Those of use that have Twitter accounts know that in the past couple of weeks, Dilbert creator and cartoonist Scott Adams has been delving into the question of who has the more credible arguments: Climate Alarmists or Climate Skeptics? One of the issues being discussed was “Mikes Nature Trick” and Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit tried to help Scott Adams understand what actually happened.
Unfortunately, like many issues in the climate world, unless you have some “inside baseball” knowledge, such things often cause eyes to glaze over as is the case with Scott Adams.
Mann manipulated data in ways both large and small. Mann's Nature trick was to splice proxy data to 1980 with instrumental data after 1980 to calculate the smoothed value. This was different trick to brute deletion of adverse data as in IPCC diagram.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 17, 2019
clearly tastes vary. This post, which you described as one of your favorites, was described by Scott Adams as "impenetrable nonsense" – a little unfairly IMO.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 17, 2019
I don’t blame Scott Adams for finding the issue impenetrable, it’s an obscure trick, which is why it got past peer review in the first place and ended up in the IPCC report as “the hockey stick”.
When I read the “impenetrable” comment, I immediately thought that we need to do a better job of communicating the issue, and taking a cue from the beloved “Dilbert” way of doing so, I worked directly with our resident cartoonist, Josh, to do just that.
What follows is the result of that collaboration, along with some relevant links. (Click image to enlarge)
It is important to note that in the above cartoon, Josh focuses on the “near present” part of the hockey stick, and it’s not the entire graph with the long flat blade going back to the Medieval Warm Period and before. It focuses entirely on the fact that the tree ring temperature proxy data in modern times (from about 1980 onward) didn’t cooperate with the viewpoint of the science paper authors (it went in the wrong direction) so they truncated it and used an entirely different dataset in it’s place – surface thermometer readings. Imagine the penalties that would occur in the stock market and financial world if somebody pulled a trick like that to present data for public consumption.
The cartoon is entirely for helping Scott Adams see exactly what we see, it is presented with respect, and in a visual language that I hope helps.
Here is the famous Climategate email that revealed what was going on:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@xxxxx.xxx, mhughes@xxxx.xxx
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@xxx.xx.xx,t.osborn@xxxx.xxxDear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.Cheers
PhilProf. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK
Links:
Keith’s Science Trick, Mike’s Nature Trick and Phil’s Combo
Cartoonsbyjosh (consider a visit to the tip jar for the time Josh spent making this cartoon)
UPDATE: 1/22/19 8:10 AM PST
here are original sources for Josh cartoon. Blue tree ring diagram is cartoon of Briffa tree ring reconstruction: see https://t.co/KbL6r7CtG8. Orange version is cartoon of Briffa series as altered in WMO figure (green) discussed in hide-the-decline email https://t.co/X8CIwADQvg pic.twitter.com/wmF2GGC638
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 22, 2019
2/ over the years and over various papers, a variety of techniques were used by Briffa, Mann and others to "hide the decline" in Briffa's tree ring data. Less discussed code in Climategate mentions "Artificial Fudge Factor" – another trick to hide the decline.
— Stephen McIntyre (@ClimateAudit) January 22, 2019
Nice. Josh’s cartoon does a good job of looking alittle like — well, you know.
Adams did a cartoon about a climate scientist who looked exactly like Mann.
But he SWEARS that’s not what he was going for.
Mike’s Nature Trick is NOT complicated, imo. It’s the old bait-and-switch, or more properly the old slice-and-splice.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/12/a-mann-uva-email-not-discussed-here-before-claims-by-mann-spliced-and-diced/#comment-1257445
[excerpt]
POSTED CIRCA 2006:
More on “the Divergence Problem”, “Mike’s Nature Trick” and “Hide the Decline”:
It took eight years before the “Divergence Problem” was revealed, also in testimony. Mann grafted modern surface temperature data onto earlier tree ring temperature proxies to produce his upward-sloping “hockey stick” graph. Grafting together two different datasets is usually NOT good scientific practice.
Why did Mann do this? Because if he had exclusively used tree-ring data, the blade of the hockey stick, instead of showing very-scary warming in the last decades of the 20th Century, would have shown COOLING.
The correct scientific conclusion, in my opinion, is that using tree rings as a proxy for temperatures is not sufficiently accurate for the major conclusions that were drawn from the Mann studies.
Mann and the IPCC were clearly wrong about the hockey stick – the only remaining question is not one of error, it is one of fraud.
For more on the public revelation of the Divergence Problem in 2006, see
http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/07/darrigo-making-cherry-pie/
“The discrepancy between the forecast and the actual caught Cuffey’s eye and he asked D’Arrigo about it. She said “Oh that’s the “Divergence Problem”‘?. Cuffey wanted to know exactly how you could rely on tree ring proxies to register past warm periods if they weren’t picking up modern warmth “questions dear to the heart of any climateaudit reader”.”
– Allan
Maccrae says: ” it is one of fraud.”
…
1) Mann’s study has not been retracted.
2) Subsequent studies using different methods and different proxies have confirmed Mann’s work.
3) No reconstruction has shown Mann’s work wrong.
4) If you have evidence that Mann’s work, and the “hockey stick” is not valid, please post it.
Good l*rd, what world do you live in. Instead of asking others to do your work, do your own research. Start with his dubious statistical methods.
“Not retracted” still can mean WRONG.
Please link to a study using ONLY proxies. I would love to see the proxy data from mutiple sources and how they compare to actual temperature readings.
Explain when science decided splicing together two completely different forms of measurement was somehow acceptable and not something one should be booted out of freshman science for.
“Explain when science decided splicing together two completely different forms of measurement was somehow acceptable and not something one should be booted out of freshman science for.”
As regards MBH98, entirely acceptable.
As the paper clearly states that fact (as does IPCC TAR) ….
IOW NOT deceptive.
One of the criticisms of the method is it could create a hockey stick from noise because of how it weights the data. People using the method and getting the same result is hardly reassuring. The decline that was hidden highlighted that the method was flawed.
There are reconstructions from before and after the hockey stick that show that a MWP as warm or warmer occurred all around the globe.
Climateaudit has bucket loads of posts on the flaws and a reference to the original paper debunking the method.
How long are you going post the same comments before you go read what you claim doesn’t exist?
How long are you going post the same comments before you go read what you claim doesn’t exist?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Mr. Peterson, Mann has long since admitted that his infamous hockey stick was an error (not his fault, of course), but it attracted so much attention that he kept it and pushed it further.
He fudged the numbers. He admits to it. My question is why you’d find his own words in that e-mail posted above so difficult to understand and/or accept.
**2) Subsequent studies using different methods and different proxies have confirmed Mann’s work.**
The subsequent “studies” made the same error, as they changed a few proxies but left the bad one in. It was ll explained in Climateaudit but Peterson lasks the skils to look it up and like a good follower just repeats.
I disagree. Subsequent studies got the same results because they massaged their variables to so they emulated Mann’s results. Because once they matched they believed it was now correct. Everyone should ask themselves what are the odds Mann produced an accurate graph using a program that only produces one result? So odds are he got it wrong and after that the only conclusion is the one above.
J. Philip Peterson: You are posting a pack of falsehoods.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.
Regards, Allan
You’d better have that battle, and you’d better beat him to a smooth pulp… otherwise the idiots will take that as your concession and will declare ‘victolly!’.
I’ve dealt with his kind before… the only way to win against idiots like that is to so pound them into the ground with facts, logic and reality that they don’t dare speak up for fear that you’ll do so again. And again. And again.
The last guy I ran up against like this (on Usenet) took me three years of constant hammering on him with facts, logic and reality before he broke… he went mad, started smoking crack so he could stay up longer and fight me (because when the kooks don’t have facts on their side, they’re just dumb enough to think barfing voluminous kookspew will substitute), lost his job, lost his house, lost his wife, and ended up typing unreadable gibberish from a public library computer. He was involuntarily committed.
That was a hard win, but it was still a win. I hope his professional drug counseling will get him to see the error of his ways, but he’s a libtard, so I doubt it… they’re ineducable. In any case, he doesn’t dare spew more of his retardation, and that’s a win.
Take off the kid gloves. Hammer this kook so hard he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going. Corner him with logic and beat him about the head and shoulders with facts. Pin him down and cram reality down his gullet until he chokes on it.
It’s the only way we’re going to win against these deluded morons.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/01/the-great-climate-change-debate-william-happer-v-david-karoly-part-a/#comment-2446405
Donald L K
Below is the evidence of how totally false your above allegations are.
Who are you writing your lies for Sir? Certainly not the experts who post on this site and who have studied this subject for decades – your target audience must be the Ryan’s and the Griff’s, scientific illiterates who have guzzled the warmist Kool-Aid and keep regurgitating it, as you do. Shame on you Sir!
The Wegman Report fully supported McIntyre’s work and declared that the much-touted (by-the-IPCC) Mann hockey stick was broken.
EXCERPTS FROM WEGMAN REPORT
The debate over Dr. Mann’s principal components methodology has been going on for nearly three years. When we got involved, there was no evidence that a single issue was resolved or even nearing resolution. Dr. Mann’s RealClimate.org website said that all of the Mr. McIntyre and Dr. McKitrick claims had been ‘discredited’. UCAR had issued a news release saying that all their claims were ‘unfounded’. Mr. McIntyre replied on the ClimateAudit.org website. The climate science community seemed unable to either refute McIntyre’s claims or accept them. The situation was ripe for a third-party review of the types that we and Dr. North’s NRC panel have done.
WHILE THE WORK OF MICHAEL MANN AND COLLEAGUES PRESENTS WHAT APPEARS TO BE COMPELLING EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL TEMPERATURE CHANGE, THE CRITICISMS OF MCINTYRE AND MCKITRICK, AS WELL AS THOSE OF OTHER AUTHORS MENTIONED ARE INDEED VALID.
