People send me stuff, such as this email I recently received about a global warming spy thriller. I’m not fully comfortable with the “hoax” title, as there indeed has been some warming in the past century, some of it man made and some of it natural variation, but there’s also been a largess of funding and a shedload of zealotry and hype attached to all of that, and that’s what this book is about.
Mr. Watts,
As a retired Earth scientist, I am appalled at the war the current Administration and the EPA are waging against fossil fuels. Many good books and websites such as yours have effectively debunked the pseudoscience behind climate change. Sadly, this academic evidence has done little to sway alarmists, educators, regulators, the liberal media or the Pope.
My approach to this controversy is a bit different. I have written an apocalyptic thriller exposing the hypocrisy masquerading as man-made global warming. While the plot is entirely fictional, scientific issues embedded in the novel are essentially factual. Anyone reading this story will be made aware of the sound reasons to reject counterproductive limits on greenhouse gas emissions. A Sinister Charade is available as a paperback or eBook at Amazon.com.
This book is self-published. Although the intended audience is different from the people who are drawn to your site and twitter account, I would be thankful for any help you might provide in publicizing this novel. Your feedback is appreciated.
Dan Coffman
The description at Amazon reads:
Jesse Ngata, a prominent oceanographer, believes global warming is a sinister charade intended to destroy the American way of life. His damaging accusations provoke an attempt on his life, forcing Jesse to hunt down the climate change criminals before they kill him. Jesse’s nemesis, Basil Radoff, is a shadowy Russian agent who was given a fortune and an unconventional mission when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. He has spent the past twenty-five years convincing global thought leaders that fossil fuel emissions are destroying the Earth’s environment. Radoff has persuaded the United Nations to ban carbon emissions, while continuing his malevolent campaign to cripple the world’s energy industry. Millions of children are being taught to fear their carbon footprint. Billions of dollars are corrupting scientists and regulators around the world. Factories are shuttered and rusting. Environmental constraints are killing jobs. Radoff’s global warming hoax may be too entrenched to die. America’s future hangs in the balance, and only Jesse Ngata can stop this diabolical attack.
One of the reviews reads:
A Sinister Charade projects the hypocrisy of global warming as a means for our government to control and instill fear into everyone. From the political leaders and scientists to the individuals trying to live a normal existence…there is deception. Fear is instilled upon people by those they should have been able to trust. This book is a fast moving, exciting, soul-searching thriller. It was food for thought. Like the seasons, our lives are changing. We can’t control those changes. We can’t stop them and we have no more control over them than the change in weather. Global warming is God’s doing….not man’s. However, there are those who would like for us to think otherwise. A great read. Kudos to Dan Coffman.
The book is available on Amazon:
While you are at it, don’t forget to pick up a copy of Climate Change, The Facts
Just downloaded the Kindle sample 🙂
Ditto.
Michael Crichton thriller ‘State of Fear’ was effective.
I will check ‘A Sinister Charade’ out.
John
Yeah, Crichton’s “State of Fear” is where my head went to, too. We could USE another similar book. You never know how many still open minds are out there and might look more objectively at global warming if presented as well as Crichton did.
For me, I bought the book not having ANY idea it had a skeptical POV about global warming. As it slowly dawned on me that it DID, I found myself giggling – at “How in the HELL did I happen to pick THIS book out – of all books I could have chosen – at the book store?” That was back when book stores actually existed….LOL
Yeah, I will buy it. I hope he is a good writer!
I tried to buy State of Fear earlier this year on kindle but it was unavailable- odd for an electronic book I thought! I ended up borrowing a copy and was rewarded for my persistence. A strong point of the story was the was it was backed up with copious real world data, fully referenced. I should check again if it is available now.
Steve Garcia on October 27, 2015 at 5:21 pm
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Steve Garcia,
Dan Coffman’s novel will get critically reviewed. No doubt. And that is good for the free marketplace of ideas about what the human world is or what it could be or what it should be or what it shouldn’t be.
The great novelist Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885) said about writing his fiction, “If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away”.
John
Try Jack Du Brul’s “The Lightening Stones.” As fictitious case against CAGW proponents It is a good deal more plausible than this novel. State if Fear is still the best.
Perhaps you should try “Fallen Angels” by Larry Niven, et al. It is an excellent example of where the thinking of green power leads.
Hivemind:
You say
There is no need for fiction to suggest where ‘green’ power leads because the Khmer Rouge demonstrated the reality of ‘green’ power.
Millions die when ‘the environment’ is considered to be more important than people so “self-sufficiency” is enforced.
Richard
Hivemind, thanks for that. I’ve just read the wiki summary of the novel. The political aspect seems disturbingly close to the truth. And it was published in 1991.
Hivemind October 27, 2015 at 11:37 pm
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Hivemind,
I appreciate the HT to the book ‘Fallen Angels’ by Larry Niven, et al. It looks promising wrt crtical assessments. I will try to go to the immense used book store here in downtown Mountain View CA to look for it. But, today’s priority task is to make a good start in consuming the digital version of ‘A Sinister Charade’ by Dan Coffman.
John
Lifelong Niven fan.
Read Fallen Angel the night it was released.
Once or twice since.
Good read.
Crichton’s “State Of Fear” was what woke me up to the possibility that the debate wasn’t over and the science wasn’t settled. At the time I was a bit of a ‘true believer’ and remember being upset with Crichton, wondering how he could write something like that. But, the book was filled with references to real data, and after checking out some of it, I began to open up to the possibility that the science wasn’t settled at all. It was definitely an eye-opener! Hopefully this new book will do the same for others.
pinroot October 28, 2015 at 4:39 am
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pinroot,
I miss Crichton on all intellectual levels. He had some important concepts to aspire towards intellectually.
