Guest Opinion By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Ryan Cooper (left below), an innumerate journalist writing for The Week, asks (alongside the obligatory picture of a cuddly polar bear, right below) the tendentious question, “Have conservatives noticed their favorite climate talking point has been obliterated?
 |
 |
| Dumb journo | Dumb animal |
“Conservatives”, says Cooper, “have long been searching for a reason to do nothing about climate change … Several years ago, it seemed like that crowd had a perfect argument to justify inaction on climate: the global warming ‘pause’ … But lo and behold, two years later warming has surged back with a vengeance.”
Well, actually, it was the unlamented “Dr” Pachauri, railroad engineer turned climate guru, who gave the Pause its name in a speech in Melbourne more than three years ago. Oh, and the Pause was present until its peak length of 18 years 9 months just eight months back:
The WUWT Pause graph displayed by Ted Cruz at a Senate hearing in November 2015
Cooper obediently trots out the Party Line that most of the missing global warming had gone into hiding in the oceans (no original thinker he). He adds that the el Niño that has now ended was nature’s way of putting the heat back into the atmosphere – except that it’s been doing that naturally for tens of thousands of years.
He says, “You should never hang an entire view of a chart on the last few data points” – and then hangs his entire view of the following chart on the last few data points, which show a spike in global warming caused by the more than usually active but now declining el Niño.
Cooper carefully cuts off the observed-temperature trend line just at the peak, concealing the inconvenient truth that in the past two months global temperatures have plummeted as the el Niño comes to an end.
Next, we are treated to a not particularly scary prediction that there is a 99% chance the world will be warmer this year than last (maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but even if it is it won’t be by much, and it won’t be a bad thing).
No Clim-Comm piece would be complete without the usual catalogue of lurid supposed disasters: “Coral bleaching has reached epidemic proportions” (well, that natural defense mechanism happens whenever there is a severe el Niño, such as 1998 or two further great El Niños before that over the past 300 years, and the corals survive it just fine: they’ve faced a lot worse in the past 175 million years).
“The Arctic just had its warmest winter on record” (and a good thing too).
“The ocean level has increased 36.5 mm since April 2011” (except that Cooper carefully chose the satellite data, which have serious calibration problems, rather than the less excitable tide gauges, and he also carefully cherry-picked his period by starting it at a local nadir in global sea level and ending it at the el-Niño-driven apex).
“Extreme drought and extreme precipitation are happening all over the place” (they always were and they always will, but the trend in extreme droughts, as in all droughts, has been downward for 30 years, and even the IPCC, both in its Fifth Assessment Report and in its Special Report on Extreme Weather, says there is no evidence for systemic change in precipitation, and still less evidence that such patterns of change as have occurred are driven by global warming).
Cooper ends with a traditional Marxstream-media rant: “Will they [the non-Marxists] come around and admit their previous mistake, and join in advocating for immediate, aggressive climate policy? The world is waiting.”
Well, it can wait a little longer, just like Cooper’s grasp of grammar (“advocate” is transitive, so “for” after it is superfluous) and of climate science. The IPCC’s First Assessment Report predicted that in the first 15 years of the 21st century the world would warm at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] Celsius degrees per century.
Observed global warming measured by satellites and taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH monthly temperature anomalies from January 2001 to June 2016, including the dramatic recent spike in temperatures but not yet including the la Niña that may follow the now-departed el Niño, is well below 0.6 C°/century:
Observed warming over the period, then, is about one-fifth of the IPCC’s originally-predicted central rate.
Before the usual suspects whine that it’s not fair to consider only the past 15 years, and that one should go back to 1990 itself, I say this. The IPCC, following the computer models, predicted in 1990 that, as business-as-usual CO2 concentration increased, the rate of global warming after 2000 should be somewhat greater than the rate of global warming before it.
Global warming since 1990, at 1.2 C°/century equivalent, is more than double the warming rate since 2001, suggesting that the ever-increasing CO2 concentration in the air is causing less and less global warming, contrary to official predictions.
I cannot tell you whether there will be a la Niña later this year and into next year. But if there is, and if it is anything like as noticeable as it was following the 1998 temperature spike, then by this time next year the Pause will have reappeared, and will be close to 20 years in length.
As the discrepancy between prediction and observation continues to widen beyond all hope of concealment by further data-tampering, it will eventually become impossible to bury the now well-established scientific truth that, even though CO2 emissions are above the business-as-usual forecast made by the IPCC in 1990, the rate of global warming is a small fraction of what had then been predicted.
How, then, has the scare been maintained for so long? The chief reason is that the climate extremists readopted an unpleasant tactic first developed by the totalitarians of the 20th century: organized, paid, structured vilification of anyone who dared to oppose them.
In the end, politicians know that climate skeptics won’t screech at them and won’t spend tens of billions on front groups whose sole purpose is to trash their reputations. But climate extremists do that, and it works. It frightens off ordinary folk, who would otherwise have seen through the climate scam far more quickly and completely than they have.
In the end, though, the world won’t warm at anything like the predicted rate. By the time even the extremists have realized that scientifically illiterate pieces like Cooper’s can no longer sweep the growing discrepancy under the carpet, how many tens of millions will their cruel policies of opposing affordable electric power have killed in third-world countries?
Mr Cooper should be ashamed of himself. But he won’t be. One needs a conscience first.
Oh dear. WUWT and it’s ridiculous obsession with seeing Marxists everywhere. McCarthy would be proud.
McCarthy was correct. The US Government and academia were riddled with active, conscious agents of mass murdering Marxism.
Yes, indeed, Mr. Russell. See Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, by Ann Coulter. The release of the Venona Papers, as thoroughly described by Ms. Coulter, provided ample evidence that benben’s statement is misinformed (to say the least).
Hmmm well I’m in academia so you’d expect that I would be surrounded. How would you describe a communist?
[Confirmed, he works for http://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en Odd though that given he’s “in academia”, he has to use a fake email address “bspammer66”. You’d think he’d have enough integrity to put that force of academia and the integrity it implies behind his name. Obviously not – Anthony]
It wasn’t easy for me to escape that cruel fate. Luck and pluck.
How would you describe a communist?
Mom. But she went apostate in her later years. (Unlike Aunt Louise.)
look in a mirror?
“How would you describe a communist?”
In this era after the total failure of several communist countries, most notably the old USSR, few call themselves “communists”. And I agree with them, it is better to use the more general term “collectivist”.
The collectivist looks to the state (government) to control the society and looks for ever greater power to be given to the government at all levels so that it may force everyone to do exactly what the collective has determined is just. No doubt you are surrounded indeed.
The opposite of the collectivist is the individualist who claims that he owns himself and that he and his family should make the decisions about how to live life. He actually thinks that he should be left alone to live his life. If he is a real radical he may even be heard at times to mutter, “live and let live”. (no collectivist would ever say that even on the most dramatic of drugs)
There are many people someplace in between the two poles given above. Most Americans seem to be sheep who are for the government making those hard choices for them, but I still think that a large segment of the population values liberty over safety at this time. But we darn sure have beaten the individualism out of the young. Stalin was right, he wanted to “educate” the young and turn them into the obedient slave-workers the state needs.
The above is just off the cuff. If you really want to dig deeper, there are several links I could provide.
“Hmmm well I’m in academia…”
Ah, you’re a student.
That explains why you know everything.
Jolly good, carry on.
catweazle666,
+97%. 🙂
I think the term ‘communist’ ought to be ditched, by those opposed to what to my mind is better described elitist totalitarianism. Using the former actually helps in the recruitment of useful . . not real smart folks, it seems to me, since they will imagine the goal they are lending support to is a “classless society”, which is the exact opposite of what I believe the actual goal is.
What we just saw in regard to Ms. Clinton’s non-indictment, is a taste of things to come, as is the “immunity” to any civil or criminal prosecution the EU political elite enjoy . .
Communists are those who have a deep, abiding, Gnostic knowledge that the “invisible hand” described by Adam Smith is wrong, but can’t explain why Venezuela has no toilet paper.
@ anthony, I prefer to remain anonymous (which I think is wise given the vitriol displayed once again in this thread) and you should really respect my decision by not posting personal info about me in your capacity as moderator. Please remove that link to my workplace.
[nope, sorry. You brought up your position in academia, and the link reveals no personal information about you -Anthony]
Q. “How would you describe a communist?”
A. A socialist with guns.
Anthony, yes it does. There are many Ben’s in academia, globally, but not that many at Leiden. A name and a workplace and 5 minutes of searching is all it takes. Not to mention that you also put the bigger part of my email address out there. Again, please remove it. It’s very unpleasant and servers no function. I’m sure people here trust you enough that you can just confirm my academic status without giving hints about my personal info.
[From the WUWT policy page:
Anonymity is not guaranteed on this blog. Posters that use a government or publicly funded IP address that assume false identities for the purpose of hiding their source of opinion while on the taxpayers dime get preferential treatment for full disclosure, ditto for people that make threats.
You used the University network to make commentary here.
-Anthony ]
@ benben
The ultimate in dishonesty is for someone to be utterly ashamed of him/her self, …. but only after being outed, …… for publicly voicing what he/she professes to believe in.
I agree with benben on this Anthony. I too am in “academics” and I choose to not
use my whole name due to the intolerance by the “progressives” in academia that benben can’t seem to find even though it is backed up by numerous studies and surveys (I realize he said communists or Marxists which is a step or two further than a progressive but there are many in academia who proudly call themselves leftist and use Marxist thought in their research). At any rate, I think that the fact that he comes here and tries to engage in dialogue is a positive and there is no reason to partially “out” him by giving his university. And please don’t do it to me. Thanks!
[Ben Ben has been hostile here by saying “Oh dear. WUWT and it’s ridiculous obsession with seeing Marxists everywhere. McCarthy would be proud.”. As far as I’m concerned, that’s an insult, because I certainly don’t see “Marxists everywhere”, yet he paints me and others with a broad brush of his own bias. If he can’t take the risk of using the university network to run his commentary under a fake identity, then he shouldn’t. You on the other hand aren’t using a fake identity, and clearly identify your university affiliation. That’s the difference. Besides, it is in our policy page. I take a dim view of academics hiding behind fake identities in order to hurl insults, and he’s certainly unapologetic for his behavior. – Anthony]
The fact that many of your fellow academians are not as far left as you are is not evidence that there are no Marxists in academia.
@ benben
“How would you describe a communist”
[Short Version]
Controlling a populace by controlling its energy use is just way too inviting for Totalitarians. In 2009 shortly after the Copenhagen CO2-Climate Change COP, Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus noted the similarity of CO2-Climate Change to Communist thinking, PC, and irrational ideology or Religion:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2009/12/18/czech-president-klaus-global-warming-science-new-religion.html
“We’ll be the victims of irrational ideology. They will try to dictate to us how to live, what to do, how to behave,” Klaus said. “What to eat, travel, and what my children should have. This is something that we who lived in the communist era for most of our lives — we still feel very strongly about. We are very sensitive in this respect. And we feel various similarities in their way of arguing or not arguing. In the way of pushing ahead ideas regardless of rational counter-arguments.”
A Communist is a Totalitarian and/or Narcissist who thinks s/he has all the answers, but answers which never seem to apply to her/himself – apart from The Party being in as much control as possible over the rest of people in a Society, if not totally. A Communist has chosen Marx’s Revolution as their Model, although in the U.S. they’ve found they need [an Italian Communist] Gramsci’s Hegemony to bring about the Revolution; because the Middle Class has prospered in the U.S., and therefore the Workers didn’t revolt. Thus the Communists decided to abandon the banner of Communism and infiltrate the Democrat Party [and evey other Societal Institution available] because they realized they couldn’t win Marx’s critical First Majority as Communists. Academia has become largely a hot bed of Communist “thinking”
Now they call themselves “Progressives”.
And Diana West’s book, American Betrayal. It references the new information obtained from the Venona papers and Russian records (now re-closed by Putin).
The sheriff and I take a dim view of show offs with guns.
– just love that line from Support Your Local Sheriff.
o Sorry. Carry on.
@Anthony, well I’m sure we can both agree that I’m not threatening anyone. The public money thing… well, my program was actually not driven by taxpayer money but by companies. But sure, there is no way for you to check that so whatever. However, if you’re truly interested in having people from the other side of the fence visit your blog, you should consider removing that part.
Actually, Anthony Watts, I think I’ll stop posting on this website from now on. I really dislike how you threw my personal info out there, and your subsequent self-righteous reaction to my request to have it removed. But I guess that was the objective of your moderation intervention in the first place. Good job Mr. Watts!
Kind regards,
Ben
The only McCarthyism I see going on here involves the RICO20 and the ‘clean’ AG’s. I’m sure you were very concerned about their inappropriate behavior. You live in an awfully fragile glass house to be throwing such stones, benny.
I don’t know if they’re “everywhere” but on 90% of American colleges, they’re all over the place, teaching young skulls full of mush. Wait. Did I say teaching? I meant indoctrinating.
BenBen, your statement is ridiculous. WUWT does not see Marxists everywhere. There are people posting comments who believe government and bureaucracies are inefficient and thus making government and bureaucracies bigger will lead to more inefficiencies and thus more taxes, less growth, smaller middle class, and more poor.
Ha! I invite you to read the other comments.
Well, Howdy benben. How’s the old red flag hammer and sickle these days.
“A man who has not been a socialist before 25 has no heart. If he remains one after 25 he has no head.”—King Oscar II of Sweden
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/head-heart-and-science/
I have read the other comments, and you are either paranoid or lying.
re: “‘A man who has not been a socialist before 25 has no heart. If he remains one after 25 he has no head.’—King Oscar II of Sweden” Ron Clutz
The earliest known version of this observation is attributed to
mid-nineteenth century historian and statesman François Guizot:
Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart;
to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.politics/MF0PiYYN_AM
Dan Kurt
Actually, a major theme of WUWT posters is the promotion of right wing and Conservative politics, and the trashing of anything which smacks of Socialism. I have posted here for many years and it has always been thus. Sadly it often detracts from useful information that can be found here. By the way, a Communist is the opposite pole from someone who thinks they are the centre of all that is important in society and only they and their beliefs matter. Both poles are dysfunctional, but the individualist has been in the ascent for some years now in the West.
“with seeing Marxists everywhere:”..
When they are parading themselves down the street in front of you, its pretty hard not to see them.
Open you other eye.
You can’t see the Marxists if you’re suffering from proctocraniosis, as [snip] apparently is.
@jorge
There is now a surgical procedure that mitigates the worst effects of Proctocraniosis called Plexibody. Plexibody surgery inserts a Plexiglas window into the lower abdomen allowing those suffering from Proctocraniosis to see where they are going. Unfortunately, it is not a popular, well known procedure.
A homophobic slur! Wonderful! Please keep up the useful contributions to this debate, Jorge.
now, implying that Proctocraniosis is related to being gay, THAT is homophobic slur, benben.
But it’s still good joke, thanx
Like most leftists, benben is incapable of arguing honestly.
He has to lie about what others believe in order to vilify them.
Proctocraniosis? Is that like “He views the world through a glass navel?”
bebben. Please look up the Venona Papers and see that America was the most penetrated country, in modern times, by Communists. Your statement, is incorrect, unfair to WUWT and its readers and either stems from willful deceit or ignorance of the role of Marxists in the last century as well as this one.
Given what marxism/socialism does to standards of living, we’ve got a right to be paranoid. Venezuela being the most recent example.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/17/the-left-who-lust-after-a-socialist-paradise-should-look-at-what/
To quote Sowell.
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Benben
What other names have you used here?
benben is the poster who wouldn’t stop insisting that the “there hasn’t been global warming since ____” claims were based on the cherry-picking of dates. “Academia”…how sad. That sort of intellect would’ve been much more useful in the janitorial field.
I believe this says it best, to wit:
Academics are those who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
benben you wouldn’t know your Troposphere from your Uranus, why would anyone be interested in anything you have to say?
Well, I for one am very entertained by your highly intelligent jokes. Please continue!
Fair point that the linking of ‘failure to read graphs’ with ‘Marxism’ is unjustified.
Even if it was true, the article doesn’t justify it.
Which is a weakness.
“Don’t let El Nino write off the Pause until the next La Nino is factored in”.
That is a well-reasoned argument.
“Don’t let Reds under the Bed mention El Nino”.
That is unpersuasive.
My thinking exactly
La Nina.
Aye.Typo.
My record shows I know my atmospheric science
But not my Spanish, alas.
Benben: that’s your takeaway from the post?
Well, as per my original comments, I think it’s quite ridiculous attempt to overtly link concern about climate change with Marxism (not actual Marxism of course, but the evil left wing boogeyman that conservatives Americans have made Marx to be). For example this quote, where the author inserts Marxism into something completely irrelevant to actual Marx. It’s just plain bad journalism which only panders to people already agreeing with the author.
“Cooper ends with a traditional Marxstream-media rant: “Will they [the non-Marxists] come around and admit their previous mistake, and join in advocating for immediate, aggressive climate policy? The world is waiting.” ”
Then, content wise… meh. For example, at one point the author complains that a graph is used that does not show the last two months of a temperature line. But then the author himself uses a graph that ends in 2012. Why would you do that? Plenty more errors in the work, but I don’t think this thread is the right place to discuss that.
If your comment wasn’t poor quality irony then clearly you didn’t read the post. But analogy is tough for true believers to grok.
I got in trouble for criticizing the Yanamamo, once. But the drug-crazed warmongers grew on me after a while.
(Still don’t think much of the Yanamamo, though.)
benben,
I too prefer the term “collectivist” because it covers all the bases (socialism, marxism, etc.) Here is a simple way to look at it: An individualist says “People should help those that are less fortunate than themselves.” But a collectivist says “People MUST help those that are less fortunate than themselves.” And then the collectivist sets about creating a government to do just that, forgetting how easily power corrupts people.
Collectivist is too broad a term, IMO.
I think that part of the problem is trying to put people into neat little boxes How many here support public education?
What about people who believe that government should be as small as possible, but who also believe that small as possible includes providing education, police, army etc…
Where does the logic go then? “Collectivists are bad, and I’m not one of them, except for the issues that I’m a collectivists on”
How many people who are anti collectivist would do away with the army, police, public education etc….
Hey Phillip, +1 for that. It’s very difficult to even respond to a lot of the replies here because everyone just throws around terms like communist and collectivist with no clear definition whatsoever. Nobody just wants more inefficient government without getting anything in return, and it’s just shows how little people actually talk to people with other opinions, to see people here claim that leftwing ‘marxists’ are only interested in exactly that.
It’s about providing the basic services that you would want of a modern nation state (security, education, healthcare) so that every member of society has access to it at reasonable costs. It’s quite an interesting intellectual challenge to think about what structure society should have to achieve those goals, and that is probably why academia is more left wing than the general population (at least in the US, in western europe everyone is way left compared to the US).
Cheers,
ben
Paul, beyond that, the collectivist usually sets up so that others are the ones who are forced to help, and he and people he likes are those who will always get the help.
Government should only provide those services that only government can provide efficiently.
Police/Fire/Defense fall into that category.
Education doesn’t. Government ruining of education is one of the biggest problem this country has to solve.
Literacy in the US was in the 90th percentile before any public school system had been established. Families and communities took teaching the next generation seriously. The goal of establishing public education was not to shore up lacking private teaching (which was not lacking). It was to make it easier to indoctrinate the young by putting a degree of separation between them and their families.
Should the State provide food as well? I can guarantee that without it you will die of one of a number of well documented medical conditions, therefore food must be considered medicinal. This silly notion that the government ‘provides’ so many valuable services is laughable. There are extremely few things that the government provides that the private sector cannot let alone do it better: defense, courts, police, standards. Charter schools routinely outperform the
public schoolsteacher’s unions, LASIK and cosmetic surgery have come down in cost with no third payer; private roads are better, faster, and cheaper; etc..You don’t like the tarring of being called a Marxist? Then stop advocating for coercive central planning. Just because you don’t like the darker implications and side effects of your pining for a return to feudalism and serfdom (is it truly a coincidence that Europe leads the way?), doesn’t mean that the shoes don’t fit. And the kicker in all this: you actually think you’re entitled to anonymity when you actively advocate enslaving those around you. It’s a kinder, gentler slavery but it still tells them what they can do, what they can earn, where they can live, what they can say, and most importantly what they can think.
COMMENTSJoin the Discussion
Temasek PKG How Temasek is investing post-Brexit
1 Hour Ago|04:23
The U.K. economy will be negatively affected by the country’s vote to leave the EU, according to a new CNBC survey of chief financial officers (CFOs), with the results also suggesting the recent referendum will do little to boost the chances of Donald Trump becoming the next U.S. president.
Ninety-seven percent of global CFOs across a wide range of industries said that Brexit would have a “negative” or “very negative” impact on the U.K. economy over the next six months, with 81.8 percent stating the same for the economy of the European Union.
Benben, something for you. Another 97 percent …
(not to counter your point, Janus100, just to amplify and remind bb of how accurate 97%ers are…..)
http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/truey.jpg
#(:))
If the economy of a large number of grouped countries is going to be so negatively impacted by the leaving of one, then they were fraudulent in their percieved performance in the first place. Just look at the annual balance of payments deficit and increased annual debt individually and collectively. Some of the decline is punishement for leaving, the rest is that the economies were and still remain on life support anyway. If you take away the constant cash infusion most are negative growth.
Oh that is a universal trait common to collectivist masses world wide:
As just happened in Australia: http://joannenova.com.au/2016/07/politically-tragic-soft-left-journalists-completely-missed-the-defcon-vote/
They constantly read their own press and believe it without a hint of skepticism and thus are susceptible to government propaganda and are inclined to uncritically accept the climate change alarmist meme.
benben —
When a name becomes tainted you change it. Communists now call themselves Progressives. If you don’t think Progressives are Communists consider what type of society the Progressives envision the future should hold for humanity.
There are two types of Progressives. Those Progressives who know they themselves are Communists and those Progressives who are too dumb to know that they themselves are Communists. I think you fit into the last group.
Eugene WR Gallun
Oh dear benben you seem to be as illiterate as Mr Cooper; that’s very embarrassing. You claim to be “in academia” but are not aware that possessive pronoun “its” does not have an apostrophe. How stupid is that?
We have been penetrated. My tablet has been programmed by others to change “its” to “it’s”, causing me the nuisance of extra time to correct it.
Next they will change “they are” or “they’re” to “their” or “there” as many are now writing wrongly.
Or “cite” to “site”.
Or use “sex” for “gender”.
As in the job application that asked “Sex: M or F” and gained the reply “M’d last night. Have not F’d for months.”
Apologists will say that language evolves and that it is wrong to fight change that the people adopt.
Well hell, but I am “routing” for the clarity of the old, correct way.
Yeah I’m often commenting via my phone and it leads to quite a few autocorrect errors. Unfortunate fact of modern life
Geoff Sherrington July 8, 2016 at 12:46 am:
“Or use “sex” for “gender”.
As in the job application that asked “Sex: M or F” and gained the reply “M’d last night. Have not F’d for months.”
Apologists will say that language evolves and that it is wrong to fight change that the people adopt.
Well hell, but I am “routing” for the clarity of the old, correct way.”
GOOGLE:
gen·der
ˈjendər/Submit
noun
1.
the state of being male or female (typically used with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones).
“traditional concepts of gender”
synonyms: sex
“variables included age, income, and gender”
2.
GRAMMAR
(in languages such as Latin, Greek, Russian, and German) each of the classes (typically masculine, feminine, common, neuter) of nouns and pronouns distinguished by the different inflections that they have and require in words syntactically associated with them. Grammatical gender is only very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex.
Sex – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex
Wikipedia
Organisms of many species are specialized into male and female varieties, each known as a sex,
Me: It looks to me like using “sex” to describe one’s biological identity is the old way, while using “gender” is the new way, in order to discuss one’s mental state.
SR
Steve at 5:39 am
Agreed, sex versus gender, but my tongue was gently in the cheek.
It does not work in reverse.
Have you ever tried “Want to have gender with me tonight?”
Geoff.
So if that was their objective, why did they choose to employ means which resulted in the exact opposite happening ??
I would say that the best method to improve the population’s economic welfare, is simply to focus all of your efforts on improving your own economic welfare, so you don’t become a drag on everybody else.
G
Well Geoff, as far as I am aware, there are two of the known 57 genders (not including hermaphrodites) that actually do engage in sex.
Whatever it is that the others do instead of sex, is quite beyond my imagination.