“Where we have commonality, I believe our report and the [NAS] panel essentially agree. We believe that our discussion together with the discussion from the NRC report should take the ‘centering’ issue off the table. [Mann’s] decentred methodology is simply incorrect mathematics …. I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn’t matter because the answer is correct anyway.
Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.
The papers of Mann et al. in themselves are written in a confusing manner, making it difficult for the reader to discern the actual methodology and what uncertainty is actually associated with these reconstructions.
It is not clear that Dr. Mann and his associates even realized that their methodology was faulty at the time of writing the [Mann] paper.
We found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling.
OVERALL, OUR COMMITTEE BELIEVES THAT MANN’S ASSESSMENTS THAT THE DECADE OF THE 1990S WAS THE HOTTEST DECADE OF THE MILLENNIUM AND THAT 1998 WAS THE HOTTEST YEAR OF THE MILLENNIUM CANNOT BE SUPPORTED BY HIS ANALYSIS.
[The] fact that their paper fit some policy agendas has greatly enhanced their paper’s visibility… The ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of temperature graphic dramatically illustrated the global warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster graphic. The graphics’ prominence together with the fact that it is based on incorrect use of [principal components analysis] puts Dr. Mann and his co-authors in a difficult face-saving position.
We have been to Michael Mann’s University of Virginia website and downloaded the materials there. Unfortunately, we did not find adequate material to reproduce the MBH98 materials. We have been able to reproduce the results of McIntyre and McKitrick.
GENERALLY SPEAKING, THE PALEOCLIMATOLOGY COMMUNITY HAS NOT RECOGNIZED THE VALIDITY OF THE [MCINTYRE AND MCKITRICK] PAPERS AND HAS TENDED DISMISS THEIR RESULTS AS BEING DEVELOPED BY BIASED AMATEURS. THE PALEOCLIMATOLOGY COMMUNITY SEEMS TO BE TIGHTLY COUPLED AS INDICATED BY OUR SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS, HAS RALLIED AROUND THE [MANN] POSITION, AND HAS ISSUED AN EXTENSIVE SERIES OF ALTERNATIVE ASSESSMENTS MOST OF WHICH APPEAR TO SUPPORT THE CONCLUSIONS OF MBH98/99… OUR FINDINGS FROM THIS ANALYSIS SUGGEST THAT AUTHORS IN THE AREA OF PALEOCLIMATE STUDIES ARE CLOSELY CONNECTED AND THUS ‘INDEPENDENT STUDIES’ MAY NOT BE AS INDEPENDENT AS THEY MIGHT APPEAR ON THE SURFACE.
IT IS IMPORTANT TO NOTE THE ISOLATION OF THE PALEOCLIMATE COMMUNITY; EVEN THOUGH THEY RELY HEAVILY ON STATISTICAL METHODS THEY DO NOT SEEM TO BE INTERACTING WITH THE STATISTICAL COMMUNITY. ADDITIONALLY, WE JUDGE THAT THE SHARING OF RESEARCH MATERIALS, DATA AND RESULTS WAS HAPHAZARDLY AND GRUDGINGLY DONE. IN THIS CASE WE JUDGE THAT THERE WAS TOO MUCH RELIANCE ON PEER REVIEW, WHICH WAS NOT NECESSARILY INDEPENDENT.
BASED ON THE LITERATURE WE HAVE REVIEWED, THERE IS NO OVERARCHING CONSENSUS ON [MANN’S WORK]. AS ANALYZED IN OUR SOCIAL NETWORK, THERE IS A TIGHTLY KNIT GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS WHO PASSIONATELY BELIEVE IN THEIR THESIS. HOWEVER, OUR PERCEPTION IS THAT THIS GROUP HAS A SELF-REINFORCING FEEDBACK MECHANISM AND, MOREOVER, THE WORK HAS BEEN SUFFICIENTLY POLITICIZED THAT THEY CAN HARDLY REASSESS THEIR PUBLIC POSITIONS WITHOUT LOSING CREDIBILITY.
IT IS CLEAR THAT MANY OF THE PROXIES ARE RE-USED IN MOST OF THE PAPERS. IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT THE PAPERS WOULD OBTAIN SIMILAR RESULTS AND SO CANNOT REALLY CLAIM TO BE INDEPENDENT VERIFICATIONS.”
ESPECIALLY WHEN MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF PUBLIC MONIES AND HUMAN LIVES ARE AT STAKE, ACADEMIC WORK SHOULD HAVE A MORE INTENSE LEVEL OF SCRUTINY AND REVIEW. IT IS ESPECIALLY THE CASE THAT AUTHORS OF POLICY-RELATED DOCUMENTS LIKE THE IPCC REPORT, CLIMATE CHANGE 2001: THE SCIENTIFIC BASIS, SHOULD NOT BE THE SAME PEOPLE AS THOSE THAT CONSTRUCTED THE ACADEMIC PAPERS.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/11/mcintyre-a-reductio-ad-absurdum-of-tree-ring-chronologies-as-useful-temperature-proxies/#comment-2492128
Kristi, the moderator is correct.
There is ample evidence on Steve McIntyre’s website climateaudit that MBH98 et al (“MBH98”) were false nonsense – you should not ask that it be repeated here. The is ample evidence that MBH98 was not only false, but fraudulent.
If you still have doubts, read the Wegman report. The North report was weaker, but under questioning, North agreed with Wegman’s conclusions.
Before Steve McIntyre’s skilled and diligent work, we already knew that MBH98 was false, because it eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age from the historic record, and these periods are very well-recorded.
Large portions of European populations died from cold, starvation and deprivation during the Little Ice Age. I am guessing from your name that these were your people; they certainly were mine. Let us show some respect for their suffering.
Regards, Allan
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/02/climate-scientist-michael-mann-congratulates-identity-thief-peter-gleick-for-receiving-his-carl-sagan-award/#comment-2447182
Repeating for Phil:
For more on the PUBLIC revelation of the Divergence Problem in 2006, see
http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/07/darrigo-making-cherry-pie/
Phil, Briffa is discussed by Steve McIntyre in his above 2006 post on ClimateAudit, but the true significance of the Divergence Problem, and the shifty way it was handled by Mann and others was not a matter of public knowledge until about 2006.
We owe a great debt to Steve McIntyre for his highly competent and tenacious efforts to reveal this warmist chicanery.
Mann’s early poor-quality tree-ring data eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age to depict the straight shaft of the Hokey Stick, but his later tree-ring data would have showed modern cooling with the blade of the stick turning down (the so-called “Divergence Problem”), so Mann deleted the modern tree ring data and instead grafted on modern surface temperature data to show the very-scary global warming message that he wanted to portray. Mann became famous, moved to Penn State and a tenured position, etc.
In summary, the Divergence Problem was “solved” thus:
Pure tree-ring proxies showed a downturn in modern temperatures, so Mann grafted modern surface temperature records onto the tree ring data to show global warming. Presto! Problem solved!
The IPCC loved Mann’s hokey stick and published it several times as an important piece of evidence in their “2001 TARpaper” – a steaming pile of deceptive warmist propaganda!
Now it was time to stampede the sheep!
References:
https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/
2001 TAR Fig SPM-10b and other figures
https://judithcurry.com/2014/04/29/ipcc-tar-and-the-hockey-stick/
“Regarding the Hockey Stick of IPCC 2001 evidence now indicates, in my view, that an IPCC Lead Author working with a small cohort of scientists, misrepresented the temperature record of the past 1000 years by (a) promoting his own result as the best estimate, (b) neglecting studies that contradicted his, and (c) amputating another’s result so as to eliminate conflicting data and limit any serious attempt to expose the real uncertainties of these data.” – John Christy
And yet Mann gives testimony to Congress that his hockey stick was validated by later studies. What’s he hanging his hat on. Sure it’s been covered but can’t recall.
You can lie directly to congress as long as you are a PC-promoter. Just look at Google CEO Pichai a few weeks ago when he gave a big black lie directly to congress, claiming that Google has not manipulated search results on a bias, although independent studies all show the opposite is true.
It was leaked internal documentation that showed his bald faced lies up.
The “later studies” were very similar. Other members of the “Hockey Team” did some “studies” which were called “independent”. What they did was use some different proxies but the ones causing the problem were still there. I believe Steve McIntyre identified 4 different types, one of which was the Yamal series. What happened in those “studies” is the method that was used has a dominant series which overpowers the other proxies. Steve pointed out the error and method that produced the “independent” studies. Of course, they also claimed that the studies were “peer-reviewed”. If you read the Wegman Report you will find that the reviews are more “pal-reviews. Most of this is detailed in Climateaudit.org. I hope this explanation is close to the point.
It depends on your definition of “peer.”
Indeed:
From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
Date: Thu Jul 8 16:30:16 2004
Mike,
… I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
Phil
And yet the usual suspects on here rest to accept the blatant fraud.
How are humans so capable of glaring self deception?
Indeed. But we live in a world where the outrage mob, led by the MSM, is now going over high school yearbooks with the proverbial fine-tooth comb to see if high schoolers actually act like high schoolers. George Orwell couldn’t make this stuff up.
I spent no small part of my career as a liason between a data collecting branch of government and the freedom of information (FOI) office.
If I saw even a hint of a shadow of an iota of a rumour that someone was deleting information, as was CLEARLY GOING ON here, I would have availed myself of the ample whistle-blower sections of the FOI law and dropped a very large, and very heavy dime, on EVERYONE involved, up to and including Ministers of the Crown. That nobody did shows me how inadequate some systems are in protecting their integrity (although we see them handwave the very meaning of the word out of existance because FEELZ.)
That these lying crap weasels not only got away with it, but still continue to smear skeptics with repulsive, derogatory terms like “denier” reminds me not only of cultish behaviour (see: Scientology), but also of seteroid abusers such as Lance Armstrong. Until they get caught they throw hammer and tong at their acusers.
