate interests.
Dog, do read up on GMO crops. They do not release persicides. They contain naturally occuring persticides that kill the insect larvae that try to eat them. The have zero effect on pollinators. Whether the neonicotide class of. Hemically applied pesticides is a major impactor on pollinators is a matter of swrious scientific debate. Under some circumstances, clearly yes. As for seed coatings, probably not.
Colony Collapse Disorder is complicated, but nothing to do with GMO.
From a farmer and environmentalist who studied these issues before deciding what to plant where and when. The several wild honey bee colonies in the hollow trees of my woodlots exist very nicely alongside the Bt corn, soy, and alfalfa. But they also have plenty of water sources (a running sping with the trickle out’ , two dammed ponds) and plenty of food sources (wild apples and crabapples in the spring, plenty of wildflowers in the pastures, wild backberries in forest openings (we selective log about 120 acres in four woodlots), and alfalfa blossoms in summer). Not the constantly transported commercial hives speading varoa mite and viral disease.
I meant naturally occurring pesticides which I always thought were released just during the spring to give budding plants a chance to grow.
I guess I have a bit reading to do….
Thanks for the heads up!
Thank you ristvan, for stating the truth about GMO crops. See my comment about the Triple Crown above.
Dog, as a corn & soybean grower, I see the use GMO seed and Glyphosate to eliminate competitive “weeds” as a reduction in the normal habitat of the desirable component of insect population (mantis, butterfly, bee etc and on up the food chain).
i have been engaging in conversation with locals about the establishment of wildflower habitats on ground which is set-aside or residential and the possibility of getting assistance from the advocate organizations. Nothing too serious has been done yet, but by spring I hope to know if we have to fund it ourselves or not.
Thank you for more evidence for my informal study of how few people win the “Triple Crown.” Meaning: how many people get all three answers correct when asked the following questions:
1) Is CAGW a legitimate hypothesis? (No.)
2) Do you accept that evolution is a fact? (Yes.)
3) Are anti-GMO activists wrong? (Yes.)
Now that you have educated yourself regarding CO2, might I suggest that you educate yourself regarding GMOs. The fears that haunt your dreams have been disproven.
I have written several songs decrying the ridiculousness of a fight on climate change and have very little luck getting anybody in the St. Louis area musician crowd to help record them. I got kicked out of a band last year after announcing my skepticism around a group of k-12 music teachers who played in this band also.
Mr. Siegel, welcome to the search for the real mechanisms of climate and the cycles thereof.
I will share my latest lyrical efforts for your entertainment.
The tune is in a A minor and reminds one of John Prine or Steve Earle.
Thank you for the essay. Unfortunately, you are not likely to reach much of the audience here that you at first targeted.
“What was clear is that skeptics are losing this battle, and I want to tell you why.”
You explained in following paragraph the “why” for your belief that skeptics are losing the battle. I would like you to expand on the use of the word “clear”. In other words, what is your evidence that skeptics are losing the battle (for public opinion)?
I would contented that the skeptics are winning, if ever so slowly. The rhetoric of the warmist side has reached a very high pitch; “climate deniers worse than holocaust deniers”; “climate change is the most serious threat to national security”, “climate change threatens human existence”, “coal trains are death trains”, etc. But, over the last 10 years, ‘climate change’ has moved to dead last in people concerns in the US, and even worldwide as evidenced by a UN survey.
I am not over optimistic. The battle will go on for tens of years, but it is a war of attrition. A skeptic win is inevitable. The only question is what damage the warmist can do to the world economy before that happens. The Paris conference will give some answers.
Texas Dave, here is your UN survey data.
On a posting about Portugal climate change, a note was made.
The people have had enough of dramatized reports predicting an imminent climate apocalypse just around the corner. According to a Eurobarometer poll conducted in July 2013, a mere 4% of the European population now cites the alleged climate catastrophe as their most pressing concern. Moreover, the number is zero percent in seven European countries, including Portugal.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/05/surprising-facts-about-climate-change-in-portugal-why-the-climate-catastrophe-is-not-happening/
A quick research led to me to comment.
The most optimistic statement made – From the 2011 polling – Half (50%) of all Europeans think that climate change is one of the world’s most serious problems and around one in six Europeans (16%) think it is the single most serious problem.
http://ec.europa.eu/clima/citizens/support/docs/report_2014_en.pdf
Progress is being made. Drop from 16% to 4% in just 2 years.
And from the June 2011 Special report – pg 14- QB3 From the following list, please pick the five main environmental issues that you are Worried about. (ROTATE – MAX. 5 ANSWERS)
It is interesting to note the huge decrease of 23 percentage points of climate change since 2007, from 57% to 34%. And that’s top 5 worries.
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/pdf/EB_summary_EB752.pdf
http://i1039.photobucket.com/albums/a475/Knownuthing/Enjoy%20interglacial_zpsu4jr488m.png
Who’s scared of global warming?
Unfortunately his point 4 is very likely not true.
He should contact Willis on point 4 – (the 11 year sunspot cycle, among other things).
The issue is interesting. I think there is probably no one on this site that is not an “environmentalist” in the sense that we wish our planet to be clean and unspoiled by human activity. That does not translate into unchanged! When I was young it was a perfectly acceptable aspiration to “make the deserts bloom” and I personally think the same is true today. Golden Gate Park in San Francisco is a botanical garden, and a lovely one, not a wilderness. Yellowstone and Yosemite are parks replete with campgrounds for the pleasure and serenity they afford human beings not laboratories to study the law of the claw and fang in the presence of wolves and grizzly bears that humans have to quit meddling with. Stewardship of our planet does not mean returning to some mythical time of “naturalness”.
There is no more ecologically destabilizing practices by mankind than those driven by poverty and economic want. Take a look at “the other side of the tracks” in any inner city or charcoal based third world country. Economic progress requiring increased levels of skill and education with concomitant elevation of the standard of living should be the goal of any “environmentalist” and all this nonsense about “traditional practices” is just that, nonsense. Modern people get it. Keeping our world fit to live in is understood to be a legitimate cost for production of our way of life that must be accounted for. The only way that happens is through technological innovation and progress. Fairy tales about wind and solar somehow filling that bill is to commit resources to a technology still born with respect to the job at hand. It’s like trying to build the Hoover dam with table spoons.
“I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is).”
“I’ll gladly fly halfway around the world to take photos of them in their natural habitats.”
I’m confused. Only one author is listed, but there seem to be two: One who tries to protect the environment and one who doesn’t.
Mr. Siegel wonders whether his ten points are “heresy” or “critical thinking.” I don’t think it’s really much of either, but mostly oversimplification. It’s also hard to miss the note of sour grapes, mixed with conspiracy theory implications, that comes when Siegel mentions having had his work rejected by other publications. Perhaps the work was rejected for being similarly reductive?
It’s absolutely true, I want to add in passing, that global warming receives disproportionate attention to other environmental issues–species and habitat loss, nitrogen runoff, overfishing, marine pollution, to name some of the big ones. And it’s absolutely true that alarmists exist, and that ad hominem and hasty generalization and post-hoc fallacies fly thick from every side on this issue. But “disproportionate attention” doesn’t mean there aren’t serious concerns that need to be taken seriously.
1. Both true and false. Weather is climate: true. But plenty of studies DO show links between the greenhouse effect and weather change. Both are functions of the troposphere, both involve thermal gradients, solar radiation, and large-scale complex patterns.
2. Mostly true. There are of course natural variations in the planet’s greenhouse effect. Solar energy varies, natural factors in terrestrial and marine biogeochemical exchange vary, and the atmosphere itself moves and varies in complex ways.
3. Mostly false. There is always uncertainty in science. Models are always flawed. But the chemistry of climate change is pretty basic–some chemicals at varying levels of the atmosphere tend to absorb solar radiation at certain spectra while other chemicals tend to scatter, refract, or reflect radiation. CO2 added to salt water creates carbonic acid. Carbon in the soil or in biota or underground can be either stored or in flux, and when it’s in flux it has to go somewhere. The math, science, and logic are all pretty straightforward here. Models of the effects of these changes are absolutely flawed by definition–because they’re models. But they’re generally–not always–handled with margins of error.
4. Mostly false. Solar fluctuations do correlate, but less closely than do anthropogenic contributions.
5. Mostly true. CO2 certainly has lower global warming potential than does CH4, or CFCs or SF6. Water vapor contributes more to the greenhouse effect. And it will indeed take a lot of decarbonization to change the climate.
6. Absolutely true. Carbon is an element. It is not moral. The moral dimensions of climate change do not come from good or evil in the environment. Moral obligations are owed to other people . To the extent that global warming is an ethical concern, it is so because the effects seem likely to fall disproportionately on the poor.
7. Mostly true, but misses the point. There are obvious links between warming and melting of land ice and sea-level rise: it doesn’t take research to show that. There are also clear links between rising CO2 and warming–though many people reading this site may not admit this.It takes only the transitive property to connect the dots the rest of the way.
8. Mostly true, I think. Natural variations exist. Even human contributions can be considered “natural,” so we should be careful about that word. I don’t know anything about polar bears. I haven’t spent time researching them. They’re not on my radar. Maybe that’s a moral failing; I don’t know.
9. False, false, and true. Three separate claims here. Damage to reef systems is clear. Additional CO2 emitted will slowly, subtly acidify the ocean. The real issue isn’t THAT CO2 is being emitted: it’s that the pace and amount exceeds the ocean’s capacity to absorb, exceeds the rate at which CO2 can be redeposited on the ocean floor, Fish, however, are indeed primarily threatened by overfishing. That’s a different argument.
10. Mostly true. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, I suppose), all “scientific inquiry” is conducted by humans in specific cultural contexts. Since the time of Francis Bacon, there never has been science completely uninflected by politics and culture and/or public relations. Our knowledge is nearly always purposive. It’s best to acknowledge that.
As someone persuaded by atmospheric science and motivated by ethical concern for others, I appreciate when everyone fights fair. So it’s good when ad hominem attacks and careless generalities and distorted data are outed. Neither side of an issue should get to cherry-pick data or accuse others of being conspiratorial in their motives or of being illiterate. And so I appreciate those moments when Siegel gets facts right. I just wish there were more of them.
Let me guess; you didn’t bother to even read the essay backing up those ten points. You merely did what many Warmist trolls do; nitpick, and throw out the Warmist version of “facts”, which have been debunked countless times.
Bruce. I don’t think anything I said is either warranted or at all reasonably countered by your name-calling and guess-work and sweeping generalizations. If you want to be taken seriously, think and be civil.
Just because you think what you said is reasonable, doesn’t make it reasonable when read by people who actually know what they are talking about.
If your going to make comment Mark read all of his stuff and the references and then give a counter with some actual fact rather than your own opinion and a huge dose of conjecture. Personal opinion carries virtually no weight at all. You make statement after statement that are completely unsupported – it is just arrogant twaddle
Sorry if I came off as arrogant. It’s not “twaddle,” though, nor is it personal opinion. I have a day job, and frankly don’t see the need, on a site like this, to sort through and cite widely available documentation on basic science as if this were a peer-reviewed scholarly publication. There’s no “conjecture,” either. I don’t think I made any hunches. I just am not persuaded that Siegel is thinking clearly.
Fine but that not how you come across. I agree though that he needs a much stronger argument
/case than this, it was very quickly blown out of the water by people who wished him good luck – and not sarcastically either
Translation: I believe that my opinion trumps his facts.
Mark:
Each of your points is untrue. If you actually think they are true then please say why you think that and provide your evidence. Until you do provide some evidence your points are merely unsubstantiated assertions of an anonymous internet popup.
For example, your first assertion says
“Plenty of studiesDO show links between the greenhouse effect and weather change”? Really?
If so, then what are these “studies”, what do they say, and where?
Please note that – as you say – weather is a function of thermal gradients: indeed, weather is driven by thermal gradients. But, AGW predicts little temperature rise at the equator with largest temperature rises at the poles (ref. IPCC AR1) and this would REDUCE temperature gradients so would be expected to REDUCE severe weather.
And several papers Report reduced severe weather; see this.
So, does your postulated “weather change” mean less severe weather events? If so, then why did you not say that?
I could provide similar refutation of all your other assertions. But there is no need because they are all ambiguous and you have not substantiated any of them.
Richard
The assertions I have made–you’re right that they are assertions, made in response to assertions Siegel made over evidence he seems to me to be overmatched by (which it’s easy to be)–are all relatively straightforward, and evidence for them is extensive. Here are some overviews in response to your challenge of my first point.
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes
http://s3.amazonaws.com/nca2014/low/NCA3_Full_Report_02_Our_Changing_Climate_LowRes.pdf?download=1
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalWarming/page7.php
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~atw/yr/2010/collins_etal_2010_natgeo.pdf
Temperature gradients at the equator would not simply be “reduced,” by the way. There are oceanic and atmospheric thermal gradients; there are currents of water and wind. It’s more complex than you let on.
I didn’t assume that everyone needed access to science that is readily available. That was clearly not a safe assumption.
Mark:
Thankyou for your reply although it is – to be polite – lame.
It is not reasonable to make unsubstantiated assertions and when asked to substantiate them to reply to the request as you have by saying
Your arrogant assumption is that people would only have “readily available” the knowledge of and access to whatever not-referenced information you are considering.
Furthermore, your “overviews” are just that; overviews. You claim that justifications for your assertions are somewhere within those overviews. What on Earth makes you think anybody would believe your claim or would search through those documents in hope of finding what you claim?
If you really want to justify your assertions then cite, quote and if possible link to your evidence. A claim that your evidence is somewhere within an overview is merely an additional unsubstantiated assertion.
Importantly, why should I think your links contain what you think they do when you misrepresent my words?
I wrote
and you say to that
I see no reason to think a person understands what he reads when claims
“little temperature rise at the equator”
means
“Temperature gradients at the equator would not simply be “reduced”.
When you demonstrate such inability to understand what I wrote then I see no reason for anybody to believe your unsubstantiated assertion that a set of “overviews” contain information which supports your assertions. And they don’t: model projections are evidence of the opinions of the modelers and of nothing else.
Richard
Okay. I should acknowledge that it WAS indeed arrogant to post comments on a website like this, using terms like “true” and “false.” That I didn’t present evidence to support my assertions is a totally reasonable point, and compounded the part of this that is my fault. I was multitasking while my students were working. I should have paid better attention. That’s not an excuse; it’s an etiology.
I wrote in frustration at what seemed and still seems to me to be inaccuracies and sweeping generalizations about “the liberals,” “the warmists,” “the mainstream media,” on the part of both the author and the commentators. I tried to represent, in broad, broad strokes, what I believe is an entirely reasonable and altogether commonsense position. That position, to be perfectly clear, is that (a) global warming is indeed occurring right now, (2) it is mostly the result of human combustion of fossil fuels as well as other industrial and agricultural practices, (3) it represents a tragedy of the commons, since the atmosphere and the oceans are no one’s private property, and any costs–or benefits–that may occur to them will be shared by others; (4) although no models can entirely accurately project what the costs and benefits will be, most models predict effects that are severe enough they ought to be taken seriously; and (5) this does not mean that the worst scenarios are any more likely than the best possible outcomes; it just means that proper preparation–technological, ecological, economic, and social–is desirable.