G
Actually traditional marxists at least had the objective of improving the population’s economic welfare . The watermelons overtly want to suppress it .
Yes I agree with this. If you actually read Marx his analysis of what was wrong in society at the time when he was alive is quite well done. It’s just that his proposed remedies didn’t quite work out so well, to say the least.
But just because one part of Marxist theory turned out wrong doesn’t mean that his initial line of thought should be completely ignored. Especially after Trump and Brexit, which Marx would probably see as a perfect example of the proletariat rising up against the elite.
benben said:
HA, does the following quote define your noted “one part of Marx’s theory that “turned out to be wrong” simply because it defines the basis of Capitalism which involves “selling one’s labour for wages”, …… to wit:
I find it ironic that the University of Leiden’s motto is:
“‘Praesidium Libertatis’ – Bastion of Freedom”
http://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/about-us
Just research for youself what Sen.McCarthy uncovered and not blithely except what some blinkered academic tells you hopefully you might just learn something.
benben
you need to look under your bed of course…
Oh dear. An academic who doesn’t know the difference between it’s and its. The village idiot would be proud.
with seeing Marxists everywhere
===================
classical fallacy. argument by exaggeration. someone says they see X. You exaggerate this to “X everywhere”. And since there isn’t X everywhere, there must be not X anywhere.
X exists, it doesn’t exist everywhere, but it does exist.
On the other hand, I believe that Monckton was engaging in his own exaggeration and probably knowingly for effect and due to being fed up with leftists. While there are many (a large majority) of progressives and leftists at most universities, most would not call themselves Marxists or communists.
And yet ask them where they will draw the line limiting government power and intervention in the private lives of citizens and they would be hard-pressed to find it anywhere outside of reproductive ‘rights’ which are so ironically named. I can guarantee a vast majority of them will favor redistribution to ‘fix’ the inequality ‘problem.’ that is the real bogeyman in today’s political world.
Noting that a person’s tactics are the same as those used by Marxists is not the same thing as calling someone a Marxist.
Once again, you prove yourself to me not as smart as you believe yourself to be.
Does it ever wear on your ego to be wrong all the time?
“I prefer to remain anonymous (which I think is wise given the vitriol displayed once again in this thread.”
Well, BoBo, considering the snark with which you opened this thread, I’d say you earned it.
And I am just SO surprised you are ‘in academia’ – a close-minded community of conformist indoctrination, living in a world of pure theory, untouched by reality, but slave to funding.
And I never wondered at all why you don’t have the courage to use your own name.
benben,
Who is John Galt?
If you do not know may I suggest reading “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. It is written by a woman who lived through the Russian revolution yet is incredibly relevant today. It will help you understand why so many abhor collectivist ideology.
Oh, dear, Monckton makes several salient attacks on a faux journo, and ben sees it as cause to slur the entire site as McCarthy-ites. Went down the string a long way, saw no apology or any type of correction, only whining that somebody might try to contact you in person and say naughty things. Dear, dear. Please let us know if a single reader does send you an insensitive email, prof(haha)essor, most of us will be satisfied to mock you where it’ll be appreciated. And using your University account to send personal emails? You should be less worried that somebody will email you, more concerned that your employer might be compelled to produce your emails. You read here, yet you haven’t learned THAT? Dear, dear, dear.
You are an honest man Benben, but you will be made to suffer for your observation. There are people who post on here who see left wing tendencies in Mein Kampf, so are extremely unlikely to allow you to make such comments without firing a barrage of personal criticisms against you as a person.
Well, Mein Kampf was written by the world’s most progressive Leftist, so… yeah.
Has anyone thought that benben’s post is clearly a Red Herring? The article is about how the Alarmists think that an El Niño somehow voids all the arguments we have been making. However, the article gives good evidence that this is not the case. Debating Marxism vs, Progressives vs. Collectivists is interesting, but taking away from the excellent data presented in the article.
Here’s a commenters take on a book – “Marked to Read” by Ryan Cooper – “Finally, a book that bridges the best of the scholarly and activist literatures in socialist ecology! Sophisticated and compelling, eschewing academic jargons �postmodern’ and otherwise, Ecology and Socialism more than competently champions a Marxist approach to environmental crisis and the kind of economic democracy needed to achieve an ecologically friendly system of production and human development.” —Paul Burkett, author of Marxism and Ecological Economics.
I do not know if it’s the same Ryan Cooper as I did not go thru all the pages to find out. But it came up in a search on Marxism and Ryan Cooper. Here’s the link to the book and more comments… espousing Marxism, Socialism on ecology, etc…
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8493487-ecology-and-socialism
This took just a one second search. There’s so many other Marxist-Green links I can provide if you like and connections to Climate Change. None of this is surprising since Communist and Marxist have long been the Front of the Green Party movement on environmentalism.
It’s not about “seeing Marxist everywhere” but there are connections and it is perfectly OK to point out far left ideology, many socialist and Marxist, including those ignorant of such ideologies and socialist solutions rage against Free Market solution in favor of Marxist solutions including the Climate Change “crisis.”
This exist in leaders like Communist-Marxist Van Jones being appointed as Green Czar by Obama. A man ruled by hatred and Marxism who lashed out about racist related green issues in America. He was quickly removed from office as Green Czar once his Communist-Marxist roots were exposed along with his crazy rants.
Obama himself trained and mentored by Communist Frank Marshall Davis and William Ayers to hate America and Free Markets, received his first nomination by the “New Party” in Chicago by Communist Party USA “former” members. Including Marxist and Socialist in Bill Ayers home. Ayers, himself an American hating, pro-Communist, pro-Marxist believer and domestic terrorist activist, responsible for attacking police officers pushes Global Warming along with many other favorite far left, Marxist memes. This is nothing new under the sun. And well known.
Obama is also a Saul Alinsky trained “community organizer.” Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals dedicated to Lucifer, was the Communist-Marxist author’s manifesto in how to divide and conquer in order to gain power from evil ways of Free Markets. Again, out of Chicago.
So yes, Communist and Marxist in the West are largely tied to Climate Crisis solutions, and many are largely anti-Free Markets, or in case of our very President attached to and trained by communist and Marxist during much of his life.
Just because many young people and others ignorant of this information do not know it, does not lead to it being non-existent. It clearly exist.
So, why run away from Marxism? You should embrace Marxist. And why run away from Communist? After all, they are some of the most fundamental and ardent supporters of Global Warming. They do you a good service.
Marxist and Communist have long been associated with the Green Party that champions Climate crisis and the environment. That you protest this connection shows either ignorance of the historical connections or your own bias to dissuade readers that ideology plays a role by many of those leading the so-called climate crisis. Why deny that much of the drive behind it is ideologically driven for global governance in directing of laws and rules for how people must behave collectively as a group? When in fact, everything tied to the movement is about control over how people live, drive, eat, breathe, go to the bathroom, etc?
There are many great reasons for clean energy, fuel efficiency, etc. I’m all for it for many good reasons. But what I hate is lies, lies and damned lies as told thru the scandalous emails that surfaced in attempt to hide the failures of climate models. Climate models that could not and did not include all facets of potential forces to create an accurate model.
Lets not pretend that far left radicals are not involved as Marxist when it is clear they are. Lets not pretend many scientist themselves are not far left ideologues feeding at the banquet of Red-Green Marxist, like the Green Party, or far left zealots in political power in many Euro nations and America that push global warming, global-collective force-fed governance.
Obama, himself a lover of Marxism – sought out Marxist – as stated in his own book. Trained with Marxist and Communist much of his life pushes global warming – telling the world that he would stop the oceans from rising.
Much political leadership on the far left are driven by corruption themselves with large companies banking them for the profits, like Goldman Sachs in the crazy Carbon Credits scheme out of Chicago with Al Gore. Or, GE which owned NBC, MSNBC at the time promoting Global Warming and heavily promoting Obama for the Presidency. GE was well rewarded financially for their propaganda and election of Obama.
Demonizing people who are skeptical of computer models that have utterly failed in predictions has been the norm. Whining when people push back against the machine on the far left and point out the ideology of the left – when the Far Left constantly attacks Free Markets and the Right is utter hypocrisy.
Alinsky radicalism…
And Joe was correct anyway. Enough of us have died to hold them back, and it does not seem to be quite over. To our sorrow.
McCarthy was right ,benben….
Oh dear. A climate troll armed with the usual ridiculous strawman and ad hominem arguments, topped off with a non sequiteur. We’re doomed.
Considering the other responses I’d say I decided a pretty accurate observation. How is that a straw man argument Bruce?
Benben, got any thoughts on the data, I’m not interested in your politics
benben is just here to troll. He comes out from under his rock from time to time. Claiming everyone is using a straw man argument is one of his favorite things to say, regardless of any data, facts or argument that is made.
Anyone with the (nick)name benben hasn’t gotten out of elementary school yet.
“Anyone with the (nick)name benben hasn’t gotten out of elementary school yet.”
Oh dear!
For those like the above comment poster who are ignorant of what a “benben” is, then …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benben
“Benben was the mound that arose from the primordial waters Nu upon which the creator god Atum settled in the creation story of the Heliopolitan form of Ancient Egyptian religion. The Benben stone (also known as a pyramidion) is the top stone of the Egyptian pyramid. It is also related to the Obelisk.”
Lying about what others have said is always a form of strawman.
Even an “academic” should be able to figure that out.
…Sorry Toneb, he spelt his name benben, not Benben ! Your assumption is incorrect ! Reality matters !
imagine the sound of thunderous applause. Now, take a bow.
Oh dear. Benben’s ridiculous obsession with finding fault with WUWT, even though WUWT is just a blog and thus cannot have any obsessions….ridiculous or otherwise.
He hangs around for about half a thread until any points he’s made get utterly demolished. Then he slinks off into the interdark.
time difference my friends. Gotta get some sleep eventually!
I love the hindcast period. Shucks, I could do as good or job with the assumption that the AMO is going to go up for the next 36 years in a somewhat sinusoidal pattern. For this they want extra bucks? Good grief. I wonder what the lame excuses are going to be now that the AMO has rolled over and is heading down. Oddly, the AMO does appear to be in sync with the solar magnetic field which is in sync with the TSI. But never mind, we all know that it does not have anything to do with the flame under the teapot, what matters is what is in the teapot. That determines how hot your tea is.
Science realists have most definitely not been
AGWers have not yet made a prima facie case for their conjecture. Causation has never been established to ANY rationally meaningful degree. That is, the burden of proof is still on the fantasy science club, Mr. Cooper.
Thus, Mr. Cooper’s entire essay is based on a false premise and, having no foundation at all, his argument never even gets off the ground.
Then, to pound it into the sand beyond all hope of recovery, as Lord Monckton replies above ad arguendo, the stop in warming, i.e., the current plateau upon which the most recent El Nino made only bump to step over, is.
CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.
Game over.
even so, it is good to have the Lord back and writing –
“the less excitable tide gauges” – nicely done
Hi, Bubba — glad you wrote that, for I didn’t realize (we all have a bit of a blind spot for our own writing, I think) that my remarks seemed to imply that Christopher Monckton’s writing was a waste of time or something. Not at all! His arguments, so powerfully stated, bear repeating OFTEN. And, yes, after his “final broadcast” (v. a v. Brexit) we’ve all been a bit concerned…
Hope you are enjoying summer back there!
Janice
Janice, when will you ever learn that logic in an argument has nothing to do with the cultist reality?
They are regurgitating the dogma of their faith. Of course you realize that I do indeed agree with your analysis – Touch et check-mate.
That was to be “touche”…..(spell checked again!)….
Glad you clarified that. That could get you in trouble!
Hi, Scott — Yes, yes, (smile). “Touch,” eh? Heh. That means I am now “It.” Cool (as in, “She’s really ‘it.'”) lololol IN MY OWN MIND.
Janice wrote: “Thus, Mr. Cooper’s entire essay is based on a false premise and, having no foundation at all, his argument never even gets off the ground.”
That goes for most of the papers posted on this website promoting AGW/CAGW, and goes for the Leftwing AG’s and their prosecution of Exxon and Skeptics, too. They all assume *way* too much. They assume facts not in evidence. As you say, they operate on a false premise.
Finally, we get to the heart of the matter. The Eco-Fascists keep talking about AGW like it’s an established fact, when it’s not, and never will be. No evidence of causation continues to be the issue that they need to address. “We can’t think of anything else it could be” just doesn’t cut it.
Well, to be fair, they probably won’t identity as Marxists – they have a number of cuddly names now. And many don’t even know where they’re headed or what a worn out, dangerous path it is. Marxist will do as well as any name.
“Cooper carefully cuts off the observed-temperature trend line just at the peak,…” Yet another example of the hide the decline mentality that is so enduring among AGW stalwarts.
“Mr Cooper should be ashamed of himself. But he won’t be. One needs a conscience first.” Strong words. One might even suspect, after dealing with such nonsense all this time, that your patience is become taxed.
Temperatures will be going DOWN for the next eight months considering a mild La Niña is expected.
We can come back then and see what the warmists/leftists/anti-progressives/benbens say then.
If the La Niña occurs (it may or may not) and if it is small, then there will have been a small and quite harmless warming rate this century – but well below the models’ hysterical and scientifically unjustifiable predictions.
No worries. We will just redefine the meaning of acceleration. We will instead call it the rate of acceleration in hopes that no one will notice its been redefined to become the rate of a rate.
Doorman is perhaps not familiar with the concept of the magnitude of a first derivative, which is not, as he naively implies it is, the same thing as a second derivative. If the rate of warming is small, then the consequences of the warming will be generally harmless and beneficial. And that is what the unconcealable and inexorably widening discrepancy between childishly extreme prediction and unexciting reality indicates.
So Lord M of B, are you familiar with the function: y = exp (-1/x^2), which is zero for x = zero, and equals 1/e for x = 1.
But ALL of its derivatives are also zero for x = 0
So your thoughts on how it ever got away from zero, if all of the derivatives are zero there.
G
Karl Marx was an unhygenic slob and an ingrate to those closest to him. On the other hand he didn’t have a clue about the human condition. So there you go, you just never can judge people by outward appearances! 😉
Christopher Mockton is always on point. I had a few Marxist instructors in college, and that was nearly forty years ago, and lived in the same area as Berkeley, with a great deal more. The major thing the US got wrong in the late forties and early fifties was lumping the very diverse communists into one group, and inducing solidarity, when the Trotskyites an Stalinists hated each other.
Tom, you will enjoy Tom Wolfe’s essay on this subject, if you haven’t already.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/07/06/warmists-and-rococo-marxists/
That’s pretty funny! Everyone, come! All will be accepted in our Socialist paradise! Wait! No Socialist paradise for you! Socialist Hell for you! Yes, I know. They look identical! Lol!
Benben says”Oh dear. WUWT and it’s ridiculous obsession with seeing Marxists everywhere. McCarthy would be proud.”
From the article: “climate extremists readopted an unpleasant tactic first developed by the totalitarians of the 20th century: organized, paid, structured vilification of anyone who dared to oppose them.”
The only way Warmunists can avoid see marxists is by not using mirrors.
Actually, Marxists leave no reflection in a mirror.
Wooden stake through the heart is still effective against a wide range of creatures, physics defying or not.
The whole communist/socialist/progressive/liberal side of is pretty much the same. They seem to think there is a significant difference in their viewpoints.
In reality it looks like more evil, midevil, and slight less evil. Differing shades of bad and worse.
Like Chaotic Evil versions of Robin Hood: take from the good and give to the bad.
Nice to see benben playing troll today.
Why? You write interesting articles about actual data. This author is just randomly injecting the term Marxism into a debate that has nothing to do with Marxism. Since the term Marxist is used as a derogatory term around here, the only point this article serves is to vilify climate scientists, with no basis whatsoever (as noted elsewhere I certainly am no Marxist and neither are any my friends and/or colleagues in the field).
If anyone is trolling it would be the author of this post.
Oh benboob, stop playing dumb. You’re a troll and you know it.
Bruce, I know this is a difficult concept, but just because people don’t agree with you doesn’t make them a troll. Or a marxist.
Ho, ho!
Come on Benben, you have to admit that deluded 21st Century Marxists have enthusiastically hung their hat on the CAGW scam
https://www.marxismfestival.org.uk/themes/climate-change-and-the-environment.htm
http://www.cpusa.org/party_voices/marxism-on-climate-change-nature-is-also-fundamental/
http://www.environmentforbeginners.com/content/view/98/51/
http://systemchangenotclimatechange.org/marxism
http://m.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/20204
I have to agree with Benben that someone who happens to disagree with you in a comment thread is not a troll.
Shouting “troll!” at someone is just an attempt to shout down debate.
It is no better than the apologists for islamic atrocities shouting “racist!” at someone who expresses opposition to the Islamic faith, despite the fact that Islam is not a race.
A troll is someone who consistently lies about what others have said in order to distract and derail conversations.
benben is definitely a troll.
Ehm MarkW, could you give an example of where I lie about what others have said? I don’t do that as far as I know. And why would I?
It would be quite entertaining if you now fail to show a good example of me lying, because that would make you, by your own definition, the troll. Looking forward to your evidence!
MarkW,
I don’t regard benben as a liar, just seriously deluded 😉
Are those labels on the photos in the article correct? Shouldn’t they be reversed? Just asking.
There is a problem with the photo captions, but they are not reversed.
The polar bear is captioned as “dumb animal”, but we know they are smart, even cunning, and resourceful animals.
The dumb journo on the other hand, belongs to phylum cnidaria, class cubozoa, along with jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton.
I agree. I hope that the captions are the work of some editor. I would hate to think that Lord Monckton is guilty of libel.
Economic and social system in which all (or nearly all) property and resources are collectively owned by a classless society and not by individual citizens. Based on the 1848 publication ‘Communist Manifesto’ by two German political philosophers, Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his close associate Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), it envisaged common ownership of all land and capital and withering away of the coercive power of the state. In such a society, social relations were to be regulated on the fairest of all principles: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/communism.html#ixzz4Dll3KnJz
More or less sounds like the “Millennial Generation” to me?
Bernie Sanders incarnate. “Free” everything – paid for by the working people’s tax dollar.. …..”for each according to his ability (I’ve never seen any Communists espouse this tenant in practicality. Cronyism in the extreme is more like it), to each according to his needs”. Now this sounds like the snow flakes of the “liberal” education system. I need a “trigger warning”, a “safe space”. I’m a “social justice warrior” a “gender equality” warrior and the list goes on. The “needs” of the newly college educated will indeed by great as their professors have dissuaded them from actual carriers in many cases; certainly productive ones.
“The withering away of the coercive power of the state”…..That didn’t seem to work out too well for post WW2 Russia unless your last name was Stalin.
Hopefully you teach a subject which has an actual value in teaching young kids how to THINK rather than what to think?
I make no inferences of who you are or might be. You asked what the definition of a communist was.
The chap who wrote this article used every tactic of Saul Alinksky who himself was a self described communist.
Where do you stand on this Benben?
Just for clarity:
I was of course referring to “dumb journo” who used the Alinsky method, not Christopher Monckton.
Karl Marx said: “Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.” With an attitude towards humanity like that, who but a madman would follow his philosophy? Marxism has hatred for mankind and murder at its core
well, as I wrote elsewhere, I think that marx was completely wrong about his proposed remedies the problems he observed in his society. Obviously communism was a terrible mistake back then and given the fact that our current example of venezuela is also pretty miserable I think we can conclusively say that communism as a form of state is bad.
The point here is that certainly none of friends and climate change ‘believers’ would want communism. And to link the two together is pretty bad form and very disingenuous.
Bingo.
The problem is, as the links I provided up-thread demonstrate, the hopelessly naive and misguided hard-left/socialists/marxists/communists have embraced the CAGW scam with relish as it suits their purposes. That is something that cannot be ignored.
“The point here is that certainly none of friends and climate change ‘believers’ would want communism. And to link the two together is pretty bad form and very disingenuous.”
I’ll hope you’re simply ignorant of the facts? Making such a definitive statement without substantiation is the Alinsky method in the flesh. Polarize and demonize on this blog will have you instantly placed in the bin of trolls.
Sorry Benben, but what you said above just isn’t true….
Read Naomi Klein, Naomi Oreskis, Christins Figures – a short quote from she who now wants to head the UN.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution. That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 – you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation.
”ALL of them have made direct references as to how climate change legislation would benifit from the elimination of capitalism and democracy. I could go on, but if you’re just trolling, I won’t waste my time.
Hey I said that I have plenty of climate scientist in my social circle and none of them would remotely qualify as marxist. I have no idea what UN career politicians think or say and I care very little tbh. I think you guys underestimate how little interest in politics scientist generally have.
Now obviously there will be plenty of marxists that climb on the AGW train. But so what? That line of argument is akin to saying that white supremacists like Trump, and therefore Trump should be seen as a white supremacist. Obviously not a valid line of reasoning.
Outside of the US AGW is just not such a political issue and groups from all sides of society agree that action should be taken on AGW. They might be wrong, and the science might be faulty, but to claim that this has anything to do with marxism is just… very strange. Unless of course you use Marxist as a general catchphrase for ‘someone I don’t agree with’, which is what you guys seem to be doing.
In the last figure, after correcting for 60-year sine curve,the linear increase disappear and show the clear heitus — no significant change associated with CO2 increase — this is both surface plus ocean temperature.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
http://izquotes.com/quotes-pictures/quote-four-legs-good-two-legs-bad-george-orwell-139704.jpg
Cooper: Will they … admit their previous mistake …? The world is waiting.
(Eye roll)
Well said and again, “Touche”….(still embarrassed about the spell check above….:-))
Thanks. And, again — (smile). 🙂 Don’t be embarrassed — I thought nothing of it (except that it was fun to make a joke, heh).
“Touché” actually, spellcheck is completely blind to diacritical marks. Picked nit! Check.
“… the el Niño that has now ended was nature’s way of putting the heat back into the atmosphere …”.
====================================
If that were so, since the 2016 El Niño peak is only marginally above the 1998 El Niño peak (within measurement error) in the bulk of the atmosphere where any CO2 warming ought to be measured, then the ‘pause’ definitely continues:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/MSU%20UAH%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979%20With37monthRunningAverage%20With201505Reference.gif
“nature’s way of putting the heat back into the atmosphere”
One way of looking at that statement is to argue for a step change in the overall temp after a big El Nino event, as happened after the ’98 event. Will a step change happen again? Well, that is the big question.
I looked at how long and how deep a La Nina must be for the Pause to reestablish, and as of May, st seemed like maybe 18 mo. at the earliest. With June data, we see that the current peak is only about half as wide as the ’98 event, and the cooling has been truly dramatic. I don’t think anybody expected that. So the Pause getting reestablished quickly (9-12 mo.) becomes all the more plausible.
Place your bets for beer money here, now.
I bet cooling, and the Pause, NO step change up.
The actual fact is, we have absolutely NO IDEA. The warmists have been proven wrong, it’s not CO2 that is driving temperature. But what is?
All it would take is a particularly deep La Nina to erase the step we’ve been on. I personally think that is more likely than a step up.
And regardless what their ridiculously precise temperature charts purport to show, temperature control on this planet is remarkably stable.
Yep, with 30% more CO2s around the el Nino peaked 0.09C above the last one. 18 years down the track. The 21st century trend calculated by Lord M is bang on that, and way above that of the late 20th century (with the normal 60 year cycle as a tailwind).
CO2 appears to be having an effect at around the +0.3C per doubling calculated by Dr Evans. That means all the “AGW” that has ever been is about 0.15C, and swamped by both the post-LIA trend that was in force 100 years before coal power AND by the 0.5C of a decent el Nino.
I’d like to read more about the calculations of Dr. Evans. Have any links? Thanks.
Dumb animals are so called because they can’t speak. Polar bears are actually wily and not-to-be-messed-with.
The implied comparison between polar bears and journos is a serious insult to polar bears.
If only the journo could not speak. Or write!
Let’s put the journo and the polar bear in a cage match. My money is on the bear.
I’d actually like to see a cage match between the RICO 20, plus Gore, against the Polar Bear. My money would be on the bear, too. And after the bear is done with the RICO 20 and the fat boy hypocrite, we can follow up by feeding him “cause” pushing “climate scientists.” 😉
Look, Chris; I get you many well informed points but bears aren’t dumb. Bears are actually pretty damned smart. So the next time you decide to compare a bear to some idiot, consider the bear.
And “for the record” I was referring to Christoper Monckton. It should have read “your” not “you”, other than that I think I’ve managed to echo Bob’s sentiments; don’t malign the bears.