Well, in Mann’s case they did not read and calculate, they did a “peer” over a beer.
The Mann made global warming spike was not just a technical matter. It was an iconic triumph which was later dropped by IPCC without disavowing it explicitly. Hence the limbo, walking dead hockey stick. The saga ia summarized here: https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/rise-and-fall-of-the-modern-warming-spike/
Yes, Cheers!
Mike’s Nature Trick – It never gets old!
Smooth move, Bowels!
I’ve been listening to Scott’s thoughts on climate change. For me he showed a lack of thought processes of sufficient complexity to understand the subject. One thing he did say which I found telling was about Tony Heller.
He said that Tony’s analysis was about the data and not the climate (sic)
Scott Adams set himself up as a referee to judge which side was being more persuasive, but that misses the whole point. You’re either persuaded by people, or by the data/facts, and only the latter is scientific. He seemed to have the type of mind that is persuaded by people, and seemed to think that’s how “citizens” look at it. Frankly I don’t think he speaks for “citizens”. Most people don’t give a rat’s @ss about global warming. Seriously, he seemed to be channeling the clueless boss guy in the Dildobert cartoon (don’t get on my case for massacring the name; Dogbert was originally named Dildog; looks like a portmanteau to me).
I think Scott Adams should focus on the real purpose of science, which is not to persuade, but to elucidate objective reality.
In other words, all that is important is what is true, what is correct, who is right, if anyone.
Being wrong but persuasive, whether by making emotional arguments, which are known to beat logical ones with many people, or by simply shutting down one side however they can and monopolizing the message that most people get, well…being wrong is still wrong.
Persuasion counts for nothing in science, and has been known to impede and obstruct getting at the truth, many times, and over many years.
In fact though, I am certain Adams is not as dense and bewildered as he is pretending to be…he is deliberately refusing to take a side, and in fact seem to relish playing Devil’s Advocate, jumping from one side of the argument to the other over time, back and forth, but always failing in the end to claim he is convinced one way or the other, and even to deny that anything has been or can be decided based on available evidence.
Adams doesn’t believe in objective reality. That’s his whole shtick.
Yes, life is a movie or series of movies or even a computer simulation according to Adams.
A reality denier!
he is deliberately refusing to take a side
If so, that’s prb’ly expedient but shows the lack of courage that is epidemic today.
I really like Scott but I think that is a fair criticism.
” is persuaded by people,”
Especially rich people, like Elon Musk. He was blown away by the awesomeness of Musk’s rescue sub.
BTW, he obtain says you can be persuaded by good persuasion even if you know the persuader is bsing you. That’s the magic of persuasion.
he OFTEN says
he talks about persuasion but also evaluates the “facts” and manages to think the liar is more persuasive … and leaves it at that … weak …
Always wondered why Mann just didn’t inverse (upside down) the tree ring series, he could have just inferred a negative correlation (i.e. hotter temperatures = tree growth is affected negatively).
Probably because historic data would then show numerous other period of warming akin to today’s warming – and you can’t have that.
Ha! Google “Upside down Tiljander”. There’s little surprise waiting…
So many of these critics of what Dr. Jones did is focus on the term “Trick”. We all use tricks and short-cuts of one kind or another to get done what we want. What most of us don’t do is “Hide” what we’ve done. The definition of hide says to conceal from others.
Agreed, come taxation time, there are tax ‘tricks’, then there is ‘hiding’ your income. For the average Joe, the latter gets you get audited and/or fined, climate science not so much.
Good one, thanks for the analogy
“We all use tricks and short-cuts of one kind or another to get done what we want”
Well isn’t that just as damning as hiding work?
To get done what we want… Well that’s not science is it?
Steve,
Yes, I always thought we should have been focusing on the “hide” part more than the “trick” part. A trick to hide something really can’t be defended.
The point people seem to miss is that, if the modern bit isn’t trustworthy and needs to be replaced with other measurements, nor can the ancient bit be trustworthy.
The trick wasn’t the use of modern temperature readings.
The trick was to use modern temperature readings while still using the long flat blade from the proxy.
The biggest “trick” (as in, un-scientific) of all was to get people to believe that tree rings can be used as reliable temperature proxies at all.
The biggest factors in tree ring growth are
1) Food,
2) water
3) genetics
4 warmth/cool
In that order – So why would the 3rd or 4th biggest factor be treated as having the greatest weight in the temp proxies?
As a side note – I recently cut down a 30 year old cedar elm ( a species that normally lives 80-120 years). A few things I noticed
1) the same year ring may be wide on one side of the tree but narrow on the other side. The adjacent tree ring may be smaller and likewise flip the relative width on other side.
Very true.
I would think the tree ring analysts would know this; that they would need at least 3 (120 degree) cores to be sure they are not into an anomalous area of growth.
does anybody know how (if) they account for the possibility of “bulbous rings”? or do they just assume uniform interior growth just because the tree looks normal from the outside.
But they do provide some great, high-paying careers!
Have to disagree. Its an impressive trick, but pales in comparison to all the other crappy proxies…
During the only period where tree rings and thermometers overlap, the two curves do not match.
However we are assured that during the period where we have no thermometers to calibrate the tree rings, they do match.
That’s not science, that’s mysticism.
Good point. In fact, excellent point
“Impenetrable nonsense” is what makes people stick with the headlines and soundbites. The details are confusing, but the message is clear. Neat journalistic trick.
I like the Dilbert comic, but I find Scott’s other ramblings mostly impenetrable nonsense, to use his own words. His success has gone to his head, and now he seems to think he is erudite. What makes his comic characters funny many times is that even when they are trying to be rational and logical, their reasoning is so flawed they look like buffoons. Lately it has made me wonder if he really believes he is dispensing wisdom upon the unwashed masses via these doses of humor. Mostly I think not.
Scott Adams I suspect is feigning the ignorance. He is a big supporter and investor in block chain technology to secure financial transactions of the future in the e-commerce world. And understanding blockchain and the encryption technology behind it is not for those whose eyes-glaze over with the mere mention of something technical like the data manipulations/truncation of Mike’s Nature Trick and the attempt to hide the (tree ring proxy) decline via a deception.
So I suspect Scott knows Climate Change is a hustle; an elaborate con-job with many, many different actors and groups, each with their own motivations adopting a common agenda under the guise of climate change — climate change “frenemies”. As a California multi-millionaire, Mr Adams undoubtedly has many Liberals in his circles of professional and social interactions, many of who he admits have abandoned him since his “denier” cartoon of 2017. But like flies to stinky poop, his money of course probably keeps them nearby, never so far away to eschew a feeding opportunity.
So Scott is merely trying to play the middle, seeming to claim the science of climate change as something he he doesn’t/can’t understand to avoid being labeled a denier that he vividly displayed his understanding of it his 2017 Dilbert cartoon. Real or not, he clearly understands CC is being used as a hustle. More to the point, he knows the many varied claims of the climate models are a hustle, as he has compared the many climate models’ “everything and anything could happen” to analogous financial hustles that use the same cherry-picking gimmicks to fool people and take their money.
Too bad blockchain is a flop:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/16/mckinseys_blockchain_warning_irks_crypto_hipsters/
“Despite billions of dollars of investment, and nearly as many headlines, evidence for a practical scalable use for blockchain is thin on the ground.”
I’ve been a Dilbert et al fan for years and thought his head was bolted on pretty securely. He reported ‘cubicle’ life quite accurately from my experience in my 1973 through 2013 work history. It is not conceivable to me he doesn’t understand the climate hoax. But after his comments today on the Catholic kids in Washington, I have my doubts. Where is his apology?
His apology is right here:
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1YpKkVnDERmxj
“Scott Adams apologizes for believing @CNN about the Covington Catholic Boys fake news. With coffee.”
It’s funny because his cartoons are concise and yet convey a lot of meaning. When he talks, he rambles and uses 100 words when a half dozen would do. I’d like to listed to some of his podcasts because he has a unique view on things, but his rambling drives me crazy so I don’t.
Honestly, I think he’s smoking too much pot.
btw, he did profusely apologize for jumping the gun.
Unfortunately, far fewer people are paying attention when retractions and apologies come, and some never seem to get the message that comes later.
We see this time and again, where someone who is dragged through the mud but later vindicated, is nevertheless tainted forever, and completely guilty in the minds of many people no matter what.
IOW…being sorry is not the same as never having been wrong to begin with.
On one side we have children, and on the other, adults.
Condemning children publicly?
From a video clip?
Everyone knows about context, and how snippets from conversations of events can be and often are not at all what they seem to be.
For an expert on persuasion, Adams seems to be very gullible.
He should be ashamed of himself.
But my guess is he has forgiven himself already, even as many are saying no one ever has to forgive a child who was smeared in a video assassination.
“For an expert on persuasion, Adams seems to be very gullible.”
Maybe he accidentally hypnotized himself.
The standard for the news media is that the retraction and apology has to be at least as prominent as the original false story.
I take note that BoingBoing also issued a corrected version of the story. What I don’t see is an apology and retraction by CNN.
Scott Adams makes it clear that the kids were smeared and that those kids behaved in a remarkably cool headed and mature manner.
That’s all the left wing media’s doing! The examples are endless.
– Superstorm Sandy was a hurricane …. Not
– GWB outed Valerie Palme …. Not
– Trump started the practice of splitting families at the border …. Not
– Harvey was due to Global Warming …. Not
– the Russian heat wave was due to global warming … Not
– the campfire was due to global warming …. Not
The list goes on and on …. but you will not find any front page apologies for them being lies. Maybe a little footnote at the bottom of a page in small italics …. naturally read AFTER you have read the diatribe.
“On one side we have children, and on the other, adults.
Condemning children publicly?
From a video clip?”
The children had MAGA hats on. Seeing that is all it takes for some people to lash out. Leftwing mindlessness and violence..
I did go to Scott Adams’ Twitter and check out his apology, and I have to say that his seems sincere and emphatic and clearly spoken.
