Michael Bastasch
2:01 PM 07/25/2017
President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser compared the Trump administration’s use of “red teams” to debate climate science to a “kangaroo court” meant to “create a sense of continuing uncertainty about the science of climate change.”
“But I suspect that most of the advocates of the scheme are disingenuous, aiming to get hand-picked non-experts from federal agencies to dispute the key findings of mainstream climate science and then assert that the verdict of this kangaroo court has equal standing with the findings of the most competent bodies in the national and international scientific communities,” former President Barack Obama’s science czar John Holdren wrote in a Boston Globe op-ed published Monday.
“The purpose of that, of course, would be to create a sense of continuing uncertainty about the science of climate change, as an underpinning of the Trump administration’s case for not addressing it. Sad,” Holdren wrote in his op-ed, railing against the “perversity of the climate science kangaroo court.”
The idea of using red teams gained traction with Trump administration officials this year after former Obama administration official Steve Koonin suggested the arrangement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in April.
Koonin, a physicist and former top Department of Energy official, argued red teams could strengthen climate science by exposing its faults and uncertainties. The military and intelligence communities often pit red teams against blue teams to expose weaknesses in policies and strategies being pursued. It could work in a similar way for climate science, with a red team of researchers given the goal of finding pitfalls in blue team’s scientific argument.
“A Red/Blue exercise would have many benefits,” Koonin wrote in the WSJ. “It would produce a traceable public record that would allow the public and decision makers a better understanding of certainties and uncertainties. It would more firmly establish points of agreement and identify urgent research needs.”
Many climate scientists, however, say it has no place in their field. One group of prominent researchers even argued red team exercises amount to “dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions” that undercut mainstream science.
Holdren argued the scientific peer-review process already acts as a check on bad science, further arguing a red team exercise is a ‘right-wing’ plot against climate science.
“Climate science has been repeatedly ‘red-teamed,’ both by groups of avowed contrarians sponsored by right-wing groups and by the most qualified parts of the world’s scientific community,” Holdren wrote in his op-ed.
“The right wing’s ‘red team’ efforts have consistently been characterized by brazen cherry-picking, misrepresentation of the findings of others, recycling of long-discredited hypotheses, and invention of new ones destined to be discredited,” Holdren wrote. “Almost none of this material has survived peer review to be published in the respectable professional literature.”
Despite this, Trump administration officials have begun looking for scientists to participate in a red-blue team exercise to test scientific claims about man-made global warming. Media reports suggest the Trump team is considering asking Koonin to lead the exercise.
The administration also sought recommendations for who should participate in the red team exercise from the Heartland Institute, which is known for its skepticism of man-made warming.
“The White House and the Environmental Protection Agency have reached out to the Heartland Institute to help identify scientists who could constitute a red team,” Heartland spokesman Jim Lakely told reporters Monday.
Follow Michael on Facebook and Twitter
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Tags: Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Energy, John Holdren
“President Barack Obama’s” should read “FORMER President Barack Obama’s”
Former President 0bummer.
∅
How about “The last president who was allowed to choose a science advisor”?
The “blue” team will never debate. It’s not in their nature. Never have, never will.
sorry. we debate all the time.
just not with people who think the earth is flat.
theres a healthy debate on the one thing that matters. ecs.
nic lewis and judith have published interesting stuff.. heck they even passed me the work to look at before publishing.
got a nice hattip in the acknowledgements.
it added to the debate.
what folks wont show up for are publuc stunts or forums where people accuse them of fraud. waste of time. the eart isnt flat.
You’re on a team Steve?
That explains so much.
Steven, out of respect, while I think the red/blue team is a bad political tactic for the Trump administration, if it came to that, I would give a hattip to you leading Blue team. The fact you are consistently here speaks volumes. Yes, the public stunts, on both sides, does not serve us well. In stead of a Red/Blue team, I’d much rather see Meat and Potatoes team.
The ‘flat earth’ was the consensus of its day…
“just not with people who think the earth is flat.”
Ahh.. I see you have read Trenberth’s work. !!
How’s the used car sale job , going Mosh !!
The highlight would be Mosh during the debate on warming vs cooling over Antarctica. Mosh would claim Antarctica should be cooling for decades to come according to simple physics and global warming theory while his teammates stare befuddled with their jaws dropped-open and wonder if his references to poppers and typing in slurred-speech style are more than a coincidence.
Go straight to insulting people?
Very scientific of you.
Call people names and then say you won’t even talk to them?
Very noble.
Refuse to give numbers of real stations and real observations.
Very frightened of the truth.
Run away when asked these questions?
Tough.
“How’s the used car sale job, going Mosh !!”
Unless I have it wrong, and this is not an appeal to authority, you may disagree with peoples views but be respectful! We don’t want to live in a bubble now do we, he ain’t no used car salesmen that is for sure!!
http://berkeleyearth.org/team/steven-mosher/
Your flawed and intentionally misleading reference to a “flat earth” is indicative of the type of “character assassination science” that alarmists engage in. If open and honest debates were not avoided and ridiculed by special interest groups in the early days we wouldn’t be having to go through these adversarial shenanigans now. In my experience only people who know they are wrong ridicule debate.
To paraphrase Einstein: “A child armed with a thermometer and a scribbler wins out against a thousand scientists with computer models and data normalizing algorithms”.
As I recall, Gavin Schmidt wouldn’t even show up in the same forum with Roy Spencer, who is another scientist. That’s what I call cowardice.
Duncan, that CV describes a salesman.. Nothing more.
the eart isnt flat, but temperatures are.
Steve Mosher
I believe that you were part of previous modelling efforts.
Can you confirm that the modellers undertook a CO2 atmospheric density analysis for the period of the last ten years of glacial, right through the temperature rise into interglacial and say at least 10,000 years of this interglacial.
A CO2 density curve. Not a model of assumptions. A density analysis based on CO2 and atmospheric temperature raw data.
PS – ppm is not density.
Mosher,
Do you really think that appeals to authority, insulting the other side, fear mongering and misplaced self-righteous indignation is debating the science? I have yet to find anyone on the broken side of the science promoted by the IPCC, and this includes many high profile individuals who have contributed to IPCC reports, who can explain away any of the falsifications of a high sensitivity that I’ve developed. The science you believe in is so incredibly broken the only defense its supporters have is to avoid having to explain how the laws of physics support their position.
Here’s a simple one for you to try and explain. But be forewarned that there’s no plausible explanation you can offer that will be consistent with the absurdly high sensitivity claimed by the IPCC. This simple fact is why people like Trenberth, Schlesinger, Schmidt and others have no answer either.
The IPCC claims a nominal sensitivity factor of 0.8C per W/m^2 which when multiplied by the 3.7 W/m^2 of equivalent forcing arising from doubling CO2 results in the nominal 3C increase claimed.
The average surface temperature of 288K emits about 390 W/m^2 (per Trenberth’s energy balance diagram). Increasing this to 288.8K increases the emissions by about 4.3 W/m^2. The additional 3.3 W/m^2 above and beyond the 1 W/m^2 of forcing causing it is claimed to be the result of massive positive feedback amplifying something tiny into something big (See “Feedback Fubar” to understand Bode so you can see why this is impossible in the first place).
Why aren’t the 240 W/m^2 of accumulated forcing arriving from the Sun also generating 3.3 W/m^2 of feedback each? Obviously they’re not, for if they were, the surface emissions would be close to that expected from a body the temperature of boiling water. How can the next Joule/sec of forcing from increasing CO2 concentrations be nearly 3x more powerful at warming the surface than the last Joule/sec arriving from the Sun?
COE tells us that Joules are Joules and in fact, work is measured in Joules and maintaining surface heat requires work. The consensus position is such an obvious violation of COE that for reasons that defy explanation seems to go above the head of nearly every consensus climate scientist on the planet. How can they be so incredibly dense and/or so unaware of how to apply basic sanity checking to a scientific position?
“public stunts or forums”
You’ll take shots at skeptics on incredibly popular public forums like WUWT and twitter, but you won’t consent to serious debates in any official capacity?
Total losers.
Steven Mosher
According to the Pope, the earth is round. Not a sphere mind, round, like a pizza.
Who are you calling flat earthers?
Your problem is, you’re just to yellow to have the AGW scam challenged without the ability to stifle dissenters and load the bases.
Truth fears no question.
What are you so afraid of, Mr. Mosher?
ypu aint the blue team mosh, what are you? english lit or something?
Mosh did you pick up Heller’s challenge to your fake graphs claim, he offers data and code, you have a habit of making spurious claims, and I know you sanitise your twitter when you get owned
Is it “flat Earth-ism” to question the sensitivity of the climate to CO2? Is it “flat Earth-ism” to point out the failure of so many climate predictions? Is it “flat Earth-ism” to suggest that just maybe, destroying our economies by a too-rapid conversation to unproven technologies is not the best approach?
See
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/25/flat_earth_society_believes_in_climate_change/
“As it turns out, there is a real Flat Earth Society and its president thinks that anthropogenic climate change is real. In an email to Salon, president Daniel Shenton said that while he “can’t speak for the Society as a whole regarding climate change,” he personally thinks the evidence suggests fossil fuel usage is contributing to global warming.”
So the president of the flat earth society is on YOUR side.
co2isnotevil July 26, 2017 at 9:39 pm
“Why aren’t the 240 W/m^2 of accumulated forcing arriving from the Sun also generating 3.3 W/m^2 of feedback each? Obviously they’re not, for if they were, the surface emissions would be close to that expected from a body the temperature of boiling water. ”
I’ve wondered the same thing. The only answer I’ve been able to arrive at is the CO2 somehow has an exponential effect on the creation of water vapor. /sarc
We debate, but only with people who agree with us.
Jim,
Yes, this was the first thing I noticed which inspired me to perform proper due diligence on the claims of the IPCC. The comprehensive due diligence that followed uncovered many more inconsistencies with first principles thermodynamic theory, so many in fact that it’s hard to believe how so many serious errors have found their way into ‘settled’ science and have gone unnoticed for decades, moreover; every error is in favor of alarmism, much like the many dubious adjustments made to data sets.
I remember many having trouble with thermodynamics back in college physics and it appears that this trait is shared by most climate scientists who side with the IPCC and its ludicrous claims. I want to believe that it’s just incompetence driven by group think and confirmation bias, but it’s getting harder and harder to rule out nefariousness, especially given how the warmists are doubling down on the alarmist rhetoric, for no other reason than that the current administration wants to get the science right.
Steven, I’m no scientist, but recall the recently published RSS update. Why was Christy not part of the peer review process?
When you say “we debate all the time” what that says to sceptics is “the people that agree, continue to agree, but we will ignore the people that disagree.”
Just look at the MSM. They booked Clinton into the White House months in advance because they agreed to agree with each other but refused to debate the people that didn’t. The election was lost despite all of the greatest pundits and polls agreeing.
Steven, is your caps key broken?
What do you mean “we” debate? You’re not a so-called “climate scientist”, in fact you’re not a scientist at all. How can a liberal arts baccalaureate debate science, with real scientists?
So climate science, among all human enterprise, is exempt from fraud or waste!
Amazing.
Angech.
Your question has been asked and answered repeatedly.
Here you go AGAIN
The data is here
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/downloads/TAVG/LATEST%20-%20Quality%20Controlled.zip
Download that
Then run this code
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
zip <- "LATEST – Quality Controlled.zip"
unzip(zip)
Station_data <- read.table("data.txt", comment.char = "%" )
Station_data <- Station_data[,c(1,3,4)]
colnames(Station_data)<-c("Id","Date","Temp")
Station_data <- tbl_df(Station_data)
Total_Stations <-length(unique(Station_data$Id))
Summary % group_by(Date) %>%summarise(Stations=n())
ggplot(Summary,aes(x=Date, y= Stations)) + geom_line()
#############
there is no point in me repeating an answer yet again when you just ignore it or deny it.
The whole point ofposting data is so that YOU have the power to do you own checking.
Total is over 42,000
Peak is around 19000
Currently Active This month is between 14000 and 15000.
Because they know they will loose
Intelligence Squared already hosted a red team-blue team debate in 2015.
Red Team: Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen, and Phillip Stott.