Unless it’s the ManBearPig. You can malign him all you like.
I hate this web site. Why is it you haven’t been drug into the 21st century with an “edit” button? It’s not hard.
We like to go “commando” here, Bart
In response to Bartleby, I do indeed owe an apology to the bear.
“The term Lysenkoism is also used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process (CAGW) as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.”
That old repetitive history.
Anyone want to join me in poking a self pompass prick?
http://www.wired.com/2016/07/exxon-fighting-right-deny-climate-change/#comment-2771129560
I’ve decided my new word for particularly ignorant kids who don’t even realize that they’re on a marxist bent is “benben”. As in, oh come on bono, you’re just being a benben.
Marxist? As best I can tell the WUWT logic goes like this:
You claim global warming is a problem, and that society as a whole, including government, needs to act. But you know it isn’t real, so you must just be part of the conspiracy to push this in order to gain dominance over the people to enforce your Marxist ideology.
Boom.. Can’t argue with that…
[Mr. Schaefer, that’s your twisted logic, not mine nor “WUWT’s”, Don’t put words in my mouth or the mouth of others to fit your own imagined biases – Anthony (edited for punctuation, spelling)]
…Wow, I bet you convinced a lot of people with that twisted logic ! ..I bet BooBoo is convinced !! /Sarc off
Exactly the point made by me and other here in this thread. People just use the term ‘marxist’ to refer to others they don’t agree with, without any thought given to what marxism actually is, or that those other people have absolutely nothing to do with that.
See my reply to you above. Maybe time to troll along – nothing to see but facts here.
I believe that Van Jones, Obama’s original Green Czar and I believe a firm proponent of CAGW is a card carrying Communist, by his own admission, if I am not mistaken. He is also one of the leaders of 350.ORG. It is too bad that 350.ORG doesn’t have any people trained in science in the leadership of their organization. I believe, that they do refer to Michael Mann as the writer of their “manifesto”.
Dan Sage
Correction: It was James Hansen not Michael Mann.
The ultimate example of this was US voters calling Obama a Marxist , (as well as on this site). If someone really thought Obama was a Marxist, or a Communist or whatever, they patently have very little understanding of political terminology. It’s the same when people call Bush a Fascist, or suggest that Tea bag supporters are mainstream.
[snip – off topic, personal attack -mod]
Talking of dumb journos, here is the Guardian’s Goldberg off on another breathless, fact-inverting bit of alarmism.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/07/arctic-sea-ice-crashes-to-record-low-for-june
NSIDC reports June ice loss to be slightly less than average: she reports it as “70% faster”.
“Anyone with the (nick)name benben hasn’t gotten out of elementary school yet.”
Curiously, and in this instance appropriately, the Japanese word for “bowel movement” is …ben.
….So it’s ” PooPoo” !! So his comments are childish AND crappy ? Nice to know, thanks …LOL
Why so few comments of the article itself? The reason is simple. After Lord Monckton gets done with someone there is really nothing left to add.
Eugene WR Gallun
Yeah, just witness the way he got done with Leif and Willis. Or has that already fallen out the bottom of the WUWT collective memory?
Christopher
A commenter at Climate Audit claims that a ‘model ensemble’ does not have, in any meaningful sense of the word, a ‘confidence interval’ of 95% or any other %. The reasoning as I understand it goes something like this:
A model produces a range of ‘outputs’. Those outputs have no ‘confidence interval’ they just are what they are. After multiple runs of the model from different initial conditions, a spectrum of results emerge with a mean, and a 95% confidence interval can be drawn on either side by subtracting or adding three standard deviations from/to the mean.
Taking the means of several mode averages and plotting them is an exercise in graphing not a ‘model with multiple runs’. Calculating the standard deviation of the plotted means is not a valid step because they are graphical representations of different things. Thus to calculate an SD and creating a 95% interval on either side of the ‘average of the means’ is literally meaningless. The central line is an average of a bunch of averages, not variations in outcomes from different initial conditions.
Is this a correct understanding? The commenter claims the model mean’s CoV is a mirage, a fiction with no substance.
If the method of creating it is as described here then I agree. If one plotted all the runs of all the models then averaged them, one could make some claims for a 95% confidence interval but it would be a very broad stroke, far broader than that produced about the average of a set of averages.
I could of course be quite wrong about how their 95% is produced. I’d appreciate any insights you have on this because I found an exact parallel in another field where similarly ‘low’ CoV’s are created by first averaging the results of runs that start with different initial conditions and then averaging the averages, claiming a final performance (mean) with a low CoV. I think the confidence is overstated.
Thanks
Crispin in Waterloo raises a fascinating question that I am not well qualified to answer in detail. The fundamental problem with climate modeling is that it is an equation in too many unknown and unknowable unknowns. The models can be – and are – tweaked to reflect the high-sensitivity interval imagined by IPCC. Since each run of each model starts from a different value-set for the initial conditions, and since each model models the climate differently, one can neither derive a true confidence interval from any individual run nor from any individual model, from which it follows that trying to derive a confidence interval from an ensemble of models is no less foolish than assuming that an ensemble of models is more likely to be correct than a single model.
In its present early stage, climate modeling is little better than voodoo, which is why it is becoming so embarrassingly evident that the ensemble outputs relied upon by the IPCC have been and are tuned to generate exaggerated predictions of future warming. As my forthcoming revision of the global warming speedometer will show, the IPCC has been reducing its predictions, but has not reduced them anywhere near enough to bring the predictions somewhere respectably close to the unexciting reality of a small and harmless rate of global warming.
Matters are, of course, complicated still further by the fact that the climate behaves as a mathematically-chaotic object, deterministic but not determinable, and by the repeated alterations (whether or not they are justified) to the temperature and other data on which the models depend.
On the chaos point, it has been well demonstrated that some of the processes vital to the prediction of future climate states occur at sub-grid scale. The models are just not well-resolved enough to be useful, and it is not particularly difficult to demonstrate that, even with a rapid growth in computing power, the data inputs to a sufficiently well-resolved model to overcome the chaos problem would require all the time from here to the end of the universe to produce a ten-year forecast.
On the data-tampering point, it is self-evident that the uncertainties in any and all models cannot be less than the uncertainties in the values of the parameters describing the initial conditions. If we do not know to a sufficient precision what the values of those parameters are – and the precision has to be very high to overcome the chaos problem and allow reliable long-term predictions – it is impossible to expect the models to get things right.
What can we do? First, we can exclude the single outlier model whose climate sensitivity is the justification for the absurdly extreme and unjustifiable RCP 8.5 IPCC scenario, which was included despite criticism from expert reviewers including me. Secondly, we can compare the less unreasonable predictions made by all models except that one with observed reality. Even then, it is clear that the models are running hot, for reasons explained in some mathematical and physical detail in our paper “Why models run hot” in the January 2015 edition of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Crispin: If a chaotic system is “transitive” or “deterministic”, its long-term behavior will be independent of its starting point. Averaging the results of many model runs will produce a result that is independent of the starting position. However, one can’t know how long the runs must be to reach a long-term average for the system, rather than just one local area of the system (an attractor). If you are serious about this subject, you can find a series of posts about chaos and climate at the link below. The host is known as a supporter of the consensus, but he is mostly a supporter of reliable physics (which many skeptics mistakenly assume is the consensus). In the second link, he discusses the problem of averaging).
https://scienceofdoom.com/roadmap/natural-variability-and-chaos/
https://scienceofdoom.com/2014/11/29/natural-variability-and-chaos-four-the-thirty-year-myth/
The word “ensemble” is often applied to a collection of models with different parameters describing processes occurring on a sub-grid scale. If the relative humidity in a model grid cell is 99%, some regions of that grid cell are going to be cloudy some are going to be clear. If one doesn’t account for this problem, the albedo of the planet will be far too low. So model developers have a parameter that controls how rapidly the grid cell gets cloudy near 100% relative humidity, and they tune that parameter so that the albedo in their model agrees with that of the earth. Unfortunately, that parameter interacts with many other parameters during the tuning process, meaning that no uniquely optimum set of parameters can be identified by tuning them one at a time. The trickiest parameter (the entrainment) controls how much turbulent mixing occurs during vertical convection and it can change climate sensitivity by about 1 K/doubling. To avoid the problem of tuning parameters, a group in England (climate prediction.net) explored picking parameters at random within a physically plausible range to properly explore “parameter space”. They created ensembles of simplified models with perturbed parameters (rather than “tuned parameters”). Some sets of parameters did better reproducing current temperature and other sets did better with precipitation, but the range of no parameter could be narrowed by showing it consistently produces inferior results. All of their publications are online at their website. The first on ensembles is below. Others have followed up their work with more sophisticated models, but the computational demands of sophisticated models make this difficult
http://www.climateprediction.net/wp-content/publications/nature_first_results.pdf
We use climate models to explore the range of future climate that is consistent with our understanding of the physics that controls radiation, the atmosphere and the ocean. We know that the output of such models varies with the initial state of the model (initialization uncertainty). There is now widespread understanding among modelers (but not the public) that the output depends on parameters that can’t be rigorously optimized. So the IPCC has called the collection of sophisticated models they use an “ensemble of opportunity” and acknowledged that it doesn’t properly explore parameter space (or fully explore initialization uncertainty). They warn against drawing statistical conclusions from the 95% confidence intervals of the roughly 100 model runs they have. AR4 WG1 Section 10.1, p754. Nevertheless, elsewhere they use their “expert judgment” to describe the 90% (or 95%?) confidence interval from these model runs as “likely” rather than with a term that implies more confidence. (The public, of course, doesn’t understand the difference.)
Policymakers have invested billions in climate models desperately seeking a useful answer for how much warmer it will be in 2100 if we continue to depend mostly on fossil fuels. It is politically impossible to be candid about parameter uncertainty.
Climate models are useless and misused. It is one thing to say my computer program can compute the probability of winning the lottery. And another thing to say my computer program can compute the winning number. The first thing is what climate models do rather incompetently. The second thing is what IPCC tells the world.
Frank: “Policymakers have invested billions in climate models desperately seeking a useful answer for how much warmer it will be in 2100”
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
IPCC Working Group I: The Scientific Basis, Third Assessment Report (TAR), Chapter 14 (final para., 14.2.2.2), p774.
Ironically, the first to point this out was Ed Lorenz, a climate scientist.
Catwealle666 quoted the IPCC and graciously provided a reference. The full quote conveys a different message: Projection inherently probabilistic.
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. The most we can expect to achieve is the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions. This reduces climate change to the discernment of significant differences in the statistics of such ensembles. The generation of such model ensembles will require the dedication of greatly increased computer resources and the application of new methods of model diagnosis. Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive, but such statistical information is essential.
The work on perturbed parameter ensembles I cited above occurred after AR3 was drafted and resulted the section of AR4 that I discussed. Since the IPCC’s “ensemble of opportunity” does not systematically explore parameter space, it is inappropriate to draw statistical conclusions from the spread or probability distribution of model output. Of course, this caveat is widely ignored.
Frank states, incorrectly, that if a chaotic object is deterministic its long-term behaviour is independent of the initial conditions. In fact, it is of the essence of chaotic objects that they are deterministic. Lorenz’s original paper on what later became known as chaos theory, published in a climatological journal, is entitled “Deterministic non-periodic flow”.
In a chaotic object, even a tiny perturbation in the initial conditions can drastically affect the object’s evolution, even after quite a short time. That is why weather forecasting for more than a week or two ahead is so bad.
Given that the climate behaves as a chaotic object, and that the sub-grid processes are an influential subset of the initial conditions, and that the data to describe them are unavailable, and that the parameters that describe all climate processes are arbitrarily tweakable, and that even if all the initial conditions were mensurable to a sufficient resolution to overcome chaotic perturbation, and that the data to be processed would be so numerous that no model run would be complete before the end of the universe, trying to use climate models to predict climate sensitivity is nonsense, and a scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money.
It is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle or a unicorn-counter.
Monckton of Brenchley,
How odd how some Lorenz fans forget his seminal work on the concept of an attractor, which is what Frank meant by “long-term behavior”: However, one can’t know how long the runs must be to reach a long-term average for the system, rather than just one local area of the system (an attractor).
There is such a concept as a stochastic attractor as well.
Rubbish. Is this climate model sensitive to initial conditions?
It is the deterministic nature of climate which allows us to even have a term for the statistics of weather, and by which we routinely make predictions that winter brings cooler temperatures *on average* than summer months in the mid- and high-latitudes. Or why those living in equatorial regions speak of wet and dry seasons.
It’s also why nobody in their right mind would argue that we simply couldn’t know anything about what would happen over the next few decades if solar output increased 10% and stayed there.
Something climate modellers know darn well from Dr. Lorenz is that predicting the noontime temperature in Toronto on July 1, 2100 to within a hundredth of a degree is folly. Let’s try to not further confuse the difference between weather forecasts and centennial-scale climate projections.
Both Lord Monckton and I appear to have made misleading statements about chaotic systems.
The long-term behavior (or long-term average) of TRANSITIVE systems exhibiting deterministic chaos is INDEPENDENT of initial conditions, while the long-term behavior of INTRANSITIVE systems exhibiting deterministic chaos can CHANGE with initial conditions. Early AOGCMs often veered off into glacial climate depending on initialization conditions. “Flux corrections” were needed to guide those models into a state resembling today’s climate. Those early models appeared to be intransitive.
In both cases, the word “deterministic” means that the future evolution of a system is completely determined by its initial conditions, but that slight changes in initial conditions can cause the system to evolve ALONG very different paths. The word deterministic doesn’t imply that AVERAGE behavior is independent of initial conditions.
My words were misrepresented by Lord Monckton. I actually said: “If a chaotic system is “transitive” or “deterministic”, its long-term behavior will be independent of its starting point.” It was INCORRECT of me to equate the terms “deterministic” and “transitive”, but the term transitive was used correctly.
Lord Monckton replied: “Frank states, incorrectly, that if a chaotic object is deterministic its long-term behaviour is independent of the initial conditions. In fact, it is of the essence of chaotic objects that they are deterministic.”
It isn’t clear to me what Lord Monckton actually meant by his correction. In general we agree about the weaknesses of climate models. Are today’s climate models transitive or intransitive? If one out of five runs from different initialization conditions veered off towards an ice age or a cooler climate, would the results be published or submitted to the CMIP archive?
See Section 2 of Lorenz (1968) http://eaps4.mit.edu/research/Lorenz/Climatic_Determinism_1968.pdf
“In the case of nonlinear equations, the uniqueness of long-term statistics is not assured. From the way in which the problem is formulated, the system of equations, expressed in deterministic form, together with a specified set of initial conditions, determines a set of long-term statistics. The question remains as to whether such statistics are independent of the choice of initial conditions. We define a TRANSITIVE system of equations as one where this is the case. If, however, there are two or more sets of long-term statistics, each of which has a greater than zero probability of resulting from randomly chose initial conditions, the system is called INTRANSITIVE.
So far I have just introduced definitions. Mathematical theory now tells us, however, that both transitive and intransitive systems exist. Moreover, no simple way has been discovered for examining an arbitrary system of equations and determining whether it is transitive or intransitive.”
Section 3 discusses experiments involving intransitive systems.
“….Cooper carefully chose the satellite data, which have serious calibration problems…”
_________________
Rich.
The satellite calibration problems for the laser-altimetry instruments are indeed formidable and remain unresolved. The intercalibration errors between the most recent three sea-level satellite series are substantially greater than the total sea-level rise the satellites show – a rate of increase that is not observed by tide-gauges and is not occurring anywhere on Earth except where local tectonic conditions are anomalous.
However, Grinsted et al. (2009), using reconstructions of past sea-level rise by Jevrejeva et al., indicated that sea level rises or falls by about 8 inches for every Celsius degree of global warming. At current global warming rates, therefore, one would expect sea level to have risen by 4 inches compared with today in 2100.
The 5 organisations currently producing global sea level data derived from laser-altimetry instruments all quote error margins that are much lower than their best estimate rates of rise. Currently these are (since Dec 1992):-
CU: 3.4 ± 0.4 mm/yr
AVISO: 3.4 ± 0.6 mm/yr
CSIRO: 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/yr
NASA GSFC: 3.4 ± 0.4 mm/yr
NOAA: 3.2 ± 0.4 mm/yr (w/ GIA)
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Contrast these low error margins with those of the RSS lower troposphere satellite temperature data over the same period, currently 0.011 ± 0.013 °C/yr: http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
The error margins in the RSS temperature data since Dec 1992 are larger than the best estimate rate of change. This suggests that the organisations producing sea level data from satellite instruments are much more confident in their assessment than those producing lower troposphere temperatures from satellite instruments.
It seems a little paradoxical therefore to dismiss the statistically significant best estimate trends reported by all the satellite altimeter sea level data producers whilst, apparently, accepting at face value the much less confident best estimate trends reported by a lower troposphere satellite temperature producer.
In reply to dwr54, the inter-calibration errors between successive laser-altimetry satellites remain unresolved; the Aviso Envisat satellite, during its 8 years of operation, showed sea level rising at one-tenth the rate claimed by the Jason/TopexPoseidon satellites, though the data were suddenly rewritten after the satellite failed, to show a far larger rate of rise; note that the satellite data were all tampered with to include an artificial and actually non-existent glacial isostatic adjustment; and coastal observations do not suggest that significant global sea-level rise is occurring. Ask any honest sea-captain.
As for the fact that the RSS warming falls within the uncertainty estimate, the correct conclusion is that RSS data do not definitively show warming at all – statistics 101. And, since there has been only enough warming to raise sea level by 4 inches a century since 1993, why do the satellites show sea level rising at more than thrice that rate?
Occam’s razor suggests that neither sea level nor global temperature is rising much. At any rate, it is clear that, though CO2 concentration is rising, the warming rate is falling. Perhaps the decline in solar activity is enough to overcome low climate sensitivity to CO2.
If you take the change in sea level from the last glacial maximum to present day, AT EQUILIBRIUM sea level rose about 20 m for each degC of warming (120m/6K). (As ice caps retreated poleward, there was less ice cap to melt per degree of latitude, so this figure is somewhat inflated.) How about a value of 8 m per degC rather than 8 inches?
Of course, it took almost ten millennia for the warming following the LGM to occur and almost another 10 millennia before sea level became undetectable (an inch or two per century). Considering human life-span, sea level rise is more about RATE than QUANTITY. One meter of SLR by 2100 requires (in the simplest case) a constant acceleration of 1 inch/decade/decade from the current rate of about 1 inch/decade. Such an acceleration clearly has not been detected. Until it is detected, we can forget about scary scenarios involving 1 m of SLR in the following century. However, it is equally absurd to expect that equilibrium SLR associated with AGW will total only one foot.
Laser altimetry is not capable of measuring a change of 3 mm/year, because satellite orbits are not that stable. Therefore the satellites need to be calibrated by carefully measuring sea level rise, glacial isostatic rebound and other local changes at a set of calibration sites around the world. Changes at those sites have been monitored by GPS for about two decades. Do we know what is happening a these sets of calibration sites well enough to believe the higher rate of SLR reported by “laser altimetry” than by ordinary tide gauges? And which set of tide gauges should we use? There is a lot of room for doubt on ALL sides.
Frank is disingenuous in saying sea level changes by 1 meter per degree of global warming. In the past that was the case because much of the Northern Hemisphere land mass was under miles of ice. Now that there is little ice left, the expected change in sea level is 20 cm or 8 inches per degree, and that is all.
Gee. Benben posed the question “How would you describe a
Communist?” which nobody effectively answered,
It’s easy:
A communist is an individual who has read and believes in
Marx and Engles 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto
(available free of charge
in pdf format . ) Read it and you will be able to accurately
identify and label real Communists. Knowing it will add
some precision to discussions instead of the wishy washy meaningless,
imprecise and annoying left and right generalisations.
Yes, I’ve read it and I know my enemy. I vehemently reject it.
Das Kapital Vol I got it wrong, Das Kapital Vol II</em
goit it wrong and, despite correcting some major errors from Vols I and
II, Das Kapital Vol III> still got it wrong. Most believers who try
to read Das Kapital never get any further than trying to read Vol I, which
is very trying.
Try your “academia’s” library. It should be shelved in the
Economics section. Enjoy.
“How would you describe a Communist?”
Probably a member of one of the various Communist groups. There are rather few real Communists now. To distinguish from ‘Marxist’: someone who accepts the main lines of the view of history and society first articulated by Karl Marx. There are many Marxists, particularly in some academic fields, but very few Communists, and there are still more who are to some degree influenced by Marxism.
The lasting contribution of Marxism to the left has been the argument that people’s opinions and politics are determined by their role in the means of production and thus their class interest.
This leads to moral relativism – because your views become just your opinions. It also leads to a focus on motivation rather than reason, and when it spreads into the junction between science and public policy, it results in finding reasons to reject scientific arguments on the basis of attributes of the people putting them forward. The result is the corruption of scientific argument.
There is a familiar paradox of Marxism, first pointed out by Popper. The Marxist argument is that certain developments in society are inevitable. People opposing them are doomed, they will simply find themselves ‘on the wrong side of history’. However the Marxist cannot then explain why we should do anything but wait for these inevitable developments. Cannot in fact explain why we even CAN do anything but await them.
It is the old theological issues about free will and determinism, reappearing in new clothes.
What any of this has to do with climate is a mystery. Perhaps the main point is that the desire to tar the views of people one disagrees with by trying to associate the people with a particular group of some sort has so thoroughly penetrated our society that even genuine, JS Mill liberals do it without realising.
I completely agree with you. What marxism has to do with climate science is a mystery, and certainly none of the climate scientists I know are marxists or communist (I actually have one real marxist friend. He’s a theoretical physicist. Make of that what you will).
“What marxism has to do with climate science is a mystery” – BenBen
Anyone who has looked seriously at the evidence of CAGW can reasonably come to an answer on this. In the years that is has been examined, CO2 has risen steadily, nearly linearly; temperature has not. In the history of this planet, there have been numerous periods far warmer than today (some with lower CO2), and somewhat cooler (sometimes with much higher CO2 than today). The linkage between historical temperatures show a lag in CO2’s rise to temperature rising, implying that rising temperatures cause a rise in CO2, not the other way around. In short, the null hypothesis has not been tested, the numerous other variables (i.e. solar output, cloud formation, plate tectonic shifts) have not been factored out, and the evidence to support the theory is poor.
Why then politicians latch onto the theory, pump money into further research, and seek to change public policy to the detriment of the economy? Because control of CO2 means control of energy, and control of energy means control of nearly everything. The CAGW meme is a statists dream: it is complicated enough to fool the average man enough to keep him from objecting to his loss of freedom, and far reaching enough to be able to assert influence over nearly everything.
“We must take full control over all the energy in order to save the planet! We must decide how energy is created and who gets to use it! Our very survival depends upon this!” The statist gets to take control while having the masses thank him for his vision and heroic leadership to take action. They get to vilify big energy companies as greedy and exploiting the planet, all the while taking control and freedom away from the people. They get to allocate research grants for a “problem” which has no end, give resources to their friends in the name of developing “green energy”, and make a false claim to the moral high ground.
A non-problem that the people are too ignorant to appreciate how non-problematic it is that gives justification for taking control over vast amounts of the economy is a collectivists dream come true. If ever the temperature does start to fall, they’ll simply take credit for solving the non-problem. That, my friend, is the linkage you asked about.
Maybe you should research 350.ORG. Their main tennent is CAGW. As stated above: “I believe that Van Jones, Obama’s original Green Czar and I believe a firm proponent of CAGW is a card carrying Communist, by his own admission, if I am not mistaken. He is also one of the leaders of 350.ORG. It is too bad that 350.ORG doesn’t have any people trained in science in the leadership of their organization. I believe, that they do refer to Michael Mann as the writer of their “manifesto”.”
Dan Sage
Correction: It was James Hansen not Michael Mann.
If forced to answer the question “what has Marxism to do with climatism”, one answer might be their explicit predictions, which disciples then have to spend much effort explaining away. Marx had a very 19th century, mechanistic (Hegelian), view of history. Uncertainty and randomness did not enter. This led to a rather precise description of predicted developments which 20th century Marxists had a hard time trying to explain away. Sounds familiar?
“explicit predictions, which disciples then have to spend much effort explaining away.”
This is a result whenever any analysis is based on too little information. I do not fault the original analyst, as it is difficult to know what data you don’t know. I do fault the disciple who sees newly discovered countering data and works to discount it.