Now let us hope he goes forward knowing he ought to be more patient and less judgmental.
That old guy lied, deliberately and repeatedly, and has now been found out.
As awful as it gets, grown man walks up to random kid and tries to destroy his life for absolutely no reason at all.
Check the top of his Twitter feed.
Adams appears to be living inside his own cartoons, where he’s the PHB
He started out as Dilbert, with Dogbert and Catbert as his evil, manipulative alter-egos. He has since morphed into becoming the ignorant PHB by claiming the climate science is too arcane for his understanding.
The Peter Principle. As long as he stuck with cartoons…..
Truly amazing how it’s not warming when ice is melting all around the planet, sea level is rising, the timing of the seasons has changed, catastrophic weather is becoming much more common and more.
And all consistent with science that is over 100 years old.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Arrhenius/arrhenius_2.php
In 1895, Arrhenius presented a paper to the Stockholm Physical Society titled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” This article described an energy budget model that considered the radiative effects of carbon dioxide (carbonic acid) and water vapor on the surface temperature of the Earth, and variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. In order to proceed with his experiments, Arrhenius relied heavily on the experiments and observations of other scientists, including Josef Stefan, Arvid Gustaf Högbom, Samuel Langley, Leon Teisserenc de Bort, Knut Angstrom, Alexander Buchan, Luigi De Marchi, Joseph Fourier, C.S.M. Pouillet, and John Tyndall.
Arrhenius argued that variations in trace constituents—namely carbon dioxide—of the atmosphere could greatly influence the heat budget of the Earth. Using the best data available to him (and making many assumptions and estimates that were necessary), he performed a series of calculations on the temperature effects of increasing and decreasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. His calculations showed that the “temperature of the Arctic regions would rise about 8 degrees or 9 degrees Celsius, if the carbonic acid increased 2.5 to 3 times its present value. In order to get the temperature of the ice age between the 40th and 50th parallels, the carbonic acid in the air should sink to 0.62 to 0.55 of present value (lowering the temperature 4 degrees to 5 degrees Celsius).”
Sure some people don’t and probably never will understand this… because they decide from the start not to.
For the rest of us it’s about as clear as all the science that backs it up.
Like the quantum mechanics that define why carbon dioxide absorbs heat and molecular oxygen and nitrogen do not creating a radiative imbalance the more CO2 we add to the atmosphere.
Svante Arrhenius was able to understand fossil fuel climate change before it was a political hot potato and before intentional idiots spent billions of dollars trying to “disprove” fundamental scientific principles and buy off politicians.
Like carbon dioxide really does absorb and re-emit electromagnetic radiation in the wavelength emitted by the Earth but not the Sun. And this is a stochastic meaning about half of that intercepted heat is going to be returned to the Earth surface.
Resulting in the very real heating that is being observed and the catastrophic impacts that are already happening.
While the idiots here are pretending it’s all just some fantasy.
This entire site would be very humorous if not for the hell that some of us are already going through.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/state-emergency-bc-wildfires-1.4803546
https://watchers.news/2018/05/14/historic-flooding-hits-british-columbia-after-record-snowpack-starts-melting-canada/
The only question I have is when are the people most responsible for this unfolding disaster going to be held accountable.
If the cause is wrong then the cure is wrong.
If the changes are natural then all the money wasted on mitigation will not be available for adaptation.
History will judge you as we now judge the eugenicists.
Remember, the climate models do not work and cannot be used to average their errors. They are in error – practically and philosophically.
Even the IPCC talks of projections, not predictions, as they cannot be used for policy making.
Are you trolling?
I would say yes.
Doug Coombes,
I think you forgot the /sarc tag. If not, your practicing what many people call cherry-picking the data. If you have even a minimal amount of objective intertest, you might want to research what Arrhenius thought about 12 years later (Arrhenius, 1908).
Exactly.
Arrhenius himself realized his own error before long.
So Doug, still think we need to heed Arrhenius?
Or only the parts of what he thought and said and believed that you agree with?
I have errands, but is is very interesting that Doug never gets around to mentioning such factors as the overlap of the absorption bands with water vapor, or that the bands are already saturated at low levels by the amount of CO2 already present, with additional amounts having progressively less and less theoretical effect.
Also convenient to fail to note that radiation is only one of the three different ways that heat and energy is transferred I the atmosphere, and that any increase in surface heating or warmth is counteracted by increased rates of radiational losses, as well as enhanced convective and evaporative processes.
And then there are them clouds…
It is really good in science to look at all the factors if you want to know what is going on.
The actual Earth is not limited to behaving according to Doug’s misapprehensions.
Like most alarmists, Doug believes that the only data that matters is the data that supports what he wants to believe.
” you might want to research what Arrhenius thought about 12 years later (Arrhenius, 1908)”
That book is here. Here is what he thought:
““If the quantity of carbonic acid [CO2] in the air should sink to one-half its present percentage, the temperature would fall by about 4°; a diminution to one-quarter would reduce the temperature by 8°. On the other hand, any doubling of the percentage of carbon dioxide in the air would raise the temperature of the earth’s surface by 4°; and if the carbon dioxide were increased fourfold, the temperature would rise by 8°. ““
The next paragraph goes-on to remark that the world was recently 2 degrees C warmer than present (which we know as the MWP)…and then that levels of CO2 are so insignificant in the atmosphere that it would take centuries to have an impact.
1908 is the English publication of that work…it was published in German in 1906 and contains the CO2 math from a 1903 Swedish technical publication. It wasn’t a claim he made in 1908. It was out-of-date by that time.
What others are referring to was his apparent subsequent refutation in 1906 which was published in German (not sure if/when it was published in English)…
“Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 Cº or +1.6 Cº respectively.” (Vol. 1, No. 2 of the Journal of the Royal Nobel Institute).
“his apparent subsequent refutation in 1906 “
Well, at least you have given a quote, and indeed a reference. But that quote continues (FOS translation):
“In a similar way, I calculate that a reduction in the amount of CO2 by half, or a gain to twice the amount, would cause a temperature change of – 1.5 degrees C, or + 1.6 degrees C, respectively.
In these calculations, I completely neglected the presence of water vapour emitted into the atmosphere.”
IOW he has just done the calc without wv. When he takes that into account:
“For this disclosure, one could calculate that the corresponding secondary temperature change, on a 50% fluctuation of CO2 in the air, is approximately 1.8 degrees C, such that the total temperature change induced by a decrease in CO2 in the air by 50% is 3.9 degrees (rounded to 4 degrees C).”
It is that number, 4°C/doubling, that he used in the 1908 book, and is the number that has been quoted since.
So it’s the water vapor that makes the difference.
Nick,
I’ve got a copy of the book and can read.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/16/claim-global-warming-causes-colder-winters-and-more-snow-in-europe/#comment-2593164
[excerpt]
Based on full-Earth-scale observations, the MAXIMUM climate sensitivity to increasing atmospheric CO2 is about 1C/(2*CO2). Thus, there is no credible catastrophic man-made global warming crisis. Furthermore, based on MacRae (2008) and Humlum et al (2013) as discussed above, actual climate sensitivity is probably much less than 1C/doubling, because atmospheric CO2 trends LAG global temperature trends at all measured time scales.
Lewis and Curry (2018) estimate climate sensitivity at 1.6C/doubling for ECS and 1.3C/doubling for TCR, using Hatcrut4 surface temperatures. These surface temperatures probably have a significant warming bias due to poor siting of measurements, UHI effects, other land use changes, data adjustments, etc.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0667.1
Christy and McNider (2017) estimate climate sensitivity at 1.1C/doubling for UAH Lower Tropospheric temperatures.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/2017_christy_mcnider-1.pdf
Both analyses are “full-earth-scale”, which have the least room for errors. Both are “UPPER BOUND” (maximum) estimates of sensitivity, derived by assuming that ~ALL* warming is due to increasing atmospheric CO2. It is possible, in fact probable, that less of the warming is driven by CO2, and most of it is natural variation.
(*Note – Christy and McNider make allowance for major volcanoes El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991+).
Practically speaking, these MAXIMUM sensitivity estimates are similar, and are far too low to support any runaway or catastrophic man-made global warming.
Higher estimates of climate sensitivity have little or no credibility and THERE IS NO REAL GLOBAL WARMING CRISIS.
Increased atmospheric CO2, from whatever cause will at most drive minor, net-beneficial global warming, and significantly increased plant and crop yields.
The total impact if increasing atmospheric CO2 is hugely beneficial to humanity and the environment.
Best, Allan
Dave,
“Truly amazing how it’s not warming when ice is melting all around the planet, sea level is rising, the timing of the seasons has changed, catastrophic weather is becoming much more common and more.”
You seemingly think living in the temporary warmth of an 10,000-15,000 year long interglacial should mean we have a never-changing Garden of Eden ….until we started burning fossil fuels. The LIA that just ended in the mid-19th Century was the coldest 400 year period of the last 11,000 years. The high solar magnetic activity of the last 80 years clearly has had global warming effects beyond simple TSI measurements, to not understand that is to not understand how the ocean warming of 1910-1945 was quite similar to the ocean warming of 1980-2015.
All you did was simply stating the warming (radiative imbalance) effect of added CO2 without acknowledging major negative feedbacks (via water vapor and clouds) that must be present in the Earth’s climate system. Strong negative feedbacks that have clearly prevented a runaway hothouse.
You ignore the inconvenient fact that proxy reconstructions of CO2 levels have lagged proxy reconstructions of global and regional temperatures at all time scales.
So the real Denier is the person who ignores inconvenient data and relies solely on the junk computer-generated climate model puppetry.
I meant Doug, not Dave. (sigh, I miss edit)
The Earth’s climate is not a univariate system determined by a trace variable. The most significant heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere is water vapor. Carbon dioxide has negligible influence by itself. Water vapor is treated as a variable that is completely dependent on carbon dioxide. That is a modeling assumption. It is not something that has been proven. Most of the so-called “carbon pollution” is actually water vapor. Water vapor contains no carbon.