I stand by all of the assertions I made, Richard, despite your claim that ALL of them are untrue. I think you are being penny-wise and pound-foolish in how you view this issue. It is simple addition– no?– to see that carbon stored underground in fossil fuels goes, upon combustion, into the air. Though that amount is small measured against respiration and decomposition, it is continually, annually positive. Until it is redeposited in the ground, it will remain in the air and in the oceans and in as many primary producers as can take it up. Carbon that was stored is in flux. Surely these facts of the carbon cycle do not need citation. That carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexafluoride, and other compounds absorb solar radiation in the troposphere is likewise factual. That carbon dioxide dissolved in salt water creates a weak acid is simple chemistry. These basics alone make global warming and ocean acidification a logically likely outcome of fossil fuel consumption.
Obviously there are complicated chemical, biological, and thermal properties in this world that can regionally vary the impacts of warming and acidification. But they don’t change the logic or the math. This is not ignorance or opinion on my part; so please don’t condescend. If I am wrong about these basics, please prove that to me.
More importantly, speaking of proof, I now understand that in cursorily replying to your request for evidence for my first assertion, I was walking–clumsily, I admit– into a kind of trap. There’s something pharisaical about your style of argumentation. You want me to prove that global warming has caused any instance of weather change. But the fact that no swallow makes a summer, and your relatively fundamentalist view of what constitutes proof means that I can’t simply say that longer, hotter summers in most of the US are part of a preponderance of evidence. You won’t accept models on principle. So it is definitionally just about impossible to “prove” to you that the climate is changing. You apparently want to quibble back and forth about thermal gradients at the equator, as if that is what constitutes genuine understanding of the big picture of human reliance on nonrenewable resources and the need to transition to renewable resources sooner rather than later.
I do appreciate that a number of responders here seem genuinely interested in dialogue. I am not trying to set myself up as any kind of perfect exemplar of thinking, and God knows not as an exemplar of practice. (I feed my kids, just about nightly, those disposable pouches of pureed fruits and vegetables, because it’s just about the only way to get them to eat their veg. I also used to drive them around the block or leave my engine running to get them to fall asleep.) I do not mean to condescend to you or to anyone here. I think there is reasonable middle ground between thinking that global warming is a leftist plot to start the new world order and thinking that skepticism is denialism, funded by the petrol lobby, that ought to be punished with a prison sentence. We may disagree about where that middle ground is. That’s fair.
I understand your letter, which appears to be reasonable in some respects. However, it reveals a fundamental lack of numerical knowledge about what has happened in the past, and right up to the present. I simply ask whether you /personally/ have ever downloaded any climate time series and carried out any numerically based analysis, or even made your own graphics – very easy these days.
I have studied climate data since 1992, when I first became aware that these time series often contain some well disguised but important and perhaps vital information.
I presume that you are fully acquainted with the several “indexes” or indices that many climate professionals seem to regard as being indicative of “something”, but often this is vaguely described or hinted at. I routinely analyse many such series, and other more direct climate data such as global, regional and site data for temperatures, sea levels, ice extent etc etc. I’ve made literally thousands of analyses and plots. I hope that you may have done so too, but infer that you have not simply because of the several statements in your posting. I would really like to see some of your analyses.
Robin
Mark: You are so close to having your lightbulb moment. In case you are at least partially held back by the same thing that held me back; the thing that galls me every time the subject of CAGW comes up and I have to decide whether to speak up or not, here are my two cents worth of advice:
Yes. There are some ludicrously misinformed, angry, unpleasant and dogmatic people on the correct (skeptic) side of this issue. And it really, really does suck to have to keep that kind of company. They make discourse more difficult; they are incapable of seeing their similarity to equally awful people on the other side; they have hair-trigger tempers and rarely think twice before going nuclear… on their own allies. And–more damaging than anything else–they make the issue political, often while criticizing those who believe in CAGW for the very same thing.
But the fact that I give a second’s thought to the TYPE of person on “my” side is flawed behavior on my part. The fact is: scientific principle DEMANDS that you ignore the messenger and stick only to the message.
Please google, or youtube, interviews and speeches by any of the following people if you want to hear intelligent, calm, clearly-reasoned evidence that will convince you that the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming due to CO2 emissions is completely wrong. Prof. Bob Carter, Patrick Moore, John Christy, Freeman Dyson and others.
If you aren’t interested in being persuaded away from the belief that human CO2 emissions are “bad,” then you can still hear how “fighting climate change” will do much more harm than good. The documentary “Cool It” is excellent.
Mark:
Verbosity is NOT an alternative to evidence. Your many words still provide no evidence that your assertions have any validity (they don’t).
And there is nothing “pharisaical” in my explaining to you that when you make assertion then you need to provide evidence for the assertion if you hope anybody will accept that your assertion has any validity.
You claim to have students and I pity them if their tutor needs to have these points explained to him.
Richard
Richard, this is a comment section on a .com site. It is not peer-reviewed science. This forum shares more features, it seems to me, with comment sections on sites where Christian fundamentalists gather to worry about how gay marriage is taking over the world and how evolution is “just a theory.” What passes for evidence on some of these fundamentalist websites and their comments sections consists primarily of cherry-picked quotations pulled out of historical and social and textual context, quotations which the commentators refuse to acknowledge they are *interpreting.* There are even conversion narratives here as well as there, people claiming to have “seen the light,” and the same libertarian gnosticism that tends to accompany communities of true believers who find themselves unjustly marginalized and oppressed. (This observation, by the way, is what led me to think of your style of reasoning as similarly “pharisaical,” in tone and structure and function.
What I said, in my most recent comment, was that human contributions to the carbon cycle are continuous and continuously positive, and that these contributions slowly but surely affect atmospheric and marine chemistry (though to unknown effects). You can call this statement mere assertion if you’d like, but it is verifiable in any chemistry laboratory anywhere. For less than $50 + postage, I can send you all the materials you need to see how carbon dioxide behaves in a saline solution. It’s been done before so many times, in so many places, I simply don’t see the need to root around in specialist literature to prove to you what is simple chemistry. (I have already acknowledged that the earth’s chemistry is more complicated than what is in a lab; but they are that: complications.)
More importantly, you clearly have a very narrowly circumscribed–I would say “attenuated”–definition of what constitutes evidence. My students struggle more with making claims than they do producing ample, reliable evidence for their assertions; they are college students, they are young, and it is frankly harder to reason than it is to cite. They are also writing in an academic context, rather than posting on a science-y blog. What I tell them is that, depending on context and field, evidence can be statistical, testimonial, physical, anecdotal, experiential, but it can also be factual and/or logical. When you say “prove it,” and I refer you to websites and scholarly publications, you accuse me of not providing adequate evidence, and then hit the “all models are entirely subjective” button. When I return to the basics of biogeochemistry, you consider this verbosity and mere assertion. (As for my verbosity, you might be right; I thought I was being garrulous and conversational, but you don’t see it that way. La vie.) In short, then, again: if I am wrong about the carbon cycle, please prove that to me.
As for “takebackthegreen,” and your charge that fighting climate change doing more harm than good, doesn’t that depend entirely upon how one “fights”? How is it harmful to promote renewables using the same kind of subsidies that fossil fuels have relied upon? How is harmful to anticipate future and externalized costs of current (and antiquated) technologies? How is it harmful to seek ways to undercut the either-or fallacy of economic growth and environmental responsibility?
None of this is to say that “carbon is bad.” Nor is it good. It’s just an abundant element; it doesn’t have a face. Nor is coal “bad.” It is probably necessary in the near term to burn it with the best capture and storage and co-generating technologies we have available. We can think through these things in society together–they ARE political, necessarily so.
Mark: I’ve given you a reference that answers your question and many more. Why not go watch it? Watch the first ten minutes, at least. You have nothing to lose and very much to gain. It will leave you feeling more optimistic than any documentary you’ve seen. Plus, as I said, Lomberg is on your side. He believes in AGW.
Or–if what you believe is more important to you than whether your beliefs are true or not–don’t watch it.
Mark:
As you say, WUWT is not peer reviewed science. However, it is the world’s best science blog having won that title outright as a result of winning the poll in three successive years.
A scientific discussion needs to be of EVIDENCE and not opinions.
I yet again point out that verbosity is NOT an alternative to evidence. Your many words still provide no evidence that your assertions have any validity (they don’t).
And your insults, irrelevancies and red herrings fail to conceal the fact that you have provided no evidence of any kind to substantiate your assertions (which is not surprising because they are all mistaken).
Richard
Is this how you think science is done, Richard? Would you prefer to debate without using sentences? It’s possible for me to cut and paste literally thousands of figures and charts from peer-reviewed scientific literature. Is that science?
CLAIM: Excessive CO2 acidifies oceans, affecting coral reefs and other habitats
EVIDENCE: (The conclusions reached by each of these articles rely on experimental and observational data rather than modeling; they are not unanimous or cherry-picked; they just happen to come only from lead authors whose surnames start with A,B, or C.)
Albright et al,, 2010. “Ocean acidification compromises recruitment success of the threatened Caribbean coral Acropora palmata” PNAS
Andersson AJ, Kuffner IB, Mackenzie FT, Jokiel PL, Rodgers KS, Tan A. 2009. “Net loss of CaCO3 from a subtropical calcifying community due to seawater acidification: Mesocosm-scale experimental evidence.” Biogeosciences
Anthony, K. R. N., D. I. Kline, G. Diaz-Pulido, S. Dove, and O. Hoegh-Guldberg. 2008. “Ocean acidification causes bleaching and productivity loss in coral reef builders.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA
Anthony, K. R. N., J. A. Kleypas, and J.-P. Gattuso. 2011. “Coral reefs modify their seawater carbon chemistry—implications for impacts of ocean acidification.” Global Change Biology
Barkley, H., A. L. Cohen, Y. Golbuu, V. R. Starczak, T. M. DeCarlo, K. E. F. Shamberger, 2015. “Changes in coral reef communities across a natural gradient in seawater pH.” Science Advances
Birkeland et al., 2013. “Safety in Numbers? Abundance May Not Safeguard Corals from Increasing Carbon Dioxide” BioScience
Borges AV, Gypens N. 2010. “Carbonate chemistry in the coastal zone responds more strongly to eutrophication than to ocean acidification.” Limnology and Oceanography
Brander LM, Rehdanz K, Tol RSJ, van Beukering PJH. 2012. “The economic impact of ocean acidification on coral reefs.” Climate Change Economics
Caldeira, K., M. E. Wickett, 2003 “Oceanography: Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH.” Nature
Castillo et al. 2014. “The reef-building coral Siderastrea siderea exhibits parabolic responses to ocean acidification and warming.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Comeau, S., R. C. Carpenter, Y Nojiri, H. M. Putnam, K. Sakai, P. J. Edmunds. 2014 “Pacific-wide contrast highlights resistance of reef calcifiers to ocean acidification” Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Cooper TF, De’ath AG, Fabricius KE, Lough JM. 2008. “Declining coral calcification in massive porites in two nearshore regions of the northern Great Barrier Reef.” Global Change Biology
Cornwall, C., and Hurd, C. 2015 “Experimental design in ocean acidification research: problems and solutions”
Crain C, Kroeker K, Halpern BS. 2008. “Interactive and cumulative effects of multiple human stressors in marine systems.” Ecology Letters
Crook, E., et al. 2013. “Reduced calcification and lack of acclimatization by coral colonies growing in areas of persistent natural acidification” PNAS
Mark,
Despite the appeals to authority, oceans are not “acidifying”.
dbstealey:
Right. NOAA’s WOD pH time series…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/31/ocean-ph-accuracy-arguments-challenged-with-80-years-of-instrumental-data/
…reveals absence of the downward trend in the oceanic pH that would support the “acidification” hypothesis. A representation to the contrary was presented Congressman Ed Markey in testimony before the U.S Congress. In his testimony, Markey misrepresented calculations of a computer model as readings of a pH meter…
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-the-worlds-ocean-ph-measurements
…perhaps because the calculations supported acidification but not the readings.
Mark:
I again express my pity for the students you claim to teach.
Evidence consists of data that supports your assertions. I am astonished that you boast you do not know this.
I repeat what I explained to you above when I wrote
The same is true of a list of references.
I will demonstrate this to you. Take these references
Courtney RS, ‘An assessment of validation experiments conducted on computer models of global climate using the general circulation model of the UK’s Hadley Centre’, Energy & Environment, Volume 10, Number 5, pp. 491-502, September 1999
Kiehl JT, ‘Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity’, GRL, vol. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007
Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’, E&E v16no2 (2005)
Each of those references is clear and accurate but on their own they are evidence of nothing except the fact that those papers exist. However, I have used each of them as evidence in posts I have provided to WUWT in recent weeks.
This is an example of a statement with supporting evidence and supplementary argument.
The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate variability is much, much larger. This concurs with the empirically determined values of low climate sensitivity.
Empirical – n.b. not model-derived – determinations indicate climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 equivalent. This is indicated by the studies of
Idso from surface measurements
http://www.warwickhughes.com/papers/Idso_CR_1998.pdf
and Lindzen & Choi from ERBE satellite data
http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf
and Gregory from balloon radiosonde data
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/OLR&NGF_June2011.pdf
Indeed, because climate sensitivity is less than 1.0°C for a doubling of CO2 equivalent, it is physically impossible for the man-made global warming to be large enough to be detected (just as the global warming from UHI is too small to be detected). If something exists but is too small to be detected then it only has an abstract existence; it does not have a discernible existence that has effects (observation of the effects would be its detection).
Anybody can discuss my statement that says,
“The feedbacks in the climate system are negative and, therefore, any effect of increased CO2 will be probably too small to discern because natural climate variability is much, much larger”
by agreeing or finding fault with the evidence I have presented which concurs with it.
Merely providing the statement without the evidence would be an assertion incapable of discussion (other than “yes ’tis” and “no ’tisn’t”) so should be rejected.
I hope – but admit I doubt – you now understand what scientific evidence is.
Richard
You like to condescend, don’t you, Richard? Your charitable lessons on how to use evidence, your repeated pity for my students, your assumption that because I don’t cherrypick evidence the way you do (Gregory’s essay from “Friends of Science” cited seriously? Citing yourself repeatedly?) that therefore I just don’t know how to argue–it doesn’t really persuade anyone outside of this blog that your positions on climate sensitivity are somehow more reliable than the vast majority of papers you don’t choose to cite.
