By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: The news has become stranger since the climate policy debate has decoupled from the IPCC. Ludicrous claims of certain doom and nightmarish futures splash across the headlines, seldom with rebuttals (climate scientists are complicit in their silence). This one-sided flow of “news” will shape public opinion slowly but surely, creating support for bold measures by President Clinton. Activists are panicking the public for political gain.
“I think looking at grief is quite appropriate, as I believe we are facing human extinction”
— Comment by a reader on the FM website.
“The more immediate danger is runaway climate change. A rise in ocean temperatures will melt the ice caps and cause the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide from the ocean floor. Both effects could make our climate like that of Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees.”
— Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Hawking on “Good morning Britain on NBC News’ U.K. news partner, ITV News in May 2016.
This was reported as “Earth DOOMED by climate change which could burn us alive, warns Stephen Hawking” by Sean Martin in The Daily Express, 31 May 2016.
We have heard this before. The BBC hinted at it last year; Hawking has said it before. There is no support for this in the IPCC’s reports and little (perhaps none) in the peer-reviewed literature. There are papers clearly saying the opposite, such as “Low simulated radiation limit for runaway greenhouse climates” by Colin Goldblatt el al, Nature Geoscience, August 2013 — Gated. See the press release here. Excerpt…
“The so-called `hothouse’ climate of the Eocene is the most useful constraint for anthropogenic change. With the solar constant 1% less than today and a few thousand ppmv CO2, the mean temperature was 10 K warmer than today. With CO2 and temperature both higher then than we expect in the foreseeable future, this implies that an anthropogenic runaway greenhouse is unlikely.
“…As the solar constant increases with time, Earth’s future is analogous to Venus’s past. We expect a runaway greenhouse on Earth 1.5 billion years hence if water is the only greenhouse gas, or sooner if there are others.”
While peer-reviewed analysis is good, it is obvious that Earth cannot become Venus in any policy-relevant time. See the NASA fact sheets for Venus and for Earth. They explain that…
- Venus is closer to the Sun. Venus is aprox. 0.72 AU distant from the sun (72% of Earth’s), with a total solar irradiance (TSI) almost 2x that of Earth.
- Venus has a denser atmosphere. The pressure on Venus is 93x that of Earth, the equivalent of almost 1 kilometer under the ocean. This is probably the largest factor causing its high temperature.
- The clouds of Venus are mostly sulphuric acid (not water vapor) — a powerful greenhouse agent.
- The atmosphere of Venus has nearly 3000x more CO2 than Earth’s atmosphere. Venus is 96.5% CO2 by volume vs. 380 per million for Earth (0.038%). Goldblatt el al say that with CO2 at 30,000 ppm Earth would have “no stable temperate climate.” That would require burning 10x more than Earth’s estimated fossil fuel resources.
A bizarre, even fun example of our mad news media
“Humans? In 2300? At the rate we’re going odds are there WON’T be many of them and the ones that are there will be far too busy trying to survive to bother over history, other than to curse us.”
— Comment by Bruce J. at the website of Brad DeLong (Prof Economics, Berkeley).
Take a look at “When Did the End Begin?” by Robert Sullivan in New York Magazine — “A scientific debate that’s oddly amusing to entertain: At what point, exactly, did mankind irrevocably put the Earth on the road to ruin?” The title is irrelevant to the article, which discusses dating the point at which the “Anthropocene Era” began, if the designation is approved. That is, when human impacts are the predominate force shaping Earth. It does not imply the beginning of the End Times.
Sullivan gives us the real-world version of an incident in Berkeley Breathed’s great “Bloom County” comic strip. It is not funny when played out in real life.
Bedfellow: “Hello, Bloom Beacon! This is Senator Bedfellow! What’s with this headline? … There’s no story, just a headline!”
Milo: “Which headline?”
Bedfellow: “The big headline on the front page!” ‘BEDFELLOW: THE SECRET LIFE OF A WIFE-SWAPPING ATHEIST’”
Mile: “Oh, that’s just a typo.”
Conclusion
“There will be no successor civilization. … Our planet had ONE shot at building a sustainable industrial civilization, and we humans f***ed it up, big time.”
— Comment by Redwood Rhiadra at website of Brad DeLong (Prof Economics, Berkeley).
A battle consists of phases. Both sides muster their forces, seize advantageous positions. Victory comes to the side that breaks through their foe’s lines. Then begins the pursuit phase, as the losers are chased away or destroyed.
Climate alarmists have followed this formula in the climate public policy debate. They built commanding positions in academia, the news media, ngo’s (such as foundations and the major science professional associations), and the relevant government agencies. With the funding and power so gained, they attack — abandoning the scientists of the IPCC (once called the “gold standard of climate science). Their articles are cheered and echoed by scores of organizations. Dozens of glitzy (well-funded) websites staffed by professionals propagate their messages, as do a flood of books and films.
Now they use their commanding position to say almost anything, however bogus, which pushes their message of climate doom. This campaign will reshape public opinion. For more information see Why skeptics will lose the US climate policy debate.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
NPR story I heard yesterday afternoon went on an on about how it’s the hottest this and hottest that on record and everything is only going to get worse and hotter. No other opinion representated – just DOOOOOOMMMM.
NPR is a propaganda broadcasting platform.
It is completely bent and an embarrassment to any concept of balanced journalism.
Just like fox news, right?
NPR = the old PRAVDA of USSR.
The news never has good news. But these are facts to be concerned about.
Yeah, it might get warm enough for my tomatoes and peaches to ripen. Imagine the horror…
The horror of a somewhat less frigidly frozen Arctic wasteland!
Heavens to Betsy.
Sounds unsurvivable to this kid, alright.
[snip -language /mod]
Luckily we have ecomarxism that will save nature and stop climate change? Have Marxism ever worked?
..Trump will cut off the Tax Payers money supply to this House of Cards and it will crumble into oblivion….
I wouldn’t bet on that, if I were you. He’ll be taken to one side & have it explained to him,how much money flows into the coffers of the various treauries, worldwide, from “Green” taxes.
I doubt being told of how much money is taken from productive businesses will impress Trump. You are playing the same ‘zero sum game’ that politicians do. To earn real money the country needs to be productive not penalize production based on spurious claims ‘because it gets taxes in’. Moving money about in an economy is not increasing wealth indeed it will decrease it as productive companies move to other countries.
Ian W; Donald Drumpf is a New York Liberal, he’ll do what Liberals do.