Ice has been melting back since the last glacial advance, or, for 14000 years. Why are the last 40 years our fault? You posted a link to a wildfire, in a forest that depends on fire to reproduce. Is that “dangerous” climate change? I see you also posted a link to a flood. Is that the first recorded flood in BC history? Are they increasing or decreasing? You really are a useless troll. Mindless, posting links to nothing articles. As for your last dumb question, 85% of CO2 emission occur at end use therefore, because you use oil and gas. You are accountable. You are at fault. You should sue yourself.
Epic Douchebaggery.
Actually, the ice has been receding since the last glacial maximum at about 22,000 years ago. A huge amount of the Laurentide Ice Sheet had already melted by time the major pulses began ca. 14,000.
Some may see this correction as pedantic, but the climate cult has used the 14,000 date to claim that CO2 was rising before the ice sheets began to melt, ignoring that the ice sheet terminus already retreated from around Topeka, KS to Peoria, IL or from the Pyrenees to the Baltic region in Europe from 22,000 to 14,000 years ago.
This is as important to get correct as correctly stating that the modern warming has been occurring since the end of the Little Ice Age instead of the later dates that the climate cult uses.
The 1895 paper is a good example of an outdated and erroneous science dying a hard slow death. The paper was written before quantum mechanics was even first proposed and is should be regarded as purely outdated archaic science today.
https://file.scirp.org/pdf/JMP_2015120414350912.pdf
The problem with the climate cult, is they have this belief in this archaic science like an evangelical believes Moses parted the Red Sea. No amount of reasoning, logic, or evidence will convince them otherwise after a childhood of brainwashing.
As evidenced by Stokes unrelenting pedaling of “the narrative”.
The same type of mentality that freed Barabbas instead of Christ
Don’t you know? It is settled science. Arrhenius was debunked ages ago when people realised that it did not explain the ice ages at all. Another theory did.
See, in the good old days theories (hypothesis, conjectures) that did not fit the observations were considered falsified and abandoned. And such happened with Arrhenius CO2 theory, because it did not fit the observations at all.
Alas those good days are gone and after some scientific necromancy and a lot of fake data and fake(d) papers it somehow is back. But you know what?
The OBSERVATIONS STILL DO NOT FIT THE CONJECTURE!
Capice?
when ice is melting all around the planet
Nonsense. It is growing in the Antartic and now almost back to 2014, which was a maximum for decades. We recently went into that, in great detail & with colored pictures (yes peer-reviewed and recent). And I understand that we are growing again in the Artic, trend looks colder, but too early to call IMHO.
sea level is rising
In your dreams. Majority of low lying land and islands are now growing, not shrinking.
Claimed see level rise is not statistical significant. The underlying data requires post-processing, I get that, but a different way of post-processing gives falling sea-levels (again not statistical significant, obviously).
the timing of the seasons has changed,
It is the same as it was in, say, the 70’s or 80’s. Sometimes still rain in June, sometimes early summer, sometimes earliest freeze in January, sometimes in November or even Oktober.
This year snow as early as August, and in October much more, from November sustained at the correct higher altitudes. I have seen worse than that many times in the last 50 years.
The weather and the climate changes all the time. It did so decades ago and still does.
In the 1930’s it was very hot (in EU and in US) and in early 1940’s all of a sudden very cold. But then at the end of the 20’s there had also been a cold-snap. Yet this time it lasted a bit longer. Nothing new.
Early 20’s and in 50’s of 20st century the Artic ice melted alarmingly. Sounds familiar?
catastrophic weather is becoming much more common and more.
Not true again. As you should know.
Less and less severe hurricanes. etc etc etc etc
Jaap Titulaer January 21, 2019 at 1:47 pm
when ice is melting all around the planet
Nonsense. It is growing in the Antartic and now almost back to 2014, which was a maximum for decades. We recently went into that, in great detail & with colored pictures (yes peer-reviewed and recent). And I understand that we are growing again in the Artic, trend looks colder, but too early to call IMHO.
——————
please check tis link. It shows a decreasing Antarctic and Arctic.
https://ads.nipr.ac.jp/vishop/#/extent
Here are a few plots of arctic from 1979 to dec 2018
I do not understand what info you are getting Perhaps links would be good please.
Doug Coombes January 21, 2019 at 12:40 pm
Truly amazing,,,,
============
WUWT must be hitting a nerve…..that was a lot of effort to make double speak try to sound like it’s not
That name rigns a bell.
Doug, you don’t hang out over at Dr. Spencer’s website, do you?
Nothing has changed. Arrhenius estimated the average global temperature as 15C back then, no different than today. If anything, weather is less extreme but modernity allows us to better handle all kinds of catastrophes.
Are you saving for last a video showing a guy shining a light on two sealed bottles – one with CO2, the other with air – and measuring the temp of each? That’ll show ’em.
You touch a raw nerve there- I witnessed this disgraceful deceit being practised by someone with the nerve to claim to be a scientist on a BBC programme aimed at children. One of the most shameful things I have witnessed.
That’s why climate alarmists have little credibility with me and need to show exemplary proofs and not hand waving magic of the narcissistic Mann variety.
Doug, it looks like you quoted the newspapers from the 1920’s. It was all there before.
**The only question I have is when are the people most responsible for this unfolding disaster going to be held accountable.**
CORRECTION: “”The only question I have is when the people responsible for the fear mongering will be held accountable.””
What nobody seems to notice is that Arrhenius later issued a correction for some of his errors or miscalculations, but it seems more convenient to quote the errors.
Also that back then, everyone including Arrhenius knew that warming was good, and it was colder weather and climates that were bad.
He wanted to deliberately add CO2 to make the globe warmer.
+42. When selectively cherry-picking Arrhenius, people seem to conveniently forget that, or at least leave that part out.
Like most alarmists, Doug can’t refute the actual arguments that actual people are making.
Only a small handful of skeptics argue that CO2 has no affect. Doug then dishonestly pretends that this is the argument of all skeptics.
He then dishonestly pretends that if he can refute that argument, he has proven that the worst case predictions of the alarmists.
Even Arrhenius only predicted a warming of a degree or so.
No disaster there.
BTW, I notice that Doug also dishonestly tries to claim that every bad thing is caused by CO2 and CO2 alone.
I guess that once you have decided to lie, you might as well lie about everything.
NOBODY argues that CO2 has no affect.
…
Some argue that COW has an EFFECT.
I am saying CO2 has no effect. The mechanism of “greemhouse gasses” does not exist, and never observed, there’s no barrier preventing atmospheric convection.
Wait, wait! LWIR downwelling! Ahhhh more the same claptrap. Conjecture and speculation is what supports that.
Fact, all “greenhouse” gasses absorb and saturate immediatly.
Fact, all “greenhouse” gasses emissivity is immediate.
Fact, “greenhouse” gasses do not ‘continue to hold heat’ during the day or night.
(if you dispute these points… temperatures can immediately drop from a passing cloud- not to mention the 10F drop during the recent Solar eclipse. If CO2 worked as CAGW proponents claimed, that air would have remained hot.)
Fact, it’s all about solar irradiance, albedo & atmospheric dust.
The only hand humans have in the climate is changing the surface via infrastructures; buildings, asphalt, roads, bike paths, waterways/storage et cetera.
ALL heat is surface derived, all that heat convects, and there’s not a damn mechanism any “greenhouse” gas can\would\could\maybe\possibly prevent convection.
[EDIT: By atmospheric dust, I refer to clouding\cloud formations]
And furthermore, since you mention quantum mechanics, could you go ahead and find that paper written by a quantum physicist published in a QM journal, where they discuss the phenomenon and how it works in the real atmosphere? Can you even find a climate science paper that mentions “stimulated emission”, “emission directionality”, “temporary dipole moment”, or “temperature/pressure dependent absorption and radiation transfer.
It seems like this type of real climate research mostly ceased in the 1960s.
This paper from the 50s for example:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0469%281952%29009%3C0001%3AOTPDOR%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Only has 41 citations. You’ve got to wonder if climate “scientists” today are even aware of QM.
A) no one is arguing that the earth is in a general warming trend
B) virtually no one is arguing that GHC’s are not a contributing factor in the warming.
C) The question is how much of a factor GHC’s are contributing to the warming.
D) When the climate scientists get caught misrepresenting the findings and the science – ie the hockey stick, they lose credibility
The layman/skeptic may not be able to evaluate the validity of effect of GHC and climate sensitivity to doubling of GHC, but the can judge the integrity and honesty of the climate scientists in areas that they are competent to evaluate – the temp reconstructions being a primary example.
In Sum – the climate scientists need to clean up their behavior and the behavior of the pseudo climate activists who masquarate as climate scientists.
There is more than one question.
An important one is, why should anyone think warming is a bad thing on our ice age having planet, where large parts of the surface are perpetually frozen wastelands, and an even larger part is cold enough to be deadly on a seasonal basis.
Almost the whole ocean is cold enough to cause hypothermia and death, and over large parts of it a person would have to be very hardy to survive more than a few minutes immersed in the ocean.
Warmer periods are known to be more clement and friendly for life and human endeavors, colder periods worse…far worse.
Life prospers in explosive profusion on a warm wet Earth, and perishes and withers away on a cold and dry one
Then of course, there is the small detail of CO2 happening to be at the base of the entire food chain of the biosphere.
Every living thing is completely dependent on a trace gas which is perilously near the point of the extinction of all life on Earth.
Mindless idiocy ignores these facts and proclaims calamity from an amount of warming which is not only arbitrarily arrived at based on zero evidence of harm, but is dwarfed by the variations that occur in every place over every time period ever studied.
joe – the non climate scientist
Is that you Scott?