Blue team, Brenda Ekwurzel (UCS — team Kenji), Gavin Schmidt and Richard Sommerville (meteorologist).
The blue team lost. The debate was highly publicized. It didn’t change anything.
During the debate, Gavin Schmidt accused Richard Lindzen of dishonesty, thereby revealing himself to be the very special human being and ethical scientist that we all know he is.
The date of the debate was March 22, 2007. (I just gogled it.)
“The blue team lost. “
Even though Michael Crichton died seven years earlier?
I think you mean “lose”, the word “Loose” means weak and wobbly – which also describes them!
My mistake about the date. The rest holds.
Will 80% budget cuts encourage them to defend their field?
“Never debate”
(not augmentative in my response) that is precisely why this is a BAD idea. FORCING the blue team into debate will cause them to circle the wagons. They will bring out every study, graphs in hundreds of a degree, homogenized, blenderized, smootherized, modelerized piece of data they have in the past 30 years, and THEN say the Trump administration is denying science. It will back-fire, cannot red/blue team the merits of a religion, it will be a media circus.
It won’t be a media circus if it is handled online like the old Climate Dialogue site, with multi-topic dialogs going on at once.
Roger, I would agree if it would be that straightforward. Just need to look to the current Russia Collusion investigation, there would be leaks, interviews, protests, virtue signally, on and on. The Utopian dream of a bunch of guys/gals sitting in a room having a rational debate, if 30 years of hysteria is any tell, would be impossible. My guess, the ‘other’ side would just boycott the whole thing, claiming it’s rigged, a witch-hunt and anti-science, at least that is what the MSN would be reporting – They win!!!!
Well, thanks to Steven Mosher and others like him, there has been a debate that is going on here at WUWT for some time now…but how much has the MSM or anybody else reported on this to the general public?
Mosher and most of the other warmists who visit this site don’t debate, they just pontificate, which only serves to weaken their position. After all, spouting incoherent rhetoric is all you have left when you can’t accept that the physics falsifies what you’re told to believe.
Steven Mosher is not a scientist, so he can debate here, sure, but not really debate other scientists as a scientist. He is disingenuous when he insists “we debate” meaning “we climate scientists debate”:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2014/06/who-is-steven-mosher.html
He is a continuing participant in BEST. That satisfies any claim of “we”, Poptech’s war on him notwithstanding.
Will they let this guy into the debate from Greenpeace??:
They will probably eliminate Cruz, not a scientist. He is a Master-debater…
He could still advise.
The MSM continue the deluge of disingenuous drivel with all manner of scare stories directed at both the CAGW acolytes & ordinary folks who rely on these sources for their news & information. We are assaulted on a daily basis by stories predicting the end of the world due to CO2 (blame hydrocarbons), pollution (blame hydrocarbons), pesticides (blame hydrocarbons), plastics (blame hydrocarbons), falling sperm counts (blame hydrocarbons), changing albedo of arctic & glacial ice (blame hydrocarbons), increased rainfall & flooding (blame hydrocarbons), bad air (blame hydrocarbons), etc. etc. The list is apparently endless! How can the wonder materials that lifted us from a subsistence agrarian economy pre-1750 to our modern day high standard of living & increased longevity have become so demonized & despised? It belies belief!
Actually they always say Carbon (instead of CO2, carbon dioxide) – whatever that means. It’s like saying water,H2O is hydrogen.
You can hardly help but blame smog on hydrocarbons…!
Now there’s a non sequitur!
I thought this article had to do with the impact of CO2 on temps and climate.
Or are you suggesting that the EPA go back to its original mission of addressing particulate matter in the air and dirty water?
Griff, come visit the Smokey Mountains!
And in the UK much of this smog is the result of burning wood and biomass. Typical of the greens to promote something that does more harm than good.
“One group of prominent researchers even argued red team exercises amount to “dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions” that undercut mainstream science.”
…buck buck buckaaaaawwck!
(chicken)…
And you certainly need to take this route when mainstream science is so controversial while the side that’s demonstrably wrong refuses to admit there’s even a controversy. Talk about denial …
It should really be bidirectional with red teams attacking both a high and low sensitivity while blue teams defend either a high or low sensitivity. After all, the root of all differences that separates the warmists from the skeptics is the magnitude of the climate sensitivity.
Two for starters:
Helicobacter Pylori
Plate Tectonics
Two previous dangerous minority opinions opposed for decades!
SteveT
+100
Reality is the tide that washes over intellectual edifices, to see if they are made of stone or sand. Science is throwing buckets of water on those same edifices, to see if they will stand up to the tide.
Such an indignant statement is really a cry of: “Stop throwing water on our sand castle!”
Fantastic analogy! I started as a believer in AGW and looked into it to better understand the problem. What I found first confused me, then disappointed me and finally enraged me as I came to understand how thoroughly my beloved science has been corrupted by Leftist politics and career seeking activists like Michael Mann and others who should be in jail.
But ,but, butt he already alluded to a needed vetting process, no?
ya read popper on red teams…
opps.
You seem to have raided the popper cabinet.
You are never going to be picked as any sort of scientist, are you mosh.!
To call Holdren a kangaroo would be a compliment. Donkey.
Temperature data is one thing, but you can’t just change Popper’s views to support your own position…
Popper was talking about real science. It should work well in political science. Actually it was designed for this kind of thing.
What are these sterling scientists all afraid of? If they have a story, they should mop the floor with the red team, don’t you think? You can’t use the idea that, say, it’s not fair, poor Einstein has been asked to debate HIS theories with high school science teachers!
For those interested in real science, Trump is about to give climate science a real test without red team stuff. Let’s see what will happen to world temperatures now that the Paris agreement is dead. This is the real thing that all the whinging tougher/ideologues and useful phools are palpitating about.
What’s your guess, Moshe? Are we afraid of dying or afraid we will be just fine? I love the thrill of good brinkmanship.
Lol, blue team getting nervous. Resist we much!
The same thing that US democrats are terrified about with Trump’s voter fraud investigation.
I feel certain that Obama’s former seance czar will be perfectly OK with this process as long as the press fully covers the outcome … with a pillow … until it stops moving.
This is right up there with Phil Jones’s, “All you’ll do is try to find something wrong with it.” A true scientist would say, “Yes! Let us talk of this. Listen to the brilliance of my argument. You will see the truth of what I say. The scales will fall from your eyes!”
Instead we get cries of “Heretic! Disbeliever!” A very sad state of affairs.
Gary, outside the Trump govt and some Republican states, Paris is alive and well…
Macron, Merkel and UK environment minister Gove all spoke up for it and have said Trump was wrong to pull out. The Chinese and Indians seem to be accelerating their commitment to it…
Mosh, maybe you need to quote Popper instead of just saying : because Popper. As always you don’t say what you mean and leave it as a guessing game.
Theoretically scientists should be their own red team , questioning their own work and that of others in PR. Sadly, we know all too well that this is not happening in climatology, where there are many policiy advocates posing as scientists instead of acting like responsible scientists. They have perverted PR into a gatekeeping exercise to ensure no contradictory work sees the light of day. This was clearly evidenced in the Climategate emails. No point trying to pretend otherwise.
The whole point about the need for a Red team is that this is a policy question and there the red/blue team exercise if valuable.
The field of Climatology has been severely disfunctional for over 30 years now and has become political movement, not science. That is why a red team is both appropriated and needed.
The purpose is to point out uncertainties or weaknesses in the theory.
While there are many, let’s just think about the cloud feedback.
Without the assumption that it is a certain positive value, global warming theory changes from dangerous to a slightly beneficial impact. There is Zero studies demonstrating what the feedback value really is despite all the money going into climate research. $biilions of dollars and dozens of satellites yet nobody within the science has taken this important question on.
Something simple like this is what the politicians need to hear about.
Reading this site alongside some from the “other side” (SkS, Open Mind etc) I am beginning to wonder what the argument
is actually all about. If you look at some of the potential “Red Team” that are genuine climate scientists such
as Judith Curry, John Christie, Roy Spencer, Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen, they actually agree with most of what the
Blue Team thinks. All believe:
Global warming has happened, is happening and will probably continue to happen in coming decades.
A significant part of the cause is an increase in CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels
The points of disagreement are limited and rather nuanced:
The level of sensitivity (TCS, ECS) of surface warming to changes in CO2 proportion in the atmosphere
Um, that’s it.
The big disagreements are not over the fact of AGW, but its severity and possible consequences. How much will sea level
rise? How will the weather change – more severe or more benign? (evidence is beginning to point to the latter)
Desertification or greening? (evidence is beginning to point to the latter), more deaths from heat or fewer from cold?
…and so on.
So, the first thing any discussion should do is decide on all the points that they agree on and just concentrate on
what the best estimates of ECS and TCS are, and whether perceived risks justify the mind-bobblingly huge costs of
trying to mitigate. Personally, given the long timescales involved and slow nature of the process, I believe adaptation
is likely to be more effective and a lot less costly than mitigation.
For example:
The UK’s recently announced policy of 100% electric cars by 2040 will involve providing about 36,000 gWh of new power
generation each year – roughly doubling domestic electrical power consumption. That is 41 gW of new installed
generation plant which is either 12 new 3gW nuclear powerstations, or 27,000 wind turbines (working at 30% capacity),
or 1,600 square miles of solar farms (40 miles square or 2.6 Greater Londons).
To carry all that electricty to everybody’s domestic car charging point will require roughly double the quantity of
copper cable. Imagine the cost of all that copper and the disruption and cost of digging up all the roads to lay that
cable and replacing all the pylons and substations.
Billions and billions and billions of pounds. Who is going to pay for it all? What will be the implications for our
economy?
Total and utter “pie in the sky”.
The most honorable scientists are those who are the most diligent to falsify, or encourage others to falsify, their own theories. Anything less than this, really, is just a career called Science.
“Theoretically scientists should be their own red team , questioning their own work and that of others in PR. Sadly, we know all too well that this is not happening in climatology”
Exactly. Since they refuse to check their own work, point out errors etc. (i.e. practice science), no one else must do it either.
Greg,
This is precisely why the idea will NOT work. The technique is only effective when both teams share the same mission, pulling for the same overall objective; for example the US military or NASA space scientists.In those instances the Blue team values the critiques uncovered by the Red team.
Can you imagine Dr Mann (or Holdren) saying “Thanks guys, now we can now more effectively move forward together.”?
This is an adversarial relationship at its core.
All of this is unnecessary, just a PR stunt. The verdict is already in–the “smart money” has been betting on natural gas development, utilization, and export and the infrastructure is already coming on line to make that a reality. It’s an “inconvenient truth” for the Green Blob that just around the time the so-called “science”
aka models’ predictions have been debunked (finding this out is not hard–hit virtually ANY conservative web site) the USA has been found to have a better record at “decarbonization” than all the “green” EU countries put together! Just let the money roll on where it will do the most good; for most of the public, “climate change” rates below toenail fungus in their list of daily worries.
James Schrumpf July 27, 2017 at 4:24 am
“This is right up there with Phil Jones’s, “All you’ll do is try to find something wrong with it.” A true scientist would say, “Yes! Let us talk of this. Listen to the brilliance of my argument. You will see the truth of what I say. The scales will fall from your eyes!”
Instead we get cries of “Heretic! Disbeliever!” A very sad state of affairs.”
Plus many.
Plus lots of many. Beautifully put. My thanks.
A debate, orderly and polite, with each side allowed to bring all the evidence they can offer, harms nobody.
It may not enlighten – but, it might just do that.
Auto
Well Steven…this is exactly what I was talking about. This is exactly what I predicted would be the blue team strategy: no science, but lots of hand waving and obfuscation. You might say that Holdren is not a blue team member, but he is one of the many blue team spokespersons, defending what passes for ‘mainstream’ science.
My favorite part of the article: ““Climate science has been repeatedly ‘red-teamed,’ both by groups of avowed contrarians sponsored by right-wing groups and by the most qualified parts of the world’s scientific community,” Holdren wrote in his op-ed.”
I agree with what he says, although I still don’t know who these ‘right-wing groups’ sponsored people are. (Are there left-wing groups sponsored scientists? Is that okay with Holdren? Technically, all the climate science done under Obama was sponsored by left wing groups, namely the administration.) The red team work is already finished, and has been completely ignored, or more accurately, avoided! The only purpose of name calling and appeals to authority (consensus) is to avoid an actual discussion. There is no point in using these extremely inferior arguments to defend your position if your position is at all defensible.