Adam Gallon July 20, 2016 at 11:56 pm:
I wouldn’t bet on that, if I were you. He’ll be taken to one side & have it explained to him,how much money flows into the coffers of the various treauries, worldwide, from “Green” taxes.
Hogwash: No not true. Trump understands economics. He gets the high cost of special interests, and how they drive up the price of energy, to make a few people rich at the expense of a booming economy. So no, Trump cannot be fooled into believing this nonsense. That is Hillary’s position, not Trump’s.
Mario Lento says:
Trump understands economics.
Correctomundo, compadre. Any self-made $Billionaire who doesn’t understand economics won’t remain a billionaire for very long.
Next, @Adam G: Mr. T doesn’t seem to be the kind of guy who can be “taken to one side & have it explained to him” that ‘green taxes’ make any sense. He’s already on record saying that human emissions make little difference to ‘climate change’. For that matter, anyone here is free to ‘explain’ to the rest of us why we should have ‘green’ taxes. All it takes is measurable evidence.
Taxes should be impartial. Otherwise, taxes end up being an extention of government policy, and used to drive its social engineering schemes. But that isn’t what taxes are supposed to be used for.
The gov’t can spend tax revenues on whatever it likes. But when it uses taxes as a punishment for ideas it disapproves of, there’s no real difference between doing that and using the IRS, EPA, and other bureaucracies to harass and punish its political opponents.
It’s the same thing when the gov’t rewards favored businesses. The competitors of those businesses are put at a disadvantage — and the taxpaying public loses again when the business is Solyndra, or the scores of similar scams. When the President gives a ‘loan guarantee’, it is no different than another $500 million tax when Solyndra goes bankrupt. Multiply that by hundreds of examples, and it starts to add up…
Tax policy should be neutral and free of politics. When this country began, most taxes were assessed on property. Property-based taxes were passed on to users; apportioned to all users of that property regardless of their politics. And you can’t hide property overseas.
But things have changed since then. Now, tax policy is routinely used by the government, and it’s gotten much worse: tax revenues are regularly handed out now as federal grants to favored groups. That’s why we see trigger words like “man made global warming”, or similar dog whistle phrases in most climate related papers. But if a paper states that natural variability is sufficient to fully explain observations, the authors can give up any prospect of a federal grant no matter how valuable their conclusions are.
The problem we face now is that this favoritism has become much more political under the current Administration, which blatantly misuses the federal bureaucracy to punish citizens who question its policies: the EPA routinely declares seasonal mud puddles as “wetlands”, forcing the property owner to either spend a huge amount of money to fight the EPA — or to give in, and lose control of their property. But if the same EPA causes an environmental catastrophe, it is protected by the Administration.
Finally, in respose to ‘Sun Spot’: whether you disagree with something about a particular candidate, it’s always best to keep the Big Picture in mind: Which candidate will be best (or worse) for America? No candidate is perfect. With both of them there will always be some things you disagree with. You should reject the candidate whose over-all policies, vision, and personal ethics you most strongly disagree with.
For example, part of the Big Picture is: who will make the next two or three – or four – Supreme Court appointments? That matters — a lot.
Another consideration: will the accelerating tidal wave of anonymous immigrants, both legal and illegal, continue its exponential rise? Or should the country put the current influx on hold until the INS can get some semblance of control over the rising tide of humanity pouring in, and vet the newcomers at least to the point of getting pictures, fingerprints, and other identification recorded? Each candidate has diametrically opposed views on those questions.
Another choice is between the continued decimation and demoralization of our military, versus rebuilding it to a level sufficient to protect our country and our interests in an increasingly hostile world. For the first time in our history, flag rank officers (generals, admirals) are now either kept or cashiered based on a political litmus test. And the gutting of our armed forces continues: recently the Army lost 40,000 soldiers, and the Air Force cannot get spare parts for its aircraft.
Another consideration is whether we should continue wasting billions of dollars endlessly ‘studying climate change’, rather than funding the other areas of science that have been starved of the $billions being diverted to the CAGW false alarm.
There are many other sharp differences between the only two viable candidates. American citizens have a stark choice: to continue the policies of the past eight years, or to change direction from the hard left turn our country has taken.
This time it’s a clear choice. There is no middle ground; it’s either/or. Vote wisely.
dbstealey July 22, 2016 at 2:58 pm:
To Add to DB’s comments, which of course are CORRECT. I will make it simple for you’all regarding green taxes. The products that green taxes pay for with MY money, ensures these products get used, and necessarily make all energy more expensive and for what?
You see, energy is what gives us a higher standard of being. A human can expend perhaps 1kWhr of energy per day for labor. At 3 cents per kWhr, human life is elevated from the likes of the 3rd world. Both health and well being is gained and we thrive. Making energy more expensive is antithetical to logic. It defies all that is good.
Today, people gladly defy what is good to our present and future deficit… why? For this dreaded boogeyman call AGW. It’s a craze that funnels monies to people who make products no one wants. And these people do not have to compete on a realistic playing ground. They make products of lower value, hence the need for taking other people’s money to do business.
And don’t get me started on Tesla. Only few rich people would buy these toys Tesla they had to compete based on their own virtue. And still, it’s only for wealthy people to get an expensive car at a price point they are willing to spend. Mark them up 30% higher without the tax credits and almost no one would buy them. This scheme causes all other transportation to pay their toll thus pushing up the cost of other vehicals us plebians must buy.
You who are sure man is causing some catastrophy believe it only for religious reasons. Logic and reason escapes you. Open your eyes and think about the fundamental truth.
To continue: I listened last night to Trump’s acceptance speech. It was the first time in my adult life I’m actually excited for how someone could help America where we need it most. Everything about wasteful government that I hated under Bush and more so “underneath” Obama, will be corrected. I am talking about fiscal conservatism.
Making choices to supposedly reduce our temperature in 100 years by some theoretical fraction of a degree are futile and godly expensive. The policies will only redistribute the dwindling wealth of our nation and make people poorer. There will be nothing good that comes of it. This AGW meme causes the EPA to focus on what is NOT pollution (fertilizer for plants) instead of what is pollution. Focusing on reducing CO2 comes at a huge cost to civilization. We may never recover from the damage it’s caused thus far. It’s killing our GDP.
People who use names like “Clean Coal” (which is defined as coal that is process such as to sequester the non polluting CO2 that would otherwise be good for the environment) are using words they do not even understand!
The alterntive? A deceiptful liar, that lives off of the trough of the US’s good will to enrich her own life. She, like Obama, thinks people of specific races are stupid. They divide races of people and pander to them simply to get votes. If Obama really cared about “Black Lives” he’d do something to reduce the actual cause of most black lives being taken.