SR
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
Asimov’s “psychohistory” shares some of the claimed deterministic features of communism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3APsychohistory_(fictional)
Yes, the problem is that Lord Monckton thinks of “Marxism” as a kind of synonym for extreme leftism, so when he wants to characterize someone as extreme leftist he thinks it is okay to call that person a Marxist. But the left has undergone major transformations over the past hundred years, and today’s leftism has little in common with Marxism. Notably, Marx and the early Marxists were very much in favor of economic growth (which they called “developing the forces of production”). We see this, for example, in Marx’s Speech on Free Trade, where he says he supports free trade against protectionism because free trade develops the forces of production more rapidly. (Marx believed that the communist revolution would eventually put an end to both free trade and protectionism, but would continue to develop the forces of production, because planned production would be more efficient than competition.) So, at the heart of Marx’s thinking is the belief that it’s good (and, loosely speaking, inevitable) for the material living standards of the masses to be increased without limit. Today’s extreme left predominantly takes precisely the opposite view, holding that economic growth is a bad thing and should be curbed if not halted. From a rhetorical point of view, the situation is that “Marxism” sounds more nasty than “Greenism”, because of the history of Communism, but if people understood the issues more clearly they would view Greenism as, if anything, even worse than Marxism.
One rather agrees with David Ramsay Steele’s elegant analysis. A disproportionate fraction of the shadowy board that runs Greenpeace are Marxists in the original sense of the term, and many of the naive followers who subsidize it are unaware that they are backing a Marxist entity which continues to believe that central planning by the great and the good will be better than market competition. The Greens also share Marx’s naive belief that central planning will lead to an increase in living standards, when in fact it has almost always depressed living standards. Finally, they share the naive belief of the followers of Marx (too many of whom infest our universities, though they screech when they are called what they are for they know that Marxism has discredited itself in the eyes of the world) that capitalism is less efficient at resource allocation and at environmental protection than pietistic, bureaucratic-centralist collectivism. In practice, capitalism is visibly better both at allocating resources and at protecting the environment than the various Marxist countries, who have defiled their land and their air and their water to an extent unmatched in the Western world.
Since the Greens share all of the essential beliefs of Marxists, with the added nasty gloss that the Greens actually intend to reduce the population deliberately, whereas Marxism does that by insouciant inadvertence, it seems to me to be appropriate to call them Marxists – for, in essence, they are Marxists first and foremost, and are merely using the environmental movement as a way to attempt to recover their position in Western society following their humiliation when the Berlin Wall that they had erected to deny to their populations the freedom, democracy and prosperity of the west came crashing down. That, at any rate, is Patrick Moore’s analysis, and he ought to know, for he founded Greenpeace and eventually left it when the Marxists took over – his words, not mine – and mounted a fatuous campaign against chlorine (one of the elements in the periodic table), just as they are now mounting a fatuous campaign against carbon dioxide (a gas essential to all plant and animal life on Earth).
To those Marxists in the “Green” movement who do not like to be called what they are, I reply with the wise words of Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army: “They don’t like it up ’em, sir!”
Spot on comment C.M. While there are always clear and nuanced differences in disparate “statists” political systems, the common effect is central control of people and economies to the detriment of individual rights and liberties, and eventual social and economic collapse.
That benben and a few others miss this most basic effect of statism, be it facist, communist, monarchy, religious as in Islamic Sharia today or various religious states in history, or “socialism” which history demonstrates (the EU as a current example) allways evolves into an ever more powerful state, is only evidence of their shortsightness.
Benben attempts to super simplify his rebuttal, while entirely missing the common failings of all statist systems, and missing those central elements of statist systems which lead to the very same central failings.
Benben after you read “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” come back and have a real conversation sans your opening ignorant generalization.
David Ramsay Steele,
I agree it’s not really Marxism anymore, but something that uses tactics and rhetoric similar to what Marxists used, which causes difficulty in discussing what “it” is now . . within the conventional lexicon of political/economic terminology.
“So, at the heart of Marx’s thinking is the belief that it’s good (and, loosely speaking, inevitable) for the material living standards of the masses to be increased without limit. Today’s extreme left predominantly takes precisely the opposite view, holding that economic growth is a bad thing and should be curbed if not halted.”
In biological terms, it seems to me; Many (not all) who depend on a productive “host” society (like politicians, militicians academics, journalists, scientists, bureaucrats, entertainers, lawyers, elite criminals, etc) have convinced themselves and each other, that their host is a distinctly inferior breed of animal, which needs to be thoroughly domesticated/pacified, once and for all. And they have (intentionally in some cases, instinctively in others ; ) nurtured/bloated the “welfare state”, swelling the dependent class in general, so as to acquire enough raw political clout/numbers to effect the overthrow/conquest of Western Civilization.
Within that quasi biological lingo context, I would call it; Parasitism.
Benben is correct: climate “science” aka Warmunism doesn’t have a lot to do with Marxism. The similarities however are uncanny, which is why as a rhetorical device, Monckton used the amusing word “Marxstream-media”. But, as we all know and as evidenced countless times by benboob, Warmists lack not only intelligence, but have no sense of humor. Indeed, it has been shown that the two go hand-in-hand.
Bruce: It is a religion, and hardly anyone has a sense of humor about their deepest beliefs.
JimB touches on something I’ve pointed out often:
Most on the left, and most millennials, are so ignorant about religion that they are completely unaware that they have created their own.
Agreed 100% JimB – AGW is nothing more than a secular religion. What is astounding is how many that deride religion in the traditional sense “believe” in the AGW religion fervently, and are seemingly blind to the parallels.
Excellent as usual, thanks
You want to get ahead at University. Those in a position of authority hold ideas you do not agree with. Are you going to speak up and tell them you don’t agree? That you have found conclusive evidence that they are wrong. That their careers have been built on false ideas?
Only if you are stupid, because that is a sure way to destroy your career. If there is anything guaranteed to gain you disfavor it is to shake the pedestal upon which those in high places stand.
So instead you bow meekly and tell the person that controls your future how wonderful their ideas are.
I’ve let Mr Cooper know this article is out there -perhaps he will respond?
Personally I believe we should be evaluating the science of climate change as science… not spending our time alleging those adhering to one hypothesis or another are ‘marxists’ ‘warmists’ ‘fascists’ or whatever
So, let’s see, Cooper can falsely describe climate sceptics with the political label “conservatives”, but sceptics can’t draw attention to the fact that climate extremism and pseudo-moralising, messianic, collectivist totalitarianism are substantially coterminous?
Let us see if he can answer the scientific points raised in the head posting.
…OMG !! ….. Milord, are you really expecting “Climate Extremists”: to be honest !!
Well, I think I will blow benben’s mind. We spend too much money on higher education, leading to a college population that is heavy in kids who do not have the intellect to handle truly advanced topics. And to hiring the necessary number of professors to baby sit them. We need more attention to the first seven grades, and practical courses for high school. Like mechanics, painting, plumbing, construction trades etc.
BTW, my degrees are in chemical engineering and law.
His Lordship complains: “Conservatives”, says Cooper, “have long been searching for a reason to do nothing about climate change … Several years ago, it seemed like that crowd had a perfect argument to justify inaction on climate: the global warming ‘pause’ … But lo and behold, two years later warming has surged back with a vengeance.””
Who was responsible for making The Pause the focal point of skepticism about CAGW? Why His Lordship! The graph from Ted Cruz’s hearing looks like one of his graphs. The next hearing undoubtably will show a graph demonstrating how misleading that graph turned out to be. A quick search of WUWT turned up 18 posts in the last 2.5 years on The Pause authored by His Lordship and his figures have been used in many other posts. Now that The Pause is gone and it is time to eat crow, why is His Lordship is complaining?
Monckton says, “[Cooper] should never hang an entire view of a chart on the last few data points” – and then hangs his entire view of the following chart on the last few data points, which show a spike in global warming caused by the more than usually active but now declining El Niño.” Unfortunately for Monckton, the chart he is referring to (the second graph) is a plot of ANNUAL temperatures. 2015 was the last complete year on that graph. Monckton complains that temperatures have been falling as El Nino wanes, but the first half of 2016 has been so warm that Roy Spenser has already speculated that 2016 is likely to be warmer than 2015 (only half of which was distorted by a strong El Nino). When a point for 2016 is added to this plot, it will almost certainly show negligible cooling from the “declining El Nino” and be closer to the midpoint of the IPCC’s projections. The good news is that even a strong El Nino hasn’t driven temperature anywhere near the top of the 95% confidence interval – or even above the midpoint.
If His Lordship had bothered to consult with the experts at the GWPF before placing so much emphasis on The Pause here at WUWT and elsewhere, he would have known that The Pause was very likely to end with the arrival of the next strong El Nino. (FWIW, even I made such a prediction in a comment to one of Moncton’s 18 posts on The Pause.) And Monckton would probably also have been told that the enhanced greenhouse effect from rising GHGs made long-term warming nearly inevitable, because the forcing or temperature change associated with previous cool periods (the LIA, 1950-1970, the Maunder minimum, volcanos etc) has been smaller than even the most optimist projections of warming (using an ECS of 1 K/doubling for example). Perhaps the much ballyhooed coming solar minimum will cause more cooling than the Dalton and Maunder minima, but those event were associated with cooling only comparable to warming during the second half of the 20th century. With increasing GHGs, a repeat of those events is unlikely to return MGST to that observed in the middle of the 20th century.
The responsible scientific case against CAGW has never been based on The Pause, the 1940’s warm period, the cooling around 1960 – nor attempts to use those phenomena to invalidate the theoretical basis for AGW. These periods are all examples of decadal UNFORCED VARIABILITY. Unforced (or internal) variability is a phenomena that plagues analysis of all phenomena exhibiting chaotic behavior. Likewise, the rapid warming from 1978-1998 was another example of unforced variability that enhanced the warming associated with rising GHG’s. ENSO is an example of unforced variability on our planet that evolves more rapidly than these slower processes. (ENSO involves chaotic fluctuations in the currents exchanging heat between the surface and deep ocean via upwelling off equatorial South America and downwelling in the Western Pacific Warm Pool.)
In the presence of chaotic behavior, the best we can do is average out unforced variability by looking at projections and realization of warming forced by GHGs over the longest period possible. Otto (2013) and Lewis&Curry (2014) make the case that the best estimate for ECS is 1.5-2.0 K/doubling (with plenty of uncertainty on both sides). This is 1/2 to 2/3 the central projection of the IPCCs models. This conclusion doesn’t change much whether one uses surface temperature, or tropospheric temperature (RSS/UAH).
Cooper’s graphs mislead by beginning with the rapid warming that began in 1975. The overall warming rate would be lower if he started at mid-century. Lord Monckton’s graphs mislead by starting after some or all of this period of rapid warming; they pay more attention to The Pause.
Frank: You have, despite all that writing, missed the key point.
CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.
(Thus, the conjecture of AGW is not only “not proven,” it now has anti-correlation evidence against it.)
“Frank: You have, despite all that writing, missed the key point.
CO2 UP. WARMING STOPPED.
(Thus, the conjecture of AGW is not only “not proven,” it now has anti-correlation evidence against it.)”
I take it (as you had no /sarc tag on there) you don’t accept that the recent EN caused the warming spike?
And that CO2 should have done – it but as it is *now* cooling then AGW theory is wrong.
AGW acts over a period of decades/centuries.
That Nino has boosted GMT’s temporarily is neither a surprise nor any sort of “not proven” event re AGW.
What is it about chaotic variability in the climate system that you don’t understand?
Do you expect GMT’s to present a unwavering ongoing slight warming?
Irrespective of said internal variability.
On what planet, nay universe could that possibly occur.
And, as Frank points out, even your bizarre head-standing comment the graph Monckton posted is an annual one and 2016 will more than likely not show a cooling. It will be once more the warmest on instrumental record …. along with 2013, 2014, and 2015.
Frank has not, alas, read my previous posts about the Pause with due care and attention. Had he done so, he would have discovered that I had repeatedly stated that elementary greenhouse-gas theory establishes that, all other things being equal, some warming would be bound to occur, and that, therefore, the Pause would not endure indefinitely. I sounded repeated warnings that one should no rely solely upon the Pause as an argument against the climate extremists, though it was – and may yet be again – a useful indicator that the rates of warming originally predicted by the IPCC have not come to pass and are most unlikely to do so.
As for Cooper’s use of an annual graph of global temperatures, that is the oldest of dodges to conceal inconvenient data in the more recent months. My original point stands: global temperatures have plummeted now that the el Nino has ended, and, if they continue to fall, the outturn for this year on Cooper’s graph (which comes, I think, from the unreliable and deeply prejudiced “Real” climate website) will be visibly a long way below the central estimate; and, if the gentle warming rate evident since the late 1970s continues, it will in a few years be well below the admittedly fictitious and unawarrantable 95% “confidence interval” shown on that graph.
As for climate sensitivity, one cannot really determine it with any reliability using the very short run of reasonably reliable and spatially near-complete and consistent satellite data. One should instead go back to first principles, as, for instance, Monckton of Brenchley et al. (2015) did in what has proven to be, by a factor of ten, the most-downloaded scientific paper on any subject in the entire 60-year archive of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Frank cites Lewis and Curry (2014) with approval, as well he should, for it is a thoughtful paper. I had the opportunity to spend some time with Judith Curry at the Fifth Los Alamos Climate Conference in 2011, at which we were both invited speakers, and more recently with Nic Lewis, whose knowledge of the climate change issue is formidable. I have the impression that they, like others working on the vexed question of climate sensitivity, are moving in the direction of lower rather than higher sensitivity. I think they will end up not too far from the 0.9 [0.8, 1.2] K per CO2 doubling that was our climate-sensitivity interval in 2015.
Finally, Frank asks for a trend calculation dating back to the beginning of the rise in global temperatures that followed the great Pacific climate shift (associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation) in 1976. The rate of warming shown by the HadCRUT4 dataset from January 1976 to May 2016, the most recent available date, is less than 1.8 K/century equivalent. However, if one takes the trend on the same data from Januaary 1990 the rate is 1.7 K/century equivalent, which is less than the longer trend, contrary to the theory that CO2, which increased throughout the period, is the main driver of global warming. And that rate of just 1.7 K/century equivalent is below the 1.9 K/century equivalent minimum predicted warming rate over the period 1990-2025 in IPCC’s First Assessment Report (1990). The HadCRUT4 trend since January 2001 is little more than 1.2 K/century equivalent, sharply down on the the trends since either 1990 or 1976, and again raising serious questions about whether CO2 is the main driver of climate, since the CO2 concentration change, as noted in the head posting, is somewhat above the IPCC’s business-as-usual case in 1990.
To summarize: my articles on the Pause contained frequent warnings that the Pause would end with the arrival of the el Nino, which is exactly what happened; and that, all other things being equal, one would expect some warming to occur, which is exactly what is happening; but the rate of warming, even though the results are up-skewed by the recent el Nino and will not be returned to normality until a couple of years after the recent spike, is still only a small fraction of wnat the IPCC had predicted with what it called “substantial confidence” in 1990.
If these facts were better known, as they would be but for the refusal of the Marxstream media to reveal them to their audience, the trillions now being squandered on this scare would not have been wasted, and the world would be a more prosperous place as a result.
Lord Monckton: Thank you for the thoughtful reply. As you can see from the first reply to my comment (and the uproar it would have been caused if I had finished it earlier), many of your readers simply believe that The Pause has invalidated the theoretical basis for GHG-mediated warming. Clearly other readers haven’t noticed the caveats in your previous posts on The Pause. Nor did you cite such caveats. From a scientific perspective, I worry most about those at Ted Cruz’s hearing feeling mis-informed after this El Nino, but politics is your specialty, not mine. In any case, the role of unforced variability is badly under publicized in public fora and those without scientific training simply look at the data that confirms their pre-conceptions. IMO, your posts encourage that.
The Pause does invalidate many current climate models: They either produce too much warming OR too little unforced variability. But such invalidation is inherently probabilistic. To use the IPCCs language, the multi-model mean is “likely” to be wrong, and probably “very likely” to be wrong, but it isn’t clear that we have crossed the p less than 0.05 threshold. Based on my memory (from Doug McNeall?), the probability of a five-year pause across all models was about 25%, a 10-year pause was about (25%)^2, and a 20-year pause about (25%)^4. That source cleverly avoided reporting a value for 15-years. So, the multi-model mean is in serious trouble.
I didn’t intend to ask for the trend over any particular period. Given that periods of faster and slower warming (pauses) are known, all attempts to pick a single period over which to compare warming trends and forcing are subject to bias – but the longer period, the less bias that can be introduced. Even worse, you and others don’t bother to calculate the confidence interval for the trend (which is tricky and potentially subjective given auto-correlation). If one goes back as far as 1960, the rate of increase of CO2 (not the only factor) was about half of today’s rate. Otto (2013) and L&C (2014) take these factors into account. I find their values for TCR and ECS – and the comparable values from AOGCMs – far more informative than the observed trend over any particular period. In terms of TCR (the relevant parameter for comparing observations to projections), their central estimates only about 25% lower (or the IPCC’s values are 33% too high). This is difference is hard to see clearly on any noisy graph, but I wouldn’t characterize it as:
“only a small fraction of wnat the IPCC had predicted with what it called “substantial confidence” in 1990.”
That characterization is what one sees when one focuses on periods dominated by The Pause. The difference in terms of ECS is larger (up to 50%), but even that technically isn’t a “small fraction”.
As best I can tell, the Pacific has returned to a fairly average state after this El Nino and the atmosphere typically lags a few months behind. (Consider seasonal warming from seasonal changes in irradiation. The lag after the equinoxes if about 1 month over land and 2-3 months over ocean.) So I would guess that GMST is nearing or at “normal” now, but that normal still has noise in it. It will take another five years or more to discern whether the post El Nino trend resembles that following 1982 or 1998.
To mutilate a saying, there are lies, damm lies and graphs of projections vs observations.
In reply to Frank, I am now working on nailing down exactly what amounts of warming the Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports of the IPCC predicted, and I shall be adding those to the Global Warming Speedometer. There is little point in adding uncertainty intervals to the observed temperature measurements, because all of them are altered so often that the best one can say is that they are all so uncertain that specifying an uncertainty interval is not possible.
I am working with a talented student at the University of East Anglia, in the Environmental Sciences Department, who had read some of my postings here about the unreliability of temperature measurements and the frequent tamperings with them. He is a practical man, and is working on a completely new land and sea temperature array of instruments far cheaper but more reliable than the present instruments, to give us a better-resolved surface-temperature dataset and one that is vastly more standardized and uniform and multiply redundant and self-verifying and automated than anything we now have.
Our paper proposing the new network will probably be published next year, and we shall then seek funding to establish it. A very large fraction of the apparent global warming shown by terrestrial datasets at present has arisen – whether rightly or wrongly – from ex-post-facto adjustments to the measurements. This process of belated adjustment (even of temperature records a century old) is naturally prone to subjectivity on the part of climate scientists trying to push the Clim-Comm agenda. We want to stop them doing that, by the simple and not particularly costly method of introducing simpler, better, more uniform instruments and deploying them in their millions to give us properly-resolved measurements.
As for the trends, you should not underestimate the extent to which the fact that the rate of global warming is inexorably declining casts doubt upon high-sensitivity global warming predictions. That is why I presented HadCRUT4 trends going back to 1976, so that you could see the decline in the warming rate for yourself. This is a startling anomaly compared with what all of the models and all of the IPCC reports predicted, and it should not merely be swept under the carpet. It tends powerfully to falsify the high-sensitivity case, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.
You have confused two points from my earlier comment. On the one hand, you talk of Lewis & Curry’s climate-sensitivity estimates; on the other, you talk of the IPCC’s 1990 predictions, and you say that IPCC’s predictions are quite close to Lewis & Curry’s transient-sensitivity estimates. With respect, that was not the point I was making in stating that the IPCC’s “substantial confidence” in its 1990 predicts was substantially misplaced. IPCC itself made specific predictions of how much warming would occur at all points from 1990 to 2025; and the correct method of testing the reliability of those predictions is to check them against the best temperature measurements we have, which for various reasons are probably the satellite datasets.
On that analysis, the rate of warming since 2001, for instance, is about one-fifth of the IPCC’s central estimate in 1990 of what that warming rate should have been by now.
As for el Nino and la Nina, I can’t predict them, so I can’t say whether there will be a la Nina, but I can say, on past form, that we shall know within not more than two years whether there has been a la Nina. At present, the el Nino spike at the right-hand end of the temperature graph has a disproportionately exaggerated effect in lifting the apparent trend, because the trend-line since 2001 begins after the 1998-2000 la Nina had ended, and we shall not get an undistorted trend until a couple of years from now.
The central truth, which no one can now reasonably deny when confronted with the evidence, is that the rate of global warming – on all measures, including those which appear to have been improperly tampered with to accelerate the apparent rate – is very substantially below prediction; that the IPCC, at the insistence of expert reviewers such as me, has been compelled to reduce its predictions, and has done so for the short term though not yet for the long; that it continues to rely upon models nearly all of which very greatly exaggerate climate sensitivity; and that, therefore, the trillions being spent on making largely non-existent global warming go away are trillions squandered.
Hi Chris,
It is worth remembering that the Lewis & Curry work on Climate Sensitivity was stated to be based on IPCC data and was a reworking of the IPCC mathematics and some physics.
So far as I know, neither has expressed a private view on a preferred PDF of CS, but I might be wrong.
Nick & Judith are not in good positions to gather their own data instead of reliance on IPCC data that in aggregate is hugely expensive.
Regards, Geoff from Melbourne (where Marxist thinking has long infected the PM and a few from Cabinet. I blame the leadership of learned Societies for much of the reinforcement of that infection.)
Lord Monckton: Thank you for the second thoughtful reply.
One way to present the uncertainty in the record of observed warming is to treat all of the adjustments uncertainty. Given the paucity of metadata at empirically defined breakpoints, no one has the slightest idea of what really happen at these breakpoints: 1) There could have been a major change in measurement conditions. 2) There could have a gradual deterioration in measurement conditions that corrected by station maintenance or a station move away from a deteriorating site. In the case of documented changes in time of observation or instrumentation, validated methods for correcting these biases exist, but these caveats apply mostly to the US. So I would consider reporting RAW and adjusted warming and calling the difference “systematic uncertainty”. If I remember correctly raw warming on land is about 0.8 degC and adjusted warming is about 1.0 degC. If so, I’d call it 0.9 +/- 0.1 degC. If this is correct, the issue of “tampering” isn’t as bad as some make it out to be. It doesn’t seem unreasonable (IMO) to assume that about half of breakpoint corrections fixed real problems and use that for your central estimate (with uncertainty spanning the gap between raw and fully homogenized).
Unfortunately, SST and therefore global records all require adjusting temperatures measured by multiple techniques before combining them. No system for doing so can be unambiguously proven to be better than another. So presenting all the records is a good way to illustrate their uncertainty.
You write: “As for the trends, you should not underestimate the extent to which the fact that the rate of global warming is inexorably declining casts doubt upon high-sensitivity global warming predictions.”
I ignore and recommend ignoring all trends without confidence intervals calculated taking auto-correlation into account (but don’t accept Tamino’s extreme methodology for doing so). The trend covering only a decade or two will have a confidence interval so wide that it will probably include the IPCC’s multi-model mean trend. So I don’t expect to see robust evidence of dramtically reduced warming rate (but will keep an open mind).
As I noted earlier, when you look at periods of more than three decades, the early rate of increase in forcing was lower than today and that forcing would be expected to drive a slower rate of warming. So. no matter what period one chooses, one runs into difficulties. (And you still can be accused of cherry-picking the period.)
Why not make life simple for yourself?
The key parameter for IPCC projections is TCR. The multi-model mean projection for ANY period is simply the multi-model TCR (1.8 K) times the change in forcing for that period. There is no need to look at cherry-picked graphs or projections. No need to figure out how to align the observed and projected temperature at any particular starting date. No need to go back and determined if the projected change in forcing actually took place.
Uncertainty in projected warming arises from the uncertainty in the actual forcing change and the uncertainty in the multi-model mean TCR. One doesn’t need to worry about the massive uncertainty in projected temperature at a particular starting date – a form of initialization uncertainty.
Best of all, Nick Lewis has complied all of the data for you and gotten it through peer review! Forget the graphs of projections. Use model TCR to determine what the IPCC’s models actually project for a given forcing change.
Using consensus sources for temperature change Nick calculated a TCR of about 1.4 K, 75% of the multi-model mean. Substitute the temperature records you prefer.