Does Holdren, or any other blue team spokesperson, refer to the science in specific terms…ever? No! Just a proclamation that the science is settled. They cannot talk about the remarkable skill of the climate models in nailing their projections. it hasn’t happened. They cannot talk about the tropospheric hot-spot. They cannot explain why it has failed to warm as expected. They cannot explain early 20th century warming. They cannot explain mid 20th Century cooling or why their fear-mongering projections of increasing extreme weather hasn’t happened at all. The attempts to explain the pause have been laughable, so they generally avoid that subject as well.
Can the red team actually penetrate the powerful shield of intolerance that surrounds the blue team? Let’s hope so, for the sake of science and our wellbeing.
You mean the John Holdren who along with Paul and Anna Ehrlich warned us of a new Ice Age about to descend upon us (in peer reviewed literature)?
Who can forget the memorable book “The Population Bomb”? /sarc
Yup, that John Holdren:
Holdren and Ehrlich, 1971: Global Ecology: Readings toward a rational strategy for man [pgs. 76,77] “[Because of an imminent ICE AGE] .. even more dramatic results are possible; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.”
John Holdren then was pushing de-industrialization as a solution for this global cooling:
Holdren is seriously deluded. The good news is he is in the rearview mirror now.
Haha, strange how the coming ice age and global warming both required the US to go into the dark ages. Does this guy live in a mud hut, or just expect others to?
Holdren’s goal is to increase the power of government, and he will ride which ever vehicle will take him in that direction.
Scientists, and those who would have us believe their prognostications, are ignoring the elephant in the room. Most published research is bunk. link
In face of the above, we have to ask the sanctimonious Dr. Holdren, why should we believe you?
The teams are misnamed. The Red team should be warmists and the blue team the anti-warmists (coldists perhaps). Also since warmists get support and funding from Russian gas interests (to raise the price of gas in Western Europe and hence provide more export income to Russia) it is appropriate for the warmist side to be denoted the Red team.
Au contraire mon ami. link
Au contraire mon ami. http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/
Those guys are marching to the beat of their own drummer. The media has standardized on red-Republican, blue-Democrat since about 1988. link That roughly coincides with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also roughly coincides with when the Democrat party quit working for the interests of working people. I wonder if there’s a connection.
Hot things turn red, and cold people turn blue.
I like the idea of taking on a new name for those who fail the faith test on AGW. We have been labeled as “deniers”., as if that is somehow derogatory when it is actually the proper defense of the scientific process. My concern is for the impending return of glaciation because we are still in an ice age. Maybe Interglacialists has a ring?
I personally think the red/blue team is a BAD idea, it will accomplish nothing besides MSN pontification (look they want to kill science). A false positive cannot be disproved. Like arguing Religion, it will not get anywhere. This administration needs to cut funding, after all the Science is settled and shine light into every dark corner forcing exposure of methods used to pursue further regulation. No money and make them jump through hoops, all perfectly legal. For example, just require a ROI calculation be done on every regulation, in the open, fudging numbers would quickly be exposed.
I agree completely. This charade has gone on for over 40 years and there’s nothing remotely scientific about a “red/team blue team” exercise. It’s pure foolishness. No debate has ever been tolerated by the ruling regime.
Cut off their funding. They’ve produced nothing useful. No results. Let them wash cars.
Agreed, Red/Blue teams can work when both sides have the SAME interest in mind, such as the defense of a Carrier Group. One side will find ways to attack it, the other side will find ways to defend. The ultimate goal is to find all the weaknesses – same side – same goals.
The Red/Blue team in climate debate have very different goals/interests in mind. They are not working towards a common goal. This is why it cannot work and will turn into a simple debate between opposing sides.
Duncan
I fear you may be right. There is little point arguing about religion since it is based on “beliefs” rather than scientific facts and CAGW is certainly a new religion. I also agree that cutting ALL funding for this nonsense should be a matter of urgency as should the withdrawal of many generous long-term subsidies for clearly inefficient alternative energy sources.
Meanwhile, much of the rest of the developed world is getting itself into a frenzy of “virtue signalling” with each country trying to outdo the other in introducing ever-more draconian measures to eliminate our major transportation and energy-genarating infrastructure. France, Germany, the UK have all jumped on the bandwagon to eliminate gasoline/diesel vehicles & coal power stations and, as we know, parts of Australia are already basket cases in terms of energy policy. We know the ridiculous stated goals driving (sic) these policies are unattainable, short of a revolution in electricity generation, storage and distribution, but the politicians are having a field day and just rubbing their hands in glee at all the carbon taxes they will ratchet-up to steal from ordinary people. This BS need to be stopped NOW!
Just let Europe regress back into the Dark Ages. This would provide Hollywood with all kinds of medieval movie settings without resorting to a lot of props and computer-generated graphics.
Germany and the UK have been installing renewable energy for nearly a decade now.
No ill effects showing…
UK has already closed the bulk of its coal power plant… Germany gets 35% of its electricity from renewables.
This is not a bandwagon people are jumping on, but a long established set of policies making steady progress.
Griff….always determined to put a positive “spin” on wind, solar and biomass. Actually, UK has been installing useful renewable energy (hydroelectricity) for over a century but let’s not get distracted by that.
As for “no ill effects showing”, I’d beg to differ. Germany comes 2nd only to Denmark (followed by Spain & Australia) as already having the most expensive electricity in the developed world thanks to its misguided policies. Any idea why electricity is so expensive in this countries? Duh! Germany also relies on extensive transnational grid interlinks to balance its power supply & demand. Heaven knows what will happen when Germany’s neighbours also have as much intermittent sources of energy in the form of wind & solar as Germany does. Grid instability will rise significantly as intermittent energy sources increase and may lead to significant power outages.
What you also neglected to mention, is that Germany actually has MORE INSTALLED CAPACITY OF RENEWABLES than conventional sources yet those RENEWABLES ONLY GENERATED 35% OF GERMANY’s ELECTRICITY. So how do you square the economics on that, Griff? Please explain!
So the bulk of Germany’s electricity still came from guess what? COAL!!! And not just any coal – predominantly low grade brown lignite. Very environmentally friendly! And, it’s worth mentioning that a significant chunk of your so-called “renewable energy” comes from burning biomass in the form of wood pellets. In fact, over 40% of Germany’s domestic timber production goes to produce pellets for burning in power plants. Again, please enlighten me on the supposed environmental benefits of that little game.
However, you rather missed the point in my original post, Griff. The bandwagon I alluded to was the one concerning electrification of the transportation sector which France, Germany and the UK have all made bold statements about in the past couple of weeks. Given that replacing gasoline/diesel for transport conservatively represents an energy demand of the same magnitude as the existing electrical supply in these countries, I’m curious how Germany, France & the UK will provide all this electrical power by 2040. Please enlighten me since, as you already pointed out, they are busy closing down their reliable coal-fired power stations as well as nuclear stations in Germany while France claims it will slash its nuclear power from 73% to 50%, too. Which magical source will all this energy come from….and at what cost? Oh, and BTW, what about the grid infrastructure to handle an effective doubling of the energy required, thanks to all those electric cars? How much will that cost and who will pay? Take a guess?
I really don’t need any lessons on energy supply from you, Griff. Thanks!
YES!
Duncan & Bart: Agreed. As Pat Frank posted above, it’s been done and then ignored by the blue team pep squad in the media. Skeptics will get a red team of lukewarmers who will prepare for an academic exercise. Progs will send out scientists like leo decrapio so long as it’s meaningless, if ever there was a real debate with repercussions, Progs send guns to the knife fight. Mosher will “debate” those who agree with him that CO2 is warming the atmosphere, but if you say “good, measure it and let us know”, you’re a flat e@rther.
Red Team/Blue Team is a good idea.
“A Red/Blue exercise would have many benefits,” Koonin wrote in the WSJ. “It would produce a traceable public record that would allow the public and decision makers a better understanding of certainties and uncertainties. It would more firmly establish points of agreement and identify urgent research needs.”
If this is true,
“The right wing’s ‘red team’ efforts have consistently been characterized by brazen cherry-picking, misrepresentation of the findings of others, recycling of long-discredited hypotheses, and invention of new ones destined to be discredited,” Holdren wrote. “Almost none of this material has survived peer review to be published in the respectable professional literature.”
then what are they (The Blue Team) afraid of?
What are they afraid of? Why won’t Dr. Mann produce discovery? link
Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
“What are they afraid of?”
Yeah, anyone who had their facts straight would be eager to argue their merits. I’m guessing they don’t have their facts straight. And they probably want to avoid talking about Climategate and they are worried it might come up during the course of the RedTeam/BlueTeam debate, seeing as how it goes right to the heart of the only “evidence” they have to back up their claim: The bogus surface temperature charts.
The Blue Team wants to declare themselves to already be the winners. They don’t need no Red Team, they say. In reality, they are running away and trying to avoid this examination of their past records. Like they have something to hide.
“Almost none has been published” because the rigged “pal-review” system actively conspires against it, as seen in Mann’s and other’s Climategate emails.
This guy holdren acts like he’s never heard of a false paradigm before. Personally, i think they need to red team AGW to the max. Is it really feasable that a trace “green house gas” could cause a third of the warming of the earth coming out of a glacial?
Don’t marginalize CO2 because it is a ‘trace’ gas. It created and creates the entire biosphere including ourselves. This is heavy lifting indeed and is the defining characteristic of this planet and possibly this tiny spot in the Universe. Go after CAGW chicanery by all means, but throw away that argument forthwith.
Just because CO2 is important in some respects doesn’t mean it is important in ALL respects! If it affects climate at all it is not to a degree which can be detected!
Gary, my question at the end there is exactly the type of thing that i want to see red teamed. Is it really plausable to think that 1/3 of the warming coming out of a glacial is caused by rising CO2? Think about it. Of all the massive things that are going on coming out of a glacial, how is it that CO2 gets such top billing. Water vapor alone dwarfs CO2’s impact. Then we have solar irradience changes due to orbital shifts, obliquity, albedo. (just think of the albedo changes due to ice alone!) So, i’m not buying the “magic gas” claim. Something gets lost in between the greenhouse effect and its eventual impact on surface temps. As Dr Spencer oft repeats, we can’t begin to quantify the effects of AGW until we have quantified the effects of natural sources of warming. (and that hasn’t been done yet)…
John Holdren wasn’t Obama’s science czar. He was Obama’s scienciness advocacy czar.
Holdren is very familiar with Kangaroo courts. He tried to silence Roger Pielke Jr. because he contradicted the Democrats / Consensus talking point that warming weather had caused more severe weather. Had him investigated by his university along with several others who would not parrot to the party line.
It should be obvious to anyone John Holdren never expected to be alive in 2017. His co-conspirator Ehrlich wrote a book on the subject. We were all supposed to be dead long before 1990.
That’s how smart Holdren is.
The Obama Administration and its climate science participants pushed nothing but climate alarmist propaganda and politicalized all science to serve unnecessary and massive increases in government regulation.
The country endured 8 years of climate alarmist Kangaroo courts under Obama. His administration used billions of dollars in federal funds to “bribe” universities and government organizations to produce politicalized climate alarmist science in support of his schemes.
Those scientists who challenged his schemes were punished with political attacks and denied funding for their work.
It is clearly time for a red team effort to challenge the so called “concensus” which was created to coverup the clearly flawed state of climate alarmist science which is driven by politics not science.
About the reaction I would expect from Holdren. Anyone who could associate with Paul Ehrlich and still consider himself a scientist is deceiving himself.
“Many climate scientists, however, say it has no place in their field. One group of prominent researchers even argued red team exercises amount to “dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions” that undercut mainstream science.”
I believe tectonic plate theory was a very minor opinion for quite awhile that the consensus fought against.
Germ theory of disease? It was in the 1980s that helicobacter pylori was discovered to be causative in many gastric ulcers.
The debate is about whether man-made CO2 released into the atmosphere is a problem. There is plenty of factual evidence to show it is not a big enough problem to warrant changing the methods we use to generate energy.