Instead Obams goes oversees and says that America’s police will be “a lot safer” if they admit they are the problem.
That, is the alternative to Trump. Chaos caused by hateful statements like that.
Having worked in the media for 60 years, I can only observe “what’s new?” Nothing. The media loves the sky is falling. The media honors government and Ph.D.’s. So gloom and doom will be headlined whenever the government or a Ph.D. gives the nod.
John,
That’s an important point. Fear sells, a cousin to “if it bleeds, it leads”.
Likewise, people overcome by fear is nothing new in post-WWII US history. There was widespread hysteria about nuclear war after the USSR exploded a nuke (read Robert Heinlein’s late 1950s stories to see its effect even on smart people).
But these things are still problems, albeit in not unique.
“PRESIDENT” CLINTON???? Aye God, Woodrow! (We ain’t there YET!)
These are facts to be concerned about. From sources more reputable than a fossil fuel tycoon.
But there are some ridiculous claims out there, like earth turning into venus… but this is not an assertive statement. More like worst case scenario, x,y, and z could create unliveable conditions in ???years.
Media will always try to create an attention grabbing story.
But when FACTS are presented you cannot deny them (rising temleratures) and you should be concerned. When a scuentific theory is presented it should be questioned only with with science.
Dallas: please explain why the earth warmed significantly, and in a very similar way to our recent observations, from 900 to 1300 AD. If you tell me it’s because the Vikings rode vehicles driven by the internal combustion engine to Greenland I will smile.
Jake – I will smile, too.
And probably roll on the floor laughing!
Auto, hoping Dallas reverts o a human timescale [unlike his ‘scary’ scenarios . . . .]
Dallas,
Computer models written by graduate students that have no formal computer software training is not science. And don’t tell me that the models don’t matter; if they didn’t they wouldn’t be quoted so often. These unverified models are a key component in the AGW theory. Perhaps the most important to the general public.
Unsuitable models that don’t accurately predict reality aren’t important to anybody, particularly the general public, Paul.
If the climate models are so accurate that we should base the future on them, then use data from the past as model inputs, use real assumptions based on observation and not someone fanciful interpretation of reality. As a scientist I can make any model say just about anything if I manipulate the incoming data and use un-realistic or slightly realistic assumptions. Otherwise the inputs are garbage in and a crap out. They are not real and don’t match reality. Hence they are garbage
Earth cannot become like Venus. It’s far away from that heating source you know. And, guess what, Mars’ atmosphere is also mostly CO2… and it’s cold as hell there.
The heating of Venus’s atmosphere is from the planet’s central molten core. Venus’s crust is thinner than Earth’s and heat is transferred by conduction much quicker. The atmosphere of very dense and largely refluxing sulphuric acid with oxides of sulphur producing some oleum (SO3 in solution with H2SO4). Anyway the atmosphere is far too dense for radiation from the sun to penetrate so greenhouses don’t even come into the equation.
@ur momisugly Gold rider 4: 21 pm This one-sided flow of “news” will shape public opinion slowly but surely, creating support for bold measures by President Clinton. Activists are panicking the public for political gain.
That one just jerked me up out of my chair as well, (Oh dang I was having a snooze).
There is a market for doom. The only way that doom-mongers ever lose influence is by mockery and contempt. If the greens were treated like Evangelical millenarians, much of their influence would go away.
But we have a credulous, invested and compliant media who love doomism for its “compelling storyline”.
It looks to me like they threw the sex scandal thing at the IPCC chair to get rid of him, and used that to shut it down. Hence, the media is off ranting on its own. The raging doom headlines are not shaping public opinion, they are totally ignored. People are getting an increasing amount of content from social media, which is overall causing the old media stories to become inflamed for attention, which funny enough, leads to their being discredited and ignored. A key component of current alarm is to try to maintain a science budget in the face of really boring climate with nothing much to say. You could see the panic coming when they started saying they could process sample noise to see trends. Sort of like saying there are patterns in random numbers. An uptick in noise is no longer, uh, noise. It is now an alarming increase.
They have condition our mind to accept AGW for the last 25 years. It will take the next 50 years to correct. They will claim victory just like in the Ozone scare.
“…to accept AGW for the last 25 years. It will take the next 50 years to correct”
Nope, I’m betting that less than one cool decade would do the trick.
Nope…. this one is already cooler than the last. But as long as the propagandists control the media they will believe it’s the hottest ever overall even though it may be cold as hell at their home
Alcheson,
I disagree, as the average non-idiot has a very well developed BS meter in their skull.
“… the average non-idiot…”
IS there such a thing?
Paul writes: “I’m betting that less than one cool decade would do the trick.”
I think the price of intellectual victory in that case would be too high. I’d almost rather lose my 1st amendment rights than stand by as billions of people starve. Let’s be honest, if the astrophysicists are right and the sun is headed into a “quiet phase”, it’s going to get cold again. But the last time this happened we didn’t have a globally interconnected industrial agricultural system in place feeding 9 billion people. There was a whole lot more elasticity in the system, more unrealized capacity and a much smaller population. Most people were farmers. They raised their own food. That’s not true anymore in industrialized countries. India might still be OK, most of South America. Africa. Maybe even China. But Europe, the US, Canada, Australia? They’d be toast.
The world (as we know it) would not survive a rapid onset of cooling. If temperatures returned to the Maunder Minimum for a decade, we’d see massive social unrest, huge losses in population, war, pestilence, pretty much the worst parts of the bible.
I know it will happen, I’m just hoping to be dead before it does.
“IS there such a thing?”
Perhaps typical would have been a better word than average.
although logic and human psychology tell us that the “average” non-idiot is smarter than average.
Profits and Prophecy.
Unfortunately, scientific mysticism is not limited to prophecies of catastrophic warming. It has been equally effective to normalize the agenda of population control schemers. Whereas China had a one-child policy, liberal societies have a selective-child policy. Where the former is evidence of a minority psychopathy, the latter is evidence of consensus psychopathy. The same mystics that normalized selective-child and other selective policies are behind the CAGW/CACC prophecy and its related schemes.
Bryan,
Yes, Hillary has not yet been elected.
If the US ignorantly elects her President, her every waking moment in office will be fighting impeachment votes stemming from an unending stream of scandals. If she isn’t found not guilt by the Senate after her first impeachment, she will become the first President to be impeached more than once. Climate change will be a much lower priority, and likely never addressed. And forget about her ever getting anything passed by Congress.
I wonder what Bill will say about male interns, lol!
