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The Government-Climate Complex
Posted on July 8, 2012 by curryja | 255 Comments
by Rud Istvan
Groundbreaking science is sometimes a global collaborative effort (CERN, Higgs boson, July 4). It is more often a contact sport—especially when individuals challenge a prevailing paradigm. In 1926 the president of the American Philosophical Society called Wegener's theory of continental drift "utter damn rot". Climate science has become just such a contact sport. There is a consensus paradigm represented by 4th IPCC. There are apparent flaws and uncertainties in that consensus. The government-climate complex stifles healthy scientific discourse about them.
JC note: this is another contributed post responding to Garth Paltridge's essay (see also Andy Lacis' response).
Since climate is intrinsically important, this situation reflects deeply on the present practice of science generally, and on its interaction with government policy agendas in many other areas. Grant money flows to consensus research in a closed loop system, as Dr. Paltridge pointed out in his article "Science held hostage in climate debate" recently posted on Climate Etc. The scarier the finding, the more money flows. That incentive reinforces the closed loop. There becomes less to gain, and more to lose, by scientifically challenging the consensus even though portions of it are not backed by replicated observations.
This is deeply concerning. It is an alternative form of what President Eisenhower warned about in his last speech before leaving office. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we have a UN sponsored, agenda rich government-climate research complex seeking to reorder the world.
The thesis can be demonstrated with recent examples in three categories:
Signal to noise ratio (paleoclimate)
GCM oversensitivity
Signal to noise
Tyndall proved in 1861 that both water vapor and CO2 were greenhouse gases (Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. London 151: 1-36). There should be some anthropogenic global warming contribution in addition to natural variation in solar insolation, sunspots, ocean oscillations, galactic cosmic rays, and the like. The question is how much? This is AGW's signal to noise ratio problem. The consensus asserts a strong AGW signal. The IPCC 4th Assessment Report said natural factors could fully explain warming before about 1960 (e.g. SPM.4). The question is AGW's relative contribution thereafter, since these natural factors have not disappeared. The IPCC consensus has arguably overstated the anthropogenic signals.
An example is the infamous 'hockey stick' controversy about 'hiding the decline' in recent tree ring data (see for example Youtube 8BQpciw8suk, and the 'Hiding the Decline' commentary by Climate Etc on 2/22/11). A bigger "hostage science" issue in this saga is selection bias. Other proxies show higher Medieval Warming Period temperatures than at present. These also show that higher MWP temperatures were global rather than European. The paleoclimate signal to noise is weak to nil, rather than strong. The most recent such proxy is ikaite in Antarctica. (Lu et. al., An ikaite record…, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 325-326: 108-115 (2012)) See in general for paleoclimate proxy selectivity Lansner's Making Holocene Spaghetti Sauce by Proxy, posted on WUWT 4/11/09:
Selecting only the data that supports a hypothesis contradicts bedrock principals of science. It is a deeper problem than 'mere' academic misconduct.
There is stunningly a second example of misrepresented AGW signal to noise in the new 'Australian hockey stick' paper by Gergis et. al., Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming… , Journal of Climate (2012), formerly available at journals.ametsoc.org as JCLI-D-11-00649.1. This paper used 27 proxies but rejected 35 others using a version of the screening fallacy. The chosen 27 were then improperly detrended. This paper has been 'put on hold' (quoting the senior author) after selection bias and inability to replicate results were outed by Climate Audit. (Postings 5/31, 6/3, 6/4, 6/6, and 6/8).
GCM Oversensitivity "S"
S (equilibrium climate sensitivity) is an emergent GCM parameter for an equilibrium temperature given the standard doubling of CO2 concentration. S describes the net result of all embedded positive and negative feedbacks beyond the direct CO2 forcing itself. The mean S in all 4th IPCC GCMs is 3.2 (WG1 8.6.2.3 table 8.2). The inferred S from its consensus 3.4°C warming by 2100 under SRES A2 is 3. Only one of the several historically constrained PDF estimations with a distinct mode has a likely value for S as high as 3 (WG1 10.5 Box 1).
As an example of 'hostage science', Nic Lewis questioned the PDF "S≈3" estimate by Forest et. al. on Climate Etc, posted 6/25/12. Not only has the original source data been 'lost', pre-processed versions provided two other papers are inconsistent and contradictory. The lesser problematic of the two suggests the probable S is 1, not 3. Forest et al. are presumably preparing a response to the issues that have now been raised.
Nic Lewis is probably correct in his suspicions. There are a number of ways to infer climate sensitivity from observation without relying completely on GCMs, and a number of results. They point to sensitivity less than 3, most likely to something between 1.1 and 1.7. Details are covered in a separate comment, "What Climate Sensitivity says about IPCC Consensus Science".