Will stopping this method of rent seeking reduce rent seeking? No, people who cannot find anything useful to do will not suddenly change as this form of arbitrage disappears. They will “invent” another crisis.
So the pragmatic issue is not about climate change but about how to manage lazy and greedy people. If we have to pay for their greed how do we get them to do something useful? If we cannot, it is certainly less expensive to pay these people to do nothing. When they do something it can lead to very expensive outcomes.
I would vote to get a rope. If using a rope was a valid response the ‘Glo-buncha-bull (™) warming alarmists’ would have already hung anyone who advocated actual science. So I guess I will not suggest it, but I might think it hard enough that we all can see the color and fibers of the rope thereof.
Prescient analysis! I like it.
Yeah, scientists who work 60-80 hours per week are lazy people. Or scientists that spend 6 months to a year away from their families in remote locations such as Antarctica or Greenland. All for salaries, that when factoring in their work hours, are quite modest. So no, they are neither lazy or greedy.
Chris, your romantic notion of the toil of climate scientists reveals you are a young millennial patsy.
Chris, in your unconnected to reality opinion, do you honestly believe that all scientists meet the description you just gave?
Gary Pearse said: “Chris, your romantic notion of the toil of climate scientists reveals you are a young millennial patsy.”
Gary, you are 100% wrong. Do you have any other mindless comments to add?
MarkW said: “Chris, in your unconnected to reality opinion, do you honestly believe that all scientists meet the description you just gave?”
Mark, it’s good to hear from Mr, 10,000 posts and still zero supporting links provided. I’ve worked with professors at universities in the US and Asia, and found that most work pretty hard, and don’t make a lot of money. Not all, but most. According to Geoff’s logic, with which you clearly agree, lazy folks are going to do the following 1) Get a bachelors degree in a hard science – most likely physics – which is challenging and requires great effort, takes 4 years (realistically 5 these days) and costs $100K 2) repeat the same process for 2 years for a master’s degree, adding another $30-50K 3) repeat the process again for 3 years, adding another $50K. And at the end of that 10 year slog – and longer if they had to work in the private sector in between to save money – they can become an associate professor and make $40-50K/year. So in total, give up 10 earning years of your life, rack up $200K in debt, and then get a job that pays $40-50K/year. That’s what a lazy person is going to do, according to your logic.I’d say you and Geoff are the ones unconnected to reality.
Chris,
private industry starting salary PhD physics …. $80-110K
permanent university ……………………………….. $50-70
post doc university or affiliated research ………. $42-54
government lab ………………………………………. $60-74
the above are the mid (25th-75th) percentiles. So, the guys you are referencing are the low end of the spectrum. Maybe lazy, maybe not.
Be they altruistic, or be they not able to qualify for the careers that pay twice as much?
You vote for altruistic, I vote for relatively incompetent (and/or relatively lazy).
Don M,
Private industry salaries are not relevant to this discussion. They are not going to be writing papers on climate change, they will be working in defense or space industries.
Many, many more are hired into universities than govt labs – the ratio is at least 5-1. So, the figures for universities are the more relevant when looking at the entire PhD pool. And, you noted a range from 42 – 70K across the 2 university related categories. So call it 55K, that’s fine. It’s still a very low salary for someone who puts in 10 years of hard work and incurs up to 200K in student debt. Someone with technical aptitude can come out in 4 years with a computer science degree and make $100K+. I just don’t buy the lazy accusation, there are far easier routes to making a living than becoming a PhD in atmospheric sciences.
Hey, that fact is not relevant to my point of view ….
A person spends 10 years and $200K and they “CHOOSE” the $45,000/year career track.
The next guy (that put in the same time & money) who actually does get to choose the $110K career track, gets first choice because the next guy is more competent and/or hard working.
Or, the first person is indeed the altruistic save the world type (which is just as scary).
Lazy is as lazy does.
The face of fascism, “settled science” redux.
While I worry about skeptical blundering and moronic political agnosticism as the culture of choice you have to wonder after reading an article like this; “how have we lost to clown science authority such as this for 50 years running?”.
I give Pruitt credit for drawing them out with “Red Team” posturing. Blue looks really obtuse to a larger viewing share then normal.
trouble with red teams is that what with only 3% of scientists to start with, and most of those 3% past retirement, it’s vary hard to get real scientists.
You are not really very skeptical if you fall for that 97% – 3% line…. that is debunked for a start. Does not even need a Red team to do it.
https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/20/what-is-there-a-97-consensus-about/
Well, being a scientist, I know more than a few scientists. And I know not a single one a den1er. So, as a skeptic, I actually think 97% is far too low.
And isn’t JC recently retired? A common phenotype of den1ers these days.
Giving JC the label “denier,” you must have serious comprehension issues, a very limited English vocabulary, or a propensity to lie.
(this moron doesn’t even know how to spell “skeptical”)…
Most high profile skeptic scientists are part of the 97% (including Dr Curry)…
I know how to spell sceptical. And I’m not even a Brit. (although I’m somewhat fond of the language).
Do you know what the two questions were on the so-called survey?
And yes, it’s odd how once a climate scientist no longer has to worry about career advancement and grant applications they become outspoken against AGW. Why do you think that might be?
So, Really, Cook et al, Oreskes, Holdren, all say 97%, but you say that’s too low. Does that make Cook, Oreskes and Holdren denlers? Please step up your game, or you’ll bump Steve from the “lamest tr0ll here” honor he so treasures.
It seems you aren’t aware of the total debunking of the 97% meme…
You might have a small amount of credibility if you knew how to spell “skeptical.”
“sceptical” is the British / Commonwealth spelling. (Although Fowler argued that it shouldn’t be.)
(Roger, he spells it “skepical”)…
Jstalewski,
I much prefer “skeptic” to “sceptic” as the latter reminds me of “septic”, as in septic tank, a container of malodorous bodily effluent.
Hi VB,
even the link you mentioned shows that less than 3% of abstracts surveyed implicitly or
explicitly rejected the consensus. I would ask where the red team could find 30 or 40 scientists
who are active in the field (i.e. not retired) who would be willing to be part of the process?
In addition the last time this was tried was the Berkeley earth project which was set up by the
then skeptical Richard Muller and the basic result was that he ended up agreeing that the consensus view was right.
Finally is there any serious notion about how this will work? And who will judge the results?
I assume that a likely point of attack will be the uncertainty in the climate models. And suppose
the red team say they are too uncertain to be relied upon and the blue team responds that that
is not the case and also they are the best we have. Who is the third party who gets to decide who
to believe. A stale rehashing of old arguments is not going to solve anything or change anyone’s opinion.
There needn’t be any formal judges, or maybe the moderators of the Dutch Climate Dialogue site could be recruited.
It won’t be a stale rehashing to 97% of the journalists and opinion leaders who read it. They’ve heard only the warmists’ alleged debunkings of skeptical claims. They haven’t heard the skeptical counterpoints to them. Warmists haven’t been forced to get down to brass tacks.
Roger,
what makes you think that US politicians for example have not heard both
sides of the debate ad nauseum? There was a recent high profile hearing in
from of the house science committee (covered here and elsewhere). Unless there
is some process of deciding which points are valid that is accepted by both sides
then this is a waste of time.
Germino
All that is required is a room with a window, a big window, or is seeing not believing ?
The first thing needed is a team of referees to examine papers to be accepted into argument. These need to be mostly physicists and statisticians who are recognized as impartial. They should also give reasons why other papers are not accepted. Who knows, maybe the Blue team would have the nerve to submit M. Mann’s contaminated crap as evidence of something besides corruption of science!
Totally bogus comment. Skeptics who work with the temperature data sets, both surface and satellite, would love to debate. Meanwhile Mosher won’t debate because he thinks the opposition are flat earthers.
Realscep, the 97% thing wasn’t even cleverly dressed up. However, I believe only 3% of the population actually thinks for himself; the rest parrot their masters’ doggerel. The Soviet Union dissidents we know of numbered far fewer than 3%, but they represented the impossibly brave ones.
Of course, basically ‘knowing’ and ‘thinking’ only what you’ve been told to without using your own resources, clearly you cast yourself on the side of the authorities and think the dissidents were stupid schmucks. So I suppose it isn’t a given to everyone that Soviet dissidents were actually brave.
I try to tease out some original thought from commenters like yourself because you do come to this site, which is a big step up from the designer-brained, pre-programmed types that burden society. And also, you are quite a young man (I won’t spell out the many ‘tells’ that inform me of this) and, hopefully you will think differently as you grow older. You can see what a tragedy it would be if you already knew everything you were ever going to know, I’m sure.
Resorting to the 97% consensus fabrication is just like the 97% fabrication itself- a blatantly false appeal to authority which betrays the credibility of the underlying argument. So, you declare yourself to be willing to embrace falsehood and deny scientific process. You are the enemy of truth! Presumably you think Michael Mann is a great scientist and not a nasty, lying, conniving, activist pseudo-scientist. Perhaps you are Michael Mann!
John writes: “Presumably you think Michael Mann is a great scientist and not a nasty, lying, conniving, activist pseudo-scientist. “
John you left out “fishbelly white mass of quivering gelatin infested by a strange, bunch grass like growth on his head”.
Translation:
“We’ve been been peer-reviewed by those who already agreed with our conclusions. A ‘Red Team’ might be made up of scientist who weren’t funded to reach our conclusions and challenge how our conclusions were reached. HOW DARE THEY!”
But it’s been “peer reviewed up the wazoo” .
https://youtu.be/aO9Mx5IcdJQ
it would that this is how they see the tax and rate payers.
TYPO!
“It would seem that this is how they see the tax and rate payers.”
(time for my nape …er… nap. 😎
A “settled science” with a “97% consensus” is worried about “dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions” ?
Neo,
97% consensus, what odds can I get on that ?
Frustrating though it may be for some to be placed into the position of a public debate, there are a few realities here that are hard to ignore. Much of the funding for climate science comes from the government. A large enough portion of the folks in the USA placed climate change concerns low enough on the scale of importance that they voted for Trump and for republicans in the house and the senate. I don’t know if that will happen again, but it has happened once. If those who believe in imminent catastrophic climate change want to continue to get increasing amounts of government support and funding, some of those people will have to change the way they vote. Refusal to engage is not likely to change minds. The CAGW supporters might do better using unrelated reasons to change the minds of enough people so that the vote changes. However people go about, the reality is that without continued government support the goals of the CAGW supporters won’t be met. Some of those people who have been called deplorable, flat earthers, deniers, or whatever need to change their minds. I’m not sure that walking away from a debate is a workable option anymore, even if it means listening to and debating with people that are considered inferior. I suppose we’ll see how this plays out and if it makes any difference. The CAGW crowd might be able to just wait this out for 3 or 7 more years.
This is my favorite quote “Holdren argued the scientific peer-review process already acts as a check on bad science, further arguing a red team exercise is a ‘right-wing’ plot against climate science” .
And that ridged peer review process passed a paper on Star Wars did it not .
Peer – review is the best argument he can come up with.??.
Hands up everyone who knows it’s pal-review: Biased, funded, corrupted and agenda – driven.
Passed his papers on Global cooling I assume! What a joke! Peer review as it presently operataes is part of the political corruption of science
I guess you never know when a ‘breakout peer reviewed’ paper about midi-chlorians will destroy all of Climate Science.
I think that the red team blue team suggestion is a good idea. It is used extensively in major civil and structural engineering projects, in which the design of a project is audited by a separate design team, using independent models and methods of analysis.
This process results in safer and more efficient structures when compared with unaudited projects. Indeed, several jurisdictions have written auditing into their building codes.
If climate change is important then why should the routine auditing process used in major engineering projects not be adopted by climate scientists?
So, does that mean that red team members haf to BELIEVE that unscientific findings are true? Or can a red team member be a main stream scientist who is just acting as a devils advocate?
Belief is for religion and politics. If you really were a scientist you’d only care about facts, not belief.
No.
Why not?
Ya know ‘ReallySkepical” I’m a ‘scientist’ as well. Well I have a science degree with Hons at least. I am part of the famous 97%. Yes, the world is warming yes anthropogenic CO2 is very likely contributing to that, but how much?