Frank seems not to like the deadly comparisons between predicted and observed temperatures that I have been posting here. However, they have the merit of clarity. It is blindingly obvious that the world has not been warming this century at more than a small fraction of the predicted rate.
And he can hardly expect me to derive any useful quantity by using a transient sensitivity twice what the great Dick Lindzen thinks equilibrium sensitivity is.
Climate sensitivity is low and, in that interestingly small minority of climatological papers on global warming that are demoted to its determination, inexorably and rapidly declining towards Dick Lindzen’s 0.7 K at equilibrium.
Lord Monckton writes: “Frank seems not to like the deadly comparisons between predicted and observed temperatures that I have been posting here. However, they have the merit of clarity. It is blindingly obvious that the world has not been warming this century at more than a small fraction of the predicted rate.”
Data without confidence intervals is never blindly obvious. The proper way to determine the significance of the difference between two trends is to use the correct statistical formula for the difference between two means. The standard deviation (o_d) of the DIFFERENCE between observations and projections is given by:
o_d = SQRT ( o_o^2/n_o + o_p^2/n_p )
where o_o and o_p are the standard deviations of the observed and projected trends and n_o and n_p are the number of observed and projected trends. Once you know the difference between two trends and the standard deviation of that difference, you can assess the likelihood that the difference could include zero (the null hypothesis). The confidence with which one can reject the null hypothesis separates the “blindingly obvious” (p less than 0.01 or 0.001) from the statistically significant (p less than 0.05, wrong 1 out of 20 times before considering systematic error and investigator bias) and from the IPCC’s unscientific terms “very likely” and “likely”.
Steve McIntyre discusses this method in a less straight-forward manner at the link below. He chose to combine five different assessments of the tropospheric warming rate into one single “observed trend”. He also chose to complicate the subject by doing some steps with Monte Carlo calculations based on confidence intervals, but the principle is the same: Determine the standard deviation of the difference between observations and projections and then assess the significance of that difference. For satellite temperature data (but probably not surface temperature data), the difference between observations and projections is more than two standard deviations of the difference.
https://climateaudit.org/2016/05/05/schmidts-histogram-diagram-doesnt-refute-christy/
Lord Monckton also writes: “And [Frank] can hardly expect me to derive any useful quantity by using a transient sensitivity twice what the great Dick Lindzen thinks equilibrium sensitivity is.
I recommended that Lord Monckton calculate the mean PROJECTED warming trend (and standard deviation of that projection) from the product of the TCRs of the IPCCs models and observed forcing. These are the quantities he needs to know to perform the calculations discusses above. If there were no significant difference between the projected and observed forcing, then there would be nothing wrong calculating the mean and standard deviation of the trend from the IPCC’s collection of [100?] model runs.
Finally, Lord Monckton appeals to authority and prophecy:
“And he can hardly expect me to derive any useful quantity by using a transient sensitivity twice what the great Dick Lindzen thinks equilibrium sensitivity is. Climate sensitivity is low and, in that interestingly small minority of climatological papers on global warming that are [devoted] to its determination, inexorably and rapidly declining towards Dick Lindzen’s 0.7 K at equilibrium”.
Unfortunately, the first Lindzen and Choi paper with an ECS of 0.7 K was highly criticized. The authors acknowledged the validity of some points made by their critics and responded with a second paper:
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
The new paper makes no quantitative claims about ECS in the abstract (or couldn’t get those claims past reviewers), but asserts that feedbacks are negative during the rapid rise and fall of temperature associated with El Nino events, particularly in the tropics.
Rather than look at the changes in radiative cooling to space (and reflection of SWR) during El Nino, others have studied those changes during the 3.5 K seasonal increase in GMST that occurs every year (due to the lower heat capacity of the NH). There is clear evidence of positive feedback (amplification) in OLR emitted from both clear and cloudy skies. The OLR results for clear skies agree with the expectations from AOGCMs (a combined water vapor plus lapse rate feedback of about +1.1 W/m2/K, There is also positive feedback in the SWR reflected by clouds. Unfortunately, the IPCC doesn’t separate cloud feedback (the difference between clear and cloud skies) into SWR and LWR channels, so I’m confused about how to interpret these results in terms of cloud feedback.
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/19/7568.full.pdf (Tsushima and Manabe)
NEITHER El Nino warming and cooling (focusing on the tropics) NOR seasonal warming and cooling are ideal models for GHG-mediated global warming (which will be greatest in northern polar regions). In particular seasonal warming is caused by warming in the NH and cooling in the SH, which produces a net increase in GMST of 3.5 K. The most interesting aspect of seasonal warming is the failure of AOGCMs to reproduce the large changes in OLR and reflected SWR (roughly 10 W/m2) we observe from space.from clear and cloudy skies when GMST increases 3.5 K. And all of the AOGCMs are wrong in different ways – they are mutually inconsistent! – according to Manabe.
Frank is incorrect in saying that data without confidence intervals cannot be compared. When all global temperature datasets show warming since January 2001 at a rate below IPCC’s least prediction in 1990, it is legitimate to conclude that the predictions were prodigiously exaggerated.
And Dick Lindzen did not change his central climate sensitivity estimate in the updated version of his paper. It remains at 0.7 K at equilibrium. Nor did I rely solely on that great man. I pointed out, correctly, that the trend in reported climate sensitivity estimates continues to fall throughout the small subset of the climate literature that considers the central question of climate sensitivity.
Honest researchers are not prepared to ignore the failure of global temperatures to come anywhere close to prediction. Even IPCC has had to reduce its oredictions drastically, though they remain excessive.
As the head posting says, no amount of statistical prestidigitation will be able to conceal the widening discrepancy between prediction and observation. And once our new global network of simple, cheap, standardised, reliable temperature sensors is in operation, there will be still less room for true-believers to attempt to argue that the models are right and the temperature measurements all wrong.
As for the vexed question of whether feedback is net-positive or net-negative, in an object that the ice-cores demonstrate to be near-perfectly thermostatic at chiliadic timescales, it should be self-evident that feedback is far more likely to be net-negative than net-positive. Without strongly net-positive feedback, global warming caused by Man is a non-problem.
Lord Monckton writes: “Frank is incorrect in saying that data without confidence intervals cannot be compared. When all global temperature datasets show warming since January 2001 at a rate below IPCC’s least prediction in 1990, it is legitimate to conclude that the predictions were prodigiously exaggerated.”
One can do the comparison, but Frank contends that you can’t draw any SCIENTIFIC conclusions from the difference one observes. Consider a randomized trial of a blood pressure medicine and a placebo. The blood pressure of the intervention group drops 10 psi while the placebo group drops 5 psi (because some volunteers become more concerned about their health). Is this difference meaningful? It depends on how many patients were tested and how much scatter there is in the blood pressure drop. A drop of 10+/- 5 vs 5+/-5 provides little confidence the drug is beneficial. A drop of 10+/-1 vs 5+/-1 is not.
A slogan used by a statistics teacher: Statistics, abstracting MEANING from data.
In the case of planetary temperature, we have period where temperature rise was more rapid (the 1980s, with more El Ninos than average) than others (the 2000s, with fewer). We also have autocorrelation in the data, which means that more rapid warming this month implies more rapid warming for the next few months, meaning that the monthly measurements aren’t independent.
Did you click on the link to Dick Lindzen’s second paper, read the admission of problems in the first paper and then look for an ECS of 0.7 K in the abstract? Of course you didn’t.
There are a number of papers that study changes in OLR and reflected SWR as temperature changes. Lindzen did so with El Nino. Manabe and others with seasonal warming. Others with Pinatubo. The best study of Pinatubo can be found at Lucia, from Paul_K. He gets ECS similar to L7C14 and Otto(2013).
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/pinatubo-climate-sensitivity-and-two-dogs-that-didnt-bark-in-the-night/
They are all attempting to address the same scientific question: How much must it warm for the Earth to emit (or reflect) an addition W/m2 of radiation? None of these studies use GHG-mediated warming, because that process requires many decades and we can’t stably monitor fluxes from space over periods that long. So they all rely on large temperature change over a short period: 3.5 K of seasonal warming over six months (the biggest by far), much less warming over a similar period from El Nino, and about 0.6 K of cooling over 1 year from Pinatubo. These periods of rapid, large temperature change are NOT ideal models for GHG-mediated warming. They are have weaknesses and a wide confidence interval. They all get different answers, but only L&C claim that feedback is negative. IMO, most of these phenomena suggest a climate sensitive like L&C14 and Otto13. None is definitive.
‘
Lord Monckton writes: “As the head posting says, no amount of statistical prestidigitation will be able to conceal the widening discrepancy between prediction and observation.”
Ask your friends at the GWPF: You can’t draw scientific conclusions from this discrepancy without statistics. FWIW, the discrepancy was widening, now it has shrunk. Tomorrow, who knows. Statistical analysis of previous fluctuations in warming helps one deal with this problem.
In response to Frank, who repeats the common scientific solecism that data without confidence intervals cannot be compared, I recall Richard Feynman’s dictum that if you have to resort to statistics to try to determine a scientific truth you should go and find a proper method.
It is striking that the measured rates of global warming on the various datasets differ so much that their much-vaunted “confidence intervals” do not even overlap. With data that uncertain, obsessing about confidence intervals is manifestly pointless.
One can legitimately deduce that the interval of measured warming estimates falls well below the entire interval of predicted warming in IPCC (1990).
There is no point in trying to muddy the waters with confidence intervals that, in the context of very uncertain temperature data, are meaningless. IPCC’s predictions are overegged, and IPCC has accepted this, it has said so, and it has revised its medium-term predictions sharply downward, as a forthcoming edition of the global warming speedometer will demonstrate.
Even if Frank does not accept the meaning of the data, even the IPCC does so.
So to Dick Lindzen’s paper, into which I had input at various stages – in particular, in the 2009 paper, to point out, fortunately before publication, that orbital degradation had made a mess of the ERBE data, and that a correction was now available that made quite a difference to the numbers.
I also have a copy of the 2011 paper, which, as I correctly stated in an earlier comment here, held to the original 2009 paper’s best estimate of 0.7 K climate sensitivity per CO2 doubling, implying a quite strongly negative feedback. I also discussed this estimate with Dick at the time. One should not, as Frank seems to do, merely dip into the abstract: it is necessary to study the whole paper, and then to discuss it with the author.
The infelicities in the 2009 paper, of which Frank makes much, did not materially alter the underlying calculations leading to the determination of climate sensitivity.
I am aware of all manner of studies attempting to obtain transient and equilibrium sensitivity using contemporary or palaeoclimate data. I conclude that most of them are bringing estimates of sensitivity inexorably downward. The main reason is the manifest failure of global temperature to rise at anything like the predicted rate.
Much of the argument about global temperature will cease once our massive automated array is doing its job. It will provide a resolution matched only by the satellites, but, unlike them, it will be at surface level, removing some layers of complication.
I adhere to the conclusion in the head posting, to the effect that no amount of playing about with numbers and tampering with data will be able to conceal the widening discrepancy between prediction and observation.
It is disingenuous in the extreme to say that the discrepancy has ceased to widen because there has been an el Nino. Once a couple of years have passed and the la Nina, if any, has done its work, we shall be able to see whether the rate of warming has risen by enough to reduce the difference between the warming that the IPCC had predicted should occur by now and the warming that – on any measure – has actually been observed.
Finally, if the temperature measurements are so uncertain that their confidence intervals do not even overlap, then it might legitimatel be argued that we are unable to measure global warming with sufficient precision to determine whether or not any prediction is or is not coming to pass. In that event, there is no basis for taking any measures whatsoever to make global warming go away, since we cannot tell whether or not it is actually happening.
I shall continue to produce my graphs showing what the data show and comparing them with what the IPCC and the models have predicted, and people can judge matters for themselves.
Lord Monckton: The change in TOA OLR and reflected SWR with the change in surface temperature – the climate feedback parameter (CFP) – is a fundamental property of our planet. The reciprocal of the CFP is ECS. (probably technically the effective climate sensitivity. Lindzen and Choi is one of several attempts to determine the CFP from observations. When you cited Lindzen and Choi, I put their latest work in context with two other attempts to directly measure the climate feedback parameter: Paul_K’s unpublished analysis of Pinatubo destroyed earlier publications and has a ECS of about 1.4 K. Tsushima and Manabe is the standard reference I cite as proof that AOGCM can’t reproduce the very large feedbacks we observe from space as the seasons change. (When seasonal temperature change is 3.5 K, Planck feedback is 11 W/m2 and it is trivial to distinguish between a positive or negative 1 W/m2/K seasonal feedback (+/- 3.2 W/m2). Lindzen and Choi devote most of their attention to feedback in the tropics, which very well may be negative. (This might explain the lack of a hot-spot in the upper tropical troposphere.) Unfortunately, only one Figure in their paper discusses global – rather than tropical – data and I can’t tell what they did without re-reading earlier papers by Dessler and by Spenser. I can, however, read the abstract, and it makes no mention of an ECS of 0.7 K. (Professor Lindzen may still believe this is the appropriate interpretation of his work, but couldn’t convince peer-reviewers.) Considered as a whole, these three analyses are VERY damaging to AOGCMs and the consensus position that feedback is strongly positive. That doesn’t mean I’m convinced that [global] feedback must be negative. Nor should you make that claim without admitting that some observational evidence of positive feedback exists.
I’d love to hear Professor Lindzen discuss the merits and weaknesses of all three approaches to determining the CFP using observations from space. This approach is completely independent of energy balance models and other attempts to address climate sensitivity.
Lord Monckton wrote: “In response to Frank, who repeats the common scientific solecism that data without confidence intervals cannot be compared, I recall Richard Feynman’s dictum that if you have to resort to statistics to try to determine a scientific truth you should go and find a proper method.”
Agreed. Unfortunately, no one had found a “proper method” or unambiguous method for demonstrating that the projections of climate models are right or wrong. The problem is complicated immensely by the existence of deterministic chaos and the two-fold range of model predictions. However, Feynman also said:
“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain. Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure, that it is possible to live and not know. But I don’t know whether everyone realizes this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained.”
Lord Monckton continued: “It is striking that the measured rates of global warming on the various datasets differ so much that their much-vaunted “confidence intervals” do not even overlap. With data that uncertain, obsessing about confidence intervals is manifestly pointless.”
Confidence intervals deal with noise or random error in data. They can’t tell us about systematic errors in observations and their interpretation.
Lord Monckton continues: “I adhere to the conclusion in the head posting, to the effect that no amount of playing about with numbers and tampering with data will be able to conceal the widening discrepancy between prediction and observation. It is disingenuous in the extreme to say that the discrepancy has ceased to widen because there has been an el Nino. Once a couple of years have passed and the la Nina, if any, has done its work, we shall be able to see whether the rate of warming has risen by enough to reduce the difference between the warming that the IPCC had predicted should occur by now and the warming that – on any measure – has actually been observed.”
One could also say that “it is disingenuous in the extreme to say that a discrepancy was created by a decade plus with strong La Nina’s and no strong El Ninos.” In other words, by the Pause. Why should we discount the impact of one example of unforced variability (the 2015/6 El Nino), but not another (the strong La Ninas that began in 1999)? How do we decide what is real warming (or lack thereof) and what is an artifact that we can discard?
The correct answer is to avoid discarding any data – when possible – and otherwise only discard data when it is unambiguous due to an experimental error. Feynman’s story about biased discarding of data from the Millikan oil-drop experiment is a classic example of what happens when we let our biases choose what data to discard. ENSO is noise in our observations of warming, not an experimental mistake.
Therefore, statistical analysis is needed to determine the likelihood that an apparent difference in trends could be due to an unusual number of El Ninos early in the period and an unusual number of La Ninas late in the period. If one considers 1980 to present, we have encountered three strong El Ninos,, probably a similar number of strong La Nina, and other forms of unforced variability. These phenomena have widened the confidence interval for the warming trend calculated by least-squares regression. Using the confidence interval for observed and projected warming, the method I described above provides the standard deviation for the DIFFERENCE between observed and projected warming trends. That gives us the likelihood that the difference could be zero. For example if the difference between the trends is 0.1 degC/decade and the standard deviation of that difference in trends is 0.1 degC/decade, there is a 32% likelihood of observing this difference by change. However, if the standard deviation of the difference is 0.05 degC/decade, then there is only a 5% likelihood of observing such a difference by chance.
The advantage of this approach is that the 2015/6 El Nino and the end of The Pause has little influence on the conclusion one draws from the data. Before this El Nino, we might have calculated a 10% likelihood that the difference in trends could be zero by chance and afterwards a 20% likelihood. Or this El Nino might have changed a 1% likelihood into a 2% likelihood. The conclusion isn’t all-of-nothing; it evolves GRADUALLY as new observations come in. Steve McIntyre showed the second scenario applies to satellite troposphere temperature.
Great post Monckton! The central feature is a thorough debunking of the Cooper release yesterday. Well done. Beyond me how Benben takes aim at a peripheral part of the argument and elevates that to the central scientific issue and representative of “what’s wrong with WUWT” Doesn’t that define what a troll does?
I agree with “fossilsage” that Poop-Poop, to translate “benben’s” moniker from the Japanese, is a tremendous advertisement for climate skepticism, particularly because, on this occasion, he has succeeded in derailing just about all criticism of the scientific points I made in the head posting.
Why is it that Marxists don’t like to be called Marxists? Could it be that Russian Communism, which killed 150 million, has not proven to be a terrifically wonderful advertisement for it?
It’s worse than you think…The last sanctuary for Pol Pot whose “small is beautiful” brand of communism found favor at the United Nations was China even after the murderous result of those policies became known to the world
Ben Ben is simply a troll as others have observed. I have noticed him in Chico lately. Hr is like that one from Scotland that ‘fell’ into the stream at the Bishop’s palace
https://youtu.be/po-noeR8a-I
“””””….. A slogan used by a statistics teacher: Statistics, abstracting MEANING from data. …..”””””
Sorry Frank; the only MEANING that results from statistics, is entirely a property of the algorithm, not of the data.
The algorithm (of the statistical machination) works just fine on ANY finite data set of finite real known numbers (doesn’t work on variables).
The original data set contains all of the information that is present in that data set. The statistics added no information to that data.
And virtually every algorithm of statistical mathematics creates numbers which don’t even exist in the data set, so they are results that were never observed or measured; or even observable by anybody. In other words, as fictitious as is statistical mathematics itself.
G
George: Ever heard of statistical inference? Or inferential statistics? Or statistical hypothesis testing? You can find them in Wikipedia. Once you know what these terms refer to, we can discuss whether these processes abstract meaning from data.
The question at hand is whether the difference between observed and projected warming trends is large enough to demonstrate that climate models can’t be trusted to give useful results. Read about the difference between two means.
The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper handily dispensed with Marx and Marxism and the dialectic. No, it’s not an easy post-modern read, but the lessons are unforgettable.
“Mr. Cooper should be ashamed of himself. But he won’t be. One needs a conscience first.”
That’s the money quote. Shame is the first thing to be jettisoned. Once you’ve done that, you are capable of anything, because there is no longer any interior mechanism holding you back.
That by itself explains so much.
An excellent explanation of why Hillary Clinton is a habitual liar bordering on the pathological.
The essay is spot on, with one little, niggling exception that I take regarding pronouncements on the grammaticality (or non-), in contemporary English, of a locution, one tiny sentence that the whole would have been better without, perhaps (subject to judgment, of course). You write ‘“advocate” is transitive, so “for” after it is superfluous’. In my dialect of American English, ‘advocate X’ and ‘advocate for X’ are not the same activity. When used transitively, the word refers to the holding of the position. When used with the complementizing preposition “for”, it refers here to political activity, not cerebral activity.
Additionally, when used transitively in American English, it is necessary to make sure that the direct object be an abstract nominalization. The sentence “He advocates free candy for all children.” would be ungrammatical in my dialect because it has a concrete noun as an object. [Better, though equally creepy, would be “He advocates dispensing candy freely to all children”, or something like it]
Sorry to pick at nits, but the whole discussion of academics who do not have good English mechanics is patently impertinent: It is not their fault, and except where you can show otherwise, it probably does not affect their understanding of climatic issues. We have chucked teaching English as a system in this country, and two generations of scientists have come to the trade sans English training (they do appear to have learned the major vocabulary words, perhaps). It does not reflect on their thoughts directly and unequivocally; it merely demonstrates the huge holes in their education. You know what they mean regarding climate, so please attack that, What they meant was bad enough, and they have no defense for how they expressed it. Because we can understand their plight, it appears to me, we can also take the high ground and skip the ad-hominems regarding grammar as irrelevant to the science.
With all respect to Mr Newkirk, Mr Cooper is not, as far as I know, any sort of academic: he is some sort of journalist and, on the evidence of the article in The Week, not a particularly good one. And his treatment of the verb “to advocate” as though it were intransitive is inelegant and, though no doubt widespread in some circles in America, is bad grammar.
I include occasional sideswipes like this at the grammar or the politics of the climate extremists because I am not writing a learned paper but a blog posting, which needs a little light relief here and there.
https://fee.org/articles/the-link-between-extreme-environmentalism-and-hard-core-racism/
This is a generic response to “benben”, who has stated that he/she is no longer posting here, since personal information has been dispensed:
I too, use a anonymous handle, but one which was imparted to me by one “Harry Twinotter”, who also frequents JoNova. Prior to that, I used my real name, and even posted an article (with Anthony’s help, and editing from my older brother), so that is why you see an ‘anonymous’ name for me now. I liked the handle “Harry Twinotter” bestowed upon me so much, I adopted it, and both Jo and Anthony approved my new ‘name’.
“What is a Communist” you asked, and I think it was NOT rhetorical. Let’s see: Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Progressivism, Liberalism, what-ever-ism, comes down to one central theme, regardless of the name given to it. To me, it all means about the same: the government owns and controls virtually everything. The individual is subverted to the collective, and only the government itself is good; everything else, or anything the government decides to categorize as evil, is evil. You are not permitted to excell at anything. You must do exactly what you are told, when you are told to do it, by whomever you are told to do it.
You asked, ‘what does Communism have to do with climate’. Well, let’s see. Last time I checked, there was a concerted effort to suppress any ideas which run contrary to the ‘party line’ that CO2 causes global warming. See above. The ‘government’ has decided that dissenting opinion is “evil”, so dissenting opinion must be suppressed. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Anthony, Jo, and others, do not accept the ‘party line’, so they are disparaged by believers, such as yourself. Rather than engaging in rational discourse, you come flinging accusations. The term, “watermelons”, describes exactly what the modern-day ‘climate change’ movement is all about: establishing a global government which will decide, and plan, and own, and control everything it possibly can, in the name of ‘saving the planet’. The individual is immaterial, except to be the obedient slave of the State.
If you want to live like that, that is your choice. You choose serfdom, then enjoy it. You want every decision made for you, then embrace it. You accept suppression of individual thought (because, as we all know, individuality is ‘evil’), then refrain from posting any individual thoughts on this website, or any other “*D-E-N-I-E-R*” website. You have stopped posting here; I say, good riddance!
Just recently, I finished modifying some charts that Bob Tisdale posted in an earlier thread (and, thanks Bob, those were great!!!!!!!! I had the 750-mya chart earlier, but your close-ups were the cat’s meow!!!!). Beyond a shadow of any doubt whatsoever, these prove that the hypothesis that CO2 controls average global temperature is false. You want to believe that man’s addition of CO2 to the atmosphere is causing global warming. Such is your individual choice. The data are in complete opposition to your belief, but don’t let facts get in the way of your religion.
Lest you doubt that the “watermelons” want to suppress any dissenting opinion, Robert Kennedy Jr. is on record as calling for ‘Nuremberg-style’ trials for climate change “*D-E-N-I-E-R-S*”, and Mr. Kennedy is a self-identified “socialist”, a.k.a. “Democrat”, a.k.a. “Progressive”, a.k.a. “liberal”. I’m sure someone here can find that video, where he plainly calls for such criminal behavior to be punished.
Peace, health, and prosperity, to you, ‘benben’, even though you do not believe in the last one,
Vlad the Impaler
Well, I’ll come out of hiding to say, thank you Vlad the Impaler, I enjoyed reading your response.