Asking why this is so leads to a subtler example of 'hostage science'. Sensitivity comes nonlinearly from net positive feedback. The two main feedbacks are water vapor and clouds. For purposes of this comment, consider just the IPCC water vapor/lapse rate consensus. GCM's produce a roughly constant relative humidity result at all altitudes under greenhouse gas forcing [i]
The question is whether nature does. Mean constant relative surface humidity (at least over oceans) is generally correct.[ii] Upper troposphere relative humidity (UTrH) is important for radiative balance, but more difficult to observe and admittedly less certain. 4th IPCC 3.4.2.2 rejected all UTrH radiosonde data as unreliable without discussing the declining UTrH it shows [iii], [iv]:
The IPCC AR4 then noted and rejected (because of possible ENSO influences) a satellite study showing UTrH decreasing away from the tropics, and especially in the Southern Hemisphere.[v] It noted and then ignored another (below). It did not even note two other satellite studies touching on UTrH that existed at that time. [vi], [vii] One of these showed a GCM systemically overestimated UTH. The IPCC consensus basically relied on only one satellite study.[viii] That study used HIRS to show that specific humidity was increasing, in a way roughly consistent with constant UTrH from one AGCM. IPCC 3.4.2.2 ended by saying, "To summarize, the available data do not indicate a detectable trend in upper-troposphere relative humidity." Especially when selection bias makes the contrary data unavailable.
The IPCC AR4 ignored the satellite study by Minschwaner and Dessler, Water Vapor Feedback in the Tropical Upper Troposphere, J. Climate 17:1272-1282 (2004). This paper showed interannual specific humidity increasing with temperature, but at a rate much lower than required by constant UTrH.
ERA-Interim shows UTrH declining since at least 1990.[ix]
NOAA-15 showed declining UTrH at the time the 4th IPCC consensus was being formed. [The decline is real even after diurnal drift correction. The satellite shows declining UTrH on both the descending and the ascending nodes of its polar orbit.] In fairness, this paper itself was published after 4th IPCC.
John et. al., Clear-sky biases in satellite infrared estimates of upper tropospheric humidity and its trends, J. Geophys. Res. 116: D14108 (2011).
The IPCC AR4 'consensus' about roughly constant UTrH suggests selection bias. A lot of data now indicates the conclusion is wrong, and a reason for GCM oversensitivity.
My previous Climate Etc post on crop yields and NRC's 2011 booklet Warming World revealed a 'deliberate' misrepresentation, and a deeply flawed statistical study published in PNAS. Since the original data were not available to PNAS reviewers (an abridged portion was only made available later), peer review could not have caught the flaws. This shows yet again why original data should be archived, and made available for scrutiny and results replication. Even though that is official policy for US grant purposes, in climate science it appears often honored in the breach. Nic Lewis' effort to obtain the Forest data is just one of many examples. See Boulton's recent comment in Nature 486: 441 (2012).
Rather than provide additional consequence examples (there are many in my next book), it suffices to quote Why We Disagree about Climate Change, (2009). Author Michael Hulme is now a visiting fellow at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Studies at University of East Anglia:
"The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. Solving climate change should not be the focus of our efforts any more than we should be 'solving' the idea of human rights or liberal democracy. It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come."
In other words, the science of climate change doesn't really matter. The mere idea is useful for 'political, social, economic, and personal projects'. Dr. Garth Paltridge is correct. True climate science has been 'taken hostage' by the government-research complex for political and personal agendas. We need to take it back.
[i] 4th IPCC WG1 8.6.3 treats the physical processes involved in climate sensitivity. 8.6.3.1 deals with water vapor and its lapse rate (how it declines as altitude increases). 'To a first approximation, GCM simulations indeed maintain a roughly unchanged distribution of RH under greenhouse gas forcing.' [Emphasis added] 8.6.3.1.2 concludes that 'New evidence from both observations and models has reinforced the conventional view of a roughly unchanged RH response to warming.' [Emphasis added] Box 8.1 further addresses 'Upper-tropospheric humidity and water vapour feedback' because it is so important. The Box simply reinforces the IPCC 'consensus' about constant UTrH saying, "Overall, since the TAR, confidence has increased…" about the roughly constant relative humidity produced by GCMs, which is one source of oversensitivity.
[ii] 4th IPCC WG1 3.4.2.1 says 'The global trends in near surface relative humidity are very small'…'Over the ocean, the observed surface specific humidity increases at 5.7% per 1°C warming, which is consistent with a constant relative humidity. Over land, the rate of increase is slightly smaller (4.3% per 1°C), suggesting a modest reduction in relative humidity as temperatures increase, as expected in water limited regions.' This obviously does not mean that RH itself is ever constant. It changes all the time, just like temperature.