John
Duster,
Thanks for the HT, I’ll take a look at Jack Du Brul’s “The Lightening Stones.”
John
I will wait for the movie.
You’ll be waiting a long time for Hollywood to make a movie that doesn’t look and sound and SMELL like Al Gorry’s garbage !!! I wonder how quick the book will be banned from schools and public library s ???? I better get it while I can !!!
Marcus, I would not disagree with that basic argument. I haven’t heard of any producer wanting to do “State of Fear”.
Oh eventually someone will pick up State of Fear and you’ll sit yourself down in the theater and from the first sudden stroke of lightning (for that would be the coolest way to start opening credits)… to the final union logo in the end credits you will sit there… waiting… and you will sadly conclude that Crichton’s demonstrative presentation on eco-greed and choreographed AGW fear somehow ended up on the cutting room floor, and what you are left with is a jeepers-creepers chase thriller with Silverfish-dumbsilly Internet hackers chasing a man and hot woman with the lightning strike gazingus.
But nothing could compare with the deep personal lassitude I experienced after watching Contact! The Movie [1997]… when I finally realized despite the fact it was a great film and Jodie Foster was perfect… one of the most inspiring, original ideas ever conceived in science fiction was omitted from the film.
You see (in the book) the aliens did not merely seek contact to show us how much more advanced they were and give someone the ride of her life, and turn ‘faith’ on its head by leaving her with no empirical proof of their existence. There was also this Grand Puzzle they had discovered and they were seeking out other intelligent races to help them solve. It was a message they had discovered starting at the umpteenth digit of the mathematical constant Pi.
What a mind-blowing, creepy idea! There in the ratio of every circle ever drawn, or anyone in the Universe could draw, woven into the very fabric of reality, a ‘message’? I am fond of Sagan’s pedantic and meticulous style and devoured Dragons of Eden as a young boy. But that message-in-pi idea seemingly casually tossed in by the Author leads one down a very strange path, into realms where one is exploring new places by merely imagining the possibility of such a thing.
Without the message in pi, for me Contact! the movie fell from a great height down to the level of ain’t those alien critters clever, and ain’t we dumb, but oh yes, we have potential. Whatever that means.
The villains in Tom Clancy’s “Rainbox 6” were radical enviros, though they simply wanted to kill off 99% of the world’s population with a plague, not global warming stuff.
I happened to channel-surf onto a TV programme called “Blunt Talk”. I thought it was going to be a discussion about marijuana, but it turned out to be a show about a newscaster Walter Blunt (played by Patrick Stewart).
In the episode I landed on, an eco-terrorist (as he was termed in the show) had taken Stewart captive during a live episode in order to publicize his concerns about global warming.
As I have not been following this series, I didn’t know quite how to take it, but it seemed that they were poking fun at enviro-wackos/warmunists.
If they were, that would be a welcome change of attitude. Enviros are almost always depicted as heroes, and above caricature. Maybe even the leftists who are usually in charge of popular media are beginning “warm up” to the idea that the public are being played for dupes.
There were definitely good digs at whacko environmentalists. The eco-terrorist and his family lived a ‘zero-impact’ lifestyle and rode bamboo bicycles, and the miserable crap they insisted on eating. tuff like that.
The recent “Kingsman” movie is a fun Bond type take-off/spoof, with a loonie “population reduction/greenie” cultist as the bad guy.
With courses now at the undergraduate level teaching movie making, and with CGI capabilities, it is becoming more feasible to work around the monopoly Holywierd has on the film industry.
been done, michael crichton’s “State of Fear”. I’m still waiting for the move of that one 🙂
I’ve often wondered how “State of Fear” would be received if it were published today, because of:
– Crighton’s current standing in pop culture because of the enormous Jurassic Park franchise. (His scientific credentials unfortunately were not a factor for most of his potential readers when the book was published.)
– The existence of the “pause” (hiatus,peak; whatever) may make readers more receptive to his message today. (Imagine if he were able to incorporate the “pause” into the novel!)
Hopefully the declining public interest in global warming vis a vis other national and world issues, and the books use of the “thriller” genre will garner attention.
Versa Vice you mean just asking 😎
Unfortunately not available on Barnes & Noble.
I quit buying anything from Amazon about a decade ago when they attempted to charge $2000 for a cloud server I never setup or used.
Ten years is a long time. Their customer service is second to none these days. I don’t think you’ll have any issues buying a $10 book. If you somehow do they’ll bend over backwards to make things right.
” I’m not fully comfortable with the “hoax” title, as there indeed has been some warming in the past century, some of it man made and some of it natural variation”.
Of course you know that this rational view is not the theory of AGW. The theory of AGW is (1) that all increases in atmospheric CO2, every molecule of it, derive from fossil fuel emissions, and (2) the “control knob” theory of Lacis (2010) is that atmospheric CO2 completely controls surface temperature. The policy implication of these two principle taken together is that we hold that temperature control knob and, like the Outer Limits TV show of the 1950s, we control surface temperature exactly; we can turn the knob forward to increase atmospheric CO2 and and surface temperature and destroy the planet or we can turn it backward to stop the rise in atmospheric CO2 and save the planet. This bizarre idea has been taken to the point that we can supposedly actually tweek in any temperature increase we want by the year 2100 simply by raising or lowering our fossil fuel emissions. This is an extreme and rigid view that contains no flexibility whatsoever and is therefore completely inconsistent with your rational view.
I must agree with Chaam Jamal here.