I’m guessing it will do no good but I would like to ask you to try and see people with opinion other than yours not as automatically dumb or evil. While you may or may not be correct on the AGW science part, you are certainly wrong about that AGW is just an excuse to control people. Look at it this way: if one, hypothetically, were to accept that AGW is truly a big problem then one would see most of the actions of the left (and outside of the US, both left and right) as warranted. If they are wrong about AGW, then these actions are also wrong. It has nothing to do with lying about AGW to control the population or whatever, but rather about whether you accept the AGW hypothesis or not, and the resulting line of action.
Peace health and prosperity to you as well!
Cheers
semi-anonymous-ben
Even if observed temperatures had risen fast enough to make the models look plausible, and they haven’t, the question arises whether it is cheaper to squander trillions and trash the countryside and kill millions of birds and bats for the sake of making largely non-existent global warming go away or let it happen and do what all creatures on Earth are best at – adapt to it. All serious economic analyses show that doing nothing now is the right economic course even if the rate of warming were to rise to what the IPCC has been predicting. Best to wait,. If warming eventually occurs at a more rapid rate, as it shows no signs of doing, there will be plenty of time to change, for the first 2 degrees of warming are generally regarded as beneficial, warmer weather being better than colder for most creatures, even including cuddly polar bears.
The climate scam is Left-driven for political reasons. There are no credible scientific excuses for denying to third-world countries the affordable, reliable, consistent, base-load, low-maintenance coal-fired power that lifted first England and then the West out of mediaeval poverty. The cost in lives of continuing to pursue the insane course advocated by the totalitarian Left is likely to be in the tens to hundreds of millions – just as it was in the 20th century.
Hi ‘benben’:
That was an amazingly polite, cogent response, and I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed reading it. Thank you so much for the reasoned response. I hope to do so in kind:
I would begin here by stating that I do NOT consider those with differing opinions (an opinion, by definition, cannot be wrong, or dumb, or whatever; it is simply a view held by an individual) as either automatically ‘dumb’ or ‘evil’. It is what someone DOES with that opinion that is the problem.
You, I am assuming (yes, I know what that does… …) accept AGW/CAGW/climate change [caused exclusively by humans], mostly uncritically. I do not have a problem with that. You are welcome to believe that, even though I would argue that the weight of evidence is against you.
My problem is that anyone who holds the same (or similar) belief to yours, might be in a position to ACT upon that belief, flawed as I believe it to be. That is the problem: I am to be told what I can, or cannot, do, on the basis that my actions/inactions, will or can harm the planet. I consider such action to be nonsense.
When I say the weight of evidence is against the CO2-human-caused-climate-change meme, I am looking at the whole of the geological record, which tells us many things (and yes, I have two degrees in Geology, awarded to me by a major American university; I am also licensed to practice Geology, in private, and before the public, in the state I reside, and by reciprocity, within the states adjacent to the state of my residence). I mentioned the 750-million year record that Bob Tisdale brought up again on an earlier posting, a few days ago. He also modified it to show some close up intervals, typically of 20 – 40 million year lengths. The 750 ma record itself is proof that CO2 does NOT change, or control, or modify average global temperatures. The number of instances on the record where temperature and CO2 are traveling in opposite directions are too numerous to count.
If your opinion is based on looking at some two centuries (give or take) of temperature vs. CO2, then I would hold the same opinion that you do: CO2 causes global warming/climate change.
But I do NOT restrict myself to 200 years, or 1000 years, or even the Holocene (which, by the way, is sufficient proof all by itself that CO2 does not drive climate). I observe the available record, published in the peer-reviewed literature, now extended to the Cryogenian Period (late NeoProterozoic Era) which says the hypothesis is completely lacking in scientific validity. Today, we live with about 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. If we go above 400 ppm, or 500 ppm, we are told that the Earth will ‘burn up’. Then I look at the Ordovician/Silurian transition, when CO2 concentration was about 4,000 ppm (some have argued for up to 6,000 ppm), and the Earth was in a glacial event (and, just for completeness, it was also a major extinction event — — makes you wonder if the cold climate(s) had something to do with that extinction, doesn’t it?).
You are welcome to your opinion; I just ask that it be based on science, and the whole of the record available to us. Lyell said, “The present is the key to the past” (known as the Principal of Uniformitarianism — those processes operating today are the same ones that have been operating since the beginning of the Earth, at about the same rates). The corollary is, ‘The past is the key to the future.’ Geologists were the first true paleoclimatologists; these “newcomers” have failed to study the past, in order to understand the present, so reach false conclusions. Geologists were doing paleoclimate (think sequence stratigraphy) almost two centuries ago.
At the risk of sending this to moderation, due to its overly-long length, or inadvertent use of a prohibited word, I’ll cut off here, and await any response you might choose to make. Anthony and his crack team of Mods have my e-mail, and I authorize them to make you aware of it, so we might continue off-site, if you choose.
I won’t disclose any e-mail contact info you send, if you do.
Regards,
Vlad the Impaler
Vlad, thanks. Your response is very interesting in the sense that it exactly points at the problem why the skeptical articles on WUWT and elsewhere are – as far as I can see – mostly ignored in mainstream science.
But first: mr. Monckton of Brenchely, you should be ashamed of yourself. That an author would come into the comments section of his own article and write a comment as childish and unpleasant as ‘Poop-Poop, to translate “benben’s” moniker’ (as you wrote in one of your comments above) is beyond me, and clearly you don’t deserve serious further consideration.
Vlad, firstly you assume that I must be uncritical because otherwise I could never hold believes so opposite to yours. This is not true. I hold a degree in chemical engineering, and during my electives on climate science(atmospheric chemistry etc.) we were very explicitly instructed to be as critical as possible. At one point our professors divided the class in argument, and half the class had to argue for the skeptical point of view. And anyone that gave the skeptical side anything less then their full effort received pretty bad marks. Me and my classmates have been plenty critical. And I try to be so still, which is the very reason why I keep reading WUWT.
So, lets first agree that hard data on climate parameters (now, but especially 750 million years ago) are have a fair amount of uncertainty, but that processes in chemistry and physics are much better understood.
The scientific fundamentals – and I’m talking about the chemistry and the physics and the energy balances – all point incredibly strongly towards green house gasses as being the main controlling variable in our climate system with respect to energy balances (and the subsequent temp. increases etc.). This is truly textbook stuff, and you will note that it is almost never discussed here at WUWT, because it’s very difficult to fault. Physics is, in the end, math, and in math you can be either right or wrong and that’s it. So please please please, instead of arguing with me about it, just go get a couple of textbooks. University level chemistry is not the easiest to understand but clearly you have the cognitive capacity to work through them!
benben: “The scientific fundamentals – and I’m talking about the chemistry and the physics and the energy balances – all point incredibly strongly towards green house gasses as being the main controlling variable in our climate system with respect to energy balances (and the subsequent temp. increases etc.). This is truly textbook stuff…”
I too started my career as a chemical engineer, and spent some time practising as such and hence I am fully au fait with the physics, thermodynamics and mathematics concerning such matters, and I couldn’t disagree more. And for what it’s worth, I ended up in IT, inter alia being paid good money to work on development of computer models of non-linear systems.
As to: “So please please please, instead of arguing with me about it, just go get a couple of textbooks. University level chemistry is not the easiest to understand but clearly you have the cognitive capacity to work through them!”
What a patronising little twerp you are!
Do you really believe that the vast majority of posters here are unacquainted wiuth such elementary matters?
Grow up FFS.
Vlad, in fact, the basic physics indicate that the climate should be warming up faster than what has actually been happening. This has lead to the very thoroughly analyzed discrepancies between climate models and actual temperatures. Again, please feel free to read a textbook and do the calculations yourself, no-one is hiding anything from you. But do note that we all agree that temperatures have been going up, and that at the time of writing the temperatures fall squarely within the lower boundaries of the models, as illustrated in the article above.
Lets get down to the main point: the fundamentals indicate we should be worried about CO2. The models that test those predictions are not 100% accurate. But neither is the data. So given imperfect information, we choose to still be worried because that is what the fundamentals tell us. So for WUWT to constantly repeat the message that the models are imperfect is irrelevant, because everyone is well aware of that. If you want to make a REAL contribution to the discussion you should examine the fundamentals. Actually look at the physics and the chemistry involved and critique that.
Also, from your geologist point of view, maybe take into account time scales? If temps change in 100.000 years nobody cares, but if the same change happens in a 100 years: drama. Imagine if you brake a car. going from 60-0 in 100 seconds is no problem, but if you do the exact same thing in 0.1 second you turn into ketchup.
Finally, I would like to point out that the main climate model is open source and easily accessible. If you can read code (or are willing to put in a bit of effort to learn it), you are warmly invited to play with the models themselves, or just go through the user manuals: http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm1.2/
oh and forgive any grammar mistakes, plenty post euro finals booze 🙂
Cheers,
Ben
Hello ‘benben’:
Would it be OK if I just called you, “Ben”, and we can go from there? Since an earlier post caused a bit of a row, we should find an alternate moniker.
In the interest of brevity, I think I’ll restrict myself to just the one point you tried to make: you talked about rates of temperature change.
On this side of the pond, the number, ‘one hundred thousand’ is written 100,000; the comma separates the various periods of the place values, instead of a decimal point. That info is only so that there is no confusion. Likely, you already knew that.
If a climate change occurs over a period of 100,000 years, almost no one is going to notice. Agreed. If a climate change occurs over a time frame of 100 years, it might be noticeable. It would depend upon the amount of ‘climate change’. In 2016, we are suffering a change of about one (or slightly more) Celsius degree, over some one or two centuries.
I think you will agree that this what has the IPCC apoplectic. The problematic models say that if CO2 doubles in concentration, we will see some three Celsius degrees rise in temperature, above some ‘reference’ level (say, 1950 – 2000, or some such interval).
OK, terms established: about a degree, in about a century, with some wiggle room. In the absence of being able to directly dialog with you, I will have to run on the assumption that you would accept that premise. If not, I await your next post.
So, proceeding on this premise, I would point you to the Pleistocene record, the last 2.855 +/- 0.02 million years. While different areas experienced somewhat different extremes of temperature, and differences in timing, the available evidence (starting around 1992, and continuing to today) indicates that transitions into and out of glacial episodes were on the order of four, or five, or even six Celsius degrees, IN A TIME SPAN MEASURED IN JUST DECADES. In the last decade, some have even begun to drop the plural form of the word, ‘decade’. As you are an engineer, it would help if you would distinguish for us, which is a greater rate: one degree in a century (with wiggle room) or (taking the median value) five degrees in as many decades, maybe less?
*********************
Of course the data of 750 million years is “problematic”. When I was an undergrad, there were few reliable paleotemperature data, and no CO2 concentration data. But, right back at you: do not argue with me: argue with these data. Geologists don’t blindly accept a given piece of information. Any hypothesis, idea, thought, or data, have to be confirmed. When the above piece of information came out, the whole of the community were stunned, to say the least. The prevailing view (the one I was taught as an undergrad) was that transitions took thousands upon thousands of years. Then (apologies to Kuhn), the prevailing paradigm did not fit the data that continued to be uncovered. We had interpreted our available data wrong, so in good scientific methodology, we corrected what was wrong, admitted the mistake, and moved on. The story of continental drift/plate tectonics is no less relevant, either. Wegner was right; the rest of the community was wrong, and thanks to J. T. Wilson (who I met at at conference, when an undergrad) and Henry Hess, 1960 was a revolutionary year in geoscience.
The data in Bob Tisdale’s charts have been confirmed, and reconfirmed, and reconfirmed again. Sure, we do NOT have exact data; we are converging towards the most likely value. But these data are telling you, me, and everyone else, something important: CO2 has no more to do with global temperature than our baby kitten.
Climate is, and has, and always will change; unless “man” is causing something at a rate in excess of five Celsius degrees in a decade or two, we are well within completely normal variation. You say I should study the Physics and Chemistry of CO2; what makes you think I haven’t? I may not be a Chemical Engineer, but yes, I have (and a lot of it has been in the last two decades!) looked quite extensively at the Physics and Chemistry of CO2; and I have looked at the new data coming out about what the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was at different times, and what was happening paleoclimatologically at the time. You say we should be worried; I’ll worry when global temperatures decline, in the face of increasing CO2. That’s one aspect of the Physics and Chemistry you should have picked up on: CO2 is saturated w.r.t. its IR absorption bands, in concentrations greater than about 300 ppm. We are on the asymptote of CO2’s ability to cause “warming”. That is why there was glaciation at the Ordovician/Silurian boundary, when CO2 was about 4,000 ppm. That is why there was glaciation in the early Ediacaran, when CO2 was about 12,000 ppm (some have argued it was more like 3 or 4 PERCENT).
An engineer, a person who designs or studies systems, should also know that a coupled, non-linear, dynamic system, is not, and cannot be controlled by a single variable. Paleoclimate data say CO2 has little, if any, influence on the temperature regime. Since you have the expertise, run a cross-correlation between the temperature data on the 750 ma chart, and the CO2 concentration. In science, correlation is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for causality. If there is a correlation, we can look for causality, If there is no correlation, then the process stops. The two parameters are not inter-related, so we should look elsewhere.
My correlation coefficient peaked at 0.22 (0.37 if I used only Phanerozoic data), so the hypothesis is rejected; CO2 does NOT relate to temperature.
Sorry to be so long; but I do thank you for the polite replies and posts. I can see you are a thoughtful individual. I also see that you have some misconceptions. We need to move you off of this two-century myopia you have. There is an entire universe you have yet to explore, and it beckons you even now.
“Luke, come over to the Dark Side, and let me show you the power it will give you.”
Vlad (a.k.a. Darth Vladimir)
There’s the rub, though, benben – AGW has not been shown to be “truly a big problem,” or even a “problem” or even something that actually exists. It’s pure hypothetical BS, absent proof of causation, which is completely non-existent. The shrill calls for “action” are therefore entirely unwarranted. Vlad’s points are important for all clamoring for “action” to consider. When you look at the REALLY “long term” climate record, you’ll find no indication that CO2 is capable of “driving” ANYTHING. And until adequate study of the forces that (excuse me) REALLY drive the Earth’s climate has been done, there’s no point attempting to blame humanity’s minuscule contribution to CO2 emissions for changes to the climate, or to try to “stop” such changes (which is nothing but a fool’s errand EVEN IF the AGW “climate science” was actually accurate).
Physics is NOT Mathematics. Physics creates models (fictional) that appear to behave similarly to the real observable and measurable universe.
Mathematics is merely a tool (entirely fictional) that we use to describe the behavior of our (fictional) models that appear to mimic the real universe as we observe it.
Absolutely nothing in the mathematics is observable anywhere, as we simply made it all up to use to describe our models. And we continue to make up new mathematics toos as needed to better describe our fictional models that only mimic reality.
G
PS: Isn’t your admonition to go read some textbooks, simply an appeal to authority ?? I read a lot of reviews of newly published Textbooks, and I get a distinct impression, that many such Textbooks are nothing to rely on for truth. But they do sell expensively for their authors benefit.
Hey Darth Vlad,
First of all, premise accepted.
So, what you are saying is that 2 milion years ago, the global temperature dropped by 5 degrees celcius in a couple of decades? Yes, I remember something along those lines in my climate classes. Although, reflectin on it now, I would love to understand what data you use to actually prove something on such a short time-scale, so far back in time. I never bothered to go into it back then. Could you point me to some articles?
Also, what is the actual mechanism behind this change? Why did it happen? As far as I remember from my classes that would imply some pretty dramatic climate tipping point was tipped. This is actually exactly what the AGW hypothesis says: The main claim is that CO2 will increase temperature a bit, but that the actually really dangerous thing is to accidentally hit one of the tipping points causing a very dramatic change, as evidenced by exactly what you reference to. One of the hypotheses is that increasing temperatures will mess up the Atlantic conveyor belt which will cause a very rapid cooling like you described. That’s just a scenario by the way, not a actual prediction 🙂
As far as arguments related to the actual science itself (e.g. ‘CO2 is saturated w.r.t. its IR absorption bands, in concentrations greater than about 300 ppm’), yes I am aware of all that, and it’s pretty well covered. However, when the textbook takes 50 pages to explain it, then I could probably condense it down to 25 pages, but any less and it wouldn’t make sense. I’m sure you agree that 25 pages is out of the scope of a comment! So I’ll just have to do what I did before and refer you to the textbook in question.
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118947401.html
What’s really nice about going through the textbook first and discuss later is that you can just e-mail any random climate scientist and say, ‘hey! page 570 of Seinfeld & Pandis, how does that take into account xyz?’And I promise you, someone will reply to you. If you want to see the opposite of what one does to be taken serious, just read the post by mr. Monckton!
Finally, I have an observation about geologists (if you find skeptical scientist they often tend to be either geologists or old school engineers). Geologists tend to not worry about climate change because they have seen it all before. The climate was drastically different both up and down in the past. All correct. But now we have 7 billion people in a very fragile system that is built around the climate exactly as it was in the 20th century. People underestimate how fragile our society really is. New Orleans: one storm – geologically completely insignificant – and mayhem was the result. Or just a week ago in my country: a hail storm with hail the size of tennis balls, which is completely new compared to the weather in the past 100 years or so. Yes, that hail storm is COMPLETELY insignificant on a geological time scale. But it did result in 1.5 billion euros in damage, because our society is not resilient against changes in weather patterns. So we return full circle to the concept of differing time scales 😉 Yes I know you will say, but weather changes are not the result of green house gases. Our current understanding of the climate says that they will be. And if I understand correctly you are not claiming that geological evidence somehow proves that stuff like hailstorms is unrelated to energy content of the atmosphere. Once again, the fundamentals make sense. They certainly make more sense than the senseless tirades of mr. Monckton.
And also, empirically, there are was that hail storm, which was a completely unprecedented event in Dutch recorded history. Certainly something is changing!
Cheers,
Jedi Ben 😉
Jedi Ben,
“So, what you are saying is that 2 million years ago, the global temperature dropped by 5 degrees celcius (sic) in a couple of decades?”
Let us clarify: I say nothing; this is what the geological community has determined from the evidence the Earth has left us. It took the structure of one of Kuhn’s revolutions, because the accumulating evidence (mostly European) did not fit the accepted paradigm of ‘thousands of years’ to transition between glacial/interglacial conditions.
Let us further clarify: No, the temperature (global ‘average’) did not ‘ …drop … ‘ by several degrees (C)elsius in a matter of a decade or a few decades, just a single time. Point of fact, we first transitioned into a glacial event, a change of temperature within a few decades, or less (it is considered a Pleistocene event, even though it took place late in the Piacenzian Age of the Pliocene Epoch). Then, the climate entered this ‘see-saw’ of some 30 – 35 glacial/interglacial episodes (again, different parts of the Earth had slightly different timings, and extrema of climatic conditions), first on a 40,000/10,000 cycle (with some variation), then settling into the 100,000/10,000 cycle most of us are familiar with. Each transition is now thought to occur in extremely short time frames, and involve at least several Celsius degrees; yes, decades; maybe just a decade (and I’ve heard Richard Alley is now thinking a few years, at most!).
But the essential point is that nature, the Earth itself, is causing, and has caused climate change(s) much more dramatic than one or two Celsius degrees in a Century! What we are seeing is so completely minuscule as to be laughable that anyone considers it a crisis! And you already accepted that CO2 is essentially saturated, so the increased “warming” effect is outside of our ability to measure it [“yes I am aware of all that, and it’s pretty well covered.”]. So how you can cling to the scenario of CO2 causing us to reach some “tipping point” is beyond me. If CO2 causes global climate to change, then I should be able to unambiguously see it happen consistently in the geological record. I see, unambiguously, the exact opposite. I see high concentrations of CO2 when the Earth was a ‘snowball’, and I see warm, coal-forming swamps (“Carboniferous Period”) when CO2 was near what we have today (300 – 400 ppm). The geological record completely contradicts your belief system, both in terms of rate and magnitude, and what CO2 is “supposed” to be doing.
I do not have at my fingertips a reference for the Pliestocene; I tend to shy away from them, as a dialog such as this often degrades into ‘my reference’ vs. ‘your reference’. I’ll do some hunting around ‘Quaternary Science Review’. I do know that the volume of published, peer-reviewed literature is extensive, having started in the mid-1990’s. Also, the Jousel et al paper on Vostok was one of the papers that sealed the deal, for all practical purposes. That was in 1997. Note that both Vostok and EPICA show, unambiguously, that CO2 concentrations FOLLOW temperature changes.
The weight of evidence is against you.
Fragile? OMG! So, nobody noticed that big thing that hit the Yucatan about 66.0 million years ago? The massive, choking sulfur pouring from the Siberian diabase floods was just ‘another day at the office’ for those poor schlubs in the Early Triassic, who didn’t have the decency to go extinct at the terminal Permian event?
It’s called ‘adaptation’. It’s the norm in evolution: adapt, or perish. Some 98% of all the species who have ever existed are now extinct. Extinction is the norm. Take every euro (or dollar, or ruble, or whatever) that has been put into “solving” this non-existent crises of “global warming”, and put it into adaptation, and let’s see how fragile things really are. Let us expand our use of fossil fuels to “un-fragilize” that infrastructure! You had hail? It’s never happened before? Really? Who was around taking weather observations and measurements, say, 20,000 years ago (what we call the late Wisconsinan on this side of the pond)? Climate change is the norm. If things are changing (and they are) then expect to see just about everything. Which begs the question, hail is ice; ice is cold; how do we get ice with all this unabated warming? Is the lower stratosphere still fairly cold, say, -40 Celsius? How did that happen?
I’d comment on your statement about New Orleans, but that is a political issue, and I’m trying to stick to science. And, I do not want to get too long here; the homestead is still in need of some additional work to prepare for La Nina winter, and no one else is cutting up the wood for the fire.
As to your Seinfeld text, some of us are not readily in possession of the spare change to obtain this item (it’s called the ‘war on the middle class’, and the ‘war on coal’, being waged, and won, by someone whose name I shall not utter, but his initials are B. HUSSEIN Obama, or as we like to to put it, ‘One Big – A$$-Mistake, America). On the thumbnail, it says they have a value for ECS; the IPCC uses 3 Celsius degrees per doubling. Can you save me a euro or two, and advise what value Seinfeld uses? I suspect that the value they present is out of line with a series of papers between 2001 and 2014 (JoNova put them into a single post, and I ran a LSR on the values). If you are interested, run your own:
abscissa ordinate
0 (no value)
1 3.0
2 5.0 “outlier”
3 2.9
4 2.8
5 3.7
6 3.8
7 3.0
8 3.1
9 2.6
10 2.3
11 1.9
12 2.3
13 0.7 “outlier”
14 4.1
15 2.4
16 2.0
17 1.9
18 1.8
19 2.5
20 2.0
21 2.2
22 2.5
23 2.1
24 2.2
25 1.6
27 2.0
28 1.3
29 2.0
30 1.8
31 1.7
And while we’re at it, how’s the cross-correlation of 750 ma temperature/CO2 going? Do you have a coefficient?
I will conclude here with a question: CO2 comprises one molecule in 2500. Do you really believe that one part in 2500 determines the temperature of the other 2499? Do you really accept that a coupled, non-linear dynamic system is controlled, or maintained, or dominated by a single variable? I would never accept that idea; such a system cannot be explained (or even successfully modeled) by just one variable; it is always subject to change (there’s that word again!) from the interaction of multiple variables. In the case of global climate, we’re into thousands of variables, often acting in different ways at different times.
An engineer should know that the more complex a system is, the less likely it is that just one input parameter is the deciding factor. You asked, what caused the incessant see-saw of the Pleistocene? I have no idea; it was NOT just CO2; it was NOT just the sun; it was NOT just Milankovic cycles; it was NOT just ocean currents, or albedo, or T. Rex flatus, or anything else, acting alone. Global climate is a system, and a seriously complex one, at that. The IPCC is convinced that one, single item in the whole of the Universe is causing temperature change. I say, the geological record, Bob Tisdale’s 750 – million – year graph posted on the ‘volcano/extinction’ thread a few days ago (yes, I know, it is not “HIS” chart; it is available on the internet, and has been for some time) says the IPCC and everyone else who believes CO2 causes warming, is wrong. Just flat-out wrong! The data are there; if you dispute what the data say, then I cannot help you. You can argue with me all day long, but the data still say the same thing.
Temperature and CO2 concentration are not correlated; therefore, there is no causation.
Regards, Jedi Ben,
Darth Vladimir (the Impaler-est, and mentor to my Padawans Kylo Ren, Darth Sideous, and Count Dooku)
“An engineer should know that the more complex…”
Benben isn’t an engineer, he is a student of chemical engineering.