It’s the Sun, not CO2, not You.
Mr. Coombs is apparently not aware of a later paper by Arrhenius from 1908, “Worlds in the Making,” where he wrote: “By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid [CO2] in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates, especially as regards the colder regions of the earth, ages when the earth will bring forth much more abundant crops than at present, for the benefit of rapidly propagating mankind.”
I don’t see that quote tossed around much by the alarmists. He seems to be dead on, however. There’s also the Scientific American article from 1920, by Dr. Aflred Gradenwitz titled “Carbonic Acid Gas to Fertilize the Air,” and in the conclusion of which he writes, “All experiments so far made go to show that fertilizing the air by means of carbonic acid gas is a much more efficient process than even an increased fertilization of the ground.”
So it seems that while Arrhenius and his contemporaries were aware of the greenhouse nature of CO2, they deemed the mild warming derived thereof as beneficial, and complementary to the “fertilization of the air.”
Mr. Coombs also makes the statement “Truly amazing how it’s not warming when ice is melting all around the planet, sea level is rising, the timing of the seasons has changed, catastrophic weather is becoming much more common and more.”
However, no serious follower of the debate claims there is no warming. The argument is over the methodologies used to determine the extent of the warming, and whether the thermometers themselves are capable of delivering the accuracy and precision claimed by the alarmists (they aren’t, not by an order of magnitude). Sea level is rising at the same rate it has been rising for the past 150 years; there’s no speed-up of the process. In places where it appears “sea level rise” has accelerated, it’s ground subsidence that’s the cause.
By every measure, severe weather events are down: until this year, it had been more than a decade since a Cat 4 or above hurricane had come ashore on the US. Tornadoes are way down; 2018 was the first year since measurements began that there were no EF 4 or above tornadoes in the US. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, US wildfires have been trending down for the last 20 years. The cost and number of acres has increased, but those are due to increased building in wildfire areas and poor land management that allowed more and more acreage to become covered with detritus on the forest floor.
By any accounting, it’s the alarmist side making claims that ignore the real-world evidence and propose outlandish mitigation schemes that would do nothing but transfer trillions of dollars from the makers to the takers, and leave millions in the developing world to freeze to death in the dark.
Arrhenius was born in 1859….he was well aware of the LIA
More to the point – he was born and lived in Sweden, and he welcomed the expected warming. We rely on scientists to work out what will happen, not whether we are going to like the warmth. Anyway it depends on where you are.
It would be nice if we could rely on those scientists to dispute the alarmists and panic mongers who use their research to make ridiculous claims of utter devastation and even human extinction over warming so slight that one would be hard pressed to detect it on bare skin if it happened in the space of five minutes.
Or that attribute all manner of catastrophes to things for which no convincing evidence exists, such as CO2 increases causing coral to be eliminated, shellfish to dissolve, polar bears to stave to death, and the myriad other harms which are reflexively all blamed on CO2.
And anyway, it seems not to matter where one is, since the more nuanced looks at where and when warming is occurring indicate it is happening by more mild low temps, more so than by increasingly extreme high ones.
When are you going to be held accountable, Doug? You’ve never used fossil fuels?
You have to admit, it’s going to be tough holding the folks accountable for roughly 22,000 years of sea level rise. Oh wait…did you think that it was a recent thing?
Mr Coombes: But when Arrhenius was skilfully refuted by Optical Physicst Robert Wood to the agreement of his contemporaries, he reconsidered and went on to continue a useful career in other Fields.. Those in the game then were superb experimentalists who, as Rutherford said, developed better tests rather than fudge results with statistical contortions.
Arrhenius was in fact floating an idea then, an Hypothesis or guess. He was honest, unlike today’s warmista who have a destructive political agenda to satisfy. The Scientific Method, they never practise . Just forget trying their bs here……. Brett
Cue Mosher to post saying this isn’t really Mike’s Nature Trick, despite what Phil Jones says.
So, this must be Jones’ CRU Trick, which is completely different from Mike’s Nature Trick.
All thought if that wasn’t Mike’s Nature Trick, what was?
All these Tricks leave me so confused.
~¿~
“Cue Mosher to post saying this isn’t really Mike’s Nature Trick”
Steve McIntyre got in first, upthread:
“One of the reasons why “Adams simply didn’t know what decline they were hiding” is that “skeptics” consistently explain it incorrectly. Especially those skeptics who wish to use this incident as a cudgel for their concerns about temperature data.”
Other good Mann comics could involve his claims of being a Nobel Laureate, or his encouragement to Phil Jones to lie to boost his citation index or his involvement in the the award committee that nominates and shares monetary awards among themselves.
don’t forget that Mann has also won as many Olympic gold medals in track as Nobel prizes in science. Here is excellent Josh cartoon in Usain Bolt pose.
Well, besides hockey of course, he could be champ in bullshit put, rhythmic lying and possibly handball.
I’ve been watching Scott Adams on his personal journey of discovery. Let’s hope he sees this – it was obvious that he missed the point.
He has said several times that it is impossible for a layman to make sense of climate debates. I suggest that one can learn whom to trust. In this case the credibility of McIntyre is miles ahead of Mann and this is a situation where one doesn’t need to be a scientist.
Adams simply didn’t know what decline they were hiding.
One of the reasons why “Adams simply didn’t know what decline they were hiding” is that “skeptics” consistently explain it incorrectly. Especially those skeptics who wish to use this incident as a cudgel for their concerns about temperature data.
Steve – thanks for your input
I realize that you have done a great job in the past explaining the actual differences between “Mike’s nature trick” and “Hide the decline” which as I understand are two separate and distinct events.
I welcome your insight and clarification of the differences
Thanks
Steve, its good that you continue working to get these issues correctly understood.
An aside, as your site has been slow of late, any thoughts on Mann’s motivation for release of his UVA emails? Your take of the Arizona emails? Any posting to come?
Why the blip
Brilliant.
I knew what had been done but that is a nice illustration.
Was it Richard Feynman who said something like ‘If you can’t explain a scientific theory to an 8 year old you don’t understand it yourself’?
I have banged on for long and weary that the job of scientists is to make science accessible to non scientists. They are advocates for we laymen, not somehow morally and intellectually superior.
I have yet to meet a chemist or physicist who can fix a broken down car.
Engineers are something completely different, they can fix almost anything. That does not make them any better, it’s just that engineers seem to have a real grasp on where they operate within society. In my experience they are invariably enthusiastic people who love to teach 8 year old’s like me how complicated things work, in simple terms.
If you are ever in SW Florida, we can meet for lunch and you can meet a chemist who can fix, build, or grow pretty much anything.
Excellent. 🙂
I have a PhD in chemistry. I change my own oil and brake pads and plugs routinely. I’ve replaced a clutch, water pump, leaky radiator, thermostat and replaced a timing belt, oxygen sensor, CV boot, installed a stereo, 2″ hitch, added Freon to an AC and made numerous other minor repairs at various points. I’d not mind doing more, but I don’t have all of the proper tools or time necessarily.
I don’t think we’ve met.
On the other hand, my brother has several PhDs, and the family doesn’t permit him to touch power tools without supervision.
I have a brother in law with a PhD in math, and he does not know a wrench from a screwdriver.
Would never even consider trying to fix anything, or to figure out something like evaluating the claims of alarmists by doing research.
He knows what a logical fallacy is, and all about confirmation bias, but thinks people who are “scientists” are above scrutiny, and could not possibly be wrong about something that many of them proclaim to be sure of.
Useless to point out the history of scientific advancement to him.
Very intelligent, but 100% credulous, and wrong.
MarkW
My late father in law was the same.
R Shearer
Nope, not yet met, but I know where I can bring my car for servicing now. 🙂
Analytical chemist here.
Rebuilt the master cylinder when it failed, way back in Grad School. Dismounted, carted it into the lab, and had at it. Did the same for the carburetor (remember those?). Also brakes, exhaust, a valve job, on and on.
“I have yet to meet a chemist or physicist who can fix a broken down car.”
Keep up with them and they wont break. (or at least, a whole lot less)
Way off topic, but this was funny. It reminded me of an experience I had a long time ago. My (future at that time)wife and I were invited for a weekend to a lake house owned by a friend’s husband who happened to be a gynecologist. The funny thing was, they were expecting a baby and had a crib that needed to be put together. The husband could do complex and delicate surgery but did not know how to put the crib together, so we did it for him.
Now back to your regularly scheduled programming…
Forgive the repeat of an old comment.
Stopping by Yamal on a Snowy Evening
By “Guess Who”
What tree this is, I think I know.
It grew in Yamal some time ago.
Yamal 06 I’m placing here
In hopes a hockey stick will grow.
But McIntyre did think it queer
No tree, the stick did disappear!
Desperate measures I did take
To make that stick reappear.
There were some corings from a lake.
And other data I could bake.
I’ll tweak my model more until
Another hockey stick I’ll make!
I changed a line into a hill!
I can’t say how I was thrilled!
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.
Then Climategate. I’m feeling ill.
So why didn’t the Science God in the Sky excommunicate Phil Jones, banishing him to Galaxy
GN-z11. (GN-z11 in the galaxy Ursa Major is the oldest and most distant known galaxy in the observable universe… a distance from earth of 32 billion light-years. It would be p1roper punishment for ugliest violation of scientific ethics in the history of science. Of course the British House of Commons excused Phil and directed him to be reinstated to his post; Jones and his colleagues were found to be at no fault with the “rigour and honesty as scientists” limply adding however that the CRU scientists had not embraced the “spirit of openness” of the UK Freedom of Information Act. What jabberwocky…. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe, all mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe. Beware the Jabberwock!
I’ll give Adams a bit of a pass: he writes more about persuading than being right or wrong. That’s why he called Trump for presidential winner while everyone was ignoring him before the Republican primaries.
The worst part of Mann’s “trick” is that the MSM (when they even try) will go on about that it isn’t really a “trick”, just something really, really sciency that only scientists would understand, because SHUT UP DENIER!