And there are additional reasons why the rational approach does not at this point rule out the proper use of the word hoax to describe what CAGW has devolved into.
The only man made portion of any warming which might have some degree of certainty would be the UHI effects.
1) I am not certain that the Earth has had any overall warming since, for example, the 1930’s.
2) If there has been warming of the entire Earth as a whole, over any particular interval, I am not at all sure we would or could know it.
3) If there was warming over some interval, and we did in fact have some way to be sure of it, and be sure of the amount, I have no idea how anyone can pretend to know what if any portion of that warming was due to CO2.
4) UHI effects are real, but the size of these regions is tiny as a percentage of the total Earth surface, and so the total change in average surface temp on the whole may be tiny, and may be offset by greater convective cooling elsewhere.
5) If CO2 can warm the surface, someone please show us the proof. Physicists proved a very long time ago some very esoteric and difficult things about the nature of energy, matter, and the physical constants. Nowadays they claim to have found, to specify a few examples, the Higgs Boson and to have proven that quarks exist, and that neutrinos can change flavor…but cannot produce an experiment that demonstrates the radiative property of CO2 that will force the surface to warm?
In 5) above, proved and proven and proof was a poor choice of words.
I should have said “demonstrated”, or “shown evidence of”.
5) CO2 DOES warm the earth. Without it or other greenhouse gasses it would be quite uncnfortable here. The Question is, if any additonal CO2 causes dangerous excelerated warming. Obviouslay it does not.
Obviously not the first time hearing that, Johanne.
I am wanting some strong experimental evidence, from one side or the other.
I have been following this for decades, after studying climatology, meteorology, chemistry, Earth history, geology, etc…back in the 1980s.
Saying it don’t make it so, and neither does repeating it a million times.
Perhaps you have something more compelling that just staying your view?
Evidence, or why evidence of an experimental nature is not available, or maybe it is and you know where to find it…
*shrugs and sighs*
Chaam… that is a most concise description of the current state of the existing climate debate I think I’ve seen. All the arguments about temperature rise and fall; ice melt or not; and other minutia of the technical details are irrelevant except for the point you have made. Not to say that those details are not important to science but that all the current debate depends on the veracity of the “Control Knob” thesis
insert all the current debate ABOUT POLICY
Chaam
The ‘Outer limits” was a late 1960s show. “Do not attempt to adjust your TV…We are in control”. Loved it and the white, blob monsters too. The sounds were especially eerie. I keep trying to recall a show in the early 60s called “The Invaders”, but it wasn’t on for long.
Yes, loved ‘The Invaders’ as a kid. I recently discovered that they’ve been running it again here in the UK . . .
It’s still great!
I agree, I think Anthony’s statement is a bit odd.
No serious sceptic would claim that there was no global warming in the 20th century, in fact a major sceptical argument is that in general the climate is always changing. But, because the past temperature records have been endlessly tampered with, we don’t actually know what the amount of warming was. And very likely most of the warming was natural, an inevitable rebound from the end of the Little Ice Age.
Science has been hopelessly corrupted by money, politics and green doomsday fantasies: as Anthony nicely put it, the science has been adjusted out of it. We are subjected to a tsunami of lies about climate change. These lies are effective because governments around the world have been taken in and are squandering trillions of dollars trying to incompetently solve a problem that almost certainly does not exist. These lies have given us wind farms which don’t work most of the time, ruinously expensive energy which kills people and kills jobs (the recent steel industry catastrophe in Britain), biofuels that push up the price of food and destroy the rain forests. Oh, yes, and Volkswagen: because of the EU’s insane obsession with CO2 there was a massive increase in diesel cars which probably killed tens of thousands of people.
If this isn’t the biggest hoax in history I don’t know what is.
Chris
How did diesel cars kill people?
Well and succinctly put!
The movie will not be made until and unless global cooling becomes apparent.
If CAGW was, in fact, a diabolical communist plot to destroy the industrial power of the West, what would they do differently?
PS – I love a good conspiracy theory. Flying Saucers at Roswell, Aliens at Area 51, good stuff.
Well since you like UFO conspiracy’s, try this one:
http://www.amazon.com/UFOs-Generals-Pilots-Government-Officials/dp/0307717089
Of course real alien visits would mean that SETI is also a big waste of money…..
I once tried to convince a published author that s/he should consider writing such a novel. His/her partner was qualified to provide scientific input. Unfortunately, my suggestion was not accepted.
I have all of the things now… on my kindle. Look forward to reading them
Oh what the heck, may as well get another book i don’t have time to read. If it get high enough up the rankings, it may get attention from people that need to read it the most.
“some warming in the past century, some of it man made and some of it natural variation…” No one knows whether any of the recent warming was human-made. Or all of it, for that matter.
Climate physics hasn’t anywhere near the resolution to extract the effect on climate, if any, of CO2 emissions.
In fact, the surface air temperature record itself hasn’t the resolution to tell us how much warming there actually was during the 20th century. So, a statement that some indeterminate fraction of some indeterminate amount of warming is due to humans doesn’t convey much information.
But the key part of the AGW hypothesis is that eventually, in the next century, CO2 will begin to dominate.
Then the climate models will be simplified to a single factor as CO2 is dominant.
And then the models will work.
Because the climate will really be that simple.
One day…
You could raise CO2 to 2000 ppm and there would be no warming caused by that rise, since CO2 does not warm the surface. I think hard core skeptics have demonstrated that fact, but the warmists and the luke-warmists have not listened. This CO2 delusion will someday be used like we use “flat-earthers” now.
“…some warming in the past century, some of it man made and some of it natural variation …”
Please show us the evidence that “some of it [is] man made”.