Impeachment proceedings are from the House of Reps…
taz, impeachment is proposed and voted on in the House. They are tried in the Senate.
There is plenty of rebuttal to these climate fright spasms. We see the rebuttals daily. Just how, pray, are they to appear on these check-out-line “news forums”? Kill the gatekeepers? Or at the least, tell respected scientists like Hawking to check their facts before they mouth off? If they rebut, do you suppose they will get news space? Dream on.
All of it is a runaway. manic popular delusion unmatched by anything the middle ages dished up. For all of our progress, ignorance and superstition are as controlling as ever.
We’re doomed anyway ….. during the sun’s expansion (into a White Dwarf, is it?) in the next — what? — 3 bn. years. If that doesn’t get us, some lunatic despot, or a big meteor, or other natural disaster will.
However, by far the greatest and most immediate threat is from the Alarmists themselves who would have us revert to the Dark Ages. Our life-spans will be halved, infant & birthing mortality will sky-rocket, public health-care will vanish, social welfare & community services will collapse, wars over resources will explode, famine will follow a disintegration of efficient farming and plagues will overrun us.
We’re all gonna die!!!!
So say 4.85 out of 5 leading prognosticators
Walter,
Immortality with worsening arthritis, impotence, that failing memory thing, and the rest, do seem a god argument for – yes – “We’re all gonna die!”
[As a good greenie, I’ve economised on exclamation mark use, although I support your use in the original quote from some screaming socialist millionaire thespian or other [My Guess]. Thanks.]
Auto
WoW…. so many of our are completely retarded. You take the extreme of one side of the arguement to completely discredit the entire idea and support the opposite side. How is that any better?
You cannot ignore the FACTS unless you are just that ignorant. The Earth IS warming and humans have had a major impact. The point at which that happened? The industrial revolution. Do some people take that idea and get carried away? Yes. However, intelligently analyzing the data does give cause for concerb for future generations.
Revert to dark ages? Give me a break and go give your head a shake. No, all we need to do is ditch our bad habits like burning fossil fuels and focus more on clean energy. We OWE it to future generations.
Yes the earth naturally shifts environmental states without our help. However, the rate that climate is changing is NOT its natural rate which is the problem.
Even if humans are not directly causing harmful effects to the environment (which we clearly are) shouldnt we strive to make the earth as healthy as possible…. even healthier than if we didnt exsist if its within our means? …. If we found an almost earth like planet within reach but was plagued with environmental problems whats the first thing we would try to do? Make it better…. make it liveable…. just because earth is currently liveable why shouldnt we still strive to make it better rather than ranting about alarmist and doomsayers just so you feel better about ignoring them?
Joel, “The Earth IS warming and humans have had a major impact. The point at which that happened? The industrial revolution. ”
‘My attitude changed profoundly while I was working on a project funded by the National Science Foundation to develop a climate record for the past 110,000 years. By examining ice cores from Greenland, my colleagues and I determined that climate changes large enough to have extensive impacts on our society have occurred in less than 10 years.’
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/rapid-climate-change/1
Rapid climate change.
@ur momisugly lee, read the article. As far as I am concerned, taking samples can , to me, be very misleading. Just the other day we had a storm come through witch dumped various levels of precip and in very close areas. In one area? There was nothing, a few hundred feet away, there was 15 mm of rain in 15 minutes ( measured) and a few dozen FEET away 25 mm ( one inch) of large hail ( again measured) how would those events show up in a core sample ( or core samples ) a few hundred feet away? And in samples thousands of years old ?
Joel, … How many electric vehicles are you driving?
“…shouldn’t we strive to make the earth as healthy as possible…?”
Yes. However, covering vast swaths of natural habitat with rare-bird-chomping windmills and solar panels whose manufacture generates copious hazardous waste to produce a pittance of intermittent power is not a way to do that.
Moreover, CO2 is not a pollutant, but a fundamental compound necessary and beneficial for life.
Joel writes: “We OWE it to future generations.”
Let me guess; you’re a loan officer?
Joel, it’s not clear the future exists. Heisenberg gives us good reason to think the future is entirely unpredictable. If you’re not familiar with his work I can only suggest you read it. He demonstrated the future state of a system can’t be determined from its current state. He further demonstrated the more you know about the current state of a system, the less you know about its future state. The very act of observing a system changes it.
You’re attempting to do the impossible; predict the future. Everything we know about the universe tells us the future is inherently unknowable.
But you want us all to think you know it? Why would any of us believe you?
Joel July 20, 2016 at 3:45 pm wrote
“WoW…. so many of our are completely retarded. You take the extreme of one side of the arguement to completely discredit the entire idea and support the opposite side. How is that any better?” then he wrote “The Earth IS warming and humans have had a major impact. ”
_____________
Seriously? After insulting people, you talk about the extreme case and then say Humans have a “major” impact? That’s an extreme case that is not shown in anything except hypothetical models. Where, what evidence do you have that humans have had a major impact?
Perhaps I should back up a bit. Do you have an understanding of the subject matter, or are you repeating things you heard or read somewhere without a basic understanding of what is actually true.
Good grief.
Many warmists are woefully uninformed and can barely express themselves in English.
Joel, you have apparently bought into the lie that any changes to temperature or the climate regimes of the Earth which may be occurring are somehow unprecedented, and that we are witnessing changes which are outside of natural and normal variability.
Get off the Kool-Aid and get some real information, and stop regurgitating warmista jackassery.
By parroting alarmist baloney, you cast yourself among the low information types.
Joel, it would help if you could write and express yourself in English.
Do you see this happening, REALLY? I don’t, for one very good reason–no one would be making MONEY, and MONEY is what makes the world go ’round. No one’s going to trade their Tesla for an Amish buggy, any more than they’re cashing in their iPhones for snail-mail. Hyperbole on our side does little to diminish the effect of even more ridiculous hyperbole on theirs. The bottom line will be business as usual, plus new innovations that change the game. It has been ever thus. Or to put it another way, NYC is NOT buried under 100+ feet of horse manure (except when Hillary’s talking). Have a beer! 😉
I’ve got a sharp stick ready! Better knock on my mud hut and don’t just walk in!
I just try to avoid politics and tell people the basic data. Temps are up 0.6 deg in the fossil fuel era. We can only sense a 2 deg difference and can only measure within perhaps 0.2 deg. Some, perhaps most, due to humans. Humans have caused perhaps two inches of sea level rise. It would be extremely hard to argue more than 4″ and one could easily argue 0. Forecast models have been consistently, and dramatically too high. The changes have been slowing, not accelerating. Many peer reviewed astronomers warn of solar cooling.
