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.
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.