UHI’s
But has UHI had any actual global impact, as opposed to local.
It may be that the land thermometer data set has been polluted by UHI and thereby gives the impression that there has been some real warming, but the satellite data set tells a different story. In the satellite data set, temperatures are broadly flat from launch (December 1978) through to the run up to the Super El Nino of 1997/8. Michael Mann’s (or Briffa’s) trees also showed no warming during this period 9hence the reason why he switched from tree ring data to the land thermometer record)
If one accepts the satellite data set as valid, one has to question whether UHI is just a faux warming seen in the land based thermometer record due to the increasing urbanisation of reporting stations creating very localised warming in and around the vicinity of the station, but since so little of the planet is urbanised, it has no real impact in raising temperatures when viewed on a global scale.
There is strong evidence to suggest that manmade warming is simply micro climatic and micro regional.
in the gold old times when they simply computed the raw data, there was no UHI visible, comparing satellite with land data.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/plot/uah/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/trend/plot/uah/trend/plot/none
If there was any UHI in the data, then it was before 1979, possibly in the twenties or thirties, when the cities and the traffic started to grow.
If anybody wants to show more warmig, he needs not UHI. Just a good statistical adjustment. is enough.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/gistemp-dts/from:1979/plot/uah/plot/gistemp-dts/from:1979/trend/plot/uah/trend
Johannes
There is no straight line linear trend in your plots.
The Gistemp is more polluted, but still one can see that as between 1979 to about 1994 temperatures were trending flat at about the 0.35degC anomaly level. Then following the Super El Nino of 1997/8, the temperatures trend flat at about the 0.8deg C anomaly level. One can see the before and after rapid rise in temperatures coincident upon the Super El Nino of 1997/8 albeit that Gistemp muddies the position a little bit with its endless homogenisations in the 1994 to the run up to that El Nino.
The position is clearer in the satellite data set which has not been so heavily homogenised. In that data set one can clearly see that temperatures are trending flat between 1979 and 1996/early 1997 at about the -0.12 anomaly level. Then following the Super El Nino of 1997/8, temperatures once again trend flat to date but this time at about the +0.13degC anomaly level.
So in summary, neither data set exhibits a straight line linear fit as you have plotted. But show temperatures trending flat (by which I mean no statistically significant warming) for the period through to the run up to the Super El Nino of 1997/8, and following that Super El Nino both temperature data sets show temperatures trending flat to date.
The gistemp record is not quite as clear cut since it is slightly different in the 1993 to 1996 period and this smudges the position.
I disagree with the timing in pollution by UHl. As far as the rest of the world is concerned (ignoring the US), it was post war development that was important, and the baby boomers of the 1950s. there was a very substantial increase in the size of towns at this time and indeed new towns being built. Further, it is the weather station distribution in the period late 1950s through to the 1980s when there is considerable station drop out from the record, thereby biasing non rural data in the record which has impacted upon the land thermometer data set. One of the biggest problems with the land based thermometer data set is that, at no time is it ever comparing apples with apples since the constituent stations from which it is drawing its data is constantly changing throughout the data set.
Thus for example, one cannot compare present day temperatures with those of say 1880 since in 1880 there were only about 300 or so stations and not all of these are still reporting data today, but the record today does not comprise simply of those stations that existed in 1880 and which are still returning data, but rather it has at times included over 5,000 stations, and is now using somewhere between 2,500 to 3,000 stations. So we are simply not looking at the same data that was used to compile the 1880 figures. Same applies to the 1939s/40s etc. We are not today using the same data that was used to compile the 1930s/40s figures. Adding in, and removing stations with constant churn over means that there is no consistent time series at all!!! This point is not sufficiently appreciated.
asybot
October 27, 2015 at 5:10 pm
UHI’s..
asybot, UHI’S does not cause a real or any real warming….it only effects the measurement (human measurement) of reality, not the reality itself, is considered as an error in the measurement of the reality,, does not constitute as any real man made climatic warming or as of any significance at all in the real warming of the last century, the warming in question.
Apart for effecting the temperature measurement method/process, does not have any other significant effect.
Urban Heat Island’s causing any real climatic warming or having some measurable share of any kind in the last century warming could be some time in the future a new theory/hypothesis on its own to be “borne” and to explain the global warming in question,,,,, but as per and up to this point in time there does not exist such a theory or hypothesis, as far as I can tell, unless…..you be first to forward one
Or maybe I am wrong and you can show me otherwise……….!
cheers
Evidence of man made warming?
How about this boatload of evidence:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/14/problematic-adjustments-and-divergences-now-includes-june-data/
Your being sarcastic right ???
As in made up by some men…and maybe some women too I guess.
Good question, Tony.
Tony says:
Please show us the evidence that “some of it [is] man made”.
My perennial question: can anyone produce a measurement quantifying the fraction of AGW out of all global warming, including the natural recovery of the planet from the Little Ice Age, natural solar/ocean effects, etc.?
But so far, no one has been able to reliably quantify AGW.
I think AGW exists, but it is too minuscule to measure. Otherwise, it would have been measured by now.
Since AGW is too small to measure, it is ipso facto a non-problem.
If any alarmist wants to try and pick apart my reasoning, please do so. I’ll wait here…
Sharing the link and the teaser on my FB page.
“Basil Radoff, is a shadowy Russian agent …” In fact the Russians have been rather neutral tending to skeptical about the whole AGW thing.
A better villain would have been an American climate scientist with a nut-case progressive ideological prejudice, conspiring to use AGW to destroy individualism and personal and economic rights; all to pave the way for his collectivist utopia.
He could be an American of German descent named, say, Him (Himmel) Jansen.