The issue is complex and we are clueless in many ways. But the climate is actually very stable. Relax. Move on.
Most reasonable people actually ‘get’ this which is why climate change is low on priority lists in opinion polls.
Also, it’s important to explain that “better safe than sorry” is a bad idea. Spending billions on climate change mitigation is ineffective and takes precious resources from more important environmental challenges.
But RealityTheatre™ tells is the end is near if we don’t all comply and agree to huge(er) governments and spending!
Work on soundbites. Models failed because of (1) growing divergence from satellite and balloon temperature observations and (2) nearly twice the observational sensitivity. No troposphere (satellite/radiosonde) warming this century except the now rapidly cooling El Nino blip. No significant SLR acceleration in either dGPS corrected tide gauges or satellite altimetry; the two cannot be spliced because tide gauges have closure but altimetry does not by a factor of 1.5x. CO2 is causing measurable global greening. Arctic ice has not disappeared and is likely undergoing cyclic recovery; Antarctic ice may well be net growing.
The models failed for the same reason models always fail. The parameters of the equations are not sufficiently well known. Not all processes are modeled. There is no where near enough data to be able to represent the whole planet. The equations produce chaotic results. etc. etc. & etc.
When confronted by a warmunist, I always have the winning argument:
‘Warm dese nuts!’
Debate over. Pwn3d.
I do notice the upper atmosphere is cooling. This is probably caused by the greenhouse effect.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary!
Mary that’s all well and good but it’s much less fun than a zombie apocalypse. Somehow you need to work in automatic weapons, grenades and zombies. It’s not going to fly the way you have it.
Watts Up With the new prime minister taking action on the Climate bs operation in the British govt.
see a post on legal insurrection blog
a buddy called me on phone on this
my try on the web site
http://www.legalinsurrection.com/
Watts up with off-topic posts??
correct link
http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/07/u-k-s-bold-new-leader-shuts-climate-change-dept/
British Prime Minister Theresa May has been facing criticism during her first few days in office over her decision to close the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change.
The closure was reported on Thursday, May’s first full day in office after the departure of David Cameron.
iirc same item was covered here few days ago just didn’t have chance to verify
I now it doesnt go down well but Hawking is part hack. Much of his claims re astrophysics was bollocks.
You have to wonder if he’d be as famous as he is were it not for his condition.
It suddenly struck me that Stephen Hawking must be an inductivist – “Et tu, Brute”.
Einstein, Feynman and Popper all praised imagination as the first step in finding out how things work.
However, they all stated that knowledge rests on testing:
«In the case of science – I think one of the things which makes it very difficult – is that it takes a lot of imagination – It´s really hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like!»
– Richard Feynman
“In general, we look for a new law by the following process. First, we guess it (audience laughter), no, don’t laugh, that’s really true. Then we compute the consequences of the guess, to see what, if this is right, if this law we guess is right, to see what it would imply and then we compare the computation results to nature, or we say compare to experiment or experience, compare it directly with observations to see if it works.
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
– Richard Feynman
The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
– Albert Einstein
“The only source of knowledge is experience.”
– Albert Einstein
“I said above that the work of the scientist consists in putting forward and testing theories.
The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it. The question how it happens that a new idea occurs to a man— whether it is a musical theme, a dramatic conflict, or a scientific theory—may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge. This latter is concerned not with questions of fact (Kant’s quid facti?), but only with questions of justification or validity (Kant’s quid juris?). Its questions are of the following kind. Can a statement be justified? And if so, how? Is it testable? Is it logically dependent on certain other statements? Or does it perhaps contradict them? In order that a statement may be logically examined in this way, it must already have been presented to us. Someone must have formulated it, and submitted it to logical examination.”
– Karl Popper;
I have no doubt that Stephen Hawking is an intelligent man having a great imagination.
However – Dear Stephen Hawking can you please provide us with information about the tests your imagined ideas have been exposed to, and the results of these tests?
“A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls… saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?”
– Stephen Hawking
How do we know, Stephen Hawking, that you have a true, undistorted picture of reality?
ha ha – because black holes matter, my dear.
and only yoko ono sings better than he.
Science or Fiction,
“Einstein, Feynman and Popper all praised imagination as the first step in finding out how things work.
However, they all stated that knowledge rests on testing:”
“The only source of knowledge is experience.”
– Albert Einstein
He didn’t say what you said he did, though you seem to me to be sort of reconciling that difference, and we may be thinking along similar lines about these matters . . We all have lots and lots of experiences that are not “tests”, but which result in knowledge. I know what I had for breakfast today, for instance, yet was not conducting any sort of tests . . This is no small matter to me, and I feel it is extremely important and relevant to all sorts of discussion I observe here, and elsewhere.
Science is a form of “the experimental philosophy” as Mr. Newton called it (though not the only form it seems to me, and I’ve personally performed many informal experiments myself (as I don’t doubt many here have), that do not qualify as scientific experimentation, from which I nevertheless gained knowledge). But it is not the only way people come to have knowledge, though as Mr. Einstein said and I agree, experience is.
An illusion is possible, and seems to me to be rather common these days among those who study/work in scientific realms of knowledge, which lacks depth owing to a lack self awareness. The illusion that knowledge exists independent of the knower(s). The illusion that what some scientist knows is somehow above/independent of the scientist’s fundamental belief generating intelligence systems.
I say, the vast majority of the scientific knowledge anyone reading these words has, does not come to them through tests/experiments which THEY conduct. It’s predominantly based on faith in what they’ve experienced, regarding what others (ostensibly) tested, and the reasoning done in relation to such testing. Science in this (very important) sense, is a faith based belief system, I say (and am willing to defend if anyone wishes to challenge that statement).
You write two questions, one your own;
“But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?”
– Stephen Hawking
“How do we know, Stephen Hawking, that you have a true, undistorted picture of reality?”
~ you.
I say, much subtle confusion arises from the use of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ in those questions, which is extremely relevant to many objections folks around here raise in regard to the CAGW idea and its proponents . . They say, “We know”, and act as if those who disagree are each just an “I” who disagrees with known (settled) science. In short, they employ argument from authority, which “works” in terms of public perception, to a great extent, I feel, because a great many “skeptics” still speak as though their knowledge is what a “We know”, in regard to much other science related knowledge.
And I say; It’s just us “I”s all the way down . .