One day – decades in the future – he will realise how little he really knows of engineering, and then and only then will he be on the path to truly becoming an engineer.
But at the moment, he is little more than a schoolboy, which is why he believes he is omniscient.
That ‘abscissa ordinate’ stuff posted funny: let’s try it again:
abscissa ***** ordinate
**0** ******* **(no value)**
**1** ****** **3.0**
**2** ****** **5.0** “outlier”
**3** ****** **2.9**
and so on; the values are (x-axis) numerical sequence, and (y-axis) the ECS published by the authors, taken from Jo’s compilation; Celsius degrees per doubling. I ran two LSR’s, one with, and one without the outliers. The 0.7 value is Lindzen and Choi, and notice that the regression line is trending towards their value, even if at a snail’s pace.
Vlad
There is no scientific basis for worrying about CO2. We have now been running the experiment for two thirds of a century and global temperature has not risen at anything like the predicted rate.
The models overestimate the CO2 forcing by 40 percent because they borrow line-shape equations from optical physics without understanding that for simplicity the equations assume collisions are instantaneous.
They also falsely assume the premature feedbacks are strongly net-positive, which is implausible a priori since the climate object is for well-understood reasons near-perfectly thermostatic.
There is good reason for worrying about the tens of millions being killed because they have no access to cheap coal-fired electricity.
You sir are a demagogue. Everything you mention is taken into account.You put in zero effort to validate your assertions, which are plain wrong. There is literally NOTHING stopping you from going through the textbooks and the code of the models and showing us what part of the algorithms is wrong and how they should be and then run the models again and show the difference. Once again, I point you towards the source code of the models: http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm1.2/
Now obviously you are not going to do this because you don’t care. But maybe our mutual friend Vlad does!
It would appear that a post/reply I made was lost somewhere. I have asked the moderators to see if they can find it.
I’ll wait a bit before doing any more posting, to see if the comment (directed towards “Ben” — — can we find a different moniker for you, since there was a stir earlier?) shows up.
Vlad the Impaler
Looks nice forward to that.
No my actual name is Ben so Ben suits me just fine 😉
“Benben” continues to be uncivil. He will find a detailed mathematical and physical explanation of some of the many reasons why models run hot in Vol. 60 No. 1 of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
One understands “Benben’s” religious belief in the ClimComm Party Line, but it should be self-evident to any sufficiently honest and open-minded enquirer that the predictions made by the models are vastly in excess of the rate of global warming measured by any data gathering array.
There is, therefore, good reason for worrying about the tens of millions being killed in the Third World because the governing elite’s obsession with barely-evident global warming is now the major influence denying the people the clean, affordable, reliable, low-tech, low-maintenance, continuous, base-load electricity that coal can provide more cheaply than any other fuel.
Eventually, the climate extremists will be held to account for these tens of millions of deaths, just as the murderous totalitarians of the 20th century were held to account for the deaths caused by their unbecoming and anti-scientific certainty that they were right, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary.
The University of Leiden, whence Benben operates, is not well served by his illogically un-self-critical belief in his own rightness, a belief that runs counter to the mounting evidence that, just like all other claims made by the environmentalist extremists, the climate claim has been exaggerated beyond all reason and beyond all evidence.
Appealing to the authority of unnamed textbooks, without drawing attention to the fact that the methods outlined therein have led in just about every model to prodigious exaggeration of the global warming rate, does not impress.
Higher scientific standards are expected here, though obviously not at the University of Leiden.
Monckton said: “One understands “Benben’s” religious belief in the ClimComm Party Line”
Perhaps m’lord could provide some evidence of Benben’s communist ideology if this isn’t about simply calling anyone who disagrees with you, a communist or marxist.
Well benben, you say that everything Lord Monckton criticizes the models for, HAS in fact been taken care of in those models.
So then , if that is the case, and I believe it if you say so; what is your explanation for the complete failure (gross failure) of those models (all of them) to even replicate what we already know from actual observations, has actually occurred.
It’s bad enough that we have so many models and they don’t even agree with each other worth a tinker’s damn, but they steadfastly refuse to follow what has been observed to happen.
I’d be very happy if you can point me to a GCM that is considered by the pundits to be a credible model , that approximately matches the GISSTemp graph that NASA publishes; or even some other data set that is often cited as alternative to GISSTemp.
G
george e. smith said: “the complete failure (gross failure) of those models (all of them) to even replicate what we already know from actual observations, has actually occurred.”
Orly? Allowing for natural variability, the models I’ve seen track the rate of warming pretty well.
Vlad, I’ll respond somewhere later today or tomorrow.
Mr. Monckon, once again you have confirmed yourself a demagogue. If you would have had put any effort – any effort at all – into actually understanding the fundamentals of climate change, instead of just gathering random little bits of info that suit your preconceived notion, you would have known that the holy bible (ha) was written by seinfeld and pandis.
Do yourself a favour and read the whole thing. And that of course goes for everyone here! Honestly, nobody finishes the book and remains a staunch skeptic. Not because the words magically transform you into a Marxist, but because you’ll realize that climate is quite well understood and that the AGW hypothesis makes perfect sense.
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118947401.html
Benben continues to place his religious faith in textbooks as though they were holy writ. Yet he fails to take into account that the models based on his favorite textbook have greatly over-predicted the rate of global warming ever since Hansen (1988) and IPCC (1990).
By now he should be aware that climate skeptics do not, with remarkably few exceptions, deny that adding heteroatomic or quasi-heteroatomic molecules to an atmospheric mix such as ours will be likely – all other things being equal – to cause some warming.
The true scientific debate is not about whether Man’s sins of emission cause warming. Of course they do. It is about how much warming they will cause, how quickly they will cause it, to what extent – if any – the consequences of the CO2 enrichment and ensuing warming will be net-harmful, and whether the cost of attempting to mitigate that warming today is likely to prove higher or lower than the cost of adapting to any net-adverse consequences if and when such consequences occur.
What would an honest textbook tell us about these questions? It would say that the remarkably tiny fraction of reviewed papers on climate change that concern themselves with various attempts to determine climate sensitivity are moving ineluctably towards low climate sensitivity (i.e. <2 K per CO2 doubling); that on almost all timescales at least 15 years long since 1990 the slopes of the least-squares linear-regression trend lines on almost all datasets have been appreciably below the slopes of the trend lines on almost all models' predictions; that one should be careful to count not only the imagined harms that might be done by CO2 enrichment and of consequent warming but also the real benefits; and that just about all peer-reviewed benefit-cost analyses find adaptation cost-effective and mitigation needlessly costly not only in treasure but in environmental damage and in lives.
So let us hear less of the Party Line and more of a scientific argument against the data, analysis and results that are presented in the head posting. Though history has tended not to count how many have died in consequence of the all too frequently insane policies inflicted by totalitarians willy-nilly on the population at large, it will not in the end be able to conceal or deny that tens or even hundreds of millions are being killed, now, in the poorer regions of the world because its governing class is more obsessed with solving the non-problem of global warming than in giving them the cheap, reliable, continuous, base-load, coal-fired electricity they need.
Why does demand for coal continue to rise worldwide? Because China and India are hard-headed enough to realize just how many people the lack of electric power kills.
And, like it or not, the egregious environmental cost of generating intermittent power by low-energy-density means such as solar and wind power is beginning to be counted. What do the ever-larger and ever-more-numerous windmills do? This 14th-century technology devoted expensively to the solution of a 21st-century non-problem not only kills birds and bats by the tens of millions; not only makes large swathes of land uninhabitable owing to noise, light-flicker and low-frequency vibration but also, in wrecking the landscape, now presents a sufficiently large frictional resistance to passing storm systems that it is slowing they down by just a fraction, with the inevitable consequence that more rainfall will be expected to fall in the form of flash floods than before we began our pietistic but ill-considered attempt to interfere with nature.
Of course, academe these days is totalitarian in its outlook. It is largely funded by the State; it profits by scares such as global warming; it is viciously intolerant of allowing anyone to consider the scientific questions I and others raise here; and on this as on a growing body of other topics it attempts to repudiate the very end and object of universities by stifling all dissent from the Party Line.
As the ever-more-crippling debt of nations with undisciplined welfare systems continues to mount, funding for universities such as Leiden will decline. And it will decline a lot faster if universities continue to be havens of intolerant totalitarians who are unwilling to debate.
The climate extremists have the blood of tens or even hundreds of millions on their hands. Though history has been slow to count the cost of such transiently fashionable madnesses as the global warming scare in human lives, in the end that cost will come to be counted, and the few who tried to speak out as we do here will be found wanting, in that for all our arguments we were unable to prevent that unseen slaughter.
Mr Schaeffer asks for evidence that “Ben-Ben” from Leiden University is a climate communist. Let him read this creature’s postings and draw whatever conclusions he thinks right.
@george e. smith: something that is really important to keep in mind is that models of climate cannot actually perfectly track the climate because it’s a chaotic system that highly depends on the exact starting parameter. Since you can’t perfectly know the exact starting parameters of the climate at whatever date in the past you decide to start your model, combined with the fact that we simply don’t have enough computational power to model all climate processes at the correct scale at the same time, you can never actually recreate the climate. What you can do is a monte carlo simulation and try out 10.000 or whatever different combinations of initial parameters and see what happens. If you will look at the second figure in the article above, you will see that the models (gray area) and reality overlap pretty well. I mean, we can both stare at the same picture and you can say GROSS FAILURE, but… I just don’t understand that. We’re both seeing the same picture right?
@Philip Shaeffer, thanks. It’s pretty bizarre yet entertaining. I started this whole thing by pointing out that I’m not a communist, and I explicitly wrote somewhere above that communism is an abject failure as a form of government. And apparently that is evidence of me being a communist. The mind boggles.
@ Monckton: Ha, so first I was pooppoop, and now I am ‘this creature’. Pretty bizarre behaviour from a grown man! How is anyone supposed to take you serious? I would offer the observation that Vlad and I are engaged in a pleasant conversation, and you injecting your venom into this conversation is really not helpful. Might I suggest that you refrain from posting any further unpleasantness?
“You sir are a demagogue.”
And you sir are a patronising fool with a grossly inflated belief in your own knowledge and understanding.
If you are lucky, one day you will realise how little understanding of science you actually possess. And then you will truly start your education.
Monckton said: “Mr Schaeffer asks for evidence that “Ben-Ben” from Leiden University is a climate communist. Let him read this creature’s postings and draw whatever conclusions he thinks right.”
Wow, that’s an amazingly weak response from someone as verbose as you… You are the one accusing him of being a communist. How about you provide the evidence to support your own claim.
Man up and support your own claim, if you wish to be taken seriously when you criticize others.
In 1966, in a Christian Doctrine class at a catholic boys boarding school , the following definition was studiously copied down by the class of 4P from Fr. Peter Blake’s recitation:-
“Communism is revolutionary socialism , based on the teachings of Hegel and Feuerbach , and adapted by Karl Marx to the social problems of the day . . . . ”
That’s all I can remember.
The real problem with the upward adjustments of past temperatures is that they will have to change them again if the predicted cooling global occurs. The upward adjustments will make the cooling seem so much more dramatic.
What tangled webs they weave…
benben wrote:
The scientific fundamentals – and I’m talking about the chemistry and the physics and the energy balances – all point incredibly strongly towards green house gasses as being the main controlling variable in our climate system with respect to energy balances (and the subsequent temp. increases etc.). This is truly textbook stuff, and you will note that it is almost never discussed here at WUWT, because it’s very difficult to fault. Physics is, in the end, math, and in math you can be either right or wrong and that’s it. So please please please, instead of arguing with me about it, just go get a couple of textbooks. University level chemistry is not the easiest to understand but clearly you have the cognitive capacity to work through them!
benben –
I am not a physicist or a mathematician, but rather a geologist. My understanding is that the main variable influencing energy balance is cloud, not greenhouse gases. My understanding is that cloud is primarily not a gas but droplets of water that can influence energy flow through a number of factors
Maybe, as a chemist you can give me the proportional influence of greenhouse gases vs cloud. No one in the world appears capable of doing this as cloud cover is never static – responding to short and long-term temperature and wind change
A pox on the real world! Why must it stuff up our perfect theories? If only it would stop changing!! As for those pesky negative feed-backs – they should be banned
I see that the percentage of people involved in this debate who are only interested in the real truth regarding the entire issue is very small indeed
Thank you mods, for finding the “lost” post. The time stamp is 8:44 PM on 10 July 2016, and is in the midst of the Mockton/Ben/Vlad roundabout.
Next post to you, Ben. I’m off for a couple of days, trying to get the homestead ready for the coming La Nina winter (yes, it is THAT close!).
Vlad
Mr Carter is right. There are numerous influences on energy balance than CO2. The largest such influence is, of course, the oceans, whose enormous heat capacity is the main reason why the climate is near-perfectly thermostatic, and has been so for at least 800,000 years, according to the ice-cores. Clouds, as Mr Carter rightly points out, another major influence.
As Willis Eschenbach pointed out some time ago in one of his excellent contributions here, if the world warms the tropical afternoon convection starts a little earlier than before, a process that acts as a powerful negative feedback – but you will not find it in most textbooks of climatology. And cloud, according to an interesting paper published in 2011, accounts for 97% (that figure again!) of the Earth’s albedo. All the talk of ice loss causing huge albedo changes is, therefore, as nonsensical as most of the other lurid claims of the climate extremists.
Also, the CO2 forcing is overestimated by 40%, as a recent presentation by Professor Will Happer to the World Federation of Scientists demonstrated, because the line-shape equations that model the excitation-deexcitation collisions are taken from his specialist field, optical physics, where the fact that these equations simplify matters by assuming that the collisions occur instantaneously is generally irrelevant. However, in the climate the equations are unsatisfactory, because the few picoseconds’ delay in completing each collision reduces its forcing effect by 40%.
And that is before we get on to temperature feedbacks, which are highly problematic (see my recent paper on The Temperature Feedback Problem in Energy and Environment.
Climate textbooks are, on the whole, written by profiteers from the climate scam, many of whom in any event simply don’t know enough physics to deal with any of these points at which the models of climate are in error.
In the end, the simplest way to verify the models is to check the extent to which their predictions have come to pass. To put it at its simplest, global temperature would need to rise at seven times its present rate throughout the next decade, starting at once, if it were to reach the IPCC’s predicted 1 K about 1990 by 2025.
The central fact in the climate debate is that, although one-third of Man’s total influence on climate has arisen since the late 1990s, and although CO2 emissions are rising at more than the business-as-usual rate worldwide, the global warming rate on all measures (even those that have been tampered with) well below the least IPCC prediction in 1990. The data show the scare is over, but the canting profiteers of doom cannot bear to let go.
Well Michael the trouble with your objection is that we have NO global network of TSI (under the clouds) to even observe the earth surface level solar insolation, which ultimately determines the Temperatures.
And as you say, the cloud cover is never static, so the spatial frequency spectrum of under cloud insolation extends to much higher frequencies than any of these models use as a grid, even if we had such a network it would never be Nyquist sanitary.
And I am still waiting to observe it heat up whenever a cloud passes between me and the sun. It always cools, and quite instantaneously as climate variations go. That can’t be anything BUT negative feedback.
G
George –
Is it not technically possible to compare temperatures above and below the cloud ceiling elevation (throughout the entire coverage) using satellite data ? Why has this not been done?
Why has their not been cloud mapping during the ENSO cycles?
I see a number of examples where research is not addressing the obvious paths to better understanding. I see so many researchers intensively focused on their own little niche and very few standing back using common sense and logic to address the wide picture
Michael, whether or not satellites can look above and below clouds at all pertinent frequencies, and measure Temperatures, is not particularly relevant.
You see that very little of the solar spectrum radiation is actually absorbed by the atmosphere, so there is not a lot of atmospheric heating due to the absorbed solar radiation. Water vapor absorbs some solar radiation between about 700 nm and 2.5 microns, but not much solar energy there to begin with.
What is important is the watt per square meter of solar spectrum radiation (0.25 micron to 4.0 microns) that reaches the surface which is mostly ocean, and goes deep into the oceans. That is what determines how much solar energy earth retains. Actually water has strong absorption bands at 1, 2, and 3 microns, the 3 micron band being the strongest. 3 micron radiation has a 1/e absorption length of about 1.25 microns, 5-6 microns of water will absorb 99% of 3.0 micron solar energy (which will result in evaporation, which cools the surface.
G
George – thanks for your response.
According to my understanding the heat you experience in the absence of cloud is in-coming UV from the sun. In my environment the inverse is true at night when heat is IR being emitted from the land surface. Clear skies at night (any season) = cooler air temperature. Clouds act it both a positive and negative manner
We can learn a lot from El Nino (imo) The transfer of elevated heat in some marine locations influenced land temperatures in an extremely rapid manner. In the absence of cloud it would have radiated out to space rapidly and would not have spread globally
I am therefore inclined to propose that the recent El Nino spike is not the result of the sea releasing excess heat. Marine heat is redistributed geographically due to a changing currents and wind. Due to cloud insulation in these locations, temperatures temporally rise i.e. there is a temporary blockage in the thermostat – probably due to to a slowing of heat transfer to higher latitudes where there is less cloud cover than in the tropics where the heat anomalies occur
Just another chapter in the search for truth 🙂
No the heat you experience when standing out in the sun, is from the solar infrared from 0.75 microns to around 4 microns, which is strongly absorbed in the water in your skin, which gets warmed up. This happens even if there is glass in between, such as being indoors.
“””””….. Clear skies at night (any season) = cooler air temperature. …..”””””
This is completely backwards. Cooler air Temperatures lead to clear skies at night.
Clouds at night do NOT create warmer nights.
What happens is that you have a hot and perhaps humid day with plenty of water around. The humid air will make you extra warm, because your skin cannot evaporate your sweat due to the high humididty.
Anyhow as sundown approaches, that hot humid air of course has been rising all day, and any water lying around has been evaporating. Eventually that humid air has risen to the altitude of the dew point and water droplet nucleation can start and clouds begin to form.
The higher the daytime temperature was, the higher will be the dew point altitude, due to the normal lapse rate.
The lower the relative humidity near the ground was, the higher will be the altitude of the dew point.
But the temperature near the surface will start to cool before sundown, and will be much cooler in the morning. But because it was hot and humid during the day it will be warm and more humid at night .
The high clouds did not make it warm and humid; the hot humid day before nightfall caused it all.
G
George – thanks, however ………
At this time of year (winter) where I live, if we get a completely clear sky during the day there is associated warm sunshine and considerable evaporation i.e. drying of soils. This is almost always followed by freezing (frost) at night with a completely clear sky . We never get below 0 C when there is cloud cover and evaporation is considerably less. I know because I am a farmer, among other things
The same goes for summer: a clear sky at night = cooler night temperatures
I sense that your hypothesis is too simplistic
Regards
Michael C
Interesting discussion you guys have here. I’d like to add to it that a lot of these things are pretty well understood and explained (people have been thinking about the weather for as long as there have been people, so its not exactly a new science!). The textbook I refer to when I need to know something is this one:
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118947401.html
It’s pretty widely accepted as the standard. It covers a wide base of climate related topics. A lot of the processes included in the climate models are discussed here, as is (IIRC) the basics of how one goes about modelling the climate. If anything, just browse through the index. I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.
Cheers,
Ben
As is your want Benben, you simply fail to have a rational discussion with those you disagree with. C. Monckton’s post above that begins;
=============================
“Benben continues to place his religious faith in textbooks as though they were holy writ. Yet he fails to take into account that the models based on his favorite textbook have greatly over-predicted the rate of global warming ever since Hansen (1988) and IPCC (1990). ”
=============================
is an recent example where you simply ignore inconvenient truths.
meh, not really.
Look, David, there are two things in play here. One is to qualitatively understand what’s going on, the other is to quantitatively model what’s going on. Our qualitative understanding is pretty good (just download the textbook somewhere and go through it?). The models just can’t keep up because of lack of good quality data (we’d need way more satellites etc.), and lack of sufficient computing power. These are all readily understood limitations. And I would point out that even in chemistry we are incapable of modelling chemical processes accurately, even if we have almost perfect qualitative understanding of the system, because of sheer computational limitations (try calculating all the quantum states in a heterogeneous catalysis reactions). So to pretend that climate science should somehow have perfect models when nobody else has them is pure demagogue material. Almost every scientist out there understands this, which is why WUWT is readily ignored by mainstream science.
What mr. Monckton does is point at some quantitative discrepancy, greatly exaggerate that by using words such as ABJECT FAILURE (instead of doing something useful such as, say, compare the error to the error in other common policy tools such as econometric models), and claim that our qualitative understanding is wrong, without actually ever having looked at the theory. That’s nice for you, since you already agree with him, but everyone else will just ignore this type of reasoning, because it’s irrelevant.
Cheers,
Ben
Ben from Leiden University continues to demonstrate how right Britain was to separate herself from the intellectual collapse that is the European Disunion. He seems to think (if “think” is the right word) that anyone who does not toe the climate-communist Party Line has not understood the elements of the theory of climate.
Well, as the author of an irreducibly simple climate model whose predictions are proving considerably more skilful than those of the IPCC, I have some knowledge of the relevant theory. The models have abjectly failed. They have grossly over-predicted the warming rate, and anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty would admit that, instead of waffling about comparing climate models with econometric models (hardly a good advertisement for climate models, that).
In the end, the climate extremists – much though they wriggle like stuck pigs now – will be compelled to concede that the growing gulf between predicted heating and actual non-warming is no longer bridgeable, and they will quietly slink off and think up another anti-capitalist scam.
Dear M of B, are you ever going to respond to this scathing critique ?
Just curious,thank you.
Off topic, and pathetic .
Greetings to Jedi Ben; peace, health, prosperity beyond your wildest imagination (even more than Han Solo can imagine):
I did some checking, and found a few items, as you requested. Most papers are paywalled, and as far as I am concerned, I doubt if spending a whole tonne of euros on some papers would do you any good.
Suffice it to say that multiple lines of evidence have converged to cause the geological community (including Dr. Richard Alley, who is in your camp) to conclude that Pleistocene events were extreme, took place over very short time frames (decades, a decade, possibly less — — I’m a little skeptical of this latest time frame), and happened both directions (warm —-> cold; cold —-> warm).
The main reference I found was Lisiecki and Raymo (2005), but most early data were consolidated and put into a single reference chart by Railsback, L. B. et al (2015). I think your best resource is to use a search engine, and put in “Marine Isotope Stages”, and work from there. You will likely find some free .pdf copies, and since the visual displays are the theme of each of the various papers, I found a lot of great references when I clicked on the ‘Images’ link. Yes, there are about a 1,000 (sorry, 1.000 in your parlance) or more, but there are a lot of good summaries there.
At there is a free copy of Lisiecki, called the “Plio-Pleistocene Benthic Stack”; at , they have a copy of “Ocean Cores and the Quanternary Chronology”. lists “Signatures of Time”. has their number 35, “Oxygen Isotope Stages” — — — not really a paper, but a pretty chart.
Someplace near and dear to my heart is , run by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Excellent downloads of the latest chronostratigraphic nomenclature. You might like the Geologic Time Scale, but I would try to get you to look at “Global Chronostratigraphic Correlation” under the ‘Chart/Time Scale’ button, on the left side. If you examine this chart, you’ll see the Marine Isotope Stages chart (MIS) in the middle left side, and just about dead center, the Vostok/EPICA (called ‘Dome C’).
Now, all of these have something in common: the resolution is NOWHERE near the scale of decades. About the best resolution ever obtained through sediments and ice cores is about century, maybe a bit less, if that. But, MIS and ice-cores all show that climate can, and does, always change, and the changes can be abrupt, and large in magnitude. It is through “git down on the ground, git’chyer hands dirty, and dig into the mud” field geology that caused the epiphany that climate transitions in the Pleistocene were quite dramatic, and large. Again, much of this evidence was developed right in your own back yard, from European data. North American geology has tended to confirm what was first discerned where you are.
I really hate these long posts; I’d love to type a line, or two, and call it good. Let me conclude with something else I stumbled upon (serendipity!) while looking for good references. I think this is the “English” version, so whether there are Dutch versions, I do not know. This had me spellbound for well over an hour:
“May dP/dt be with you”
Darth Vladimir the Impalerest
May the change in pressure over time be with me? Ha 🙂
I’ll go take a look at the papers once I find the time. I’m still interested in hearing how that actually happened. After all, for something to be a proper scientific theory you need both data and a explanatory mechanism! You point to the data, but intellectually I’m also very interested in the mechanism. So please elaborate.