My Amazon page tells me I can borrow this book for free as an Amazon Prime member, and that I can read it for free with a subscription to Kindle Unlimited.
I am wondering if the author, or anyone else, can tell me if he would or would not profit from a person taking advantage of one of these offers.
I would not mind reading it for free, but only if the author is being reimbursed via my subscription or Prime membership fees.
The author does receive a benefit from you reading the free copy. Amazon pools the Kindle Unlimited funds and distributes to the authors based on number of reads. My wife is a new author and is a member of this system.
Sounds like they do not get as much as if someone buys it.
Anthony, hoax is not strong enough.
Fraud suits me. Money and political control are behind this “fraud”
It’s far more than that. Fraud is almost nice compared to what is really going on because I call them climate extremists.
Interesting …
Good American/Bad Russian… So original.
Basil Radoff, is a shadowy Russian agent who was given a fortune and an unconventional mission when the Soviet Union collapsed.
I dunno, the name somehow reminds me of Jay Ward’s Boris Badenov. Maybe what we really need is a comic book spoof of climate alarmism…. Too bad Mr. Ward’s no longer around….
Anthony’s statement that there has been some warming caused by man is dubious at best. I used to think some % of warming (however small) was due to man but it’s clear from this graph (link) from Joe Bastardi that there just isn’t any evidence for it. If it’s not 100% hoax, it’s 99.999% hoax.
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/37721
I am surprised at some of the strong opinions that humans have no effect.
I am with Anthony on this one although I don’t worry at all about GHG’s.
(The climateers love to say burning wood is “Carbon Neutral” and then they say it takes a hundred years plus for it to even out with new growth. Sounds like balderdash to me as I sit here tonight in front of my wood fire watching the snow glitter in the full moon outside.)
I believe humans do have at least some regional affects on climate and they are observable as others like Jim Steele have noted (read his book). After the Arrow Dam near Castlegar, BC was constructed on the Columbia River in the 60’s, the spring skiing at Red Mountain improved dramatically as the increased humidity caused lots of dry overnight powder to fall. At least that is my opinion. But we already know that damming of rivers creating huge reservoirs 100’s of miles long creates a new regional climate. Agriculture has forever changed the climate/environment of the North American prairies. Hunting of wolves changed the regional climate of Yellowstone due to overgrazing by ungulates; restoration of the wolves restored the habitat and changed the regional climate; drainage of farm land and other like activities changes the local climate; logging and deforestation changes the regional climate as well as albedo; burning billions of cubic metres of natural gas, coal, fuel oil and wood pellets releases heat into the atmosphere; paving thousands of kilometres of roads, building concrete buildings, construction of huge airports; flying aircraft all over the world leaving water vapour high in the atmosphere; shipping in the ocean leaving visible trails in the air and water — all of it has to have some impact.
Maybe it is so small as to be immeasurable, but we know we have UHI; we know that a ploughed field next to an unploughed field creates thermals.
I would argue that humans have an impact no matter how small and insignificant it is.
I just wish someone would show me some SCIENCE to quantify it. I suspect it is small compared to the overall daily/annual variance in temperature. From a place where the temperature can vary from minus 40 to plus 40 over the year, though not every year, I have a lot of trouble worrying about a degree or two over 100 years. Especially when I go back and look at temperatures from the 1880’s to around 1950 near where I live. The trends were much more significant then than they are now. Given that the climateeers are saying that the GHG issue is a post 1950 issue, I would suggest their GHG issue is minor – at least between 49 N and 82 N in North America where I have looked.
But I think it is disingenuous to suggest that humans have NO effect.
But that is just an old engineer/rancher opinion.
(It’s nice not to wake up to frost on the inside of the house every winter morning and argue whose turn it is to light the stove though. 😉 Modern heating is wonderful, including my high efficiency masonry wood fireplace, heat pump and underfloor heating and my propane backup power instead of a kerosene lamp – although I still have some.)
I don’t kid myself that when I plough a field, haul livestock in my diesel dually, dam up a creek for my trout or cut firewood and burn it that I don’t have an impact because I know I do. What about you? Zero impact? Everyone has an impact. The question is, how much?
And I think that is THE QUESTION in this whole so called Global Warming issue, or CAGW if you are a politician.
AGW? How much?
I think we can only find out the human impact on global temperature, if we can substract the influence of the natural cycles. If we look at the longer temperature graph, we see that the upward curves are higher than the downward curves. Also in the fifties it seems there was a hesitation to go down further. I guess that the complete increase in temperature of 0.7°C in 165 years is roughly each one third of UHI, natural circles and human contribution, so about 0.2°C. Plus/minus error bar…
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:36
I doubt that anyone thinks that man has no effect whatsoever, but rather no significant measurable effect.
I consider that man has an impact but it is probably no more than micro climatic and micro regional. I can’t see any signal to CO2 in the various data sets, it is either drowned by the noise of natural variation, or it is so small that it cannot be detected within the sensitivity/limitations of our measuring equipment/array and the inherent error bounds of such equipment/array. But then again, nearly all the data sets are cr*p and not fit for scientific purpose, so it is hard to draw definitive conclusions from these.
Since so little of the planet is urbanised, and so little is actively farmed, or so few valleys are flooded and dammed, or such deforestation as there may be is offset by natural greening which is happening elsewhere, whilst these activities result in temperature changes at the micro regional level, it would appear that these manmade activities leave no significant foot print when one considers the position globally. Perhaps this is not surprising since some 70% of the Earth is covered by water and due to its latent heat capacity it rules the roost. It is the oceans (and the air currents that they drive) that control and dominate our Climate.