(If there is no God, anyway ; )
Thank you for that very thoughtful comment. I think you are touching upon something essential, and I think the interpretation of the words: Experience, test and knowledge; might be at central. I also find your perspective on “I” versus “we” to be important. I will have to let it sink in and work on it a bit before I revert. 🙂
My thesaurus provides two different meanings of the word «experience»:
1 practical contact with and observation of facts or events
2 skill, practical knowledge, practice; training, learning, education, grounding, knowledge, understanding, wisdom, professionalism; background, record, history, past ….
I think it is only the first definition which make sense in this context. I think it is fair to say that the kind of experiences included in the second definition all have its flaws or shortcomings.
Regarding knowledge, I would say: I don’t know the truth about what I had for breakfast today.
I might think I know what I had for breakfast today. However, at some level I cannot know it precisely. I might think I know that I had: a cup of coffee, 10 cherries, and 100 g croissant. However, it might have happened that I actually had two cups of coffee. How do I know that I ate 10 cherries and did not miss one or take 1 extra? How do I know the croissant was 100 g? If I had a scale I could have measured it. Unfortunately, the only thing I would then know for sure is that it was not exactly 100 gram. Simply because all measurements have uncertainty related to them. I could get closer to the truth if the scale I used had a calibration certificate traceable to the international standard for gram. In which case I could identify the scale and provide the calibration certificate. I could then state that I ate: 100 g +/- 5 g @ur momisugly 95% confidence level, of croissant this morning. There will always be uncertainties related to observations.
Anyhow, my eventual knowledge about what I ate for breakfast isn´t really scientific knowledge. Not in the sense of science being ideas about how things work. I cannot use my knowledge about what I ate for breakfast to repeatedly predict anything reliably about the future, I cannot deduce a necessary consequence from my knowledge – and the accuracy of my knowledge cannot be inter-subjectively tested. The events of my breakfast now belongs to the past. There are possible errors related to my knowledge and these errors can never be revealed. No living person knows every aspect of truth about what he had for breakfast – even if he did – it wouldn´t be knowledge about how things work.
On the other side, about things having a function: Quantitative theories, models or for that sake any physical or mental construction – is that there are all kinds of and uncertainties and possibly systematic errors related also to them.
That is why good engineers typically tests every part of their constructions, if not individually or fully, then at least as part of a larger part of the system or finally as part of the whole system. Challenger was put to the ultimate test – and failed. That test revealed an error. Tests of quantitative models or theories may also reveal significant systematic errors, or uncertainties which are larger than imagined up front.
Another aspect is that models are often so complex that no single individual cannot fully understand the function of every single component and the complete system. Hence, for a complex model there can be no single individual who can accurately and reliably predict the uncertainty and know that the model is without systematic errors. Not without testing.
However, once the model output is compared with observable events, an individual person can conclude if the model works. Even if I don´t know the function of every part of a model – I can easily conclude if a complex models works in accordance with it´s stated capability – if the intended function and the test results are available to me. I don´t have to understand every part of the model and how it is realized. And that is what I require even within my profession – that the capabilities are stated upfront and then demonstrated by independent testing.
And ultimately that is what science is about: Provide a model or construction, information about the intended capabilities and reliable information about how it compares with observations.
S/F,
You’re certainly welcome . . and thanks right back atya.
“I think it is only the first definition which make sense in this context.”
Well, to my mind both senses are often closely linked and important to bear in mind when considering many scientific matters. To illustrate, I read here recently of a man (with a relevant science degree of some sort, as I recall) who observed large scale air turbulence (weather systems) in the equatorial region, crossing the equator. He basically freaked out and sounded the Climate Change Alarm.
At which I, with no such degree, was puzzled, wondering if I had missed something basic along the way (to my current state of ignorance ; ) which would make such (to my mind) mundane physical eventualities alarming or “unprecedented” for some reason. My “off-hand” assessment turned out to be typical among degreed types (even those with “climate science” degrees ; ) and the guy was pretty universally dismissed as being foolish about the events/facts he had “practical contact with”.
That second definition/sense of ‘experience’ stuff, was apparently lacking to the point of making him less qualified than “laymen” to assess the events/facts in a rational way. I don’t doubt he has more “knowledge” about the “science” than I do, to put it in commonly used terms . . but that (1st definition) form of “experience” failed him miserably, it seems to me.
Concerning your hypothetical breakfast, I just meant you would know that what you had was coffee, berries and a croissant, or whatever. This important, on a fundamental level that is rarely discussed in science circles it seems to me. THAT sort of knowledge MUST be legitimate knowing, I say, or “scientific knowledge” cannot be legitimate either . . Very fundamental logical problems overwhelm any attempt to “us” knowing things, if “I” can’t unto myself know things . . This is the critical question, as I see the world I find myself, not the oft heard version;
If a tree falls in the forest, and only you hear it; Did it make a sound? . . ; )
I think we certainly know a lot of things which are very helpful to us. In some cases we are closer to truth than in other cases. I guess I overdid my hypothetical breakfast to illustrate that all perspectives of truth are not readily available to us, even in simple cases.
However, In many cases my experience is good enough for the intended purpose. Problems arises when I try to extend my ideas beyond what I have hitherto known well enough for previous intended purposes.
That problem is known, by some at least, as the problem of induction. The problem of induction occurs for any application of a theory at other conditions than those conditions for which the theory has hitherto been corroborated by experience. Just like the O-ring which failed on Challenger. (Challenger was qualified for launches above 40 F but was launched at lower temperatures.) Within logic, inference by deduction is logically valid. Inference by induction is logically flawed.
The problem of induction and the implication for ethical scientific conduct is very well covered by Karl Popper in his work: The logic of scientific discovery. The first 26 pages contains the essence, very well written. Certainly worth a read.
Regarding the man you refer to, who freaked out and sounded the Climate Change Alarm, I think Karl Popper describes quite well how we should relate to his ideas:
«The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible of it. The question how it happens that a new idea occurs to a man— whether it is a musical theme, a dramatic conflict, or a scientific theory—may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge.»
I think inductivism is at the core of the climate change controversy. And I think that problem has been enhanced United Nations. I think the greatest blunder has been the endorsement of inductivism by United Nations, IPCC and it´s reviewer InterAcademyCouncil. I cannot include all my arguments for thinking that here, however, you will find my arguments at the site linked behind my alias: Science or Fiction? Any thought I have ever completed about this controversy has been published, either on that site or in comments like this. That´s why I made my site, to be fully open about what I think. As you implied, there is no “we” on the skeptics side.