How much is natural variation, are feedbacks like clouds positive? How good are the models at predicting future temperature or future sea level? how certain are we? All valid questions that people you call ‘deniers’ have.
PS.
My dad, who was a ‘real’ scientist had a favourite quote. “There is no room for belief in science, only working hypotheses” (the plural for hypothesis before someone corrects me)
Nonsense. The plural of hypothesis is hypothesi. Everyone knows that, just as the plural of feces is feci…
Looks to me (non expert) the sun is about to have the last word.
I am with Holdren. Red team/Blue team is a dumb idea.
What we need is something like the NRP (National Reading Panel) that reviewed research on the teaching of reading.
When the government makes absurdly large sums of money available for “Research” you get tens of thousands of peer reviewed papers that contain little science in the generally accepted meaning of the word.
“Climate Science” is similar to public education. No matter how many research studies are done nothing useful emerges.
While there are many research topics relating to K-12 education here are some interesting statistics on one of them.
K-12 READING INSTRUCTION IN THE USA
The National Reading Panel (NRP) carried out a comprehensive review of reading research that amounted to 115,000 papers written between 1966 and 2000. A screening was carried out to select only studies that met criteria .normally used in medical and behavioral research At the end of the screening, only 428 studies met the panels high standards, and in September 2000 the findings were presented to the US Congress.
Thus the panel found that only 0.37% of the studies met generally accepted standards for scientific research.
The 14-member reading panel was chaired by Donald N. Langenberg, chancellor of the University System of Maryland. Karin Chenoweth (Washington Post) asked him why he, an experimental physicist by training, was chosen. One of the reasons, he said, was, I know what good research looks like.
That answer is the key to winnowing the chaff of Climate Science with the aim of extracting the few grains of real science buried within it. Thus I would contend that there is no need to spend another taxpayer dollar on new research studies until we have extracted the few grains of gold buried in the heap of excrement called Climate Science.
If Scott Pruitt sets up a “Climate Science Panel” headed by someone like Donald Langenburg what proportion of papers would be considered “Scientific”?
My guess is that 97% of climate scientists would not make the cut. Probably the same 97% that tell us the “Debate Is Over”.
Great idea! +100
““Climate Science” is similar to public education. No matter how many research studies are done nothing useful emerges. “
Or maybe a public restroom?
A megateam of reproducibility-minded scientists is renewing a controversial proposal to raise the standard for statistical significance in research studies. They want researchers to dump the long-standing use of a probability value (p-value) of less than 0.05 as the gold standard for significant results, and replace it with the much stiffer p-value threshold of 0.005.
Backers of the change, which has been floated before, say it could dramatically reduce the reporting of false-positive results—studies that claim to find an effect when there is none—and so make more studies reproducible. And they note that researchers in some fields, including genome analysis, have already made a similar switch with beneficial results.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/07/it-will-be-much-harder-call-new-findings-significant-if-team-gets-its-way
0.05 is only used when things are so expensive that it’s hard to get the $$ to proceed further. 0.001 is much more common.
The IPCC claims of probable human effect on global temperatures are based on “Expert Opinion”, the experts of course, being those promoting the theory.
Nature science publication has become a complete @@@t rag http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7664/full/547400a.html?foxtrotcallback=true
Plesae let editors know if you are a scientist
If blue team is leading by example, they can be ignored.
The tell for a con artist is when he dodges tough reviews and audits of their brilliant plan.
As I said of Gore’s refusal to debate, “He ducks like a quack.”
(That’s Bartlett’s-worthy, IMO.)
+10, Roger Knights.
With your permission I am going to use that one.
Thansk,
hunter
Lord Monckton should be on the Red Team. If there’s criticism for using a Brit on the Red Team, just point to the fact that the British are already trying to get the mayors of U.S. cities to ignore much of what Trump is trying to accomplish.
noaa…the British are already trying to get the mayors of U.S. cities to ignore much of what Trump is trying to accomplish…
Member of a foreign government, The UK Climate and Industry Minister, and how about that for a portfolio!) involving them self and interfering with USA Domestic matters.
The Mainstream Press must be outraged by such interference.
Surely?
noaaprogrammer
Um Ops! the Brit. gov. have just past a law banning gasoline and diesel vehicles from the Brit. roads in 2040 ??? ( hp )
No they didn’t. Read again. They are talking about banning the sale of ….
Still not good but get your facts straight.
“The Mainstream Press must be outraged by such interference.
Surely?”
No, the MSM does not care about that. They only care about reporting on things that make Trump and conservatives look bad.
Just forget the whole Red vs. Blue exercise and appoint a Twitter Tzar or two for Trump from among the informed contributors to WUWT, and start educating and exacerbating the MSM on the weaknesses of the religion of man-made catastrophic warming.
May I humbly suggest, that whatever the subject, more twitter from the Trump administration would be a bad thing!
Funny how all his opponents want him to stop by-passing the press and talking directly to his people.
Go figure.
Joel,
What is funny is to see his opponents using twitter to criticize the President for…using twitter.
Also ridiculous are the claims that using twitter is beneath the office of the President while offering no objection to it being used by US Representatives, US Senators, US Supreme Court Justices, and, of course, the previous President.
Correction: Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Has the consensus changed?
Three cheers for not using “comprise”!
— President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser compared the Trump administration’s use of “red teams” to debate climate science to a “kangaroo court” meant to “create a sense of continuing uncertainty about the science of climate change.” –Is Barack Obama is still the President of USA?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
It is formal custom to refer to all ex-Presidents by the title President. Unless you were simply remarking on the irrelevance of a quote from the exPotus’s exadavisor.
I’ve read somewhere that the usage is that presidents who were defeated, like Ford, are called ex-presidents, and so is Nixon (forced out). Others are called former presidents.
When you address an ex-president in person, you call him, Mr. President, or President (name-goes-here). When you are not addressing an ex-president in person, you call him Former President (name-goes-here).
The science is settled. The skeptics win.
You could settle a dispute, but science?
One man can prove the science wrong. In a consensus setting however? Not so much.
But I agree with you that skeptics have the better arguments, supported by real data, in the discussion on agw.
There is a red team already. Judith Curry, Christie , Spencer, Singer, Lindzen, Kirstein, and some more. There is no shortage. (peer review is no red team, its part of the blue team!)
Except none of them denies that C02 causes warming
Steve, no one’s perfect.
The recent decision in Australia to void out low instrumental temperatures means that one of the planks of the global warming CO2 hypotheses is not testable, at least in Australia.
That is that minimum night time temperatures in dry air conditions should rise due to an increase in CO2.
We are not talking about UHI effect.
Its ironic that BOM was caught out at an airport site in Goulburn, one where the local heat effect could be easily enhanced.
The two other planks, that CO2 driven GCM’s are predictive and, of course the essentially mysterious upper troposphere hot spot, are yet to be laid in place.
To state, on authority, that the science is settled is not true.
We need to have reliable data and better models.
We’re almost to the point where we need lie detector tests published as supporting documents for climate science papers!
john, you have a lot of good ideas! Lie Detector Tests! 🙂
What I get from this has nothing to do with science. The left wing politicians are right, and the right wing politicians are wrong.
Some science advisor.
Holdren has a long history of failed predictions going back to the days of the alarmism generated by people such as Paul Ehrlich and the publications funded by the Club of Rome; for example “Limits to Growth”. He is best viewed as a rent seeking charlatan of the first order – sadly even more so than M. Mann. Read all about it: https://www.pop.org/president-obamas-bizarre-science-czar-dr-john-p-holdren-professional-alarmist/
Pretty obvious that Obama gave these positions to completely unqualified activists who understood that they were there to provide supporting “evidence” for his Socialist vision.
Imo, the red team could also argue the case from the standpoint of asking why the many predictions made by the blue team have failed over the decades as well as arguing science based understandings of the physics. The science involved in climate science can be endlessly debated in large part because there is much that science does not know at this time concerning the many interacting drivers which comprise climate shifts.
I would think that attacking the warmists talking points of the dangers which they claim are headed our way would be a potent tool to use against their fixed position of settled science, as if everything is known about what drives the climate of this planet. This argument would also be something that would be more readily understood by reasonably educated people, who might follow the debate. Also, bringing up topics such as SLR, more severe storms, unprecedented Arctic melting, etc would aid in exposing the argument that the warmists have tampered with the data. The use of historical data to disprove claims of unprecedented changes in natural systems would be a strong argument, and also one that even an average person could grasp.
“I would think that attacking the warmists talking points of the dangers which they claim are headed our way would be a potent tool to use against their fixed position of settled science”
The alarmists are claiming all the time that this or that severe weather event is caused by human-caused CO2 in the atmosphere. The Red Team should ask the Blue Team to detail just one severe weather event and show how human-caused CO2 was the driver of this event.
We all know they cannot do it. The Red Team should be required to explain why they can’t show the mechanism for human-driven local weather events, but alarmists still make the claim that humans are the cause, without evidence.
They should just show how one severe weather event was caused by CO2 in the atmosphere, human-derived, or not. They can’t do it. They can’t prove CO2 is driving the global weather, much less local weather events but that doesn’t stop alarmists from making this claim. Prove It!
A red team should be able to carry out its own calculations on two things: 1) is there negative, positive or no water feedback in the atmosphere, 2) what is the real radiative forcing (RF) of CO2. I have calculated these things and published also: 1) The positive water feedback exists only during short term ENSO events, not during the long-term changes longer than 3-5 years. Therefore, the climate sensitivity parameter is not 0.8 K/(W/m2) or 0.5 but 0.27. The RF is not 5.35 * ln(CO2/280) but 3.12 * ln(CO2/280). This means that both TCS (TCR) and ECS is only 0.6 C.
You can find links to original publications on my web site: https://www.climatexam.com/publications
Publications numbers are 6, 12 and 13. These papers are published in the lower category but peer-reviewed journals. Why? I do not have money to publish on the higher level journals and I do not have any name on this field. But I can show pretty good validations for my results. Where are the validations of IPCC results?
Dr. Antero Ollila
P.S. There are optional results for a red team. They should be just professional enough to test, which ones are correct.
Doing research would just drag them down into the political fight. They can, however, identify areas that are uncertain and where additional research should be undertaken to fill in the unknowns.
Epic debate of the century: Red Team vs. Blue Team
Red Team:
Richard Lindzen
Judith Curry
John Christy
William Happer
Freeman Dyson
Blue Team:
Bill Nye – The Bullshit Guy
Naomi Oreskes – The Merchant of Dumb
John Holdren – The Pseudoscience Adviser
James Hansen – The Prophet of Doom
Michael Mann – The Hockey sTrickster
Let’s get it on!
5-hour marathon debate. One hour each pair. Televised live on Fox News and CNN
Is the science settled? – Judith Curry vs. Naomi Oreskes
Is current warming unprecedented? – John Christy vs. Michael Mann
Is global warming mostly man-made or natural? – Richard Lindzen vs. James Hansen
Is global warming catastrophic? – William Happer vs. John Holdren
Is warm climate good or bad? – Freeman Dyson vs. Bill Nye
I would only change the last to:
Is increasing CO2 better or worse for the environment/human race? – Freeman Dyson vs. Bill Nye.
Epic debate of the century: Red Team vs. Blue Team
Organizer: Office of Science & Technology Policy (Science adviser, Steven Koonin)
Sponsor: Ivanka Trump (private funding)
Venue: Trump Hotel, Washington DC
Moderators: Dana Perino and Anderson Cooper (alternating)
Free live audience: 300 randomly selected applicants. Registered voters apply online
Calling on the Blue Team
Who from red is going to argue that case that AGW is a fraud? or have you given up that position?
Oh,
A) you dont get to pick Blue
B0 if the red team does not select various bloggers and commenters to represent red you will have lost.
Why don’t you argue that case that AGW is a fraud? Since you believe that and heartbroken that nobody else believes it. Oh, you get to pick Blue so you can pick idiots you can easily beat with your fraud argument. Afraid you can’t beat Bill Nye? LOL
Mr. Mosher: We seem to agree this red/blue team thing won’t work, but you indicate a willingness to debate, so you and I can debate. I’m not a scientist but I know a bit about fraud. I’ll take “AGW is a fraud’, and go first. AGW is a fraud because the hockey stick is a lie, and the hockey stick was used successfully to push higher cost energy generation to fight AGW. These higher costs are the “damages” resulting from “fighting AGW”, not “fighting a hockey stick graph”. Although man-made CO2 may warm, there is no evidence that it will have catastrophic consequences. The bit of truth in AGW is used by Holdren et al to promote CAGW, which is fraudulent on its face. Will you argue that CAGW is NOT a fraud, or will you need to add a member to your team?