So its not about Co2 then?
I think you are the one being disingenuous. No one says that “humans have no effect”, so that’s a straw man. That isn’t even the issue. The issue is, has manmade global warming, i.e. AGW been shown? And the answer is no, it hasn’t. That is NOT the same thing as saying that it doesn’t exist, just that if there is a human fingerprint, it is too small to ferret out, and certainly too small to make any difference to climate.
Do you realise that Nasif Nahle is a Sky Dragon Slayer who doen’t even accept the basic physics of the natural ‘greenhouse’ effect and thinks that CO2 is a cooling agent? And that graph has long been recognised as being very dodgy?
If there is no resumption to warming before 2030, and many warmists such as Julia Slingo (the head of the UK Met Office which has one of the warmest running GCM models) suggest may be the case, it will be interesting to see whether the so called ‘basic physics’ gets re-examined and may be some of the views held by Mr Nahle may in the next 15 years gain traction. Not saying that this will happen, but I can foresee it as a possibility.
I am sure that regular reader of WUWT know the views of Mr Nahle. The graph is what it is, and almost all the data in this so called science could be viewed as dodgy, or not fit for the scientific purpose to which it is being put.
Everyone should be sceptical of almost all data presented, and all arguments presented both for and against AGW. There is a lot yet to know and understand.
Bruce Cobb – it really doesn’t matter but did you read some of the posts above mine? I agree with people who say the Oceans are where it is at; I agree that as a whole, farming and urbanization is small; but also look at the night time pictures of the earth and tell me there is NO effect. We know from the 9/11 contrail studies there is an moderation impact on temperatures from contrails (or we think we know). We know we can salt the oceans with iron and change the plankton abundance. There are many examples.
I have never believed in CAGW from day one as I learned about weather, climate and the environmental issues very early in life (starting 60 years ago and continuing on through university). I worked in urban and rural development for many years from Indonesia to Nunavut, always with great respect for the environment with the goal of leaving things better than we found them.
I wasn’t trying to create a straw man and I don’t believe I did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
By the way. I read “Climate of Fear” many years ago. It was very good and worth a re-read.
To David Wells – “It’s not about CO2 then?” Not for me. Just for the thousands of politicians on the junket train to COP21 in Paris. It’s about taxation and control. Like all the things in my post (Wayne Delbeke
October 27, 2015 at 10:01 pm), I think GHG’s have an effect. But based on observations, GHG effects appear to be overwhelmed by natural variation. I can accept that I may be wrong, but I will be long dead before that gets figured out. I have told my grandchildren not to sweat it and remember to carry out what they carry in. We all should leave a light footprint (but a footprint nonetheless).
Just a little note for those folks that say little of the land is “occupied”. True. There are something like 2 million farms in the US but they farm nearly 45% of the land and if you add in tree farms, well over half of the land in the US is under cultivation. (Note – countries like Canada have much less arable land due to forest cover, cold climate, mountains and tundra.)
Trivia for those that think there is a big unoccupied wasteland out there in the flyover states. There isn’t.
http://www.farmlandinfo.org/statistics
Different format showing agriculture and forested areas (45% and 33% respectively):
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/agricultural-land-sq-km-wb-data.html
I too have written a political thriller aimed at bringing the skeptical story to the masses, but mine is set in an Australian political context and may not appeal to everyone. But it does not involve global conspiracies.
Judging by the synopsis, I would doubt that Dan’s book would have traction with the uncommitted.
Where I live there is a local writer who has published in a similar vein but on the alarmist side. His book, called ‘Cull’, is a travesty. A Republican President, the archetype of right wing evilness, plans to solve the problem of overpopulation in a climate change ravaged world by unleashing a coordinated biological attack on the entire Middle Eastern population. He is aided by a typically evil Conservative Australian Prime Minister who purchases a fleet of US strike fighters so he can strafe the boatloads of climate refugees now heading to Australia. The plot is foiled by an ex KGB agent. I had great laugh.
My book is called ‘A Climate for Change’ BTW. Available on Amazon or in hard copy at http://www.vividpublishing.com.au/aclimateforchange/
“Peter O’Brien is retired and lives with his wife, Barbara, at Batemans Bay on the south coast of NSW. He graduated from the Royal Military College in 1970 and served as an infantry platoon commander with the 4th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment in South Vietnam. He served in the Army for 21 years, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel.”
It sounds an interesting CV for a climate sceptic – is the book available in the UK?
Hi Peter, completely off topic, I’m doing research into military battle speeches:
Battle speeches
I’ve got historic examples and some modern ones from the US & UK. However seeing your active service, I wondered if you could cite any examples from Australia. You can contact me on the above website or via my blog (scottishsceptic.co.uk)
I don’t want to confuse a speculative work of fiction with Sibel Edmonds’s not speculative “The Lone Gladio”, but what the heck.
http://www.amazon.com/Lone-Gladio-Novel-Sibel-Edmonds-ebook/dp/B00NQ6BK68/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
“Basil Radoff, is a shadowy Russian agent …” give me a break. the Russians are the least involved in creating the CAGW scam. I can think of a lot of better contenders for the part of the villain.
The Chinese were present at the 28gate meeting at the BBC (why on earth did they have anyone from China?) Likewise the CRU got a huge grant from some Chinese University.
And which country has profited massively as the West turned on to try to destroy its own economy?