Except for people who know actual math, such as statisticians like Steve McIntrye, who know that it is malfeasance, not just a short cut.
I like the idea of a Josh cartoon, but to properly illustrate the several varieties of trick, there needs to be a couple more. The illustration here is very specific to the WMO 1999 diagram and email – which, as has been pointed out by other side in controversy – had relatively limited circulation. Readers will also be confused into thinking that this brute splicing is the origin of Mann’s hockey stick, when it isnt.
IPCC incident is even worse than this.
How about this for a cartoon script:
Here is our tree ring data. It’s a proxy for past temperatures. [show two curves, one going up and one going down after 1950].
Trouble is. One goes down when modern thermometers go up.
– Oh. The bosses would like to use your diagram, but this one (pointing to the one going downs) dilutes the message that we want to send.
3) Purple shirt – Hmmm. If we show the data going down, we’d have to explain. I don’t want to be the one to give fodder to the skeptics.
4) show purple shirt erasing part going down.
5) Boss- now you’ve got it.
If I might suggest, put ACTUAL quotes into single quotes (or bold). Point that out in a caption.
‘I don’t want to be the one to give fodder to the skeptics.’
‘dilutes the message that we want to send.’
Either way, the Thinker is left with the realization that nothing in any of the tree ring-temperature reconstructions can or should be trusted to the precision needed for climate study. With all the problems (confounding factors) of tree ring growth, it is simply bad science to accept them as reliable temperature proxies to the precision of a few degrees C that climate science ascribes to.
Its not a question of what the people think, but what the politicians do.
So dodgy data causes the price of energy to go up and that causes a major downturn in the economy.
MJE
That is the crux of it. The Polly’s WANT to believe. Or they don’t care one way or the other. It is an issue to be ridden and an excuse to raise taxes. Pay me money and I will control the weather and save you from certain disaster.
The most egregious aspect of the original Mann (MBH 1999) and all subsequent ‘hockey stick’ graphs is the screening fallacy as elegantly described by Steve McIntyre: ‘… On the surface, screening a network of proxies for correlation to temperature seems to “make sense”. But the problem is this: if you carry out a similar procedure on autocorrelated red noise, you get hockey sticks. If you think that a class of proxy is a valid temperature proxy, then you have to define the class ahead of time and take it all …’.
?w=640
https://climateaudit.org/2012/05/31/myles-allen-calls-for-name-and-shame/
The screening fallacy is circular reasoning, in effect assuming in advance what is claimed to be an unbiased result.
Josh brilliantly illustrated the technique apropos Gergis et al 2012:
While the idiots here are pretending it’s all just some fantasy-Doug
Are you five years old Doug? We’ve always had wild fires, droughts, ice melt, ice formation, hurricanes, etc. The people at this site are doing the opposite of fantasizing. Many of them are trained in science. They don’t do talking points. They do science.
Some like me do politics. We enjoy getting into to the mud with you.
Ditto
Steve
I like your suggestion. One possible amendment would be an initial pic to explain “proxy” to the layman. So you have two lines in sync, one labelled “Temperatures”, the other “Tree rings”
1. “We can tell temperatures of the past from tree rings – when the tree ring line goes up, so does the temperature”
2. “Unfortunately these tree rings don’t work right” (Graph now showing the decline)
etc
to be accurate, one has to recognize that tree ring reconstructions go both up (Mann) and down (Briffa) in 20th century,
I don’t have Twitter. Someone may want to post this video on Scott’s Twitter Feed. It explains the issue very well.
https://youtu.be/JlCNrdna9CI
https://youtu.be/_reUlZhbU4o
https://youtu.be/XvhouGwqVt4
You should get “a Twitter”, and go to the thread and post it yourself.
Twitter is hugely influential, and has the ability to reach wide audiences that will never read a blog or visit a climate website.
Numbers matter in public forums.
Warmistas pay people to troll and flood sites and threads with comments.
Unless people, that know what is going on, respond in like numbers, the impression for people who have no idea who to believe is that almost everyone thinks one way on the subject.
How many believe something is unimportant in science, but in social media, it matters.
It’s also awash in censorship of conservative views.
It also shows no signs of correcting this attack on the first amendment
The other ‘trick’ was convincing otherwise rational people, that tree rings could be used as a proxi for temperature. Why? Because there are so many other variables that can effect tree-ring growth, that temperature is probably the very last thing being recorded.
This images comes from a forestry site, but I don’t think they realise it completely destroys the notion of treerings being used for either dendrothermology or dendrochronology….!
It did not take long to go from being a Scott Adams fan to not liking him at all, for me.
His manner has become thoroughly detestable recently.
Same! At this point he’s simply become an agitator.
I’ve been watching.
Feel sorry in a way, it seems he might be discovering that he’s been on the wrong side of history for quite some time now.
If I am listening to his periscope live, and he talks about climate, I always throw in the comment
READ ANTHONY WATTS
Don’t know if he ever sees it.
This calls for a classic music video: Hide the decline
Classic!
Hide The Decline II is making the point about the deceit even better:
Sorry, couldn’t resist. A personal favorite which brings back memories from that period: I’m a denier!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-t9k7epIk
Keep fighting the good fight!!
Excellent cartoon, Josh.
The distillation of something that appears complex, down to it’s essence.
That is the primary skill of a good (political) cartoonist.
The crying shame is that the matter ever became political in the first place.
I saw this video, it was a bit annoying. Adams’ analysis of the use of the word ‘trick’ isn’t entirely off base, people could use it innocuously in the manner he claims. But, the problem is this isn’t innocuous, it is literally a ‘trick’ to hide unfavorable data in both instances. Further, this seems to be the only portion of the climategate emails he focuses on. I recall several mentions of attempts to avoid FOIA requests by hiding behind IP, and I also recall the HARRYREADME file, and the repeated instructions to avoid incorporating all temperature data in there that might capture medieval warming. Not to mention the search for ‘missing heat’ to explain ‘the pause,’ which if I recall correctly wasn’t even widely admitted as even happening at this point by this crew. And then, if Adams is so concerned with word choice, there’s Michael Mann’s repeated use of the phrase ‘the cause’ to describe what he and others are doing. It’s supposed to be research, not a ’cause’ with an agenda. If word choice is subject to analysis, it would be nice to see Adams take a look at that one.
There’s a hell of a lot more to climategate than he seems to realize, there was no smoking gun conspiracy confirmation, but it definitely showed shenanigans a few orders of magnitude above typical, every day academic backstabbing going on. Not to mention multiple attempts to obfuscate and otherwise hide data and methods from scrutiny.
Facts and details cannot be accurately analyzed in isolation.
Having a bunch of weak evidence does not equate to strong evidence, not in every case anyway.
But there is a mountain of evidence pointing in one direction, and some of it is very strong indeed.
When Messi does a trick it is replayed all round the world. His tricks are works of wonder.
When Mann does a trick it “hides the decline”. His tricks skulk in the shadows leaving us wondering why he hides.
Except we now know.
.
❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶
❶①❶①
❶①❶① . . . The recent Slowdown – on trial . . .
❶①❶①
❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶①❶
.
If you think that “Mike’s Nature Trick” is “impenetrable”, you should see what Alarmists get up to with statistical hypothesis testing of the recent Slowdown.
Alarmists have started a legal battle, in an effort to convict the recent Slowdown of a serious crime. The crime in question is, “impersonating a real Slowdown”. This heinous crime carries a maximum sentence of 20 years of watching Al Gore “documentaries”.
The trial is about to begin. We have managed to get our “climate reporter”, Sheldon Walker, on to the jury hearing the case against the recent Slowdown. We asked Sheldon if he thought that it was “fair”, for him to be on the jury? Sheldon replied, “Is it “fair”, that Alarmists won’t admit that there was a small, temporary Slowdown, that doesn’t have any significant long-term implications for global warming”?
Sheldon is prepared to go to extreme lengths to help his friend. He has taught himself to text message with his toes, using a cellphone that is hidden in his shoe. Sheldon will be sending us text message “reports” from inside the room where the jury members are deliberating. These text message reports will be limited to 160 character per text message (Sheldon refuses to use Twitter), so Sheldon will use abbreviations where necessary.
https://agree-to-disagree.com/the-recent-slowdown-on-trial
Re:
They didn’t just truncate it and substitute a different dataset in its place.
That’s would be bad enough. In fact it’s what Hansen & Sato do for sea-level data, but Hansen & Sato use contrasting colors, and accurately label the graph, and don’t try to hide the splice points. Theirs is honest scientific malpractice:
http://www.columbia.edu/~mhs119/SeaLevel/SL.1900-2018.png
What Jones, Mann etc. did was far worse. It was dishonest scientific malpractice.
What they did was deliberately deceptive. They matched the colors of the two different kinds of data, mislabeled the graph, and even rounded the splice points to hide the fact that the graphs were spliced.
I tried to explain this to Scott Adams, via Twitter, but I don’t know whether he saw it:
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086051869909229568
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086055247762599936
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086053900128579584
https://twitter.com/ncdave4life/status/1086102451529371648
Heck..we all get overwhelmed or swamped by impenetrable arguments that occur in fields we are not experts in.
Most of us are experts in one field or another so its incredibly frustrating but who has the time to study a new field and become one of the top ten experts ?? not me, that’s for sure.
So we decide based upon other factors..the integrity of the person, the motives. Their reaction to criticism is a big tell.
I have a lot of time for A.Watts, Tallbloke and Heller
There is a fairly new podcast called Red Pilled America that covered the Climategate issue in a lot of detail and made it very simple for people to understand.
https://redpilledamerica.com/blog/demo-home/episode-7/
Interviews with the 4 main players who broke the climategate story including Anthony Watts himself.
Without having yet read all the comments (life is short…) this is brilliant ridicule.