“Almost none of this material has survived peer review to be published in the respectable professional literature.”
That would be a given, when you check out the editorial boards of the various “respectable professional journals”
Take this current ‘scare’ as the latest in a long line of scares.
It is little different from all its predecessors, Global Cooling, Nuclear Winter, Silent Spring etc etc
The mistake being made is that these kinds of things are ‘The Norm’ or perhaps, that 2-party adversarial politics is ‘The Norm’
Surely it is now obvious that such things are leading to utter craziness, such as solar panels, windmills, anti-nukes, wood burning, biofuel, the smashing up perfectly serviceable power stations and not least, epic rises in taxation. And so on.
What kind of people take on and indulge in self destructive’ activities, all the while maintaining that “they are fine, its everyone else that’s wrong and if you don’t agree, I’ll get my many, bigger-than-you friends to sort you out”
What is propelling these people, and has done for 10s of thousands of years? They have an equitable society, are not over-weight, diabetic, riddled with auto-immune diseases and/or cancer and particularly, have not trashed their environment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p058jh5q
I am not a crank and am not suggesting we all take on hunter gathering. There are far too many of us just for a start.
I want to impose a (trade haha) ban.
I suggest that folks who want to be leaders, politicians and scientists with close contact with politics…
1. Do not in any measure consume alcohol
2. Are not overweight or pre-diabetic
3. Do not consume more than 2 standard espresso coffees per day and no more than 5 cigarettes
4. A|re not afraid to eat saturated fat
This is my assertion from actual life experience. It is a simple experiment any one of you can undertake, the human body & mind is THE perfect laboratory and recording apparatus combined in one. (Just don’t quite go as far as I did and damn near kill yourself.)
If you are unable/unwilling to do the experiment, you prove my point exactly.
Because if we get leaders who are bound by my preconditions, we will get leaders with clear heads, good memories, quick wits, the abilities to take difficult decisions quickly and to act on them.
They will be honest and consequently be able to admit mistakes.
We will get leaders who do not relentlessly pass the buck, who constantly appeal to authority or consensus, are not easily swayed by popular opinion (itself propelled by consumers of sugar and alcohol)
Sadly our medics insist we should eat sugar and say its OK to drink alcohol and even do mary-jane.
So our behaviour now, that of a riotous drunken party on a cliff-top, lurches ever closer to the edge.
PS
CO2 is NOT the edge in that CO2 is a symptom of The Problem, not the cause.
Holdren certainly wasn’t picked as a science advisor on the basis of his scientific expertise, which was practically non-existent. It was a politically based appointment. His recommendation of “per review” as a syubstitute for the red team approach is pretty dumb – peer reviews are nowhere near as open and transparent and depend entirely upon the work of a selected few, usually chosen because their opinions coincide with those of the “respected journal.” Time to trot out some previous articles that were peer reviewed and are now discredited,. Peer reviews are a joke. Science needs open debates, not peer reviews.
And what makes Holdren think that there are as many scientific articles coming from skeptics, given his administration’s plicy of only funding like-mined researchers? Holdren is a political guy, not a scientist.
I don’t think he will be volunteering to be a member of the blue team.
Science progresses through trial and error, through conflicting debates, and there is no place for consensus. Sometimes a single scientist can overturn the theses in force, accepted by the majority of scientists in the field concerned. Let us recall Einstein who, by himself, has atomized the notion of ether and published the theory of restricted relativity, which makes it possible to explain many observations, such as the invariance of the speed of light regardless of the observer. If a scientific thesis refuses the debate, it is because it is pseudo-science that is under the control of an ideology. Mainstream climatology does not want debate because it highlights its inadequacies and serious mistakes, so it is pseudo-science, supported by an ideology supported by most politicians, the media, and NGOs.
A crowd sourced “NRP (National Reading Panel) that reviewed research on the teaching of reading.” style of “published paper check” could be a good way of slimming down the junk research literature that inhabits climate science.
Perhaps we could agree a list of conditions that papers need to meet to be considered ‘reasonable’.
It should not matter what the conclusion of the paper is – for or against (anything) but do the papers meet conditions of publication eg
1) All data and methods are included in an accessible manner.
2) All methods use (stats, pre/post sample selection) are standard or justified if not.
3) All software used has been proven to work.
4) All reasonable confounding factors acknowledged and justified.
5) Best sources of data used or substandard sources justified.
Etc
Etc
I suspect we could develop a list of conditions to be meet regardless the content of the paper.
Some papers will require some judgement calls by experts but conditions 1, 2, 3 should be clear and unambiguous.
Thoughts?
Ps its a bit like peer review should be in an ideal world…..
This process would winnow the piles of crap papers by about 97%!
Holdren should welcome debate from those who hold differing views. Is there a better way to test hypotheses/ideas? The open and honest collision of opinion should lead to better opinions . . . And for the same reason people like Steven Mosher should be very welcome here. Those who disagree with him would be better served by challenging his views directly, and benefitting from him challenging theirs, instead of engaging in peurile personal abuse . . .
While we are at it, why have a trial when the experts, the police, have already heard the objections and don’t think that there is any merit to them.
Don’t you trust the experts?
Does Holdren have something against kangaroos?
Or is it courts he dislikes?
He quite obviously knows the jig is up.
As is typical in dealing with climate extremists we see them project their deceptive methods and motives onto others.
Nothing resembles a kangaroo court more than what the climate extremists have practiced in pushing their apocalyptic clap trap to the top of the agenda.
It is the extremists who have been caught misrepresenting the science, silencing critics, rewriting history, colluding to hide data, destroyed careers of critics and as we see here, hide drone debate.
Bring on the red team.
We should have a Special Science Counsel to look into climate change.
In keeping with other Special Counsel teams it should be completely unbiased. I suggest that all the scientists in the team must be recommended by the Heartland Institute. (It would help if they had never voted Democrat, as well.)
Problem solved.
Whatever Holdren says needs to be vetted – by a vet.
Reading this site alongside some from the “other side” (SkS, Open Mind etc) I am beginning to wonder what the argument is actually all about. If you look at some of the potential “Red Team” that are genuine climate scientists such as Judith Curry, John Christie, Roy Spencer, Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen, they actually agree with most of what the
Blue Team thinks. All believe:
1. Global warming has happened, is happening and will probably continue to happen in coming decades.
2. A significant part of the cause is an increase in CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels
The points of disagreement are limited and rather nuanced:
1. The level of sensitivity (TCS, ECS) of surface warming to changes in CO2 proportion in the atmosphere
2. How much of the change is natural variation
Um, that’s it.
The big disagreements are not over the fact of AGW, but its severity and possible consequences. How much will sea level rise? How will the weather change – more severe or more benign? (evidence is beginning to point to the latter) Desertification or greening? (evidence is beginning to point to the latter), more deaths from heat or fewer from cold?
…and so on.
So, the first thing any discussion should do is decide on all the points that they agree on and just concentrate on what the best estimates of ECS and TCS are, and whether perceived risks justify the mind-bobblingly huge costs of trying to mitigate. Personally, given the long timescales involved and slow nature of the process, I believe adaptation is likely to be more effective and a lot less costly than mitigation.
For example:
The UK’s recently announced policy of 100% electric cars by 2040 will involve providing about 36,000 gWh of new power generation each year – roughly doubling domestic electrical power consumption. That is 41 gW of new installed generation plant which is either 12 new 3gW nuclear powerstations, or 27,000 wind turbines (working at 30% capacity), or 1,600 square miles of solar farms (40 miles square or 2.6 Greater Londons).
To carry all that electricty to everybody’s domestic car charging point will require roughly double the quantity of copper cable. Imagine the cost of all that copper and the disruption and cost of digging up all the roads to lay that cable and replacing all the pylons and substations.
Billions and billions and billions of pounds. Who is going to pay for it all? What will be the implications for our economy?
Total and utter “pie in the sky”.
to plug in an electric car at my house and any other house with a drive we’d just plug an extension cable in, in the garage. No copper required.
assumptions about UK car charging don’t take into account well advanced proposals for ‘smart charging’ in the UK – a system will mange it so cars don’t all charge at same time overnight. That means we may need more generation, but not all at once.
This week’s proposal on demand management/battery use embodies that idea
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40699986
Besides, the already planned growth in wind power (approved schemes) is 1.5 times today’s installed total… and its not the only option
Demand management and smart charging can help a bit on the margins, but the energy needed to shift all those cars and people around the country is broadly the same, whether you use electricity or fossil fuels. We have to either reduce our car use or build more electrical generation and transmission infrastructure.
You misunderstand my point about the copper cable. Sure, your extra single charging point is not a problem, but if everybody has a charging point at their house then the amount electric current flowing down the mains supply cables will roughly double (in the UK the total amount of energy used by petrol engine cars annually is about the same as current domestic electricity consumption – 360,000 gigawatt hours). Broadly speaking, at a constant voltage, if you double the current flowing down a cable you have to double its cross-sectional area or, in other words, double the amount of copper in that cable.
If you try and force double the current down the existing cable, it will heat up, burn off the insulation and possibly melt! Existing domestic cable infrastructure cannot cope with a doubling of the size of the cables carrying that electricity. You cannot dodge physics!
Besides, the already planned growth in wind power (approved schemes) is 1.5 times today’s installed total
There are currently around 8,000 wind turbines on land and sea around the UK, so a further 27,000 is 3.4 times today’s installed capacity – and those will be the biggest turbines requiring the most distance between them to avoid interference. Placement is going to become a major problem. Turbines slow down the wind behind them and cause turbulence. You need strong clean wind for a turbine to work efficiently and finding new places where the wind is not affected by existing turbines is going to be increasingly difficult. To me, wind turbines are the most intrusive form of renewable energy, visually, bird/bat mashingly, and acoustically – but at least they do not use up valuable agricultural land like solar farms. These provide a different variation of the food or fuel problem seen in the corn belt of the USA.
But solar panels don’t use up good agricultural land – UK planning law does not allow that and on the farm land they do occupy, grazing or chicken farming still takes place. Check the NFU guidelines. Then there are plenty of rooftops -and solar there is used locally and does not contribute to load on the grid. Besides, we are investing in more HVDC interconnectivity (the Western link, for example).
Most new wind currently is offshore and will increasingly be using the larger 12MW turbines. There are what 30GW of offshore sites identified…
Good job, Griff! You have a hopeless idea to paper over every other hopeless idea! Maybe we could all wear battery packs while we bike to work and charge them from the bike generators and then plug into the grid we paid for to power the plants that make the Green crap! Soon we’ll all be in our 80’s and pedalling our butts off to get to the hospital before our hearts give out. Doesn’t matter! They won’t have any power to restart us anyway!
your other point is well made:
yes, I reckon those people do accept:
1. Global warming has happened, is happening and will probably continue to happen in coming decades.
2. A significant part of the cause is an increase in CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels
I am however unsure if even a majority of the skeptic community represented on this site accept those 2 starting points?
(which may not be a problem)
I don’t think anybody in power knows or cares what people who read these blogs think – until they vote!!
The level of general ignorance on both sides of the argument is immense. The only people on this side of the fence who really know their stuff are the scientists mentioned in my first post – and all of them accept the reality of AGW. Their only argument is whether it is going to be a catastrophe and whether mitigation or adaptation should be an appropriate policy response. More and more I am coming round to the view that, in the light of the uncertainty and long timescales surrounding the extent and impacts of AGW, adaptation makes much more economic and practical sense.
For instance, sea level is rising at 3mm a year, up from about 1mm a year at the start of the 19th Century. Even if it gradually doubles in rate over the next 80 years, that is still only a rise of 0.36 of a metre (1 foot 3 inches) before 2100. I think that is enough time to put in the necessary flood defences. Florida will probably become the new Netherlands. The best use of a wind turbine is to slowly pump water uphill. You won’t drown if the wind stops blowing for a few days. Something the Dutch discovered about 500 years ago!