Nobody is saying humans have “no” impact. Global dimming and all the things William Delbeke mention above make it clear they do. In context to GW however, it is abundantly clear from the co2 vs temp graph on joe bastardi’s article, which I don’t think even the warmer’s dispute, that there is no corellation between co2 and temperature. Game set hoax.
http://patriotpost.us/opinion/37721
Do you not recognise how dodgy that graph in Bastard’s article is? Check the WUWT dodgy graph archive. Nasif Nahle is a Sky Dragon Slayer (he claims the natural greenhouse effect doesn’t even exist, that physics is wrong and that CO2 cools). So I wouldn’t put any faith in it at all.
If there is no resumption to warming before 2030, and many warmists such as Julia Slingo (the head of the UK Met Office which has one of the warmest running GCM models) suggest may be the case, it will be interesting to see whether the so called ‘basic physics’ gets re-examined and may be some of the views held by Mr Nahle may in the next 15 years gain traction. Not saying that this will happen, but I can foresee it as a possibility.
I am sure that regular reader of WUWT know the views of Mr Nahle. The graph is what it is, and almost all the data in this so called science could be viewed as dodgy, or not fit for the scientific purpose to which it is being put.
Everyone should be sceptical of almost all data presented, and all arguments presented both for and against AGW. There is a lot yet to know and understand.
For a work of fiction to have an effect, it has to be well-written.
It was only a matter of time before thriller writers realised the huge potential for global warming. I’ve ordered my copy.
Just realised why I want to read this book. It’s because I’m intrigued to know how much of it will need to be “fiction” – my guess is not a lot.
Where did the author pluck that Ngata name from? It can only be New Zealand Maori. Not saying it’s implausible, as Kiwis have recent form in the field, with Auckland University oceanographer Paul Kench especially prominent recently in debunking ocean-rise claims in the Pacific.
But Ngata is still a strange choice. Is Coffman keen to depict the US as a “nation of immigrants”? Was he keen to go uber-exotic? Did he want a name that could not be tied to anyone in the US?
Ngata doesn’t figure in the top 70,000 US surnames, as collated by the OUP’s Dictionary of American Family Names. (Interestingly, especially for Monty Python aficionados, Ni appears to have 455 occurrences.)
Another oddball is the Russian agent with the comic book name. The Russians? Really? Does Coffman follow the real-world action? Or would an American bad guy kill sales?
Sounds Japanese American. Issei or Neissei.
That would be Nagata. I also agree with Graphite that Radoff is a comic book name. In the end, I’m old and don’t waste my time reading fiction anymore, except the stuff you can’t avoid in the mass media.
As Steve P says, if it was Japanese it would be Nagata.
There are plenty of people in New Zealand bearing the name Ngata, the most famous being Heremaia Ngata, better known as Harry Ngata, a professional soccer player of some standing in Australasia.
He should have called his protagonist: James Bond.
Never mind the book, you claim that climate has warmed last century due in part by human input. What data (evidence) do you have to support this claim?
Well, there is no data known to exist. But that also means one cannot tell that human influence doesn’t exists.
We can affect LOCAL weather but climate? no we can’t because the drivers are not within out influence. The theory of the GHE has never been validated never mind other pet theories that float around the internet.
Get the data, prove the theory.
I have to thank you for this post. This book is terrible, but it’s terrible in that “so terrible it’s hilarious” sort of way. I’m loving it. The plot of the book is so absurd I want this to be turned into a B movie complete with overacting and cheesy special effects.
I know this post says:
But I don’t think that is remotely accurate. If you want to see my take on it, you can find it here, but the short version is this book is about paining global warming as a conspiracy complete with assassinations and terrorism in an effort to take over the world.
And it’s awesome. Horrible, but awesome.
“I’m not fully comfortable with the “hoax” title, as there indeed has been some warming in the past century, some of it man made and some of it natural variation,”.
Fossil fuel emissions have more than doubled over the last few decades. Nevertheless, CO2 have been increasing at roughly 2ppm per year – there has been no acceleration.
Temperatures over the last 20 years have not increased commensurately with what would be expected from the increase in CO2.
At this stage, the only scientific statement we can make is that we don’t know – we do not understand either how human emissions affect total CO2 in the atmosphere, nor how CO2 in the atmosphere affects temperature. We may have an opinion but we don’t know.
Brandon:
Ever read “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”? Maybe reality is scarier than fiction. Having been threatened with not being able to leave countries overseas for not agreeing to “dash”; and being told repeatedly that North Americans don’t know how “to do business”, reality checks are important; and a reason why I stopped working overseas. It got so you could never tell who was a businessman or a spook and where the line was.
The most stupid aspect of this analogous rhetorical debate is that even if we are changing the climate there is absolutely nothing we can do about that unless we begin a process of culling the population bearing in mind that as Obama is about to spend $80 billion on new B3 long range bombers he must believe that oil will be around for a little while yet. This view is contradicted by the latest BP report which says oil and gas have at best 68 years with coal disappearing by 2100 so at least Figueres whilst in retirement on a lovely fat UN pension can look out of her centrally heated and air condition apartment in New York and watch Tesla’s grinding to halt because the wind turbines cannot be turned into the wind or serviced and maintained because there is no coal, no gas and no oil to generate auxiliary electricity to keep them warm or fuel the helicopter to service thousands of off shore turbines.
Its a bad joke to begin with but the joke gets worse because the proposed solution to a non problem has not a hope in hell of providing a solution so when the word hoax is used that is the correct description it is all a bad joke a political charade of apocalyptic proportions.
You cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet but that doesn’t mean we should spend what is left of our lives wearing sack cloth and ashes but that doesn’t mean oil gas and coal will last forever because they wont and as yet there is no technology, no device no means of production even speculated that can provide a product which has the energy and portability of oil, we burn 95 million barrels of the black stuff every single day and only fools believe that this can go on forever into infinity.