Evidence must be representative, must be fair, must be credible. You seem to think that something quickly gleaned from a few studies can somehow replace years of study of the peer-reviewed literature. (Scientists *routinely* refer to others’ work–by title– as evidence, with the completely rational understanding that all an intelligent person needs to do is to find the work in question and read it for himself/herself.) The peer-reviewed literature has completely shot holes in Idso and in Lindzen and Choi (e.g., Chung et al. 2010). Acknowledge that. Cite Lunt. Cite Hansen. Cite Annan. You’re being completely disingenuous. You’re claiming negative feedback when by far more and by far more careful studies show just the opposite. You’re clinging to shoddy, dated studies. And you’re doing this under the self-important pretense of showing someone how evidence works? You see where I get the analogy with the Pharisees.
Schwartz rev. 2008:
“Reanalysis of the autocorrelation of global mean surface temperature prompted by the several Comments, taking into account a subannual autocorrelation of about 0.4 year and bias in the autocorrelation resulting from the short duration of the time series has resulted in an upward revision ofthe climate system time constant determined in Schwartz [2007] by roughly 70%, to 8.5 ± 2.5 years (all uncertainties are 1-sigma estimates). This results in a like upward revision of the climate sensitivity
determined in that paper, to 0.51 ± 0.26 K/(W m-2 14 ), corresponding to an equilibrium temperature increase for doubled CO2 of 1.9 ± 1.0 K, somewhat lower than the central estimate of the sensitivity given in the 2007 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but consistent within the uncertainties of both estimates.” This is a low estimate of sensitivity, not at all alarmist, but you disregard it.
I’m not sure how I can be expected me to show you evidence of anything when you can’t be troubled to read– or cite– scientific literature fairly in the first place.
But then your forum has a science blog award. That’s something.
Mark: Don’t let your disagreement with Richard over technical/personality issues cause you to reject his message.
There is no need to drown in charts and data and confusing interpretations of acronym soups. I suggested that you search out several respected scientists who make brief and eloquent cases for the insignificance of AGW. Don’t read about them. Go watch interviews/speeches with an open mind for an hour.
You owe it to yourself.
Mark, I repeat my advice to you, given with due respect for your views, that you should set to and actually download some the data sets that are readily available. You will need to be able to use some statistical software and graphics technology in order to appreciate what has actually been happening in the world of climate. If you are unable or unwilling to put in this amount of effort your ideas should be discarded as unsupported.
If you don’t do this, and continue to rely on the publications of the “climate establishment” as your source of information I’m afraid that your current opinion (I re-state “opinion”) can never change. Ten or twenty years from now everyone will be forced to admit that the current mainstream opinions and dogma are in gross error. Unfortunately, I shall not be around to witness this, being 87 already, but my offspring will, and I hope remember me!
Mark:
It is not “condescending” to try to help someone who boasts he does not know what evidence is and claims he “teaches” others.
I have genuinely tried my best to help you but you demonstrate that your ignorance is deliberate so you cannot be helped. I shall try no more because I see no purpose in beating my head against a brick wall.
In conclusion, I repeat what I said to you earlier.
Please think about that because you cannot learn until you understand it.
Richard
Dear Mark,
Do please be careful: we are all allowed to put our opinions here and it is a “site for sore eyes” (pardon the pun) and gives a tremendous amount of valuable information.
The very fact that you have taken the trouble to write here is, how shall I say, “interesting”, however; you might like to “check your facts twice” before using the keyboard.
You will find a great deal of GENUINE ASSISTANCE from certain people here: they are usually helpful and glad to give of their knowledge.
None of us is an “S. Fred Singer” or a “Willie Soon” or a “Richard S. Lindzen” but we ALL GIVE OUR BEST here, courtesy of Mr. Watts and his reasonable moderation people.
Allow me to make this suggestion if you would kindly consider it.
Write whatever you wish, then just ask, “What’s up with that ?”.
I promise you that some answers you receive will be more powerful than your question(s).
Regards,
WL
Mark your “8. Mostly true, I think. Natural variations exist. Even human contributions can be considered “natural,” so we should be careful about that word. I don’t know anything about polar bears. I haven’t spent time researching them. They’re not on my radar. Maybe that’s a moral failing; I don’t know.”
Since only half the polar bear areas have been surveyed to get estimated numbers, your understanding would only be only half as wrong as the experts.
“9. False, false, and true. Three separate claims here. Damage to reef systems is clear. Additional CO2 emitted will slowly, subtly acidify the ocean. The real issue isn’t THAT CO2 is being emitted: it’s that the pace and amount exceeds the ocean’s capacity to absorb, exceeds the rate at which CO2 can be redeposited on the ocean floor”
a little something you may put in thinking cap and modify you False.
From http://www.bikiniatoll.com/BIKINICORALS.pdf
In the northern atolls of the Marshall Islands, 23 nuclear tests with a total yield of 76.3 megatons (TNT equivalent) were conducted across seven test sites located either on the reef, on the sea, in the air and underwater between 1946 and 1958. Five craters were created, the deepest being the Bravo crater at 73 m depth (Noshkin et al., 1997a) (Figs. 2, 3). Post-test descriptions of environmental impacts include: surface seawater temperatures raised by 55,000 C after air-borne tests; blast waves with speeds of up to 8 m/s; and shock and surface waves up to 30 m high with blast columns reaching the floor of the lagoon (approximately 70 m depth)
The results of our 12 year long nuclear war on coral. After less than 50 years, a total of 183 scleractinian coral species were recorded, compared to 126 species recorded in the pre-bomb study.
There are more species now than then.
And from http://www.co2science.org/articles/V15/N7/EDIT.php
And in reporting the results of a study of a large brain coral that lived throughout the 17th century on the shallow seafloor off the island of Bermuda, Cohen and Madin (2007) say that although seawater temperatures at that time and location were about 1.5°C colder than it is there today, “the coral grew faster than the corals there now.”
Other studies have shown earth’s corals to be able to cope with climate-induced warmings as well as coolings. In a study of patch reefs of the Florida Keys, for example, Greenstein et al. (1998) found that Acropora cervicornis corals exhibited “long-term persistence” during both “Pleistocene and Holocene time,” the former of which periods exhibited climatic changes of large magnitude, some with significantly greater warmth than currently prevails on earth; and these climate changes had almost no effect on this long-term dominant of Caribbean coral reefs. Hence, there is good reason to not be too concerned about long-term changes in climate possibly harming earth’s corals. They apparently have the ability to handle whatever nature may throw at them in this regard.
An unofficial spokesman for the Allied Coral Species Association is thought to have stated – We have survived nuclear war, climate temperature changes of over 10 degrees, planetary magnetic shifts, giant undersea lava flows and plate tectonics for over 400 million years. We are personally more worried about you.
Warren Latham
October 16, 2015 at 4:14 am
Agreed! What in the world is a “climate proponent”?
Skeptics really need to tighten-up their language to avoid helping the alarmists move the goal posts. Then again, it may be too late for that.
Skeptics also need to avoid like the plague multiple exclamations points. Nothing you can do will make you look more like a teen-age boy on Twinkies, because that is one of the first things you will learn in bone-head English 101. One exclamation point per sentence. That’s it!
It’s not only about the science, but also about presentation.
Fight fire with fire, and slogans with slogans. The good writers and wordsmiths here are encouraged to mix up their long paragraphs with a few short ones to summarize. Short statements are easier to remember, and easier to deploy, than long ones.
The Great Global Warming Scare is predicated on CAGW caused by the trace gas CO₂. That hysteria has been the justification for the demonization of coal, and carbon in general, and the rationale to build vast arrays of wind turbines and solar panels, which work only intermittantly, and must have conventional power back-up for those times when the wind doesn’t blow, and the sun doesn’t shine.
Whirlygigs don’t work
When the wind doesn’t blow,
And so we get our power now,
From the fire down below.
The rational person might conclude that the best plan is to dispense with the wind and solar completely as an unnecessary expense, and go with the cheapest, most abundant fuel, which is coal.
Calculating the so-called “carbon footprint” of anything is a bad plan which plays right into the alarmists’ hands. We are carbon-based lifeform.
When it comes to energy, cheaper is better. Cheaper energy allow greater numbers of people to enjoy the benefits of modern civilization. Without power, it ain’t happening. Obama’s war on coal is in fact a war on the poor.
For the average person, economic arguments will trump scientific ones. Wind turbines cost more than they are worth, and so they become a vast money sucking mechanism, causing utility prices to “necessarily skyrocket.” Skyrocketing energy prices hurt the poor most of all, but also affect the middle class. It is only the more wealthy who can easily shrug off increased prices for the magic juice coming out of their many outlets.
And by the way, those profiting from wind turbines come from what class? Just take a wild guess…
For many, this entire CAGW kerfuffle is more about feelings than it is about facts. The average Joe Schmo rather enjoys the idea that he is making sacrifices to help save the planet. He is also possibly too dimwitted to make all the right connections, especially when subjected to the daily blasts from the Mighty Wurlitzer, whose glaring, blaring output of the same ol’ one-note samba about climate should all by itself be enough to convince those who dismiss the idea of any men behind the curtains.
Because there is no record or evidence of any harm from CO₂ – rare situations like Lake Biwa eruption excluded – the entire CAGW case is built on the informal logical fallacy known as special pleading.
CO₂ is beneficial to everyone except the alarmists who are trying to demonize it.
CO₂ is good.
Steve P,
If you promise to never again refer to the CAGW alarmist hoax, as a “kerfuffle”, I will keep reading your posts.
To refer to it as such is akin, IMO, to referring to WWII as a “disagreement”.
PS:
Steve,
Not really, but since your post was aimed at presuming to tell people how to talk, and admonishing them to “tighten up their language”, it seemed more than a little jarring to read that sentence.
Tsk Tsk.
I said: “Skeptics really need to tighten-up their language to avoid helping the alarmists move the goal posts.”
Note please, the important part about moving the goalposts.
My comment was in reference to the headline here, which uses the term “climate proponent,” a vague, and meaningless expression. Skeptics should oppose, rather than encourage the use of vague language in the climate debates, especially when it is used for labeling, and pigeon-holing. Most especially when it appears here.
Vague language is one of the building blocks of fallacies, and of specious arguments.
Kerfuffle by contrast, is a perfectly good, and fairly precise English word
borrowedappropriated from the Scots, and tsk tsk about it all you like, my use of that word here is appropriate in the contest of what I was saying, and in no way moves the goalposts. But it does seem rather odd that you go out of your way to make this flimsy quibble about my choice of words, when I wrote in all 16 paragraphs, including a verse of doggerel.I merely suggest that is the way many people feel, although I probably threw you off with the cryptic introductory phrase “For many…”, or the use of the fictional everyman Joe Schmo, who won’t easily give up the idea that he is helping save the planet, because for some, it’s more about feelings, than it is about facts.
It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling being part of the crowd who are saving the planet, and no fuss, no commotion, no kerfuffle from the doubting, disputing, denying CAGW skeptics is going to spoil their party.
Steve P:
Hear hear!
Just a pet peeve, but it is common practice to have a corresponding footnote when you use an asterisk. When I run across an asterisk without a footnote, it causes me to forget whatever it was I just read.
Yeah!
*
Hm,
Point 1, 2 and 3: yes, everybody agree to this.
Point 4: This is just plain wrong. The fluctuations in energy from the sun are very small and does not correlate at all with changes in earth’s temperature
Point 5: is just an unfounded claim
Point 6: You can argument along the same lines and claiming that there are no such thing as sewage pollution.
Point 7: No link between CO2 and sea level? Well the link is that CO2 increase the temperature which melt glaciers and expand the ocean volume. Almost everyone agree in this, the debate is about how much the temperature may increase.
Point 8: Yes we all agree
Point 9 and 10: Other unfounded claims
No thanks
/Jan
Jan,
Start over without the mendacious presumptions you used to make your decrees.
A presumption is not a link. Neither is supposition, conjecture or purposeful theorizing.
Your imaginary link between CO2 and …………….anything…… is the fatal flaw you cling to.
Actually, I was wondering when someone might raise point 5. I don’t agree with most of Jan’s statements, but I do agree that point 5 “CO2 has very little to do with it” is much too dismissive. There are big arguments about the sensitivity of global temperature to CO2, and most luke-warmists put it between 1 and 2 Celsius per doubling. Point 5 is, I think, only consistent with a view that sensitivity is less than 1 degree.
I expect one could argue for hours on how to interpret that “very little”. But without a more detailed description, that statement is going to put off any alarmist readers and allow themselves to say “nah, nah, nah this guy is crazy and is simply denying the influence of CO2”.
Rich.
It’s the imaginary link between the earth’s global temperature and anything else that’s the problem. Try doing an FFT on the global temperature records*. The only thing that stands above a pink noise floor is ENSO. That’s it. So nothing is correlated to the temperature record (at least in a statistically/DSP valid manner)
This includes an alleged relationship between both term solar fluctuations, and, well C02 as well…
Peter
* reference: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lw1kzdfjw0ifcdo/10.1.1.28.1738.pdf?dl=0
Jan – wheres your proof that the matching sun cycles to temperature are not relevant, other than the energy mantra we keep hearing noone seems to be able to successfully disprove the link. You might be right but if you are going to claim you are right you have to be able to disprove the link. The fact that the pattern is there doesnt mean there is a link either – but it sure looks more likely than not ….. but thats my opinion, just like yours and I have no means to prove it – just like you cant disprove it either.
Your point 6 analogy is just plain daft especially as the point being made is so obvious that making your analogy just looks ridiculous.
Point 7 again your analogy has no weight at all. You actually ridiculed the link between the suns cycles and changing temperature then go on to randomly pick CO2 and sea level as it suits your argument. As sea level rise for the best part of 200 years has shown little variation but man made CO2 has multiplied many times over your counter argument is very weak indeed
9 I think the point he is making is that the original claim is unfounded so well done
and 10 – I very much doubt that you bothered to look at the reference but even so can you honestly tell me with your hand your heart that there is no trickery when it is openly admitted by alarmists that trickery is fair play if it achieves the ends.
These threads breakdown when such meaningless argumentative drivel is spouted and countless boring rebuffs like mine appear, I agree with Willis et al though not rebuffing it gives the pedlar of it far too much credence
Show me this matching.
Claims about correlation between sunspot cycles and climate pop up every now and then, and they are refuted each time.
Then look at his statement:
Very strongly indeed? Someone should have noticed that, don’t you think?
This is just foolishness. Just as foolish as claiming that carbon cannot be a pollutant because it comes out of the human body.
/Jan
You mean the Soon Connolly and Connolly paper that got somewhat thrashed here on WUWT? Cherry pick your TSI research, cherry pick your temperature record, and voila, you have a correlation. Also you can’t use trend analysis on an autocorrelated time series…. I could go on your you can read this link (note the link to a previous discussion there as well). The paper actually has a good discussion on the historical TSI and temperature estimates though.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/08/a-short-summary-of-soon-connolly-and-connolly-2015-re-evaluating-the-role-of-solar-variability-on-northern-hemisphere-temperature-trends-since-the-19th-century/
Peter
Jan, did you really just log onto a science site and attempt to refute something my saying “everybody knows this”?