What global warming?
Sorry, typo, that should be “360,000 gWh of new power generation each year” or 360 terrawatt hours. That is derived from a petrol and diesel fuel consumption of domestic cars of circa 28 million metric tonnes with each tonne providing 12,900 kWh of energy.
All the other numbers are calculated off that figure.
Griff carries that kind of power around as spending money!
Having a science Red Team misses the point. As does having it full of climate scientists.
I and others should not care what climate science comes up with. We should care about the accuracy and uncertainty in the output of said science if it is used in the real world. So a Red Team would be on application of the scientific findings to life.
It would be a short conversation.
That’s it. John Holdren’s 15 minutes is up.
If the science was as solid as he wants to believe, then there would be no problem disproving anything the “red team” comes up with.
It would seem to me, any scientist should welcome any additional eyes on the work – after all, that is the scientific method – to attempt to disprove a hypothesis in the crucible of scientific scrutiny in an iterative fashion until the best truth remains. I say best truth because we do all know science is never settled.
This should be the best opportunity for the warmists to silence the skeptics once and for all – instead the initial posturing is one of fear – not confidence that their warming hypothesis will hold up. Trying to discredit the process would seem to indicate a weakness in the argument.
I, for one, would change my position should the blue team come through with their basic hypothesis in tact. Given that until now no one has published the extent of warming that is attributable to human causes, the bar is set very high, indeed.
Let’s face it, every breath a person puts out increases the CO2 in the atmosphere. Living at 98.6 degrees contribute to atmospheric warming. With over 7 billion people, that is a lot of CO2 and heat input. So, at a minimum, there is a human input. At what point is the human input noise in the signal, or become a contributing factor. That is what the blue team has to quantify. And they are scared. And should be.
Enter minority opinions? Heaven forbid. does anyone remember Alfred Wegener?
Enter minority opinions into the discussion? Heaven forbid. Does anyone remember Alfred Wegener?
“The right wing’s ‘red team’ efforts have consistently been characterized by brazen cherry-picking, misrepresentation of the findings of others, recycling of long-discredited hypotheses, and invention of new ones destined to be discredited,”
That sounds more like his own performance:
https://youtu.be/nwWqZ6_J2w0
Curry and Lewis are luke warmers. They are more like the “green” team. For the red team, we need scientists who believe CO2 is NOT a significant climate driver. They will have already concluded this based on the evidence. They need to present science they believe negates the hypothesis that man-generated CO2 will cause damaging global warming.
Name me a climate scientist who believes that CO2 “NOT a significant climate driver”. There are a few who might quibble with the “significant” bit, but all the most respected scientists labelled “deniers” by Michael Mann at least believe CO2 is “climate driver”.
By your definition, Lindzen, Spencer and Christy are also “Luke Warmers”.
Spencer, Christy and Lindzen ARE luke warmists. What a red team should do is evaluate AGW objectively, even considering the possibility that CO2 is not a significant driver of climate change. (leave no stone unturned) Of course, there would be many aspects of red teaming that fit luke warmism, too. Justifiable critiques of the ipcc’s own admitted shortcomings. Things such as the uncertainty of solar forcings, cloud feedbacks and the modeling of water vapor for starters. Some aspects of red teaming would be controversial while others not. That doesn’t mean that all aspects shouldn’t be covered…
Whereas virtually all the AGW scientists are completely convinced that we are on the fast escalator to Hell! Just like Holdren. They’ve all been crying disaster for 40 years and here we are with global temperatures nearly identical to the 1970’s! It’s clearly the greatest farce since the Tulip Bubble except this time it’s the innocent public who pays for it!
“Name me a climate scientist who believes that CO2 “NOT a significant climate driver”.”
That depends on what you call “significant”. Correct me if I am wrong, but Curry, one of your “lukewarmer” examples, says she is not sure human-derived CO2 is a problem for the world.
She apparetly doesn’t think CO2’s effects are significant, although she obviously believes there is some effect, however small. Curry, it seems to me, is taking a “wait and see” attitude, and that is the attitude one should take in this case.
CO2 may have an effect on the atmosphere, but then again, it may not, for various reasons, and noone knows the answer to this at this time. We don’t know what CO2 is doing in the atmosphere, and are unable to measure its effects because they are so small, and anyone who claims they can is blowing smoke.
The red team could also argue the case from the standpoint of asking why the many predictions made by the blue team have failed over the decades as well as arguing science based understandings of the physics. The science involved in climate science can be endlessly debated in large part because there is much that science does not know at this time concerning the many interacting drivers which comprise climate shifts.
I would think that attacking the warmists talking points of the dangers which they claim are headed our way would be a potent tool to use against their fixed position of settled science, as if everything is known about what drives the climate of this planet. This argument would also be something that would be more readily understood by reasonably educated people, who might follow the debate. Also, bringing up topics such as SLR, more severe storms, unprecedented Arctic melting, etc would aid in exposing the argument that the warmists have tampered with the data. The use of historical data to disprove claims of unprecedented changes in natural systems would be a strong argument, and also one that even an average person could grasp.
Here, here!
Pedant alert: Note the correct spelling – not the usual erroneous “hear, hear” 😉
Search, and ye shall find….
“Hear, hear” is equivalent to today’s “ditto” or “right on”.
As regards unprecedented artcic melting, there is very solid, collated historical evidence which shows we have much lower sea ice extent now than at any time since 1850 (the start of the data collection period).
all records from shipping, whaling, expeditions, submarines under the ice, everything, has been examined and collated.
Griff, stop with the bull crap!
You have been told several times that what you promote are based on VERY low resolution and scanty data,vast areas of the worlds oceans were never measured from 1850 to 1979.
You have also been told repeatedly, that CURRENTLY the Arctic ice extent is well above average for the entire Holocene.
Stop being stupid.
1870 was the end of the most recent glacier building episode, the end of the Little Ice Age. It’s not remarkable that sea ice is still receding as the warming that began in 1870 is still the trend.
Griff can’t stop being stupid anymore than a person can change their eye color.
Which HuffPo story is that from?
Griff…the last Arctic melt was back in the 1920s/30s. That means no submarines, no satellites, and no direct observations of the total Arctic sea ice expanse. So there can be no high resolution comparison between the Arctic conditions of now and back then.
…”lower sea ice extent now than at any time since 1850 (the start of the data collection period).” Well yes, perhaps so. I say perhaps because I haven’t checked to see that the historical evidence has been fully and accurately collated. But for the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate that it has. So effing what?
A quick Google inquiry (“when was the end of the little ice age?) returns, “The Little Ice Age is a period between about 1300 and 1870…”. If the LIA ended about 1870 and we started collecting data in 1850 is it really so startling or telling that we are seeing relatively low sea ice extent today? Is it? Is it really?!? Take all the time you need.
In other news, the sun rose in the east this morning.
except the predictions are pretty damn good.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/01/03/documenting-the-global-extent-of-the-medieval-warm-period/comment-page-1/#comment-2387406
[excerpt]
The following history on the subject of the MWP may be of interest – I wrote this article for E&E in 2005.
Willie Soon has managed to hang on despite many attacks, but my friend and co-author Sallie Baliunas was driven from Harvard-Smithsonian, reportedly through the actions of John Holdren, now Obama’s Chief Scientific Advisor.
I suggest that the conduct of people like Holdren and those who collaborated with them should be thoroughly investigated by the new Trump administration.
Regards, Allan
DRIVE-BY SHOOTINGS IN KYOTOVILLE
The global warming debate heats up
by Allan M. R. MacRae
Energy and Environment, Feb 2005
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/28/the-team-trying-to-get-direct-action-on-soon-and-baliunas-at-harvard/#comment-811913
[excerpt]
In the April 2003 issue of Energy and Environment, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and co-authors wrote a review of over 250 research papers that concluded that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were true climatic anomalies with world-wide imprints – contradicting Mann’s hockey stick and undermining the basis of Kyoto. Soon et al were then attacked in EOS, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.
…
In both cases, the attacks were unprofessional – first, these critiques should have been launched in the journals that published the original papers, not in EOS. Also, the victims of these attacks were not given advanced notice, nor were they were given the opportunity to respond in the same issue. In both cases the victims had to wait months for their rebuttals to be published, while the specious attacks were circulated by the pro-Kyoto camp.
*****************
“The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement.”
Karl Popper (and Me)
+10
I disagree.
Holdren, the Obama court jester, re-appears.
The global warming debate is primarily about one parameter – the sensitivity of climate to increasing atmospheric CO2 (aka ECS, TCS, etc.). Let’s call this climate sensitivity ECS for brevity.
Global warming alarmists allege that ECS is high and Earth will experience catastrophic warming due to increasing atm. CO2.
Skeptics say ECS is low and any warming due to increasing atm. CO2 will be harmless or beneficial.
The alarmist position is founded on allegations of high ECS, which are based on assumptions of strong positive feedbacks for which there is NO supporting evidence.
Furthermore, there is ample evidence that ECS is low. The most credible information is the full-scale temperature data of our planet. Earth temperature since 1850 has warmed, cooled, warmed, and remained ~flat, all for multi-decadal periods, even as CO2 increased from ~280ppm to ~400 ppm. This full-Earth-scale test shows that increasing atm. CO2 is NOT a significant driver of global warming.
Climate sensitivity (ECS) is no more than ~1C/(2xCO2) and probably less, so there is no real global warming crisis.
Many trillions of dollars and many thousands (even millions) of lives have been squandered on what is clearly false, and probably fraudulent claims of high ECS.
Well put and irrefutable, Allan!
Thank you John.
For those who prefer a bit more information (and more complexity), please see points 1, 2 and 3 below.
There is incontrovertible evidence that global temperature T drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives global temperature. This fact was demonstrated in my January 2008 paper at http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf and verified by others, such as Humlum et al 2013
Other strong drivers of CO2 also exist, but the strong correlation of dCO2/dt vs T and the resulting 9-month lag of CO2 after T demonstrates that CO2 is NOT a major driver of temperature – if it were otherwise, the close correlation of dCO2/dt vs T and the resulting 9-month lag of CO2 after T would not exist.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14
Many seem reluctant to accept of even discuss this reality, or chose to confuse it with unnecessary complications that obscure the basic fact:
“CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales – the future cannot cause the past.”
Regards, Allan
Background Information:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/13/presentation-of-evidence-suggesting-temperature-drives-atmospheric-co2-more-than-co2-drives-temperature/
Observations and Conclusions:
1. Temperature, among other factors, drives atmospheric CO2 much more than CO2 drives temperature. The rate of change dCO2/dt is closely correlated with temperature and thus atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record,
2. CO2 also lags temperature by ~~800 years in the ice core record, on a longer time scale.
3. Atmospheric CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales.
4. CO2 is the feedstock for carbon-based life on Earth, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are clearly CO2-deficient. CO2 abatement and sequestration schemes are nonsense.
5. Based on the evidence, Earth’s climate is insensitive to increased atmospheric CO2 – there is no global warming crisis.
6. Recent global warming was natural and irregularly cyclical – the next climate phase following the ~20 year pause will probably be global cooling, starting by ~2020 or sooner.
7. Adaptation is clearly the best approach to deal with the moderate global warming and cooling experienced in recent centuries.
8. Cool and cold weather kills many more people than warm or hot weather, even in warm climates. There are about 100,000 Excess Winter Deaths every year in the USA and about 10,000 in Canada.
9. Green energy schemes have needlessly driven up energy costs, reduced electrical grid reliability and contributed to increased winter mortality, which especially targets the elderly and the poor.
10. Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of modern society. When politicians fool with energy systems, real people suffer and die. That is the tragic legacy of false global warming alarmism.
Allan MacRae, P.Eng. Calgary, June 12, 2015
Excellent comments, Allan.
Zero evidence that it is less than 1C
Hello Mosh.
There is zero evidence that ECS is significantly greater than 1C, which would require positive feedbacks. It is incumbent upon the global warming alarmists to prove otherwise, which they have failed to do despite billions of dollars in funding and decades of effort. .