I meant “made worse by ” rather than “enhanced by United Nations”. 🙂
S/F,
Hmm, some good thinkin’ there it seems to me. If I was comfortable with ruling out “foul play”, I could agree that “the greatest blunder has been the endorsement of inductivism by United Nations, IPCC and it´s reviewer InterAcademyCouncil.” . . but I suspect that the endorsement of inductivism was not a blunder at all . .
(Yes, I know, it’s not how scientists generally behave . . ; )
Thanks for our conversation here, I enjoyed it a lot. 🙂
Without going into that discussion here, I think United Nations could deserve some more criticism.
There are some unelected influential bureaucrats having control over a powerful organization.
Yup! A lot of his earlier work has been proven incorrect. The later work mostly not that significant. His work on climate though,????????
The more sensational, alarming, gruesome or disturbing a statement is, the more attention it gets from the press – on the assumption that it will sell more papers / attract more viewers / draw more votes.
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
It is not about truth or correct information, and hasn’t been for centuries.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H. L. Mencken
I’m not worried. The days have gone when the people automatically kowtowed to their elites. Said elites have undermined their authority by years of obfuscation, half truths and outright lying on many subjects. People no longer believe them. And most people are not stupid, there comes a time when they realise they have been sold a pup and that time is very close in the realm of climate science. Very, very close.
Electing Donald Trump would be a kick in the nuts to said elite. And they’d claim those voters as racist or stupid or whatever. I wonder if that’s what they’d really believe or they’d recognize the nutting for what it is.
This scenario has been playing out in the UK. Look at the reaction of the EU elites and the young socialists. Both groups want to dump democracy since they know best what the UK needs.
This is exactly what the SED and their STASI enforcers thought in the DDR. They knew best what was good for East German citizens.
After 3 sweltering days (uncomfortable) in Cheltenham I thought how nice it would be to return to the cold refreshing June days; when I was told by the IPCC’s hockey stick department via the BBC that June had been the hottest on record.
Yes even the MSM here in Aus are covering this as the hottest evah for the UK, but in reality it was just a hot July. Still several degrees off the 1976 temps…so I would not be too worried.
July hasn’t been hot in GB at all only the 17th to 20th, three days; for six weeks before that it was cold, raining and miserable in fact worse than it normally is. Anyway I don’t know why I’m bothering to blog, global warming is a total nonsense, how could a footling amount (380 to 400 ppm) of CO2 cause a runaway heating of the planet when a few more molecules are added – it just does not make any sense at all.
(1) The Eocene is an inappropriate comparison. Climate is affected by continental positions and ocean currents. Antarctica did not begin to glaciate until about 35 millions years ago as it approached its present position. Present Paleocene ice age did not begin until the Panama Isthmus closed about 2.2 million years ago. Eemian highstand shows there are no SLR tipping points, at least not for another 3000 years if we do reach +2C; Eemian rise from present SLR to its highstand about 6.6m higher is a rate of 2.2mm/year, just what dGPS tide gauges. Are showing now. Greening shows more CO2 is beneficial up to levels that we cannot reach given likely price/abailability of fossil fuels– RPC8.5 is a joke.
(2) I do not share your apparent despair, for 3 reasons: a. Mother Nature is not cooperating with the warmunists, and there have been enough alarming ‘projections’ already falsified that people are beginning to take notice. Neither snow nor Arctic ice have disappeared. b. The intermittency failure of renewables is becoming evident with penetration even in wacko places like California, UK, Germany, and South Australia. I suspect even harder object lessons are coming soon in the form of killing intermittency caused blackouts, as has happened already in SA, and will likely happen this winter in UK. Relying on shut and mothballed obsolete coal/gas generation for all your inadequate reserve safety margin is UK energy suicide. c. Despite growing warmunist shrillness and its continued amplification in MSM, the public isn’t buying. That simple fact explains the shrillness. China, India, and now Phillipines won’t play. UK just eliminated DECC by folding into new BEIS; the emphasis will now be on business, energy, and industrial strategy, not climate change. Wailing and nashing of Greenpeace won’t change that until at least the next election in 2020. May has made this clear. Obama’s CPP was already stayed by SCOTUS because likely unconstitional. Hillary cannot change that. Obama failed with carbon taxes even when Dems held both branches of Congress 2008-2010 at the peak of the AR4 hype before Climategate. Hillary will have no shot either unless Trump proves an utter disaster down ticket as well as up ticket. We shall see.
Ristvan, I like your comments. Thanks!
Ristvan I like your comments as well, but just paragraph them . It will make them so much easier to read. Thanks, asybot.
Ristvan, we do need to worry about the depleting fossil fuel reserves. Need to develop better nuclear power for the USA and other developed nations. I’m not convinced we should encourage deploying nuclear plants in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, or Venezuela.
I do not think skeptics will lose the climate debate. In my opinion the climate debate will become irrelevant for policies when more urgent and serious problems take our attention out of it. Once everybody gets over the debate, science will start to work on sorting it out.
Javier,
I suggest you read the post. Time will tell which of us is correct.
If the Russians are right, and they probably are because their scientists are far less politicized than ours are, the debate will end in 2020 because the new solar minimum will cause a new LIA.
Walter, it is not the Russian scientists who believe in a new LIA brought about by a grand solar minimum in the next decade, but SOME Russian scientists, that are likely to be wrong. The fact that LIA took place 400 years ago means that it is very likely that a new very cold period won’t take place for at least 500 years, as these are millennial and multimillennial cycles at play. How many LIAs there have been during the Holocene? Why do you think there are going to be two in less than 500 years?
There have been 21 LIA like cooling periods during the Holocene. This doesn’t mean equivalent global temperature periods, but equivalent cooling periods either causing temporary stability in much longer warming period (i.e. from major ice age to inter-glacier) or continuing an increasingly long-term trend down. There were 3 during the last 2000 years with increasingly cooler global temperatures.
These periods fit in a solar cycle roughly every 360 years. There has been a period of warming for 360 years and a period of cooling for 360 years with 3 each of these in the last 2000 years. Therefore the next LIA type cooling period should not be due until around 2210, although as mentioned some say may happen sooner.
Constant bad, doom and gloom messages and reports can have a negative psychological effect, especially amongst children.
Actually if people are that easily taken by bogus,lying scaremongering claims,then they are plain gullible and stupid. But a few smarter people are WILLFULLY ignoring the evidence that the warming trend since the late 1600’s is not unusual.
“Actually if people are that easily taken by bogus,lying scaremongering claims,then they are plain gullible and stupid.”
Technically true, but kind of unfair. It really is conflicting when we need to distrust the authority of just climate science. It goes against what parents teach kids. That widespread betrayal appears to be an anomaly of climate “science”, but who knows until others comes to light?