With respect to your other post. I honestly think a large problem here is lack of communication. You repeat certain talking points that are covered over and over here at WUWT, without ever engaging in the counter arguments. And even though you know I’m European you can’t contain yourself and reference a whole bunch of American political stuff that is completely irrelevant to me. It’s just not very interesting to keep repeating the same thing over and over. All I can say is, I spent years looking at this stuff, and I’m not remotely convinced. Not because I’m marxist or dumb, but because the explanatory mechanism for why greenhouse gasses are a problem is just a very coherent, elegant and solid body of theory. And I’m talking about the whole 1100 page theory, not some 1 line highlight. Honestly, the vast majority of scientists don’t care about politics. European scientists couldn’t care less about your ‘war on coal’. Chinese scientist don’t care at all what we in the West think should happen. But we just appreciate a solid body of scientific work when we see it. Once again, I’ll say its just no use sparring on the internet about it before you tried to actually look at it from our point of view and just put in the effort to learn it the way I learned it. If you can’t afford the textbook, just download the PDF file (technically illegal but science is for the people and nobody should be denied knowledge for lack of funds, and besides everyone does it). I’m not hiding anything or lying or whatever it is WUWT thinks greenies always do. Just… you know, read the textbook, and then we can have an interesting discussion on a level playing field.
Vlad, there is a very large body of thoughtful and honest and critical discussion of how theory and data and evidence from geology connect. You’ll not find any of that reported on WUWT, and you’ll certainly hardly ever find any of the thoughtful scientists that you would enjoy discussing with, commenting on WUWT. If you wonder why, I point you at the rather horrible comments of mr. Monckton!
With that I bid you goodnight,
Ben
A most interesting comment. I cannot fathom how you think I avoided the ‘explanatory’ mechanism. Point of fact, I did: CO2 is saturated now, and cannot cause any additional warming. Either you accept that, or you do not. Two hundred years of “data” do not constitute a reason for alarm. What we do see is a consistent pattern: CO2 concentration and temperature do not correlate to each other; along those lines, have you done the cross-correlation yet? You say that I just repeat the same old, same old, yet I think I see pretty much the same from you.
Causal mechanism: Wegner was virtually laughed out of science circles because his ‘drifting continents’ did not have a ‘causal mechanism’. Last time I checked, one of the purposes of science was to FIND causal mechanisms. The M.I.S. (Marine Isotope Stage) data, Vostok, EPICA, GISP II, all have a story to tell, and have told us: climate changes, naturally, on very short time scales, to large degrees (no pun intended). What causes it? I believe many workers are searching for answers to that very question. Just as with continental drift, lack of a mechanism is not a reason to dismiss the data. You continue to think that a coupled, non-linear, dynamic system is dominated by a single variable; please justify that thought process. No engineer in the world is going to support that idea, not on century-time-scales, millennial time scales, epoch-time-scales, period-time scales, era-time-scales, or eon-time scales.
As far as politics, you brought up New Orleans, not me. Politics bores me to tears. Anthony, Jo, Dr. Evans, Bill Illis, Leif Svaalsgard et al did not bring politics into this discussion. The [since we can’t call them Marxists, Socialists, Communists, or whatever, I don’t know what to call them] on your “side” of the issue brought politics into the realm of science. Do you recall, above, where I stated that one’s opinion is neither wrong nor dumb? I stated that the problem is when someone is in a position to ACT on their beliefs, in effect forcing their opinion on someone else. That is what the IPCC et al are trying to do. Christina Figueres (sp?) said as much: the goal is to redistribute the world’s wealth, according to how the [I don’t know what to call them here] see fit. If that isn’t totalitarian, I do not know what is.
P = momentum (visualize the vector symbol above the P)
dP/dt = time rate of change of momentum
I’ll get those websites that did not appear in the last post, with luck, tomorrow. Pleasant dreams.
Darth Vlad
Ben from the University of Leiden continues to demonstrate his totalitarian instincts by 1) demanding deference to the authority of a textbook, thereby perpetrating the logical fallacy of argumentum ad verecundiam; 2) misstating the ground on which the climate debate is actually centered, thereby allowing himself to defeat a straw man of his own imagining and perpetrating the fundamental logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorationem elenchi; 3) asppealing to the authority of “the vast majority of scientists”, thereby perpetrating the logical fallacy of argumentum ad populum; 4) attacking the man rather than his argument, thereby perpetrating the logical fallacy of argumentum ad hominem, a sub-species of the fundamental logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorationem; and 5) recommending that readers should download a textbook of which he is not the author without paying for it, on the curious ground that people who provide knowledge should not be compensated for it (no doubt he will be telling the University of Leiden that he no longer wishes to be paid),, thereby inciting readers to commit the tort of breach of copyright.
A higher standard of scientific debate than this sort of trolling is expected here. Repeated and wilful illogicality is a hallmark of totalitarian propagandism.
Ben has already been told, earlier in this thread, that a textbook that describes the greenhouse effect but does not point out the growing discrepancy between the models’ predictions of the rate of global warming
and the measured outturn is a work of propaganda, not of science, and that the scientific debate is not about whether greenhouse gases can cause global warming but about how much global warming they will cause and whether it is cheaper to mitigate than to adapt. But he makes no attempt to answer these points, merely reiterating unamended his original erroneous and logically fallacious viewpoint and perpetrating the la-la-la fallacy.
As for the vaunted “consensus” that recent global warming (what little there has been) is mostly manmade, the Cook et al. paper has been thoroughly discredited by the devastating critique in Legates et al. (2013, 2015) and has been exposed as nonsense by some 240 recent papers.
As for Ben’s assertion that readers of WUWT do not engage in proper scientific debate, that argumentum ad hominem is also a manifest untruth.
As for his recommendation that readers should break the law, it is contemptible.
Mr. Monckton, I’m having a conversation with Vlad. Stop trying to participate. Maybe get some help? Your inability to say anything without being nasty is somewhat worrying.
benben . . ?? ; )
You told Mr. Monckton;
“I’m having a conversation with Vlad. Stop trying to participate.”
But turned right around and insulted and accused him;
“Maybe get some help? Your inability to say anything without being nasty is somewhat worrying.”
Which obviously invites further “participation” you can continue to bitch about . . or silence, which might give readers (or you) the impression he is allowing you to order him about, and is intimidated by those (to my mind) rather sophomoric jabs.
I write this so he can ignore you without the slightest hesitation.
ah… so my jabs are sophomoric. Very interesting. And when mr. Monckton refers to me as ‘pooppoop’ and ‘that creature’, how would you describe that? You do yourself a disservice by trying to defend that. Seriously. Referring to someone who does not share your opinion as a ‘creature’ is very disturbing behviour.
Ooooops!
It would seem that websites did not post for some reason. If I knew how to get around that, I would.
Any help, Mods?
Dear M of B, are you ever going to respond to this scathing critique ?
Just curious,thank you.
Off topic, and pathetic.
The topic is climate change. The question of your ability to accurately report on it doesn’t seem off topic. The fact that it’s been shown(in this video and others) that you have difficulty with accurate reporting puts into question anything else you write (including this piece). Will you continue (as you said you would) your debate with Hadfield on WUWT,or are you conceding?
Jedi Ben:
Links that did not show up in the previous (note to self: DO NOT enclose websites in the ‘less than’ ‘greater than’ symbols!):
(www) (dot) (rsc) (dot) (org) Signatures of Time
(www) (dot) (nap) (dot) (edu) Lisiecki & Raymo Plio-Pleistocene Benthic Stacks
(www) (dot) (geo) (dot) (arizona) (dot) (edu) Ocean cores and the Quaternary Chronology
(www) (dot) (allwidewallpapers) (dot) (com) #35 Oxygen Isotope Stages [a wallpaper]
The website I spent an hour at, that has an English version of this paper:
(www) (dot) (dandebat) (dot) (dk) (slash)(eng-klima5) (dot) (htm)
Railsback, L. B., Gibbard, P. L., Head, M. J. and others, 2015, the organizational compilation of previously published data
Back to Seinfeld, if we may. I asked if you could supply me with their ECS value. That pretty much tells me everything I need to know about this missive. What, exactly, is their mechanism for the Pleistocene climate changes? Someone told me once that good science has a mechanism. I’d love to know what Seinfeld has to offer.
You have not refuted the 750-million-year chart; please do so. That is part of our dialog.
I have a thought or two on Lord Monckton: First, you and I are dialoging on a post that he made, as a guest of our host, Anthony Watts. You drew first blood with the original comment on Lord Monckton’s guest essay, so you set the tone.
This is not your blog, it is Anthony’s, and by extension, anyone he permits to post here. Anthony, and his mods, those unsung heroes and volunteers who wade through kilometre-deep quagmires of often nonsensical posts, set the rules.
I offered (and the offer stands) to move this to the private domain, by having Anthony or a mod, send you my e-mail address, and we can go at this to your heart’s content. I promised, and renew that promise, that I will NOT disclose your address to anyone else. I have no motivation to cause you any grief whatsoever.
If Lord Monckton, or Cat Weazel, or Willis Eschenbach, or the Queen of the Planet Mongo want to post something here, that is their right.
Thanking you in advance for the ECS value of Seinfeld et al,
Darth Vlad
Mr Monckton set the tone with article, where he continues to label anyone who has a differing viewpoint, a communist or marxist. When benben called him out on this, he then proceeded to slap the same label on benben.
When I challenged him to provide evidence of benben’s communist ideology, the best he could manage was “go read what he wrote”…. Well, gee, that’s me convinced. I think he will avoid giving a direct answer, quoting what benben said as evidence, and I’ll either just be ignored, or receive a hugely verbose answer mocking me and talking around the issue at great length.
What do you think Vlad? What could you provide as evidence of benben’s communism? And if you can’t think of anything, then what basis do you believe Mr Monckton has for his claim?
Mr Schaeffer should read Mr Peden’s excellent comment upthread, which explains the similarities between climate-communist and communist totalitarians in their desire to inflict a single, narrow, hate-filled, anti-scientific Party Line on everyone but themselves. Or he should talk to Patrick Moore, who left Greenpeace when the communists moved in.
Naturally, now that climate communism’s lurid predictions have abjectly failed, they are becoming desperate to distance themselves from their failure by pretending that it had nothing to do with communism. They have foreseen, as have I, that the collapse of the climate scam will also weaken the pseudo-moralising hard Left, and perhaps destroy it altogether, particularly in academe. And good riddance.
Vlad. Obviously I’m not going to give you the ECS value. You’re just looking for an excuse to say ‘AHA I don’t need to read it because I already know, without bothering to read it, that it is wrong!’.
Climate physics and chemistry is very complicated. The textbook is 1100 pages, and that’s just an introduction. To somehow reduce that to 1 number (or a couple of back and forth comments) is ridiculous , and you know it: you used that very argument against me when saying that it was wrong to just look at CO2, because the climate is way more complex than that.
Look, Seinfeld&Pandis is a textbook, so all it does is organize and discuss the pretty vast body of research done in the past hundred years or so, on climate. If you dislike texbooks, feel free to go through the reference list and read all of that instead. And after that, feel free to download the sourcecode to the community earth systems model, which will – if you look at the actual code – refute a lot of the disinformation going around here at WUWT with regards to what is and what is not taken into account in the general circulation models and what parameters and algorithms are ACTUALLY used. There is this weird aversion here against just looking at what science actually does, instead of just basing your opinion on the faulty reporting on science by the media.
There actually is a very funny and excellent video on that. Has nothing to do with climate change, but everything with how the science is reported. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it:
I have not refuted the 750 million years chart. In fact, you will see that I wrote that the geological evidence you pose were part of my climate courses and quite thoroughly discussed. If you’re curious about how this evidence is actually presented as an argument for being concerned about AGW, once again, you know where to find the information.
I also did not refute that CO2 absorption spectrum is eventually saturated. Why would I? It makes sense. The key word is eventually. At what PPM that will be exactly has been extensively experimentally and theoretically and empirically investigated. I’m not going to discuss all of that here. You know where to find it if you’re interested.
I’d be happy to continue the discussion via mail. But ONLY if you put in the effort of actually downloading the textbook and reading it. I spent the better part of two years reading almost everything WUWT published. I know the skeptical points. You don’t have to engage in a conversation with me (or any other non-skeptical scientist for that matter), but if you want to do so, please put in a bit of effort and read up on ‘my side’ as well. Otherwise there is no point in having a discussion.
Finally, you do yourself a disservice by trying to defend a person who refers to someone with a different opinion than him as ‘pooppoop’ and ‘this creature’. Nothing good has ever come from that kind of language, and if you ever wonder why the skeptical community is shunned by the mainstream, this is literally the biggest reason. The language used by many in the hundreds of comments above is frankly horrible, and most people just don’t want to be exposed to that venom, no matter how valid the underlying scientific points may or may not be.
With that I bid you – and the rest of this weird an wonderful little community – goodbye.
Cheers,
Ben
Jedi Ben,
Well, that was far-ranging! By stating that a priori I would dismiss Seinfeld you assume something not in evidence. If I know what ECS value they use, I can compare it to the IPCC value. I gave you the values from the current ‘peer-reviewed’ published literature, and most of those values are less (some by half) than the IPCC value, so I have no idea what track Seinfeld takes.
You do, however, contradict yourself, in that you accept (with insufficient skepticism) the premise that 200 years of climate data “prove” CO2 causes warming. That’s the same a taking one line of one paragraph on one page of your “Bible”, and not looking at the whole 1100 pages (the 750 million year record). True, you have not refuted it; it cannot BE refuted. Paraphrasing Feynman, ‘it doesn’t matter how elegant your theory is, if the data contradict your theory, your theory is wrong’. Seinfeld may have spent 1100 pages constructing an elegant ‘theory’, but the data contradict the same elegant theory, so the theory is most certainly wrong.
Please do continue to believe with all your heart, mind, and soul, that CO2 is the sole driver and controller of global climate. You are welcome to your belief(s) as far as I am concerned. But I think it makes a very poor engineer, or a very poor scientist, when they do not take a serious look at what might contradict their beliefs.
We already know, empirically, when/where CO2 moves onto the asymptote of its ability to “warm”. I gave you the value much earlier in this thread. It starts about 300 ppm, and by the time one is at 400 ppm, you are well into the second decimal place of temperature “increase” that CO2 can cause. The IPCC uses 3 Celsius degrees per doubling. This value may be three times the actual value. The trend of the above information I supplied is moving towards the range of 1 Celsius degree to one-and-one-half Celsius degrees. The trend is clear; the abscissa values I gave were in numerical sequence, and were a proxy for publication date, with 1 being the earliest paper(s), and the last value more recent (2015 if memory serves correctly). There is a trend. Did Seinfeld compile the same set of papers, and show how ECS is trending downwards? I very much doubt it. Your refusal to supply me with one simple piece of information is very telling: you decry that I do not know something, yet when I ask for a piece of information, I’m basically told to go pound sand.
And while we’re on the subject, I guess knowing that “mechanism” that Seinfeld discusses at length is out of the question also. Right? Well, that certainly is a big help! Someone told me once that good science includes a mechanism; pity I’ll be forever in the dark … … …
Let’s see: I started my undergrad studies in the early 1970’s; my Math is a little rusty, but I think that may be some 40 years ago, give or take. Fall Semester started in August, so we are just coming up on my anniversary. The original climate “scare” back then was “global cooling”. Since I didn’t know much about it, I went to the university library, and despite a lack of good reference material (R. F. Flint, 1972, Quaternary Geology, was a key source — — it is about 1100 pages and had some of the early paleotemperature measurements), in about two hours of research I was able to conclude, ‘nope, just natural variation. All is good.’
You HONESTLY believe that I’ve never taken a look at the “other side”. I’m stunned, to say the least. The reason I am in the skeptic camp is BECAUSE I’ve taken a good, hard look at the ‘other side’, and found their theory/hypothesis lacking. No one ‘told me what to think’. Point of fact, I was educated at a time when students were TAUGHT to think, not told WHAT to think. I cannot recount the number of times our public school teachers would challenge what we believed, and made us defend our beliefs, and it was not just one-sided. Even if the facilitator of our class was truly committed to the ‘other side’, in order to get us to think about our beliefs, they would argue against their own beliefs, and challenge us. To this day, I am not certain what political camp some of my public school and university facilitators were in, so successfully did they argue either, or both, sides of a controversy. Now, 21st Century Planet Earth, the educational system (as a generalization —- I cannot truly address education outside of English-speaking North America) is bent on complete indoctrination of the student body. I do not see much teaching of “how” to think. All I see is students being told “what” to think.
You have disparaged me, sir, by this accusation that I have NOT looked at the ‘other side’. I have. I have done more in the past forty years than you would accomplish in the next EIGHTY. This constitutes ad hom, adding to Lord Mocnkton’s list of logical fallacies you have engaged in.
Since the 750-million-year record stands, as accurate and reliable, anything Seinfeld might have or say is null and void. There, I just saved me from breaking the law (and what kind of person suggests ‘breaking the law’; I asked for a simple, single piece of information, a few strokes on a keyboard, as if that is going to violate some international copyright laws … ). Since you know the value, and we all know the IPCC value is wrong, you do not want to put Seinfeld into the same place. So you defend mis-information. How interesting.
I guess we’ll never know your cross-correlation value, will we. Pity; all we have is mine, about 0.22. That’s a non-correlation, by the way, in case you were fuzzy on what the R value means.
Hey Phil! Last time I checked, there were, for all practical purposes, just two main soico-politico-economic systems operating in the 21st Century. One is capitalism, the other is any of the various flavors of socialism. Capitalism is private ownership; socialism is government ownership. Now, if you recall that most anything non-capitalist (to me) is socialist, and depending upon the exact flavor of socialism, they’re all somewhat synonymous to me. If Jedi Ben is not a capitalist, then he would fall into the other side, and degree to which is an other-sider is up to him. I make no claim on what Jedi Ben thinks in terms of politics (we’re both bored silly by the whole thing); my comment was that Lord Monckton is welcome to jump in on his article at any time he chooses; Jedi Ben is not in a position to decide who gets to post what, and when.
I have no problem at all with your appearance here. Even if I disagree with what you state, I think you have a right to post it, within the guidelines of our host, Anthony, and his mods.
Consider responsibility. It is two words: response, and ability. Jedi Ben had the ability to respond to Lord Monckton’s article any way he chose. He chose to be offended, and responded as he did. If he did not like Lord Monckton’s post, he could have shined it on, but he didn’t. He chose the response that he did, so he used his ability to respond by being offended at virtually nothing at all.
You do not like Lord Monckton? Are you in a position to tell him what he can, and cannot, say, write, think, speak, when he feels like it? OK, so be it. I think that tells us a lot about you.
Regards to all,
Darth Vlad
Ben, I must congratulate you on your patience and integrity. You have been polite and clear in all your responses. I hope that some of the people on this site and others who have an honest desire to find the truth,can act in the same way.( “The truth itself is worthy of our full devotion”-CMofB). It is sad to witness such childish and irrational behaviour from adults who claim to be ‘skeptics’. They are giving skeptics everywhere a bad name.
Vlad said: “Hey Phil! Last time I checked, there were, for all practical purposes, just two main soico-politico-economic systems operating in the 21st Century. One is capitalism, the other is any of the various flavors of socialism. Capitalism is private ownership; socialism is government ownership.”
You’re missing the most important system, that most people use and support. Both at the same time!
Do you support private ownership? Ok you’re a capitalist. Do you support having a police force or the army? OK you’re socialist… er…. spot the problem?
“Now, if you recall that most anything non-capitalist (to me) is socialist, and depending upon the exact flavor of socialism, they’re all somewhat synonymous to me.”
So which are you? Do you support private ownership, or do you support the police and army? See the problem with artificially dividing things into neat little boxes?
I think you’re a socialist too, or do you not support the police or army 😛 See how that can work?
“If Jedi Ben is not a capitalist, then he would fall into the other side, and degree to which is an other-sider is up to him.”
Well, I think I just demonstrated how silly it is to try and divide into two neat groups of us and them. But Monckton doesn’t even provide evidence of benben’s communist ideology anyway. He just slaps the label on him.
“I make no claim on what Jedi Ben thinks in terms of politics (we’re both bored silly by the whole thing); my comment was that Lord Monckton is welcome to jump in on his article at any time he chooses; Jedi Ben is not in a position to decide who gets to post what, and when.”
And I have the right to call him out on calling benben a communist without actually providing any evidence of his communist ideology. Benben could actually be a communist for all I know, although I seriously doubt it, but that’s not the point. The point is that Monckton hasn’t provided any evidence of benben’s communist ideology, but is happy to slap the label on him anyway, simply because he disagrees with him.
Jedi Ben:
This may end up as a double post; I’ve asked the mods to look for a comment that went missing, so bear with me, and forgive any ‘double’ of the postings.
You have not refuted the 750-million-year record. This record refutes anything Seinfeld might have to say. You state, climate is more complicated than just CO2. True. CO2 does not control, or influence, or have anything to do with climate, on any time scale whatsoever.
Since you’ve admitted this, then why continue to push the misinformation in this Seinfeld text? Feyneman had something very interesting to say about theories, and data. In paraphrase, ‘no matter how elegant your theory, if the data contradict it, then it’s WRONG!’ There is little point to your continual reference to this Seinfeld; my take is that they use, or confirm, the IPCC value of three Celsius degrees per doubling of CO2. This value is seriously wrong; at best it might be around double the actual value. More likely it is well over triple of the actual value.
I get bored with the, ‘go look it up’, ‘go look it up’, go look it up … ‘. Is that truly how you share information with your compatriots? You think I need to ‘learn’ something. OK, I’m a student: educate me. And on the subject of education, you seem to think I’ve NEVER looked at ‘your side’. Point of fact, I’ve probably forgotten more than you’ll ever know about CO2 and related subjects. The entire reason I am a “skeptic” is BECAUSE I’ve looked at ‘your side’. It started in the early 70’s, when I was an undergrad. My guess is that you are in, maybe your twenties, if that. You just do not sound or write like an engineer, or anyone in the sciences. Everyone I’ve met is excited about their subject, and loves to share stuff in relation to their specialty.
My guess is that this Seinfeld “teaches” by manufacturing a series of straw-men, then demolishing them to “prove” their view. You have disparaged me, in thinking that I’ve never studied anything about CO2, so work from ignorance. Nice ad hom, to add to Lord Monckton’s list of logical fallacies you’ve engaged in.
Nice, Ben, real nice. Thanks for proving you’re wrong by resorting to the ad hom. I’ll be a great deal happier when you finally manage gain some maturity, and know when you’ve been hoodwinked. You are welcome to your beliefs, as far as I am concerned, but your beliefs are not founded in any science on this planet.
Best regards,
Darth Vlad
To Ben & Jerry, – Don’t whine.
[snip – we aren’t opening up that discussion again /mod]
” I only wish to make you all aware of the disinformation which you (Monckton) are spreading to your followers.”
Child, given that you are very clearly one of – if not THE most scientifically illiterate and technically inexperienced poster contributing to this blog, your presumption and arrogance are truly astonishing.
Do you truly believe that I and everyone else here are incapable of evaluating Lord Monckton’s posts in the light of (in my case) over four decades of a career almost entirely based on the type of science and mathematics that governs climate physics?
That – given your absolute reliance of a very few elemenatry textbooks – is extremely insulting.
Grow up, you patronising little boy.
Ahh, I see you are trying to edit the free speech of your detractors Mr. Monckton (or is it Mr. Watts).
You have deleted my previous comment with video evidence of misinformation.
I will try again.
Please watch!
Off topic and wrong.
Well, I don’t know what the video has to do with anything.
Climategate (and a view of NSF/EPA RFPs) makes it pretty obvious that people are putting their thumb on the scale and focusing grants on creating green ammunition.
This makes any “consensus” on climate meaningless. All a consensus proves is that most people can be bought or threatened into following the party line.
As far as arctic sea ice, the next couple of years will treat warmunists very cruelly.
The Greenland dancing is just funny. Greenland is basically cup shaped and ice doesn’t flow uphill. Greenland is losing some ice from the outside of the mountain ridge that surrounds the island core. And when that limited supply of ice is gone, it’s gone.
http://news.utexas.edu/2016/02/04/scientists-map-movement-of-greenland-ice-sheet-over-time-0
The core ice is actually getting 3 times stiffer than ice that formed during the ice age, the core (Summit station) is growing, and isn’t going anywhere.