Laugh so hard I am crying…then cry so hard I am laughing.
Most vivid example all week of warmista jackassery.
Mods, typo, …something by saying…
Welcome to the bright side David Siegel.
I trust your education will continue.
I do not completely agree with most of your list, but as you expand your knowledge base that should be a self correcting niggle.
Funny how generous life in the civilized world is when you are NOT wilfully wallowing in self hatred.
The theorem of the magic gas, CO2 is evil, is so stunningly stupid that any carbon based life form should be forgiven for laughing the “believer” out of their space.
As noted you are sure to find out just how tolerant your progressive planet saving friends are.
As for sceptical point of view losing…how do you figure?
What you see as greater advances by the UNIPCC Team ™ I see as shrill desperation guaranteed to trigger a hostile reaction in the normal citizenry .
By that I mean those who have taken the “Govt experts” at their word, paid those ever increasing energy bills and never looked into Climatology.
These people will not offer a voice until they are severely gouged by govt stupidity, but more are paying attention.
However all the best in your journey into the light.
Congratulations. You will now have a difficult path to follow, but you have done the job of learning about something and then forming an opinion. This is the ideal in a democratic society.
David Siegel,
I read with some interest your lead post and the entire comments section to date. I have not read your 9,000 word essay.
My interest in reading them was mostly focused on the fundamental underlying reason those people, who you say have a conceptual position that is called liberal, aren’t accepting what you say in your essay. For the liberal intellectual leadership, it is important that concepts like ‘liberal / liberalism’ have at their base a logically hierarchical and consistent system of concepts in areas that epistemologically, metaphysically and ethically justify the political concepts of liberalism. I think you need to address the concepts at the basis of the liberal intellectual leadership with that leadership. I think that is where the strategy needs to be. I suggest that you need to take on the conceptual systems discourse with the liberal intellectual leadership in their normal habitats; with the philosophically focused academics associated with root ideological think tanks. Fenton, Bill Gates, Jeff Skoll, Jon Stewart, and George Clooney aren’t even close to the liberal intellectual leadership.
So, I do not think your strategy has much potential to be effective, but I wish you good luck.
Fortunately, it is diametrical philosophical systems and hierarchical concepts that are involved wrt the numerous problematic aspects of the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis. The adversarial philosophic systems situation has been going on for 2,500+ years and it has never been more vigorously in contention and actively argued than in the early 21st century. Good news, that.
John
Those with training in exact sciences don’t believe in scientists. Engineers use Euclidian geometry because its propositions stand demonstrated, not because they believe in Euclid. This opens a gulf of understanding between believers and practitioners of science.
Did the author really say that even though he knows being vegan isn’t healthier for him, he continues the lifestyle because it’s better for the environment…and THEN state he would “gladly fly halfway around the world to take a photo of animals in their natural habitat”?
D’oh!!!
Do no photos of those animals already exist?
My personal journey into skepticism started when the president began using the 97% figure and it was all over the media. Having been fooled since I was a child by misleading ads in comic books, I have always been wary of vague terminology, so I wanted to know “how many scientists is 97%?” Of course I went straight to Google and was shocked that the answer was not forthcoming. It did lead me to the Skeptical Science blog which popularized the figure, and I was again shocked to see that the answer was not readily available anywhere on that website. They are proud to tell you how many papers they sifted through, and how many scientists they contacted, but not how many ended up in the final study. Further Googling finally led me here, where the answer was laid bare, and I found out why the proponents of CAGW were hiding it. The 97% is a pathetically small group of people.
As soon as I find that someone is going to great lengths to deceive me, I know it’s because the truth doesn’t support their position.
Whenever I encounter a believer in the 97% figure, I simply ask them to take the same journey I did and find out for themselves,”how many scientists is 97%?”
“The oft-repeated statistic that claims 97% of scientists believe in man-made global warming, is a joke. That number can be tied to a vague 2009 questionnaire that was only answered by 79 scientists from the climate field, and which ignored the opinions of thousands of researchers from multiple relevant fields. There is no consensus”
(I borrowed that quote from somebody – sorry somebody, I don’t have your name)
Actually 3 studies, as shown below. But you also need to know the questions asked and how they were answered.
As Legates et al., 2013 pointed out, Cook defined the consensus as “most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic.” Cook then relied on three different levels of “endorsement” of that consensus and excluded 67% of the abstracts reviewed because they neither endorsed nor rejected the consensus.
Doran and Kendall Zimmerman, 2009
An invitation to participate in the survey was sent to 10,257 Earth scientists. The database was built from Keane and Martinez [2007], which lists all geosciences faculty at reporting academic institutions, along with researchers at state geologic surveys associated with local Universities, and researchers at U.S. federal research facilities (e.g., U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, and NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) facilities; U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories; (and so forth). [Note only government scientist, private sector need not apply]
This brief report addresses the two primary questions of the survey
With 3146 individuals completing.In our survey, the most specialized and knowledgeable respondents (with regard to climate change) are those who listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change (79 individuals in total). Of these specialists, 96.2% (76 of 79) answered “risen” to question 1 and 97.4% (75 of 77) answered yes to question 2.
the AMS survey Stenhouse et al., 2014. In this survey, global warming was defined as “the premise that the world’s average temperature has been increasing over the past 150 years, may be increasing more in the future, and that the world’s climate may change as a result.” Questions –
So answering the questions –
1) most warming since 1950 is anthropogenic?
2) When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
3) Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
4) Regardless of the cause, do you think that global warming is happening?
5) How sure are you that global warming (a. is /b. is not) happening?
Answers and questions use generalized words of most, think, significant, contributing and no values or significance is asked for. No where is proof or dates or amounts or data of +/- estimates required and did you see CO2 anywhere? Do these questions really provide the answer that; stopping man-made, catastrophizing, CO2 control knob, ever increasing (global warming / climate change / disruption / weirding ) [pick 1 or more], which can only be prevented by higher taxes, more regulations and a loss of personal freedom will actually keep us all from floating down the River Styx in a handbasket?
Thanks DD for that concise presentation of the nuts and bolts of the 97%. I’m going to print that out and keep it handy.
Next, I think I will do a study proving Bigfoot is real by contacting every zoologist I can think of, but then excluding anyone who isn’t a self-described “Bigfoot Researcher”. And I will poll only the Bigfoot Researchers currently writing articles about Bigfoot that have been printed in magazines under the assumption that they know more about Bigfoot than anyone else. I will ask them if Bigfoot might exist and I expect I can best that 97% figure and prove once and for all that the scientific consensus says that Bigfoot is real!
@Hoyt Clagwell – good one!!!
Guess what will happen if he does his homework on the vegan choice…
1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
Yes, there are. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-07/record-heat-virtually-impossible-without-climate-change-report/6077634
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
Do you have citations to support this position?
“Yes there are”?
Get a grip. You are citing this.
……..”The independently-funded group used new modelling to look at the odds of extreme heat events occurring, with and without man-made emissions.”
How is it you view that as evidence, let alone “conclusive proof”?
If you’re not David Appell you could be.,
Steve, when you post a refutation of the study, i’ll look at it. Asking questions back to me is not refutation.
Sounds like Appell to me. He told us he trolls here under pseudonyms.
…, when you post a refutation of the study
Upside down and backward as usual, Chris. Those sounding the alarm, like in your posted link, have the onus of producing convincing evidence showing that what they claim is in fact happening.
They have failed, and failed miserably.
First, they selected one region: Australia. That is natural regional variability. It is not “global warming”, much less the endlessly predicted “runaway global warming and climate catastrophe”.
See, global warming stopped many years ago. That falsifies the runaway global warming scare: despite a steady increase in (harmless, beneficial) CO2, there has been no global warming at all.
Only eco-religious fanatics still proselytize that “climate chance” is anything but the natural ebb and flow of natural climate variability. If Australia is especially warm, then some other region is especially cool. Because global warming just isn’t happening.
I’m not Appell.
The paper evaluated possible causes for the heat wave and could not . You do understand that heat waves have causes, right? It’s not just a random thing like rolling the dice and seeing what comes up. The paper looked at possible causes, and concluded that without a contribution due to higher CO2 levels, the heat wave would not have occurred.
dbstealey said: “…, when you post a refutation of the study
Upside down and backward as usual, Chris. Those sounding the alarm, like in your posted link, have the onus of producing convincing evidence showing that what they claim is in fact happening.”
Nope, he said there were no links between rising CO2 and droughts, heat waves, etc. I gave a paper that showed there was a connection between the two, for the 2013 heat wave in Australia. You (or he) saying you don’t believe the study’s results is not a refutation. It’s simply you saying you don’t agree with those conclusions.
Chris says:
I gave a paper that showed there was a connection between the two, for the 2013 heat wave in Australia. You (or he) saying you don’t believe the study’s results is not a refutation. It’s simply you saying you don’t agree with those conclusions.
Exactly right, I don’t agree. Those ‘conclusion’ are total bogosity. They demonstrate no “connection”, all they do is assert something with no evidence besides a computer that was programmed by people who have a preconceived idea of what the results should be. You may believe that’s science if you like. The rest of us know better. This is in that propaganda link you posted:
The independently-funded group used new modelling to look at the odds of extreme heat events occurring, with and without man-made emissions. A computer simulation of the atmosphere…&etc.
Chris, who were the ‘independent’ groups who funded that nonsense? That paper is just more propaganda feeding the ‘green’ narrative, and I reject it outright.
That’s not science, Chris, that is just a way for those people to feed your confirmation bias. They’re leading you by an invisible ring in your nose. And you like it.
None of those fake “studies” mean anything without reproducible, empirical, testable measurements. They are no more than baseless opinions. You only believe them because you want to.
Chris,
Perhaps you are unaware of what modelling is?
It is not direct measuring or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_modelling
“Modelling as a substitute for direct measurement and experimentation[edit]
Models are typically used when it is either impossible or impractical to create experimental conditions in which scientists can directly measure outcomes. Direct measurement of outcomes under controlled conditions (see Scientific method) will always be more reliable than modelled estimates of outcomes.”
“Modelling refers to the process of generating a model as a conceptual representation of some phenomenon. Typically a model will refer only to some aspects of the phenomenon in question, and two models of the same phenomenon may be essentially different, that is to say that the differences between them comprise more than just a simple renaming of components.
Such differences may be due to differing requirements of the model’s end users, or to conceptual or aesthetic differences among the modellers and to contingent decisions made during the modelling process. Considerations that may influence the structure of a model might be the modeller’s preference for a reduced ontology, preferences regarding statistical models versus deterministic models, discrete versus continuous time, etc. In any case, users of a model need to understand the assumptions made that are pertinent to its validity for a given use.”
Steve, I am aware of what modeling is. Perhaps you are not aware that not all real world phenomenon can be tested. The world is not always a petri dish. Modelling is used all the time – in cancer studies, bridge design, nuclear bomb simulation, etc. And if you don’t believe that models have any value in predicting what will happen in nature, then why don’t you go ahead and tell the millions of engineers around the world- who do modelling every day – that they are doing their job incorrectly? That’s how Intel designs new chips, that’s how Bechtel designs new power plants, that’s how Exxon designs new offshore oil rigs, that’s how the US got to the moon. We didn’t just try stuff and see how things went, that is far too costly and far too dangerous.
Chris
Almost right, but dead wrong at the same time.
The “models” you so praise are used BECAUSE the basic designs WERE “built first” (using factors of safety, flight tests – that OFTEN failed and killed test pilots!, test pieces that WERE stressed to breaking point and past their yield point BEFORE today’s FEA approximations EVER started to print their pretty little colored cubes, reactor and physics test units that WERE BUILT using real-world experience and experiments on both simpler geometries and identical instrumented geometries. I’ve seen those experimental and test reactors (run a few of them actually.) Run the testing on the flow models and the test cores.
FEA “models” DO NOT “work” in the real world. They are perfect approximations of assumed conditions of modeled perfect materials and perfect assumed geometries. THEN, the engineers using them apply safety factors and machining and material tolerances to get approximations that are closer to the “real thing” as it performs in the real world.
The “climate models” you trust the world’s economy and health with for the next 85 years, on the other hand, do not even come close to the FIRST STEPS of their supposed 100 year predictions: After ten years running, after 30 years of “calibration runs trying to mimic past temperatures using fudge factors (aerosol levels are the most common adjustment assumed to force the results back to near-life-like temperatures), they begin tracking off-real world immediately.
NONE work. Oh, and when Air France flew its computer-controlled, modeled-by-computer Airbus, it hit the ground during the air show not because the plane was badly constructed, but BECAUSE the program was wrong. Only one step was wrong, but it was wrong when it tried to fly the airplane, run the engines, and stay in the air.
Something that the Wright brothers did by the “seat of their pants” after glider and wind tunnel tests 100 years before models tried the same thing.
No, if you use any model to go straight to a circuit,machine,plant etc I guarantee you the damn thing has been proven based on experiment and verification. I use model simulators to get RF circuits as close as possible to design goals before building a prototype to confirm the models. Spending real money on any model output that hasn’t been built and tested will get you fired. Intels chip models are probably as close as you can get to reality and they’ll still prototype to verify before going into production. Point is that simple circuit models never give an exact right answer. How the hell are you going to model the atmosphere of the earth and expect the right answer?
RA, I fully agree that planes, bridges and other structures are much better able to be tested with actual models than the planet’s climate. We can’t build a 1:100,000 scaled down version of the planet in which to try and test various theories. The earth’s climate is also a far more complicated system than any plane or man-made structure. So we have two options. The first is wait and see. Don’t attempt to figure out if rising CO2 will impact climate – temperature, drought/flooding, ocean impacts – wait and see what happens. If bad things happen, try to mitigate the impacts. If nothing bad happens, then no issue. The second path is to build models to predict what will happen, test them against real world data, and iterate them to make them more accurate.
This is what has been done with short term weather forecasting. We used to be terrible at predicting short term weather, it was basically a crap shoot to know things beyond a few hours. Now, through models – yes, models – near term weather can be predicted more accurately. For example, in the recent flooding in South Carolina, models helped the government plan for impacted areas, arrange evacuations, and take whatever preventive measures could be done in advance. From a blog by Cliff Maas, who writes on weather: “The National Weather Service has flood watches, flood warnings, flash flood warnings, and more posted right now (see graphic), and some areas are being evacuated. This is a serious, unusual, and life-threatening event, one that our models have been warning about for several days.” Note it was models that allowed them to give accurate predictions of the timing and location of the worst problems.
Blog is here: http://cliffmass.blogspot.sg/2015/10/extraordinary-flooding-possible-in.html
Let me see if I have this right. Real world testing over thousands of test cases has allowed us tune physical models to the point where they have reached a rough approximation of reality.
We can’t run such tests on climate models, therefore we should just assume that they are as good as the physical models.
Chris says:
Perhaps you are not aware that not all real world phenomenon can be tested.