Since Plato, we have been taught that the Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy. Bentham called them “political fallacies.”
Charlatans usually through in some ad hominem attacks (another logical fallacy) as they try to deceive us.
“Since Plato, we have been taught that the Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy”
And since childhood we (the layperson) has been taught to respect that Authority. We have yet to evolve to handle malicious misdirection from science “authorities”. Even worse when the MSM play along.
unfair?
parents indoctrinate their children into an authority worshipping cult is unfair?
paying the consequences of believing lies is unfair?
nature is entirely and perpetually fair.
be stupid, get smacked.
it doesn’t get any fairer than that.
your disneyesque wishing for anything else than what is – that’s called ‘fantasy’
mysticism of that kind has consequences.
it’s all fair. real justice is served when a person gets what he deserved.
What has happened in the press and government organizations, is that in choosing people to deal with environmental issues, they mistakenly hired activists because they were “experienced” in environmental issues. Unfortunately they were experienced because they were zealots…all the more rational ones having long since retired from those causes because the developed world had already dealt with its environmental issues reasonably well.
We have effectively hired members of a nature cult that believes capitalism and industry are the horsemen of the apocalypse …so of course they spew nothing but news of the coming apocalypse.
And their constant appeals to emotionalism are a dead giveaway.
-Poitsplace
That might be the most accurate and concise I’ve heard it put. These “nature cultists” are so determined to have a place of importance in the world that they are prepared to live without regard for the truth.Science has a problem but in the context of public issues this is a phenomenon of modern psychology.
I am not sure why environmentalists want us to go back to the stone age. Wherever man went, mega fauna died. It happened every time man moved. In Australia, man migrated there around 50,000 years ago. within a few thousand years, all large mammals were gone. Giant Kangaroos, marsupial saber tooth cats, giant sloths, gone. Same with NA 15000 years ago. So, what man is doing now to the environment is peanuts to what happened in the past. We are probably the most gentle species around compared to what we were in the stone age.
“Wherever man went, mega fauna died”
So correlation always equals causation? And I’m pretty sure NA had some sort of climate change 15K year ago, maybe that changed things for mega fauna?
There’s some pretty good evidence that an extraterrestrial object hit NA and may have contributed to those extinctions.
I think that you mean that the greenies want to return us to the state of hunter/gatherers. It is certainly true that they more hunter/gatherers live in a specific location, the less flora and fauna survive to hunt and gather. This is why farming developed to produce more food in less area.
The green zealots can go “back to Nature” as hunter-gatherers any time they please. Please post video. I’m sure we’ll all be interested to see how much fun it is to die of tetanus or rabies or the flux at age 36 in the absence of sanitation, vaccinations, and antibiotics. Take yourselves out of the gene pool, guys!
When they come for peoples “stuff”, they will be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.
Largest misconception of climate change is the co2 factor. That will cause problems in 100 to 120 years. The real factor is us turning on a dryer to dry our clothes or driving our cars that give off over a 195 to 220 f. and now think how many are in use right now. Other causes cell phones, lights, air conditioning, laptops, and anything that we use that creates heat that’s released into our atmosphere. We’re all to blame, even me. I’m at fault as well. I do everything as much as the next person. We need to fix this. I think we have alot less time then what their projecting. I give it 20 maybe 40 years for our own extinction. It was 85 degrees in the Arctic Circle at Dead Horse. We’re in trouble. We can’t keep on acting like nothings wrong. When this happens there’s no planet to move to, no quick fix, and no place to run to. Our children or grand children will die. We need to wake up the world. Now! Please share this post. We need to be self aware!
I sincerely hope you forgot the /sarc tag.
In the event you are serious, you might want to consider the implications of principle called the conservation of energy, particularly the part that says it cannot be created.
Oh you are funny. Everyone here is dead serious.
BTW please haul warmunists to Greenland, like Australia used to be used. They’ll soon start valueing warming.
The US consumes about 100 EJ of energy every year. The US uses between a quarter and a fifth of the total human production of energy — call it 500 EJ every year. The total solar flux over the earth is about 300 EJ/hr. Two hours of sunlight falling on the earth is more than the total annual human conumption of energy. The ratio of solar energy falling on the earth to human production is about 5,000::1. Human energy production is a negligible.portion of the the total energy available at the earths surface.
Walter …. I’ve been rabbiting-on about the ratio of insolation to anthropogenic warming endlessly, BUT YOU JUST NAILED IT!
Better still if you look at the *variance* of insolation over Sun-cycles … anthropogenic warming is nothing compaared with the VARIANCE, let alone the quantum.
In short, the sun varies its radiative heating a *huge* factor greater than we burn, yet we are bothered about infinitesmal marginal additions.
The issue is not the relative amount of energy that is contained within fossil fuels that are consumed annually compared to that of solar insolation. It is the impact of CO2 emitted when fossil fuels are consumed on the radiative energy balance of the earth.
Chris, please explain your post. I am not clear what you mean.
Thanks for the belly laugh Brain.
You so crazy!
Give me a break, Chicken Little. Dial down the hyperbole.
There are Elders among the Inuit who remember their grandparents telling them about when the Arctic Circle was warm, ice was non-existent, and they hunted in canoes. If you’d ever spent any time among the Inuit, you’d know these are common stories, nothing unusual at all.
There’s a museum north of the Arctic Circle that I went to while cruising the fjords 20 years ago (in Tromsø, IIRC) where they had huge fossils of palm trees that existed all over the northern tip of Norway. The museum spokesman said the arctic was tropical at one time.
Just last November they announced finding an entire tropical forest in Svalbard, well north of Tromsø in the Arctic Ocean, Fossilized Tropical Forest Found — in Arctic Norway.
http://www.livescience.com/52868-fossil-forests-norway.html
Here are fern fossils found in Sweden:
http://www.livescience.com/44234-images-preserved-fossilized-fern.html
Furthermore, Chicken Little,
The temperature right now in Deadhorse, AK: 41 F. Nowhere near 85 degrees.
https://www.wunderground.com/weather-forecast/US/AK/Deadhorse.html
It was 84 F and 82 F on July 13, and 14. Big whoop. Look at the entire month.
https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/PASC/2016/7/21/MonthlyHistory.html
But note, it’s been quite a while since the cable news shows, including CNN and MSNBC, have been pushing it. They’ll have an hour long special on it twice a year or so but it’s not the daily drumbeat it used to be.
It’s more the international globalists who are pushing it hard.
Seems to be a subset called The Guardian, these days . . .