The skeptics have a strong case that there is no real global warming crisis, for example:
There is NO evidence that ECS is high or that CO2 drives significant warming and ample contrary evidence. that it is low. Repeating from above:
“Earth temperature since 1850 has warmed, cooled, warmed, and remained ~flat, all for multi-decadal periods, even as CO2 increased from ~280ppm to ~400 ppm. This full-Earth-scale test shows that increasing atm. CO2 is NOT a significant driver of global warming.”
Also, if ECS was significant, CO2 would not lag temperature at all measured time scales and this relationship would not be apparent in the data record.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14
Finally, the global warming alarmists have destroyed their credibility through the following activities:
ECS wildly exaggerated by false positive feedbacks and resulting model over-predictions of warming;
Fabricated aerosol data to force-hindcast the cooling of ~1940-1975;
False claims of serious global warming and wilder weather that have not materialized
Intimidation by warmists of journals, institutions and academics – see the Climategate emails;
Adjustments to historic and current temperature data;
The MBH98 etc hokey stick, Hide the Decline, Mike’s Nature trick, etc.;
The doctored SPM reports of the IPCC;
Eliminating the MWP and LIA from the climate record;
Grid-connected wind and solar power;
Forcing intermittent non-dispatchable “green power” into the grid ahead of much cheaper dispatchable power;
Destabilization of power grids by “green energy” schemes;
Corn ethanol and other subsidized food-for-fuels;
Carbon taxes, carbon trading, etc.;
Brainwashing of children and adults and the spreading of false fears;
Vilification of fossil fuels, which provide 86% of global primary energy;
Spreading fear of warmer weather when cool temperatures are by far the greatest killer of mankind;
Increasing energy costs driving up excess winter deaths;
Energy poverty, “Heat or Eat”.
… and the list goes on …
Regards, Allan
I just can’t stop picturing my youngest child sticking his fingers in his ears when we try to explain some reality that is inconsistent with his preconceived views.
Nowadays I send them what’s-up messages.
Quote: Holdren argued the scientific peer-review process already acts as a check on bad science …
Nonsesnse. It acts as a check on anyone who dares give an alternate opinion, and thus undermine the consensus view.
Ralph
If Obama’s people use the term ‘Kangaroo Court’, you can bet that’s what they assembled for themselves.
He’s really very predictable.
Considering Holden once recommended reducing population by sterilizing everyone via their drinking water, I would say he has precisely zero credibility.
“Holdren”, not “Holden.” F%#l* autocorrect.
CO2isnotevil compares the solar insolation forcing to the radiative forcing of CO2 caused by the absorption. I do not think that the calculations are correct. We can carry out a very simple calculations on the different basis. The average solar insulation is about 239 W/m2. It causes the present GH effect of 34 C. It means that 1 W/m2 of solar insulation increase corresponds to 34/239 = 0.14 C increase in the GH effect. IPCC says that the CO2 concentration change from 280 to 560 ppm increases the radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere by 3.7 W/m2 (it is the same thing, if solar radiation would have increased the same amount). If you multiply 3.7 by 0.14, the result is 0.53 Celsius degrees. IPCC says that the result is 1.75 degrees in the short run and finally 3.5 degrees in the long run. Long run (equilibriun climate sensitivity) is pure fiction. So, IPCC thinks that CO2 is evil, because its radiative forcing is much more powerful than the radiation of the Sun.
Using more sophisticated methods, my result is 0.6 degrees. It passes the simple test using the rule of thumb, which everyone can comprehend..
But your calculation assumes a linear response or relationship between the 239 W/m^2 and +34C of the GHE.
Yes it does. In the same way IPCC assumes that the radiative forcing (RF) has a liner response on the surface temperature change: dT = CSP * RF, where CSP is the climate sensitivity parameter. This is good enough for small changes around the present operating point of the GH effect. You are right that this assumption may not be totally linear for the whole range of the GH effect. Anyway the difference is very small with the spectral analysis method (the most accurate method) and this very simple method: 0.58 C versus 0.53 C. I have rounded 0.58 C to 0.6 C.
Do not mix this RF formula to that of RF formula used to calculate the RF of CO2 concentration, which is logarithmic.
Anyone who has been around WUWT and a few of the other climate blogs will soon come to realise that it is not correct to state (as some have previously) that everyone on this (WUWT) side also believes in AGW but thinks the ECS is low. There are a considerable number who think there is no such thing as a Greenhouse Gas at all, e.g. theories about gravity, density, etc.
This needs to be cleared up properly. I propose as well as the Red/Blue team exercise we also spend some money on conducting actual real experiments. Nobody should be able to object to that. The experiments can be conducted by anyone who want to, in fact it is beneficial if all THREE sides in this ALL DO THE SAME EXPERIMENTS.
Laboratory experiments on CO2, etc and then larger experiments in the atmosphere should help us get a quantitative result for the effect of CO” and other so called greenhouse gases. We need REAL NUMBERS to work with, not theoretical assumptions.
” = 2 (No excuse, my fingers are not fat today,arthritis under control)
Your argument makes sense, but once again it assumes that CO2 is the only driver to consider in the debate. Imo, it is of great importance to show that it is most likely the least of the climate drivers which should be of consideration. The Blue team, of course, would vigorously object to that argument as it clearly disproves their main and only contention of CO2 as being the only climate driver of import. This is where highlighting known historical weather/climate patterns can cut their argument into pieces.
The warming effect of GH gases are based on the theoretical calculations of molecular physics. These formulas have been further tuned in some degree in the laboratory conditions. The formula of CO2 has been checked also in the real climate conditions in the Atacama desert in Chile, where the disturbing effects of water are minimal. These tests show that the Hitran database has an accuracy better than 1 % for CO2. The water formula is not so clear and researchers use different formulas.
Yes, there are people who believe that the man has never been in the Moon. How you can convince that some scientific facts are true, if you think in this way. Mission impossible.
We used Hitran to design the Yf23 and B2.
clowns at WUWT have zero clue
Before Galileo people were divided into two schools of thought.
The speed of light is finite versus those who thought it was infinite.
Galileo showed it was finite, but his estimate of the true speed was off. Centuries later we continue to refine the answer.
In 1896 we predicted adding c02 will warm the plnet not cool it.
We’ve been doing that experiment.
in 1896 folks though ECS was around 5C. we continue to refine the number.
But no experiment will show that C02 does not warm. If an experiment does show that it’s as mistaken as the experiments that show superluminal velocities.
“In 1896 we predicted adding c02 will warm the plnet not cool it.”
Steve, this is ridiculous… The planet is either warming or cooling. Such a “prediction” has a 50/50 chance of being correct. (and this passes for science?)
I heard today that Al Gore is going to be on CNN at a “town-hall meeting” in front of a big crowd to discuss human-caused Global Warming next Tuesday.
Looks like Al is starting the RedTeam/BlueTeam debate early, and plugging his new movie, or course.
I smell fear.
“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”
—Tom Paine
I agree with the good Reverend. I see no evidence of ANY warming due to CO2. Yet to be determined in the magnificent intricacies of The Great Theory are any and all negative feedback elements. The existence of these should be obvious just by the studiously blind eye that all possibilities get from the Warmist camp. This betrays the fact these so-called scientists know full well that there are unknowns in The Great Theory which threaten to negate the entire corpulent monstrosity.
Socialism has failed in every application but its adherents soldier on through AGW. They are acolytes of a religion. Anti development, anti technology, anti truth, anti individualism and anti human. This is a political battle for the world’s soul! The enemy is disingenuous to a degree that matches the Communists of an earlier time. They seek power for their own sake!
Peer review is an inside joke.
How does Nic Lewis manage to get published
Good lesson on global warming from Holdren:
“Breathtaking”: The White House Releases Its Climate Heavy Hitter on the Polar Vortex”
“A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues,” Holdren asserts. Watch it:”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/john-holdren-video-polar-vortex/
That John Holdren……….objective scientist that he is, comes out with this “special” video explaining to the captured minds why they should not question the position on global warming/climate change or be skeptical of anything related to it.
The record cold got some minds actually thinking critically about the belief system and were moving towards questioning some of the “settled science” that their high priests of the global warming/climate change cult taught them.
Just believe everything that he says and trust him. Don’t ask questions. Don’t think critically. Don’t be skeptical. Climate science is as settled as gravity. We can represent the climate accurately with hundreds of the exactly right equations in our global climate models and project it for the next 100 years. Climate scientists and modelers are way smarter than the rest of us, so we should trust them and not notice the growing disparity between model temperature projections and observations.
Observations will eventually catch up because the flawless theory is settled science. Just like the earth is a sphere and revolves around the sun…………….NOT!!!
Bit like a court not allowing a defense, only a prosecution. It would laughed out of judicial circles, but guess who would want such a thing?, the prosecution.
I followed a recent legal case in a developing country, where the legal system was so intent on getting a conviction, they actually lambasted the defense for even putting up a case and trying to point out things, which in fact was very sound. Same thing.
Just include the classical computable quantitatively testable undergraduate level physics of radiative equilibrium for arbitrary spectra and gravitational energy balance which fills in the gap between that radiative balance and our surface temperature . Trump’s “tiny tiny” is calculable .
http://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20170602&t=2&i=1187293561&r=LYNXMPED504C6&w=940
Just noticed the picture caption. Can’t make it up, lol! I’m pretty sure the stars aren’t over there. Even Barry looks skeptical.
Holdren should return to his passion for writing about mass human depopulation options . Civil of course .
What is he afraid of . Weren’t his ideas for mass population elimination supposed to be discussed either ?
Why would anyone listen to this guy ?
Most published research is wrong. Most scientists go their entire working life without doing anything actually useful for society. Many more breakthroughs in science are achieved by maverick genius than by consensus but boy is it better for the career of the mediocre to be in with the in-crowd.
A few things are clear:
>When you have to doctor the source data to prove your theory ‘correct’ then your theory is likely worthless.
>When your job depends on a scare story being true then it is unlikely that your endorsement of the scare story is worth listening to.
>When you have spent much of your career being proved wrong all the time then you should not be regarded as an expert.
>When the policy based on the science clearly does more harm than good then an independent science review is essential.
>97% of the ‘climate-concerned’ are sanctimonious hypocrites.
>When you avoid debate, call people names like den1er, talk about the number of folk who agree with you instead of comparing predictions versus reality then you don’t even trust your own arguments.
Does this have to go the way of the DDT ban where millions of the 3rd world poor had to die in order to satisfy Western middle-class eco-angst?
JasG – well said – thank you for your excellent post.
You wrote regarding the global warming scare:
“Does this have to go the way of the DDT ban where millions of the 3rd world poor had to die in order to satisfy Western middle-class eco-angst?”
Regrettably, this has already happened. Many trillions of dollars and many millions of lives have been squandered on what is clearly a false allegation of dangerous global warming.
Cool and cold weather kills many more people than warm or hot weather, even in warm climates. There are about 100,000 Excess Winter Deaths every year in the USA and about 2 million per year globally.
“Cold Weather Kills 20 Times as Many People as Hot Weather”, September 4, 2015
by Joseph D’Aleo and Allan MacRae
https://friendsofsciencecalgary.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/cold-weather-kills-macrae-daleo-4sept2015-final.pdf
In the developed world, green energy schemes have needlessly driven up energy costs, reduced electrical grid reliability and contributed to increased winter mortality, which especially targets the elderly and the poor.
In the developing world, global warming nonsense has thwarted the development of much-needed energy systems that would have greatly improved the quality of life and reduced illnesses and premature deaths due to energy poverty.
Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the lifeblood of society. When politicians fool with energy systems, real people suffer and die. That is the tragic legacy of false global warming alarmism.
Furthermore, if the trillions of dollars squandered on global warming alarmism were put to good use, we could have saved many millions of lives. For a fraction of the money spent on global warming nonsense, we could have installed clean water and sanitation systems in every village in the world. About 2 million children below the age of five die from contaminated water each year. In the three decades that global warming has been a popular obsession, that is 60 million kids – more than died on all sides in WW2.
There are very serious ethical issues here that should be addressed. It’s not just about squandering trillions of dollars of scarce global resources – it is how those valuable resources could have been better allocated, and the consequences of not doing so.
Holdren what are you afraid of ? Someone finding out the earth doesn’t have a fever .