AGW cannot be tested for one obvious reason: because it is too small to measure!
And since it is too minuscule to measure, it is a non-problem. QED
Come on Steve, it’s really hard to distinguish between a simulation based on assumptions and infilled guesses and an actual study. Not to mention that the article stated that the simulation tripled the odds of the 2012/2013 heatwaves happening…which means that if there was a 1 in 20 chance of such a heat wave happening on its own, their simulation proved that global warming increased those odds to 3 in 20! Wow!
Interestingly, ENSO and El Ninos and other natural events also double and triple the odds of and severity of heatwaves as well.
Study done with “human influence removed”:
http://theconversation.com/this-summers-el-nino-looks-set-to-bring-more-heatwaves-to-australias-north-and-east-47704
You mean ENSO and El Ninos are not just some modeler’s imagination:)
The greenhouse hypothesis doesn’t stipulate that maximum temperatures will rise; it says that the average temperature will rise, which implies either lower high temps or higher low temps. After all, radiating gases only slow cooling, they do not heat up the air (even the people at Real Climate say so).
From the IPCC downwards one can find many reports that more CO2 cannot be held responsible for extreme weather. There are many predictions to the contrary of course and they are solely based on models (which cannot predict).
I applaud the author for looking at the problem with an open mind and for seeking the truth.
The problem is, most liberals are not interested in the truth – they are already “true believers” in statist ideology which is not about truth, but about controlling the way people live – for the greater good, of course, as they see it. And what they see is not shaped by experience or evidence.
Should add to the list: Northern Hemisphere Ice cores shows we are already heading into the next glacial period (with 6200/1200/60 yr cycles superimposed) and a departure from the interglacial requires actual adaptation or migration strategies. Sounds similar I know…but at least the timescale is very slow.
REally good essay I think. If Mr. Siegel is taking any constructive criticism, I think you need to talk a little bit about your motivation in doing this if you want to sway any opinions. This will definitely be a socially detrimental move, as well as having the potential to hamper your career.
The narratives of many commenters about their journey into skepticism of climate change are important. Thank you all for telling them.
My journey into general skepticism about pretty much everything never occurred, I was already generally skeptical of virtually everything in my early teens in the early 1960’s. Later in life, climate change was just another area to cast my generally skeptical eye on.
John
I’m right there with you, John. I have always been skeptical of two very simple things:
1) How do we measure accurately? (Gets to the heart of “what *is* a meaningful global average temp, and what levels of CO2 and temps are *optimal*?”)
2) How can we predict [let alone affect] global climate in 100 yrs when we can’t even predict local weather within 7 days?
Finally, even if our affect on climate is a subtle “net warming” to the overall climate system, that is very good news, IMO. I’d be a lot more concerned if we had a net cooling effect.
Bruckner8 on October 17, 2015 at 5:43 am
– – – – – – -,
Bruckner8,
I understand and am in agreement.
The critical capacity (skeptical process) of humans is the most wonderful thing, but it must be started voluntarily by each individual human and focus on it must be consciously and intentionally maintained for it to work through to completion; it is not automatically occurring and once started it is not automatically sustained.
Many choose to not start the critical capacity (skeptical process); they consciously to choose purposefully to avoid it.
John
The truth is, this is how most people like us start.
No time to read the whole thread. I suppose my view was influenced by the bogus campaign against nuclear energy since the 1960s, the abortive “global cooling” alarm of the 1970s, and the implausible “nuclear winter” thesis of the 1980s (an impossible thesis, once you look into the atmospheric physics of nuclear detonations). I became aware of other scientific controversies that were being swept under the rug, so began to take any mass pronouncement of science with a kg of salt.
My “tipping point” (had I needed one) probably came upon a group viewing of Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which was presented a massive panel of images of prehistoric species that supposedly became extinct from climate change…including the coelacanth, a late Cretaceous survival. How choice–to include a notoriously living example of the claimed extinct! I barked out a guffaw of recognition, before stifling further rudeness. It showed me immediately that Al Gore was an idiot, incapable of recognizing relevant facts–and that all those who endorsed his film were likewise idiots, who could not see error when it was as visible as a pig’s lipstick. About all I have learned from WUWT is that the idiocy is mingled with mendacity, megalomania, and totalitarianism…none of which surprise me much, although I am appalled by the depths to which otherwise intelligent human beings have sunk.
I agree with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, that the mission of the God-fearing (or, the truth-respecting, if you prefer) is to oppose The Lie. He did so, successfully. His life is a testament in our own time to the power of truth, and an encouragement to those of us who uphold the truth, because of and despite our own personal views. And, as many people have noted here, truth in nature will always prevail and cannot be gainsaid. I do not look forward to the end of this interglacial, but if that is what we are near, and its approach brings truth to the forefront of world attention, then there would be that to be said for it.
In the header of the lead post, I guess the pic of a goldfish jumping from one limited gold fish bowl into another limited gold fish bowl is OK to enhance the topic at hand.
I am talking about this pic.
I am searching for another kind of pic to show in comments, one of a fish jumping out of a goldfish bowl (or out of a fisherman’s net) into the vast open ocean. An image like that would represent escaping confined group thought into the big unrestricted free marketplace of ideas. I will post a pic like that if I can find one.
John
Maybe this pic is OK to enhance the idea of what David Siegel attempts.
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/red-fish-escape-13073266.jpg
John
Chris at October 16, 2015 at 12:21 pm
I was obviously NOT criticizing or rejecting modeling, but rather your pretense that climate modeling equaled conclusive proof.
Unfortunately, as is always the case with alarmist like you (and Appell), you first alter what is said by the skeptic before then responding to your own distortion instead vs what was actually said.
A response that mendaciously elevates climate modeling to engineering modeling.
Again, slowwwwwly, and NOT condemning modeling as having no value, so you can perhaps focus,
The modeling you cited as………,
“Yes, there are. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-07/record-heat-virtually-impossible-without-climate-change-report/6077634”
Is NOT a study showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
I started out as the guy in highschool who tried to galvanize everyone to care about this issue. It was al gores movie that contained things I knew ere false that got me to study and realize the idea of the c in cagw is extremely unlikely at best. I have debated it with many over the years, seems very rare you can use data to get people to question what their favorite authority figure told them is true.
For me it wasn’t a jump from one goldfish bowl to the other. I didn’t pay much attention to it. But then the name of Al Gore popped up. I was not so much “skeptical” as suspicious. He is not an honest man. I started to notice a few things.
The headlines were screaming “Global Warming!”
Back then (2007 or so), The Weather Channel would say what the record high and low was for the day on their “Weather on the 8’s”.
My impression was that the record highs were not that recent.
I went to the local NWS website and downloaded the list of record highs and lows into Excel. Most of the record highs for my little spot on the globe were set before 1950. Most of the record lows were set after 1950. Something funny was going on.
A few years later I found WUWT and heard about “adjustments”.
I went to my local NWS site and repeated the process and compared. Even for my my little spot on the globe, the record highs and lows for some particular days had been “adjusted”. Later checks sowed even more. (I remember mentioning a particular day’s change of 5 degrees here on WUWT and a few months later, Lo and Behold!, the old record was back!)
If a day’s record highs and lows for one little spot on the globe had been tampered with, what about the “non-record” temperatures? The rest of the globe?
Al Gore promoted it for reasons that had to with political goals and/or personal profit.
Those promoting it now? Same reasons. Different names.
PS The Weather Channel hasn’t shown the record high and low for a particular day for my little spot on the globe for quite some time now.
PPS I don’t mean to imply that all those who …endorse it? …. vote for it? … agree with it? … are as dishonest. Many of them genuinely care. They just haven’t taken a closer look at what they’ve been told they should care about.
A close look at the motives of the promoters is also worth scrutiny.
Don’t “throw out the baby with the bathwater”. But don’t drink the bathwater because you like the baby.
There are few things more dangerous than someone who “cares” but doesn’t take the time to understand.
Most of humanities tragedies have been caused by such people.
Mr. Siegel:
You should understand that the climate models do NOT make “forecasts” aka “predictions.” They make “projections.” A prediction is a kind of proposition. A projection is not.
The kind of model that makes predictions is tied to logic because a prediction has a probability of being true. This kind of model is falsified when the predicted probability values fail to match the corresponding relative frequency values in a sample drawn without bias from the statistical population underlying the model and not used in the construction of the model. If it is not falsified in this way the model is said to be “validated.”
The kind of model that makes projections lacks this tie to logic. One of the consequences is that it cannot be validated. Public policy on CO2 emissions is based entirely on unvalidated models. As they are unvalidated they are not “scientific.”
Worse yet these models convey no information to a policy maker about the prospective outcomes from his or her policy decisions. They cannot convey this information because “information” is a statistical concept but the statistical population underlying the models does not exist. Absent this information, the climate system cannot be controlled.
If the climate cannot be controlled why do governments persist in trying to control it? If the models don’t make predictions why do people like yourself think they do? People are being duped by applications of the equivocation fallacy. I make this argument in the peer-reviewed article at http://wmbriggs.com/post/7923/ .
Siegel should educate himself further to understand that the whole environmental movement is a scam. I highly recommend he read the book, “Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse” by Ron Bailey
I enjoyed reading this very much and I will indeed follow your links and your research.
I did laugh out loud at this one statement you made that is sort of unrelated to the Climate, but supports your story.
“I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.”
Can you link any proof of ANY government venture that has been cost effective in ANY way? I bet that would take a lifetime to research and you still would not find any evidence of efficiency in ANY Government program. Not that they should all be done away with, government is necessary, but it is not efficient, ever.
The Civilian Conservation Corps was outstanding. Extremely efficient.
http://www.ccclegacy.org/CCC_Brief_History.html
A side note.
In the late ’90’s I spent some time on a forum that had to do with animal “rights”.
There “vegan” didn’t simply mean “vegetarian”. A “vegetarian” simply didn’t eat meat. Sub-groups were lacto-vegetarians (milk and cheese were OK), octo-vegetarians (egges were also OK) and maybe a group that said fish was OK.
But “vegans”. They were the ones who not only didn’t eat any meat or cheese or eggs, they were the ones who didn’t use (or said they didn’t use) any product that had been tested on animals. They wanted to empty all the zoos and ban animal testing and factory farms and pet ownership. They defended and cheered ALF on.
They were the nuts.
(No pun intended.)
(OK. Maybe it was.)
ALF?
He ate cats, didn’t he? /
I’ve been vegan since the 40’s when my parents noticed I kept up-chucking meat and dairy products. I’ll occasionally eat eggs and cheese when there’s hardly anything vegan on the menu, but so far I haven’t suffered any ill health from my diet.
I also am a pacifist, but have always voted Republican.
Going to college in the 60’s when slide-rules were king, gave me a healthy respect for decimal places and orders of magnitude. When I first heard that man was adversely impacting the weather, I didn’t even have to use the back of a napkin to do any calculations. I instinctively knew that it was nonsense. Also, writing code for NOAA in the 70’s made me very aware how small changes in boundary conditions caused all kinds of changes in convergent values – or whether or not convergence even occurred.
David wrote: “As long as we are trying to convince people with the facts, we will lose.”
So why did you then cite ten facts? In my opinion, we will lose because people like you cite “facts” that can easily be proven to be wrong or misleading. For example:
1 Weather is not climate. There are no studies showing a conclusive link between global warming and increased frequency or intensity of storms, droughts, floods, cold or heat waves.
The IPCC’s Special Report on Extremes documents increases in extremely hot days, decreases in extremely cold days, and a likely increase in short periods of intense precipitation (flash flooding). You are correct about the absence of observed change in droughts, floods cause by persistent rain, hurricanes, tornados, blizzards.
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
Neither the IPCC nor skeptics can easily prove what constitutes natural variation, but the IPCC has inappropriately ignored the role natural variability could have played. AR5 did reduce projected warming for the next two decades because known cycles like the AMO appear to be in a cooling mode.
4 New research shows that fluctuations in energy from the sun correlate very strongly with changes in earth’s temperature, at both long and short time scales.
Read the debate at ClimateDialogue.com on this subject. IMO, the current evidence shows that solar forcing, like the Maunder minimum, is smaller in terms of W/m2 than that expected from rising GHGs. Low ECS might save us, but the sun is unlikely to do so.
5 CO2 has very little to do with it. All the decarbonization we can do isn’t going to change the climate much.
That depends on how much decarbonization we can do. If we were motivated enough, we could generate most electricity from nuclear.
7 Sea level will probably continue to rise, naturally and slowly. Researchers have found no link between CO2 and sea level.
The amount of SLR observed during the 20th century is not “normal” – SLR for the last two millennia has been negligible compared with the 20th-century. How much is due to the end of the LIA is another issue. (Half?) Is it accelerating?
9 No one has shown any damage to reef or marine systems. Additional man-made CO2 will not likely harm oceans, reef systems, or marine life. Fish are mostly threatened by people who eat them.
Numerous coral reefs have suffered damage in recent years. How much GHG’s should be blamed for this damage is the real issue.
10 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others are pursuing a political agenda and a PR campaign, not scientific inquiry. There’s a tremendous amount of trickery going on under the surface*.
I’d say the information communicated by the IPCC’s SPMs does not qualify as ethical science as described by Stephan Schneider: “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts”. It qualifies as policy advocacy: “getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have”. Without the protections built into the adversarial system used in politics and law (which gives equal opportunity for all sides to be heard), we are being subjected to a tyranny of the majority. That does not mean that most of the technical report is wrong. Climate models project what they project. The values of those projections isn’t properly discussed.
Fascinating how the trolls actually believe that they are entitled to their own facts.
Mark: Some references to back up my facts.
1) IPPC SPEX (Extreme weather) SPM Page 6.
http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/images/uploads/SREX-SPMbrochure_FINAL.pdf
2) No one knows how big natural variability is. The clearest evidence comes from Greenland ice cores, which show the Medieval, Roman, and Minoan Warm Periods, each of which represent about 2 degC of warming above neighboring cold periods. Given arctic amplification, those events might represent 1 degC of global warming – if indeed the warming was even global. These warm periods aren’t apparent in Antarctic ice cores. Therefore I’d say that the 1 degC of warming seen so far could be entirely natural – if CO2 didn’t interfere with radiative cooling of the earth. Since it does interfere (according to our host and many other skeptics), the question is how low could climate sensitivity be and therefore how little could CO2 have contributed to 20th century warming?
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/02/the-big-picture-65-million-years-of-temperature-swings/
IPCC AR5 WG1 projection for warming over the next thirty years is 0.3-0.7 degC (0.10-0.23 degC/decade) Section E1 p 20, first paragraph – obviously much lower than projections for the whole 21st century.