“with coal diappearing by 2100”
We have about 300 years of coal right hear in Wyoming and maybe more now that the EPA is regulating it out of the market.
Give BP a call then! All I am trying to do is expose the complete and utter stupidity of the whole climate change rhetoric. Greenies say we should be investing more money in renewables but they never say exactly what those renewable technologies should be if they are not wind and solar. Clearly wind and solar cannot work in the long term they only exist for the purpose of alarmist rhetoric because Greenpeace activist could not pose as the righteous authors of a solution if they did not at least have wind and solar to imply that we really can live without coal oil and gas.
I will be long gone by the time coal oil and gas expire but China would not be recovering islands off shore unless they have begun to realise that without have raw materials they have a real problem and those raw materials they need may well be beneath the sea.
So in 68 years we better have a bunch more nukes in place to provide power? Or here is some food for thought …
My father ran a team of horses on a road grader; he mowed and stacked hay with horses, we had no running water or electricity and not even a graveled road to the farm “68” years ago. We rounded up cattle and drove them to market on horseback. One of my great grandmothers was born in Butte, Montana the year that Canada became a country in 1867. she had an amulet from a Sioux sub chief of Sitting Bull. ( He came across the border into Canada in the Cypress Hills of Alberta/Saskatchewan for a few years.)
Leduc No. 1 was brought in by Esso in February of 1947 and started “68” years of prosperity in Alberta in the oil patch. Right now, Shell has shut down two major multi-billion dollar upgrader projects as even if the price of oil was higher, there is no way to ship it out of Alberta at the moment. So, as far as oil running out in 68 years, if we can’t pump it or rail it; there will be LOTS left in the ground.
That issue aside, the advances in the last “68” years have been amazing. Now there are oil and gas wells all around the old homestead, powerlines, paved roads, and huge diesel powered cattle liners.
So where will we be in another “68” years?
I would imagine there will be a lot of amazing changes.
Maybe a fleet of solar powered blimps carrying oil to petrochemical plants to make plastics by passing the Obaminators ban of Keystone?? Just kidding. But we’ll need something to power all those cell phones and computers. And I doubt we’ll have electric farm tractors by then … but maybe biodiesel or something else. Human ingenuity will prevail.
Wayne
And we have 500 years of known coal reserves at current consumption rates here in Australia. Coal is not running out anytime soon. BP are in to oil, not coal even though hydrocarbons can be extracted from coal easily.
Perfectly comfortable with ‘hoax’.
Definitely ok with hoax.
As with everything, follow the money and you get the answer.
added to my kindle (OT but I love kindle unlimited, read a book a day usually so well worth the 9.95 a month) thanks for the heads up
It’s good to see discussion about whether man has had an impact on global warming . I think skeptics including Anthony always seem careful to state this as a fact as if to not concede that point would be to sound a bit like a lunatic. What doesn’t get emphasised is that whether man has influenced climate or not is irrelevant but whether there is a direct correlation between CO2 and global warming AKA climate change is what the issue is about. Man’s influence through concrete high rise Inspired urban island effect is hard to refute but when one looks at CO2 and temperature the key major assumption which is the dominant influence on policy debate in this area fails miserably. It is in fact irrelevant whether the increased CO2 is man made or not if there is no evidence that the correlation actually exists. That is what the hiatus is all about . That is what hind casting alarmists predictions have shown. It is proof that whatever it is that is driving future climate and temperature changes it is NOT CO2. The sooner sceptics turn the argument to that clear disconnect the easier it will be to dismantle AGW theory. We have to stop putting in the disclaimer that there has been some human induced influence and start saying there has not been any CO2 influence such that removing CO2 from human lifestyle would actually make a difference.
Stop making this concession because warmists get some comfort that at least they are half right. The reality is that everything related to their predictions are wrong.
I would like to pick up a (hard) of Climate Change, the Facts, but curiously no European Amazon shop stocks it. Why????
Pretty well written. Half way through on Kindle. Enjoying the read.
Amazing and standing on its own merit Coffman has proven ‘that fact is stranger than fiction’ ..looking forward to reading more of his works before the lights go off
Yesterday afternoon I finished reading the digital version of the book ‘A Sinister Charade’ by Dan Coffman.
As a fictional thriller/ adventure/ action book it was pretty enjoyable.
I liked the down to earth characterization of the protagonist cum hero named Jesse Ngata.
The book is rooted in a plot to destroy capitalism by a hardline Soviet communist leaving Russia and going undercover near the collapse of the hardline communist coupe (1991). The hardline Russian’s undercover plan is to wage a long term campaign to destroy capitalism by using the emerging climate change (global warming) movement as a vehicle and his financial means to do so is from immense Russian owned Swiss bank accounts of German WWII gold the Russians attained at end of WWII. After 20++ years into that plan we see Jesse Ngata being impacted by the undercover activities and thus the action begins against the plan. Well, that is not too different from the worldwide plots used by Ian Fleming in many of his James Bond books, so it isn’t atypical. It is a plot where the Cold War never really ended but just went underground; while reading the book, however, one can have strong doubts of the credibility of its premise that the Cold War never ended.
In the end, it is a book that leaves me with considerable intellectual resolve on behalf of those critical (aka skeptical) wrt the hypothesis of dangerous/significant AGW from fossil fuels.
NOTE: A very interesting point to me was that only one real person was mentioned in the book. That person was mentioned twice; once near the very beginning of the book and once at the very end of the book. That person, the only real person the booked mentioned, was Maurice Strong. I have heard that meme of some kind of all-powerful Maurice Strong too many times; it weakened the book in my view but not fatally so. I recommend the book.
John