And ridicule is nearly as effective a disinfectant as sunlight.
This cartoon is both.
*1
“I don’t blame Scott Adams for finding the issue impenetrable, it’s an obscure trick, which is why it got past peer review in the first place”
No, the reason it got past peer review is because no one seriously reviewed it. The team wanted it prominent, so it went through.
Re: “I don’t blame Scott Adams for finding the issue impenetrable, it’s an obscure trick,” and Political Junkie: “He has said several times that it is impossible for a layman to make sense of climate debates. I suggest that one can learn whom to trust.”
One of the things that frustrates me greatly is the seeming desire of some very knowledgeable skeptics to explain everything exactly correctly and in great detail. If the public and responsible politicians are to understand the issues, there has to be truncated, fundamentally accurate summaries, suitable for a sixth grader to understand. These summaries should be prefaced by a link to the more accurate and detailed study and a statement saying the basic principles of the summary are correct, but in the interest of aiding in understanding some subtleties have been simplified.
One example of an overly complicated presentation are Roy Spencer’s monthly presentation global temperature climate anomalies. 98% of the population has a zero understanding of anomalies. No doubt, they are more meaningful than raw data. However, would it really be that hard to say that January’s (2019) temperature was .X degrees lower than December’s (2018) and that January’s 2019 temperature was .X degrees higher than the 2018 January temperatures. Then the anomalies could also be attached, and it could be explained that they are more scientifically useful than the raw temperature comparison. I am not picking on Spencer; there are many, many other examples I could give.
When I wrote my post dealing with whether the Climategate inquiries exonerated Michael Mann, it drove me crazy trying to be accurate with what should have been minor details, and I have spent a lot of time dealing with climate issues. Those who don’t have hundred’s of hours to examine the issues are left rudderless.
So, I believe that Adams is about 98% correct and that the responsibility for his confusion should be placed substantially on the knowledgeable skeptics who fail to write, concise, simple explanations of their work. Of course, the intrinsic complexity of the issue as well as the efforts of warmists to muddy the issues are also substantial contributors to the problem.
I would add that my viewpoint is informed by my experience as a trial lawyer. Once you go above the heads of people, they stop listening and give up. It is the responsibility of the information provider to understand his audience and make sure the information is intelligible to that audience.
A concise and accurate summary would be to simply state that the shenanigans of those in the climate science orthodoxy is completely unscientific and undermines their credibility, and the conclusions they reach are suppositions and exaggerations that amount to confirmation bias and BS.
Unfortunately it takes a lot more work to refute nonsense than it takes to spew it, and the emotional arguments made by the alarmists cause emotional distress in the credulous masses that cannot be undone by logical refutations made calmly and succinctly, whether or not those refutations are terse and concise, or wordy, comprehensive and thorough.
If you are a trial lawyer, you may have experience in the difficulty of overcoming emotional arguments, in the minds of people who do not know who to believe, with mere logic and facts.
“A concise and accurate summary would be”
The best summary I can think of is to tell people that CO2 is increasing but temperatures are falling, which is just the opposite of what the Alarmists claim will happen, which is that temperatures will rise along with the rise in CO2. Events are not unfolding the way the Alarmists say they will unfold. Therefore, the Alarmists’ predictions are wrong.
CO2 UP, Temperatures DOWN!
Here is a short piece with cartoon that I had a friend draw:
http://safehaven.com/article/13085/political-science-dogma
Back in 2009. Cartoon in 2008.
The karma runs over the dogma every time!
Thank God. The light has dawned.
A simple cartoon, fewer words is better.
This is how we reach people.
I love Judith Curry, but she drives me crazy with tangled explanations.
Can’t win the argument with that.
Scott also remarked that the 600 million year history does not prove anything about CO2 and temperature.
But, I think he missed the point that it shows there are many other factors, stronger factors.
It seems like that could turn into a simple cartoon.
Scott Adams ought to check recent history instead of worrying about what happened millions of years ago.
If he did, he would find that over the last three years CO2 has increased, yet the global temperatures have dropped 0.6C. How does that happen if CO2 is the temperature control knob, Scott?
According to the CO2 CAGW speculation, when CO2 increases, the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere increases. But that isn’t happening, Scott. Get some of your alarmist friends to explain why their hypothesis is not reflected in reality.
Tom:
“If he did, he would find that over the last three years CO2 has increased, yet the global temperatures have dropped 0.6C.”
Indeed on UAH (V6) it has.
It has also risen 0.5C since 2012.
That is what the ENSO does.
Big EN cherry-picked to give you your -0.6
LN cherry-picked by me to give a +0.5.
It’s called natural variation.
Seems you are not aware that GMT never has and never will go up monotonously.
And certainly that 3 years or even my 6 years maketh not a long term trend capable of picking out the effect of an added ~ 0.03C as a function of CO2 forcing.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/uah6/from:1979/to:2018/plot/uah6/from:1979/to:2018/trend/plot/uah6/from:2016/to:2018/trend
And guess what?
UAH (V6) still lies above the long-term trend.
“According to the CO2 CAGW speculation, when CO2 increases, the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere increases. But that isn’t happening, Scott. Get some of your alarmist friends to explain why their hypothesis is not reflected in reality.”
No, you should understand the above.
Just as a matter of fascination.
What on Earth could make you think that a 3 year trend after a large EN would reflect the linear trend of 39 years?
What do you think the ups/downs on the above were caused by?
“Just as a matter of fascination.
What on Earth could make you think that a 3 year trend after a large EN would reflect the linear trend of 39 years?”
Well, I look at the big EN of 1998 (per UAH) and see how the temperatues fell after that big EN and I’m assuming the temperatures are going to do something similar after the big EN of 2016 because I don’t assume CO2 is the control knob.
The UAH satellite chart:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_December_2018_v6.jpg
You can always see the “natural variation” when it appears to undermine your pet hypothesis, yet the same “natural variation” magically becomes invisible when you wish to pin the charges on CO2.
Until you can show, empirically, that it is CO2 that is driving whatever trend du jour, it’s ALL “natural variation.”
“…such a nice simple graph” which happened to show exactly what they wanted it to show.
Regarding the MWP and LIA, if these were local to Europe as some climate alarmists claim, the issue this raises is that to give a flat ‘hockey stick’ would require there to have been an exactly balancing amount of cooling over the rest of the world. I suppose that’s not impossible but it does seem unlikely. When you take that into consideration, the local phenomenon argument seems less plausible.
Edward Thorpe, in “Beat The Dealer”, described the same sort of “mathematical trick” used by blackjack dealers. They peek at the next card. If it helps the dealer, they deal that card out honestly. If it HURTS the dealer, the dealer surreptitiously deals a second card, upping his own odds. The “trick ” is fraudulent and dishonest for BOTH the blackjack dealer and for Michael Mann.
There’s a word for it: fraud. Plain and simple. And who knows, perhaps those chickens wil come home to roost one day.
I am now blocked by Scott Adams for saying apologists for hide the decline, and suggesting he read three books about it that might change his mind.
https://twitter.com/SciSpen/status/1087828163219111936
(one book by Fred, a very pro climate activist Guardian/New Scientist journo)
Thats funny, should be credited to Mann as another peer review.
As a laymen who’s been following the scam since the 1990s, one thing I don’t understand is why do they need to manipulate the data? Is there a reason why we can’t compile the historical data that I see on Heller’s site (and what seems to have piqued Adams’ interest) and see the trend? I don’t understand that and would like to know why we need this entire “climate science” industry when I can just look at a chart of the past 100 years with my basic high school education and say “looks like it’s getting colder”.
A fantasy of mine would be for a Dilbert cartoon to turn the scam into a story somehow. The nature trick cartoon I saw was really good, but I’m thinking more like an arch, or a book by Adams. Adams does the creative and distribution, and the smart people like Heller, McIntyre, etc., hammer out the concepts with him. Adams would know how to illuminate this complex scam and make it palatable for normal folks. It seems with this group communicating, there’s an opportunity to put something together that can really penetrate and shine light on the scam. The impossible part would be getting Adams to do that. Taking the heat for supporting Trump is one thing, but taking on the cash-cow of the elites around would be a dangerous endeavor.
I digress, but I can honestly say I’ve probably never lost a debate with anyone on this topic, and I don’t know crap about it. I just ask questions and after penetrating beyond the inch-thick narrative they parrot, they tap out. 99.9999% of the scam-deniers’ positions are talking points, and in my experience, they’re destroyed with simple questions.
“If we’ve been warming, what should the temperature be?”
“If polar bears are in danger, why are there so many polar bears?”
“Why did the Akademik get stuck in the ice?”
“If Co2 is a pollutant, do plants consume a pollutant?”
“If it were warming, why would that be bad?”
Anyway, just my random two cents.
“what should the temperature be?”
Indeed. I use that one often an it usually shuts them up pretty quick. They try to blather on about “scientists say” and “I believe the scientists” but I have to tell them that, no, scientists don’t know what the “temperature should be” either, so can’t very well tell us what the difference between that temp and our temp now. Which means they also can’t tell us what the temp might be in the future.
Of course, not having to take math after Grade 11 helps selling the apocalypse, doesn’t it?
That’s always a good one. It’s also fun to get them to adjust the temperature for what part of the season we’re in. That drives them crazy.
I’m sure you know, there’s such a delicate process to getting a scam-denier to debate or discuss. It’s like in the movies where they are breaking into some high-tech secure facility. If they make a small mistake, the alarms go off and the entire thing is shut down. Like if you post an article from, say, Breitbart. That’s their shutdown trigger that allows them to bail out and run away. There’s such a process we have to go through to stay gentle, reel them in without triggering them to give them soft, digestible morsels of questions. It really is an art, because if you go tit-for-tat, there’s no hope to penetrate them.
In the end, it’s rewarding when you make it to the heavily guarded thinking-center, where their little brains start to ask questions and figure some things out.