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
4) I already provided a link the debate between prominent skeptics and backers of the consensus at ClimateDialogue.org. The largest reconstructed solar forcing associated with the Dalton minimum (and elsewhere with the Maunder minimum) is about -1 W/m2, (out of 342 W/m2) but that translates to a TSI of -4 W/m2 (out of TSI 1362 W.m2) before being distributed over a spherical earth with 4 times the surface area of a circle. The current forcing from CO2 alone is 2 W/m2 and rising.
http://www.climatedialogue.org/what-will-happen-during-a-new-maunder-minimum
5) I should have said that the amount of good decarbonization might do depends on how much decarbonization is possible and what climate sensitivity is. Even skeptics like Nic Lewis admit that ECS could be 2.0 degC, even thought their central estimate is 1.5 degC. There are reasonable prospects of doubling atmospheric CO2 by burning fossil fuel this century, producing another two degC of warming. About half of fossil fuel is burned to make electricity, which certainly can be produced by nuclear power.
7) Sea level rise over 1900-2010 was 15-19 cm or about 1.5 m/millennia. There has been essential no sea level rise over the past two millennia; perhaps 1 m at the most. SLR 4-7 millennia years ago was about 3 m or 1m/millennium, which is unambiguously different on the graph. Clearly SLR for the 20th century was not “normal” for the last two millennia.
9) it is clearly idiotic to claim that “no one has shown any damage to coral reef and marine systems”. Numerous observations of coral bleaching have been made and other changes in marine ecosystems. The real question is what role CO2 has played via acidification and warming. Coral reefs (and other marine ecosystems) clearly survived periods where CO2 was much higher and the earth much warmer. Will coral adapt, or will the vast majority die off and be replaced by more robust species of coral and other animals that we know must have existed in the past. Will the rapidity of anthropogenic changes pose additional challenges.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching
MarkW, anyone can call anything you disagree with trollish. That’s easy. Let’s see some “facts” to back up your opinion. IMO, this post is weak on the facts.
I’m mildly amused when I see people change their minds like this as though it were some grand revelation.
It is, of course, good that David S. has changed his mind. But the real sadness for me is that he (and millions others) ever bought the spiel to begin with. All too often, people believe something based on the most superficial of evidence. And then they require mountains of evidence to reverse the position they took based on … almost nothing. It seems that too few people realize how poorly supported some of their beliefs are to begin with. I guess people gotta believe in something …
It’s a religion for them. You would have better luck converting an ISIS jahadist to Buddhism.
Having lived through the global cooling scare of the 70’s, and the various “we are running out of” scares put forth by those who were dedicated to lowering everyone else’s standard of living.
Having been an activist in the CFC wars.
When the same crowd started pushing the CAGW scare, I was sceptical from the get go. From nothing more than the reputation of those pushing the scare.
After doing a little bit of research it was obvious from the start that the whole thing was just the latest front in the war against humanity waged by those who are convinced that they are smart enough to rule the rest.
Jay Turberville,
Everyone is giving their story about when, or if, they realized that CAGW was bogus. Here’s the realization I went through.
When the global temperature (T) rose unusually fast back around 1997, it caused me to think that maybe there might be something to the man-made global warming (MMGW) conjecture. I’m aware of the energy necessary to raise global T by even a few tenths of a degree, so I knew that several tenths in a year was a lot.
So I began paying close attention. But what happened was not confirmed by subsequent global temperature action. And the more time that passed, the more clear it became that it was a one time anomaly. In fact, since then global T has remained flat; there has been no global warming at all.
I also paid attention to how the enviro groups, and then gov’t bureaucrats capitalized on that temporary anomaly. Although it was a false alarm, their constant use of charts and graphs showing the y-axis subdivided into tenths — and often, hundredths of a degree — were used to alarm the public. And of course Michael Mann’s bogus — but visually compelling — chart had a big effect.
It was all very effective, in that federal government grants began to funnel money into “studying global warming” (which of course became studying “climate change” once it was clear that global warming had stopped).
It was a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop: more grant money generated more peer reviewed papers, which in turn brought in more grant money. And scientists who told the truth — pointing out that there is nothing either unusual or unprecedented happening — did not get the grants. Scientists and universities everywhere quickly became aware of that particular cookie jar, and papers began adding the correct words: AGW, human fingerprint, “carbon”, etc.
Once again Michale Mann was involved, hijacking the climate peer review system. Alarming papers were hand-waved through journals, while anything skeptical had to run the gauntlet, and many of those never got published at all.
And then the scare expanded to things that had nothing to do with human CO2 emissions: Polar bears, Arctic ice, disappearing toads, and anything else that promoted the false alarm.
By 2000 I was about 97% convinced that el Nino was responsible for that one-off anomaly in ’97. But by then the battle lines had formed, and the scare became political. Now it’s all politics, all the time. The Scientific Method is completely ignored, along with its corollaries: the climate Null Hypothesis, Occam’s Razor, testability, replicability, and so on. Scientific opinions that did not toe the Party line were deliberately silenced. Because of those tactics I became convinced that the man-made global warming scare was completely bogus.
So yes, I pretty much reversed my position. I was never sure that human emissions had caused the ’97 anomaly, but I tried to keep an open mind at the time. I still do. If global T began rising fast, I would do my best to understand why. Like most skeptics, I am interested in the knowledge; what makes things happen. I can be convinced that human activity is the cause of global warming, but that requires facts, evidence, and most importantly, verifiable, testable, replicable, empirical measurements.
But measurements are what’s completely missing from the AGW scare. There are no such measurements quantifying AGW. Not a single one! So AGW is still merely a conjecture. There is indirect evidence, but it is far from being conclusive. What we need are measurements. But there are none.
To me, it is all about quantifying the thing that climate alarmists insist must be there. Science requires data. Physicists measure to twenty decimal places and more. Measurements are data. But there isn’t a single measurement quantifying MMGW, out of all global warming including the planet’s natural recovery from the LIA — one of the coldest episodes of the entire Holocene.
The claims of ‘dangerous MMGW’ are simply a giant head fake: a bluff. If the alarmist clique cannot produce a verifiable measurement of something they insist must be happening, and which they insist is causing all the alarming things they predict (but which never happen), then the conclusion is obvious: AGW is at most a very tiny effect; too minuscule to measure. Otherwise, there would be measurements quantifying AGW. But there are none.
That being the case, they have jettisoned the Scientific Method completely. Now they lie outright, claiming that global warming has never stopped. There is no longer any pretense of being objective.
Now we have entered Lysenkoism, and what comes next is cause for serious concern. Because the alarmist cult has been cornered. They have no ethics or morals. And they are filled with hatred toward scientific skeptics — the only honest kind of scientists.
Well don’t feel too sad for “them,” since you do the same thing with your beliefs. So do I. We all do. No one is exempt from the kind of cognitive errors you describe. If you took an inventory of any person’s beliefs, you’d find plenty of errors. But they are easier to see in others than in ourselves…
Your comment is too vage as written. It would be helpful if you explained what you mean. Who is “them”? What is the “same thing”? List some of the “errors”. Thanks.
dbstealey: is my reply vague because the original comment is so far away, under wordpress’s threading scheme?
So… “they” are CAGW believers. “Same thing” is believing in something based on superficial evidence and resisting having one’s mind changed. And…
Must I really list examples of erroneous beliefs humans have held?
——————————-
Question: Is there a list of words that will get a comment moderated on this site? Another of my comments on this thread is awaiting moderation and for the life of me I can’t figure out why…
[Reply: WordPress has a list, but they don’t share it with us. Anthony has some words like “fraud” and “Anthony” that put the comment in moderation hold until a mod can post it. But WordPress does things we can’t unerstand either. ~mod.]
takebackthegreen,
I understand now… I think. WordPress misplaced your comment. Happens to me occasionally, too. Sorry for the wrong assumption.
Takeback writes “No one is exempt from the kind of cognitive errors you describe.”
That is a bold statement to make! How do you know this? Is it perhaps a cognitive error? I suggest that some people are nearly exempt from cognitive error while others swim in cognitive error. Those least prone to cognitive error are probably also social misfits, autists, Aspies and so on.
The movie “Ex Machina” explores some closely related issues, namely that of a “grey box”. A person or robot (android) with no *drives* will generally do absolutely nothing because no reason exists to do something. Humans obviously have drives and essentially all behavior and cognition is ultimately provoked by those drives.
Michael 2:
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
In my experience, cognitive error is common among researchers. By their Nobel prize winning research, Kahneman and Tversky have revealed some of the ways in which people err.
A basis for avoidance of error is available in entropy minimax pattern discovery (R. Christensen, “Multivariate Statistical Modeling” 1983, ISBN 0-938-87614-7). Researchers who follow the rules that are called “entropy minimax” by the author avoid cognitive error.
In building their models global warming climatologists do not currently follow these rules. A result is for these models to convey no information to a policy maker about the outcomes from his/her policy decisions. Being prone to cognitive error, the policy makers think the climatologists have provided them with information. Being similarly prone to error, the climatologists haven’t provided them with any.
The two points Kahneman gives priority are: 1) Everyone, without exception, is prone to cognitive biases. It is extremely difficult to avoid them, requiring a great deal of energy our brains don’t want to expend. 2) It is far easier for us to recognize biases in others than in ourselves.
We show these to be true every day.
takebackthegreen:
In the construction of a model, heuristics and biases can become manifested in the content of this model when the model builder selects the inferences that will be made by this model from among the much larger set of possibilities. When these selections are made by a human, heuristics and biases are necessarily used in selection of these inferences in all but the simplest cases in view of the limited computational capacity of the unaided human brain. Heuristics and biases are eliminated when the selection is by an algorithm implementing the entropy minimax principle and running on a high speed computer. This approach has been used successfully for more than 50 years and results in the best possible model from given informational resources.
My sincere congratulations to the amazing scientists who have eliminated cognitive bias!
Thank you for making me aware of one of the greatest achievements in human history.
takebackthegreen:
Additional to eliminating biases these scientists eliminated heuristics; both were replaced by information theoretic optimization. In doing so they solved the central previously unsolved philosophical problem: the problem of induction. This is the problem of how in a logically justifiable manner one can generalize from specific instances.
The final work toward a solution was completed in the interval between 1963 and 1975 by Ronald Christensen. In 1975 I hired Christensen for the purpose of applying the algorithm he had developed in materials science. By 1980 he had published a nearly complete account of this algorithm. Applications had been made by it in fields that included materials science, medicine and meteorology. The resulting models had been statistically validated. Descriptions of this work had been published under peer review.
Then something inexplicable happened: this astoundingly important work was ignored by most philosophers and scientific researchers. Researchers continued to select the inferences that were made by their models using heuristics and biases rather than information theoretic optimization. Kahneman received a Nobel prize for uncovering heuristics and biases. Christensen received no Nobel prize for eliminating the necessity for them.
Several years ago I discovered Christensen’s great work “Multivariate Statistical Modeling” in the library of Stanford University. The check out card revealed that it had been read by very few of Stanford’s researchers. Recently a Harvard University mathematician rediscovered Christensen’s solution to the problem of induction. He was informed that he had been scooped by Christensen five decades earlier. Christensen continues to lack wide-spread recognition by his peers of the colossal magnitude of his achievement.
Reblogged this on Public Secrets and commented:
A welcome reminder that not all climate alarmists are closed-minded cultists. Worth reading.
You will not win converts by blasting their beliefs out of the water, they will perhaps smile politely and even not know how to respond, but a week a later they will return to their old ways of thinking. To change their beliefs they have to go through stages; noticing their beliefs don’t answer the questions, later finding a willingness to take on board new ideas that go against the grain and then finally changing their beliefs.
You can help the process along; you can sow information for the believers to stumble upon (perhaps telling them about the pause), after they have accepted these seeds of doubt point to other points of view as why the climate has paused, and finally, when they are ready, crush their old beliefs by showing them evidence of how the original data has been tampered and showing them how they have been misled by scare stories that have been concocted by the advocates of GW
Julian Williams in Wales on October 16, 2015 at 4:45 pm
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Julian Williams in Wales,
For current supporters of the scientifically problematic anthropogenic climate change hypothesis to change their ideas they must recognize first the possibility they are tragically wrong.
Men and women, in order to recognize the possibility they are tragically wrong, may need to wait until after their wrongness results in ironically self-inflicted tragedy.
Normal men and women have some reasoning capacity to do actual objective thinking. But, on the other hand, it only takes one or very small number of those to change everything.
John
I do not disagree with that, my point is that deep seated beliefs are not changed at one sitting, they are changed by a process that includes periods of reflection and doubt that have been seeded by events or information that challenges their beliefs. Believers find ways to dismiss crushing defeats, it is why the D word is so commonly used by the other side, it allows the other side to evade looking directly at something they are not psychologically prepared to contemplate.
You have to give them some reason to begin the process of doubting, and then let them think disowning belief was a decision they made themselves.
Julian Williams in Wales on October 17, 2015 at 3:20 am
– – – – – – – –
Julian Williams in Wales,
The process you discuss is a reasonable strategy. I am glad there are strategies like it.
My usual strategy differs. My strategies tend to involved indirectly exposing deep conflicts in the reasons people choose false premises. I love it.
NOTE: I seem to recall a ‘Julian in Wales’, but my memory isn’t the best. Did you formerly post under ‘Julian in Wales’?
John
Overall I thought it was a very good piece, but as you can see by the comments the useful idiots are not convinced. Hopefully some people who can actually understand the scientific method will be. I will forward to my friend who bet me $500 the arctic will be ice free sometime before 2024.
Who’s your friend? I want to bet with him too!
I will give 4:1 odds if your friend is interested and honest.
I would also buy your wager today for $150 if there were a way to do it.
(are there any Vegas odds yet?)
I noticed that there are no comments on David Siegel’s website, but he refers to WUWT for people to comment. I did read his whole essay on his website. I thought it was very heartfelt/sincere. After seeing the positive and negative comments here on WUWT, it would be interesting for David Siegel to comment here as to what he may have learned or if he thought there were too many negative comments. I think from what I read on this thread, that it was rather balanced. I wish David Siegel would make a comment eventually on this thread. Just hoping…
What an awful lot of crap.
Now that’s a thoughtful refutation.
Did you think it up all on your own, or did your professor write it for you?
Dear David Siegel,
Your essay is noteworthy but you are NOT YET STRONG ENOUGH to hold much sway here.
I do not intend to view your website, nor do I wish to be guided through your journey until you can show a much better grasp of realities.
Your article includes one particular sentence (in bold) …
QUOTE: “I’m a Democrat: I think governments play a key role in preserving our environment for the future in the most cost-effective way possible.” END QUOTE
I cannot dispute your political persuasion: that is for only you to say, of course, but your “bolded” sentence in the middle part of your article shows me that you are plainly IGNORANT OF THE VERY FACTS THAT THIS SITE AND ITS’ READERSHIP ARE FIGHTING AGAINST !
You will find NO ESCAPE HERE.
Write as you wish but don’t expect me to fall for such a GLARING INSULT to those who write here with honesty and truth.
I respectfully suggest that you read the rather special WUWT “article” produced by Lord Christopher Monckton concerning wind turbines.
I await your reply.
Regards,
WL
What I think we need to win is to get Donald Trump to start talking about the CAGW scam big time… and bring in a Few Climate scientists to support his talking points. He can get a significant number of people to start looking into to it and bring the topic out into the light for robust discussion. How to get Donald to take up the cause?
Donald could also pay to host a couple of televised debates between the top 5 Skeptical ones (include a Nobel Prize winner for good measure as well) and the five scientists the warmists care to nominate. Since the warmists will likely refuse, then the debate, or rather skeptical presentation will go on with the five chairs for the warmists empty.
alcheson,
I would love to see Donald Trump speak with Prof Richard Lindzen. Trump wouldn’t even need to give his opinion (that’s a big assumption!); all he needs to do is ask Lindzen if there’s a problem with man-made global warming.
A short 30-second commenrcial would be sufficient, adding Lindzen’s past position as head of M.I.T.’s atmospheric sciences department.
Lindzen is calm, rational, and has immense credibility, with more than twenty dozen published, peer reviewed papers to his name. Something like that would suck the oxygen out of a lot of the upcoming Paris hype.
Hello David,
From somewhere in the middle of your essay:
there has been no change in global sea level for the past twenty years.
I think that what you meant is that there has been no change in the rate of increase of global sea level. Needs correction, otherwise it makes you look like you are denying reality.
Assuming the obvious, that global warming will cause direct melting of polar ice caps, let’s look at the RATE of sea level increase since the mid-1800s. Google this search: Battery NOAA Sea Level. The NOAA chart will show a strict linear trend of sea level increase, quite obviously not the least bit influenced by the world population increase from 1 billion to 7 billion since the beginning of that data measurement. (This is likely a trend that began with the last melting of glaciers 12,000 years ago.) Given that burning of hydrocarbons MUST have increased at least an order of magnitude in that time, the data completely mitigate against any conclusion that there has been influence of man on sea level rise and thus global warming.
2 Natural variation in weather and climate is tremendous. Most of what people call “global warming” is natural.
Yes , I agree. That is why I believe that the upcoming next 30-40 years of cooler climate which is also part of the natural climate cycle will finally convince the general public that there is something very fundamentally wrong and flawed with global warming science . It has become clear, that no amount of additional science , observable data or surveys will change the minds of these alarmists .Nature will finally demolish their settled science with dropping temperatures as the co2 levels continue to rise . This has already been happening in North America and Asia for at least 10 years and will spread over other parts of Northern Hemisphere soon.. This information is not being told to the parties in Paris . In another 5 years the change in climate will be unmistakeable to all .
According to NOAA, Climate at a Glance data base, we have currently a situation where all land areas taken together show no warming for at least the last 10 years or since 2005 . Some land areas like North America show no warming since 1998 or 18 years . Within this total global land area , North America and Asia which together represent about half of all land areas globally ( or 46%), the annual temperatures are actually cooling the last 10 years . Another 48 % of the land areas including Africa, South America and Oceania are basically flat with minor change only. Only Europe which represents just 6 % of all land area shows some warming and mostly due to the year 2014. From 2005 to 2013 European land area anomalies were basically flat. The climate data that is not being presented in Paris is that winters are cooling globally.
Added to this is the regular fluctuations( currently in warm mode) of the Ocean’s SST most notably North Atlantic and North and Central There is currently extra warming of the North Pacific due to a temporary blob and the temporary presence of an El Nino in the central Pacific. As per Bob Tisdale’s monthly reporting of global sea surface temperatures global sea surface temperatures have risen at 0.09 C/decade since 1981 . This is only up slightly from the 0.08 C/decade or 0.8 C rise in overall global temperature rise per century
So where is this imminent threat that warrants an overhaul of the entire global energy strategy costing the world trillions of extra dollars with no benefits nor does it solve any global warming threat because it does not exist? Instead of wasting money to fight a non- existing global warming threat we should help the refugees fleeing from political threats not from any climate change threats. Something is very backward with the Paris Conference
Keep up the good work, Mr Siegel.
My experience over the past several years is very similar to yours.
Yes, the warmists have won the debate (at least for now) not with the science but with their massive P R campaign and propaganda. The news media are useful idiots, lapping up all of the alarming claims because they make great headlines.
None of us will be around in 100 years when the world will have a much clearer understanding that CO2 is not the “control knob” of temperatures on earth. The glaciers on Greenland and Antarctica will still be rock-solid. The Noth Pole will still be covered with sea ice in the summer. The polar bears will be thriving. Sea level rise will be barely perceptable, as will any rise in global temperatures. But crops and trees will be growing at a faster rate thanks to more of the trace gas the warmists are trying to villainize..
I skimmed your article and will read it all later — at first glance you seem too smart to be a Democrat, so that’s puzzling. Perhaps you should consider the small government Libertarian Party?
I’m a Skeptical Denier — I think climate deniers don’t go far enough.
Seeing recent attempts by leftists to silence “deniers”, I have eMailed my US Congressman and proposed locking up all leftists for one year, allowing others to fully enjoy their lives, and the good climate, without hearing so many complaints about how awful America is, from leftists like Bernie Saunders. He hasn’t responded yet, but I’m optimistic this might happen!
Scientists and Environmental Activists have been scaremongering since Roger Revelle invented the strategy in the 1960s (prior boogeymen included DDT, acid rain, hole in the ozone layer, global cooling, etc.) … and the scaremongering is not likely to stop.
If global warming stops scaring people, leftists will invent a new “crisis” that will end life on Earth as we know it (because they need a “crisis” to get attention and government grants).
Central governments get whatever “science” they pay for, and they want scary predictions of a coming catastrophe … that never comes, so no one will ever be hurt … with the goal of having the citizens constantly frightened of something, and willing to allow government power to expand … to “fight” that something.
As a leftist, you should admire the strategy — it grows the government — and leftists love BIG GOVERNMENT.
We’ve been hearing about the coming global warming catastrophe for over 40 years — meanwhile the climate in 2015 is better than it has been in at least 500 years — slightly warmer, and green plants grow faster!
Climate history is quickly summarized as mild global warming or mild global cooling, and sometimes lots of ice.
Climate proxy studies show no correlation of CO2 and temperature — in fact, warming from natural causes seems to cause oceans to warm, and then they release some CO2.
Warming causes rising CO2 has evidence.
Rising CO2 causes warming is an unproven theory (the alleged greenhouse effect from CO2 is mainly from the first 100 ppmv of CO2 in the air — we’re at 400 ppmv now — and 500 ppmv should make little if any difference vs. 400 ppmv … except in some people’s overactive imaginations,
Humans have experience with both mild cooling and mild warming.
Their opinions are preserved with written anecdotal messages: People hated cool centuries and loved warm centuries.
So the FIRST thing to understand about mild global warming is its GOOD NEWS, given the only other “choices”.
There are also hundreds of studies showing more CO2 in the air is GOOD NEWS as a plant food.
It’s amazing how devious leftists can take good climate news, and twist it into a coming climate crisis so serious everybody must do as they say without question!
They learned that strategy from religious leaders — the do as I say without question or you will go to hell strategy to control people!
The only thing environmentalists changed was to claim Earth itself would become “hell” if people did not do as they say without question.
I don’t vote for Republicans or Democrats, so I feel I offer an unbiased opinion on this: Democrats lie much more than Republicans, so its no surprise to me that they lie about climate change!
Free climate blog for non-scientists.
No ads.
No money for me.
A public service.
http://www.elOnionBloggle.blogspot.com
great comment
i will only add
you might want to start voting if you’re in the USA
Engineering science demonstrates CO2 has no effect on climate. Identification of the two factors that do cause reported average global temperature change (sunspot number is the only independent variable) are at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com (now with 5-year running-average smoothing of measured average global temperature (AGT), the near-perfect explanation of AGT since before 1900; R^2 = 0.97+).
Observation that CO2 has no effect on climate is also documented in a peer reviewed paper at Energy & Environment, Volume 26, No. 5, 2015, 841-845.
David Siegel – you have written a good account of your conversion journey. You did a self intervention and rescued yourself from the cult of true AGW believers.. Unfortunately your “testimony” as a former true believer will not carry much weight or simply convince other liberals. Look at Freeman Dyson who is an eminent physicist, a true Nobel Prize winner, and one of the smartest scientists alive. He is a registered Democrat, a self proclaimed liberal and an Obama supporter but he is an AGW skeptic. He has given several interviews that did not make it into the MSM. His “testimony” and skeptical declaration have made barely a ripple in the liberal world. See articles here on WUWT.
There is no silver bullet argument that will convert true believers in mass so we have to do this in the trenches – one on one. Present your best one or two points in short clear sentences. The aim is to introduce some level of doubt in their strong beliefs – a small crack – a foot in the door. This is a tough fight that we must win as the world is wasting much time, effort and money on this false scare which is to the detriment of true humanitarian efforts.
Some short summary articles that I have used with varying success.
https://climateequilibrium.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/climate-change-for-dummies/
https://climateequilibrium.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/climate-sensitivity-to-carbon-dioxide-concentrations/
https://climateequilibrium.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/death-of-the-positive-feedback-theory/
Feel free to use any of these but they are overview summaries which cannot be scientifically rigorous or complete.
climateequilibrium October 17, 2015 at 12:32 pm
Look at Freeman Dyson who is an eminent physicist, a true Nobel Prize winner, and one of the smartest scientists alive.
Freeman Dyson is not a Nobel Laureate.
You are correct. My mistake – he has a dozen other awards but no Nobel prize!
Not a nobel laureate, but that committee has been shown to be political as well. Any honor is tinged by what it takes to receive it (telling people what they want to hear).
No, but he should be 😉
4TimesAYear,
Yes, that’s what Prof Reichard Feynman said, too. Dr. Feynman pointed out that the Nobel prize is limited to three named scientists. Feynman said that Dyson should have won, too. But at the time Dyson was the youngest, and probably for that reason he didn’t make the cut.
Feynman acknowledged Freeman Dyson’s contribution to his Nobel Prize:
Dyson “…did synthesize and reduce to practice the Feynman/Schwinger/Tomonaga solutions to the renormalization problems of quantum electrodynamics…”
(Finally, I note that Phil. isn’t a Nobel laureate either… ☺)
The science is far from settled. Below is a quote from a study done by the University of Copenhagen.
Link below also..
“For the last 10,000 years, summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has been far from constant. For several thousand years, there was much less sea ice in The Arctic Ocean — probably less than half of current amounts, according to a new study. ”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110804141706.htm
Reblogged this on "Mothers Against Wind Turbines™" Phoenix Rising… and commented:
Education is the only cure for “government-induced climaphobia”…
For those in control (federal government) IPCC, NASA, NOAA… bureaucrats all, the end justifies the means or so they have convinced themselves. they know they are spinning a well constructed yarn about CAGW but to their way of thinking is is okay if they can move the majority of great unwashed in a direction that benefits their end game which includes population control, suppression of third world industrialization and forced conservation of natural resources through government influenced energy price inflation.
The sad thing is the easiest to dupe are those student sheeple attending college. We use to teach critical thinking along with real math and science, skills for good jobs but now we brainwash and indoctrinate and then send them forth to propagate with degrees in Climatology which is the sci-ency equivalent of social science degrees in Urban Studies, Women’s Studies, Film Studies, [Fill in you favorite] Studies…here. It is a great gig for the universities who receive billions in grant money along with tuition fees that have outpaced energy costs by 4000% over the past 20 years. “Give us half a million dollars and we will hand you a worthless degree and send you forth with some great party memories and a firm, unshakable belief in CAGW”
I think they just want our minds occupied so we don’t notice the extent of their incompetence. The more fuzzy and amorphous the better.
. The climate change that we are experiencing is typical of the Holocene for the past 10,000 years. Climate change is caused by the sun and the oceans and Man does not have the power to change it. We are currently warming up from the Little Ice Age much as we warmed up from the Dark Ages Cooling Period more than a thousand years ago. CO2 has been increasing since the start of the industrial revolution and Man’s burning of fossil fuels is the proximate cause. Direct measurements of CO2 do not go back very far so most of our information regarding CO2 in the atmosphere comes indirectly form what are called proxies, like ice core data and layers of rocks. These proxies are rather poor in terms of their time resolution so we do not really know how fast CO2 has risen or fallen in the past. We do know that CO2 has been more then ten times what it is today and during that time there has been both warm periods and ice ages.
There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is no such evidence in the paleoclimate record. There is evidence that warmer temperatures cause more CO2 to enter the atmosphere but there is no evidence that this additional CO2 causes any more warming. If additional greenhouse gases caused additional warming then the primary culprit would have to be H2O which depends upon the warming of just the surfaces of bodies of water and not their volume but such is not part of the AGW conjecture.
The AGW theory is that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes an increase in its radiant thermal insulation properties causing restrictions in heat flow which in turn cause warming at the Earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere. In itself the effect is small because we are talking about small changes in the CO2 content of the atmosphere and CO2 comprises only about .04% of dry atmosphere if it were only dry but that is not the case. Actually H2O which averages around 2% is the primary greenhouse gas. The AGW conjecture is that the warming causes more H2O to enter the atmosphere which further increases the radiant thermal insulation properties of the atmosphere and by so doing so amplifies the effect of CO2 on climate. At first this sounds very plausible. This is where the AGW conjecture ends but that is not all what must happen if CO2 actually causes any warming at all.
Besides being a greenhouse gas, H2O is also a primary coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere transferring heat energy from the Earth;s surface. which is mostly H2O, to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. More heat energy is moved by H2O via phase change then by both convection and LWIR absorption band radiation combined. More H2O means that more heat energy gets moved which provides a negative feedback to any CO2 based warming that might occur. Then there is the issue of clouds. More H2O means more clouds. Clouds not only reflect incoming solar radiation but they radiate to space much more efficiently then the clear atmosphere they replace. Clouds provide another negative feedback. Then there is the issue of the upper atmosphere which cools rather than warms. The cooling reduces the amount of H2O up there which decreases any greenhouse gas effects that CO2 might have up there. In total H2O provides negative feedback’s which must be the case because negative feedback systems are inherently stable as has been the Earth’s climate for at least the past 500 million years, enough for life to evolve. We are here. The wet lapse rate being smaller then the dry lapse rate is further evidence of H2O’s cooling effects.
A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the heat trapping effects of greenhouse gases. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass reduces cooling by convection. This is a convective greenhouse effect. So too on Earth..The surface of the Earth is 33 degrees C warmer than it would be without an atmosphere because gravity limits cooling by convection. This convective greenhouse effect is observed on all planets in the solar system with thick atmospheres and it has nothing to do with the LWIR absorption properties of greenhouse gases. the convective greenhouse effect is calculated from first principals and it accounts for all 33 degrees C. There is no room for an additional radiant greenhouse effect. Our sister planet Venus with an atmosphere that is more than 90 times more massive then Earth’s and which is more than 96% CO2 shows no evidence of an additional radiant greenhouse effect. The high temperatures on the surface of Venus can all be explained by the planet’s proximity to the sun and its very dense atmosphere. The radiant greenhouse effect of the AGW conjecture has never been observed. If CO2 did affect climate then one would expect that the increase in CO2 over the past 30 years would have caused an increase in the natural lapse rate in the troposphere but that has not happened. Considering how the natural lapse rate has changed as a function of an increase in CO2, the climate sensitivity of CO2 must equal 0.0.
The AGW conjecture talks about CO2 absorbing IR photons and then re radiating them out in all directions. According to this, then CO2 does not retain any of the IR heat energy it absorbs so it cannot be heat trapping. What the AGW conjecture fails to mention is that typically between the time of absorption and radiation that the same CO2 molecule, in the lower troposphere, undergoes roughly a billion physical interactions with other molecules, sharing heat related energy with each interaction. Heat transfer by conduction and convection dominates over heat transfer by LWIR absorption band radiation in the troposphere which further renders CO2’s radiant greenhouse effect as a piece of fiction. Above the troposphere more CO2 enhances the efficiency of LWIR absorption band radiation to space so more CO2 must have a cooling effect.
This is all a matter of science.
I think I’d quibble with your statement that “The surface of the Earth is 33 degrees C warmer than it would be without an atmosphere” I am never certain what is meant by the surface of the Earth. It seems to me that if you try to account for the cold of the ocean abyss, that 33 number has to go down. Taking atmospheric temperature at sea level seems somewhat arbitrary. Yes, the place where sunlight impinges the solid and liquid surface is the logical place to measure a surface temperature, but the existence of the huge amounts of cold in the waters of the ocean has to be accounted for if you are thinking about what is the “surface temperature” of the Earth. Remember that the heat in a volume of air is tiny compared to an equal volume of water, and that the entire mass of the atmosphere is represented by water to a depth of just 33 feet.
I will agree with you that the 33 degrees C number is quite debatable. But it is the AGW conjecture that claims that it is greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere that causes the Earth’s surface to be 33 degrees C warmer than it would otherwise be because of the radiant greenhouse effect caused by the LWIR absorption properties of greenhouse gases. However there is another body of theory that says that the Earth’s surface is 33 degrees C warmer then it would otherwise be because of the convective greenhouse effect which has been derived from first principals and does not depend on the LWIR absorption properties of greenhouse gases. It is the convective greenhouse effect that causes the lapse rate in the troposphere. We are talking about the average temperature of the atmosphere at an altitude where the atmospheric pressure equals one bar.
The article is redirected to a govt site
If you want to go to the science of the thing one should concede the science of CO2 as a greenhouse gas. It also needs to be pointed out that the warming trend of the twentieth century was a beneficial thing. If the nation’s breadbasket experienced the kind of freeze that was experienced in the nineteenth century on the night of June 4, 1859, devastation would be just as great as global warming scenarios.
Mr Siegel, I have just read your entire essay and I was very impressed with its clarity and easy-to-understand format. I am not a scientist (I’m a graphic designer), but I come to WUWT? most days to shoot the breeze and see if there’s any new Pro-CAGW propaganda nonsense being misreported on that I might need to be aware of. Most days, of course, there usually is.
As a British citizen living under the dead hand of the UK’s resolutely illberal left-progressive agenda I’m afraid that truth and honesty have long since been effectively banned from the BBC (a supposedly ‘unbiased’ state broadcaster everyone in the UK is forced by law to pay for or risk criminal sanctions) when it comes to the issues of ‘man-made climate change’.
Dissenters to the dominant narratives on ‘climate’ espoused by the IPPC (and broadcast in conspicuously uncritical terms) are to be ignored, silenced, shut down: the BBC, with a legal requirement to ‘impartiality’ under its Charter mandate has now – as matter of public record – admitted that it will, as a result of the infamous ’28Gate ‘scandal on this issue, thus forth employ a new concept: what it calls ‘due impartiality. How very slippery. ‘Due impartiality’ is a sly, cowardly way of saying ‘we are going to ban the findings of science that does not agree with our IPPC/UN/EU-endorsed and bought-and-paid-for science.’
Illiberal (un)progressivism at work, folks, sucking the public teat dry for all its worth – as long as the fear remains a more power tool than the shaky, uncertain, flawed, inaccurate, demonstrably wrong ‘science’ used so relentlessly to flog its snakeoil.
SPOT ON !
I think David Siegel is wrong when says “What was clear [from his ‘better part of this year’ studies] is that skeptics are losing this battle…”
His premise is that skeptics are losing the ‘battle’ because he believes the vast majority of everyone supportive of something called the “liberal**” cultural aren’t skeptics of the hypothesis of there being significant AGW which harms.
What is clear? It is clear that the voting democratic public, who do not really think in terms of being a skeptic or a non-skeptic, are insufficiently convinced of the openness and trustworthiness of the hypothesis advocates in the liberal culture. The voting democratic public largely seems to have vastly more trust in the openness of voluntary human enterprises (businesses) that produce for them transport and fuel and warmth and shelter and food and wealth. Because I think that is clear, I think it’s reasonably clear that the ‘battle***’ is being won to defeat the hypothesis of there being significant AGW which harms. It was/is a trust seeking ‘battle’ by general public citizens who are democratic, republican, independent and other. The skeptic ‘battle’, in any given situation, may or may not augment that trust seeking ‘battle’ by general public citizens of all parties.
David Siegel and I disagree about winning-won-win.
** ‘liberal’ is his terminology so for consistency I continued using it. I wouldn’t use such terminology in a strictly intellectual dialog because it, by itself without a valid array of conceptual identifications as to what is ‘liberal’, just makes a meaningless intellectual mish mash.
*** ‘battle’ is a military kind of term and I do not use it nor other military kinds of terms in strictly intellectual climate related dialog because it is just adds distracting emotional baggage. But Siegel initiated using it right at the beginning of his post, so I used it for consistency purposes.
John
Great stuff and thanks for the research and links. The Michael Crighton (sp?) video was worth the whole thing. Things are complex. Moreso than any of us think. I read a book a while back called “in praise of doubt” which points out that much of what we believe to be true is just wrong. Too much money is being asked from us to be spent on foolish, political, projects. The experts are not experts. We can do much of this on our own. Our ancestors were exceedingly clever and said things like “waste not, want not”. Simple phrase but it has a whole lot of meaning.
I own a radiation protection business and was recently emailed by someone worried about EMF. I told them that as a scientist, I cannot say that EMF is definitely not “harmful”, but I also cannot describe a way that it could be harmful, and neither can anyone else. He was confused because so many governments had written regulations about it. I told him that writing regulations gives the appearance of doing something which is good enough for most people. Regulation written, policies changed. But then I pointed out that the distance a cell tower must be away from a house in the regulation is completely arbitrary because no harm has been demonstrated by the dose of EMF regardless of how far they were away. There is no demonstrable basis for harm. So the distance specified has no relation to demonstrated harm. But it does have the appearance of doing something.
The resources expended in making all these changes could have been used for something more positive.
“I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment”
That doesn’t make sense. Seems to me that you’re doing yourself and the environment a disservice if it’s not as healthy to be vegan. (And I am aware of being a vegan can be deadly – a lot of people are coming to realize that)
It makes perfect sense if your brain is wired or has been re-wired to believe that the individual should sacrifice for the benefit of the multitude. In this case the individual is sacrificing his health for Gaia. The Apocalyptic Global Warming movement seems to people who need to sacrifice, and they always seem to see their slightest hang-nail as out weight every one else’s bleeding neck.
I don’t believe we’re losing – if it looks like we are, it’s because we’re having it shoved down our collective throats by a tyrannical administration.
Thank you Mr Siegel. It takes courage to challenge fashionable wisdom. Its proponents are descendants of onetime believers in phrenology. I used to teach “climate change” but was always troubled by the endless gloom and ad homs. 10 years ago I too did some research and it completely and immediately changed my mind. Lost a few friends along the way, in particular one who is desperately trying to exploit carbon trading. I believe that the world’s economic situation, which a close friend in the higher echelons of the banking world sees going belly up in a heartbeat, will plant a stake through the heart of this monster at midnight on some God forsaken crossroad.
Mr. Siegel, what you did takes a tremendous amount of courage as you will never be forgiven by the left. When you stopped drinking the kool-aid you have become a non-person in their eyes. You will probably need to travel in different circles now and you will be black-balled by the traditional media. They will never even listen to your logical and cogent arguments because it’s never been about the science. It’s about control, the left’s no-growth agenda, and the tremendous amount of money available to those who worship at the global warming altar. I disagree about your conclusion that we skeptics are losing the argument. Average Americans who have much more common sense than the elites will never support policies and programs that damage the economy to deal with global warming. You commented that you are a vegan not because it’s the most healthy diet but because it’s best for the environment. I agree with you that a vegan diet is not necessarily healthy; however, I have come to believe that a whole food, plant based diet with no-added oils and limited processed foods is our best chance to live a long, healthy life and avoid the most common maladies of Western society, ie. heart disease, strokes, cancer, autoimmune diseases. Some who promote this lifestyle include Dr. Colin Campbell, Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, and Dr. Dean Ornish.
Finally—Rational responses! Now I can watch the National Geographic shows on TV in peace. Saw an old one the other night about the formation of the Great Lakes and the strange “ridges” in certain places. Our planet is very old and constantly changing as are all lifeforms thereon. Keep studying, students!
Thank you and well done.
Anthony, thank you for this article and your perspicuity. I believe a similar campaign has been mounted (along with ossified and politicize bureaucracy in the NRC) to impede R&D of Generation IV Nuclear Power technologies in the US, especially the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR). I urge you to look into it. I remain unconvinced on the _scale_ of human induced climate change; nevertheless, I believe we need to get all the way off fossil fueled energy ASAP (we will, eventually), for three reasons: 1. Energy access equity and cost. 2. Preservation of fossil hydrocarbons for engineered materials. 3. Reduction in pollution (including the large scale wastes due to manufacture and decommissioning of all other energy sources, but especially solar and wind). Climate change, if scientifically sustained, would be a distant fourth.
YOUR cap lock KEY appears to be MALFUNCTIONING
David Siegel,
You are a class act. Thanks for commenting.
Don’t be concerned with the few comments that attack you. That’s to be expected, and it happens to just about every article author. People can speak their minds here.
And that’s why this site has become so very popular. It’s up to readers to decide which comments are closest to scientific veracity, and which are just promoting a political/religious narrative. And as we see, most readers here are skeptics of the ‘dangerous man-made global warming’ (MMGW) scare.
I also agree with you that ‘decarbonization’ is losing public traction. The reason is clear: there has been no global warming for almost twenty years now. Therefore, the conjecture that CO2 (“carbon”) is the cause of global warming looks to be increasingly silly. Planet Earth herself is busy falsifying that belief.
We see it in the mainstream media: a few years ago, many reader comments under alarmist articles were still concerned about AGW. But no more! Now, most comments ridicule the MMGW false alarm.
Finally, it takes real courage to go against the grain in the .edu factories and in the media. But someone has to do it. If you stand your ground, others will follow. People admire conviction. They admire guts even more, and what you did took real intestinal fortitude.
[PS: Like most skeptics, I try to keep an open mind. If global warming begins to seriously ramp up again, I will pay close attention. If a valid connection is made between human CO2 emissions and warming, I’m ready to change my mind. But so far, it’s been just the opposite. Despite the steady rise in CO2, global warming has remained in stasis for many years. In any other field of science, that would send the CO2=AGW conjecture back to the drawing board, because it was obvioulsy flat wrong. Only in ‘climate science’ would they double down, and continue to blame every possible event on AGW. No wonder the public is increasingly skeptical.]
I’ll START to worry when the climate STOPS changing.
Reblogged this on Via Veritas Vita (The Way, The Truth, The Life) and commented:
Consensus on manmade global warming? Are you kidding?
The “consensus” is in favor of something else: staging and maintaining a media blackout to conceal the dissenters, to pretend they don’t exist, to pretend “the science is settled.”
Reality is engineered consensus. But when that doesn’t work, “experts” just assert there is a consensus when there isn’t.
“What the hell, let’s just say that ‘everybody agrees’ manmade warming is destroying Earth and we have ten minutes to solve it, and let’s get our friends in the press to shut out the naysayers. You know, media blackout.”
Science is supposed to be about evidence and proof, not consensus. But that idea is now laughed out of court. Science is about PR and who sits on the important thrones.
Useful predictions? We don’t need no stinkin’ useful predictions. We just need dupes, and we got plenty of them.”
Here are a few excerpts from the boggling Climate Depot report:
“We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.”
— UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.
“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself — Climate is beyond our power to control…Earth doesn’t care about governments or their legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.”
— Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“The dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences is nothing short of a scandal. Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” The global warming establishment “has actively suppressed research results presented by researchers that do not comply with the dogma of the [UN] IPCC.”
— Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University.
“The whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is completely unfounded. There appears to have been money gained by Michael Mann, Al Gore and UN IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri as a consequence of this deception, so it’s fraud.”
— South African astrophysicist Hilton Ratcliffe, a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (ASSA) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics.
“In December 8 2009, 166 scientists from around the world wrote an Open Letter to the UN Secretary-General rebuking the UN and declaring that ‘the science is NOT settled.'”
“On May 1, 2009, the American Physical Society (APS) Council decided to review its current climate statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. The decision was prompted after a group of over 80 prominent physicists petitioned the APS [to] revise its global warming position and more than 250 scientists urged a change in the group’s climate statement in 2010. The physicists wrote to APS governing board: ‘Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th – 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.'”
As an adjunct to your open letter, I would like to present the idea that an increase in CO2 is actually going to be vitally important if we are to feed a growing population. I heard a commentator complain about the population increase and complain that we cannot expect another green revolution. I immediately realized that the increase in CO2 will act to increase this century’s food production, just as the new agricultural ideas of the Green Revolution increased the 20th century’s food production capability.
@David Siegel
“I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is)”
I clicked on and reviewed the factoid page linked to “(it is)”, and see nothing there that would prove your claim that veganism is better for the environment.
Wolves frequently kill more than they can eat, should they be re-educated into omnivores? Would that serve the “environment”?.
Hunters and fishermen may also over-harvest, but they are more easily re-educated. Would you have mankind stop consuming animal tissue and convert every available patch of water and land to the cultivation of edible plant material? What sort of environment would that produce?
A very real fact is that vast portions of the world’s surface are not capable of supporting any sort of agriculture or aquaculture. The best, and most environmentally sound, food productivity in these areas come from harvesting animals.
And, BTW, although I claim neither expertise or even strenuous lay study of the subject, my reading of credible reports over the years from both official government statistics and those who hunt and guide in polar bear regions of North America persuades me that the population of this species is not endangered by the regulated hunting that they’re subjected to, and that it is more likely that they have benefited from such management.
However, I congratulate your coming to your senses, if only somewhat, and rather belatedly.
Great article with great links.
“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” –George Orwell