[iii] NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis (global average) data is available at ESRL.NOAA.gov
[iv] This trend was analyzed in a more sophisticated fashion by Paltridge et. al., Trends in middle- and upper-level tropospheric humidity from NCEP reanalysis data, Theor. Appl. Climatology 98: 351-359 (2009)
[v] Bates and Jackson, Trends in Upper Troposphere Humidity, Geophys. Res. Lett. 28: 1695-1698 (2001)
[vi] Buehler et. al., A Simple Method, J. Geophys. Res. 109: D12103 (2004)
[vii] Gettelman et. al., Climatology of UTrH, J. Climate 19: 6104-6121 (2006)
[viii] Soden et. al., The Radiative Signature of Upper Troposphere Moisture, Science 310: 841-844 (2005).
[ix] ERA-Interim is produced by a 34-nation cooperation, ECMWF, based in the UK. It extends from the present back to 1979, so does not incorporate more error prone earlier radiosonde information. It excludes UTrH for pressures below 300 (depending on sonde instrument) and for extreme cold, to further remove instrumentation and calibration problems. It admixes and integrates satellite data including HIRS, which became available in 1979. Known quality issues do not include UTrH. See Ecmwf.int/research/era/qualityissues.
JC comment: Rud Istvan emailed me this post several days ago, we have gone back and forth on this several times and I have done some light editing. Rud is author of the forthcoming book Arts of Truth. This is a guest post, and the views presented here are those of Rud Istvan.
255 responses to "The Government-Climate Complex"
Rob Bradley | July 8, 2012 at 8:25 pm |
Wow–new voices are joining the debate that might make 'global lukewarming' (a Knappenberger term) the right answer.
omanuel | July 9, 2012 at 12:50 pm |
No, Rob, there is no middle ground – 'global lukewarming' – between opposing views about stability of the fountain of energy that Copernicus discovered at the center of the Solar System in 1543.
http://tinyurl.com/7qx7zxs
Opposing views were published back-to-back in Science over thirty-five years (< 35 yrs) ago, in January 1977 [1]. The Sun is either:
A. The giant hydrogen-fusion reactor that Fred Hoyle and post-modern scientists promoted in lock-step fashion after 1946 [2,3] – an abrupt U-turn that consensus scientists adopted without debate or discussion [4] – or
B. The iron-rich remains of the supernova that made our elements and continues to be heated by neutron repulsion in the Sun's pulsar core [5].
Response of world leaders and leaders of the scientific community to evidence of purposeful deception in the 2009 Climategate emails and documents helped elucidate the reason why false theoretical models replaced experimental observations on atomic/stellar cores after 1945.
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-418
1. "Strange xenon, extinct superheavy elements and the solar neutrino puzzle", Science 195 (January 1977) 208-209. http://www.omatumr.com/archive/StrangeXenon.pdf
2. Fred Hoyle, "The chemical composition of the stars," Monthly Notices Royal Astronomical Society 106, 255-59 (1946)
3. Fred Hoyle, "The synthesis of the elements from hydrogen," Monthly Notices Royal Astronomical Society 106, 343-83 (1946)
4. Fred Hoyle, Home Is Where the Wind Blows [University Science Books, 1994, 441 pages], pages 153-154
5. "Neutron repulsion," The Apeiron Journal 19, 123-150 (2012) http://tinyurl.com/7t5ojrn
Greg House | July 8, 2012 at 8:32 pm |
by Rud Istvan: "Tyndall proved in 1861 that both water vapor and CO2 were greenhouse gases (Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. London 151: 1-36). "
No, this is not correct, unfortunately this is a widespread misinterpretation of what in fact Tyndall proved.
He did not prove that "both water vapor and CO2 were greenhouse gases". He only proved that they are capable of absorbing and re-emitting some portion of IR radiation, but this fact alone does not make them "greenhouse gases" in terms of increasing the surface temperature, at least to any significant extent. He thought they would increase the surface temperature by trapping IR radiation like the glass roof of a greenhouse, but neither he nor his followers bothered to prove it and this misconception was debunked by professor Wood in 1909 (http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html). It was simply a false hypothesis by false association.
Please note that the Wood's experiment debunks a notion about warming by "trapping radiation" not only in a real greenhouse, but in general as well.
Spartacusisfree | July 9, 2012 at 4:47 am |
The problem is the assumptions made by climate science about the nature of thermalisation. 115 years' ago, J Willard Gibbs introduced the Principle of Indistinguishability: molecules in an assembly have no memory. Those who teach that trapped photon energy decays over 1000 collisions, the average time an isolated molecule takes to re-emit the photon, teach false physics. This cannot happen because of quantum exclusion..
Because a random thermal emission of a photon occurs simultaneously with absorption, there is on average no local thermalisation so long as the energy can be transferred at near the speed of light to sinks; heterogeneous interfaces and space. So, atmospheric GHGs probably act as a pseudo-scattering energy transfer medium with warming mainly at clouds. The rider to this argument is that above the cloud level, thermalisation rapidly decreases so DOWN emissivity falls to zero at TOA.
That means you don;t need to claim imaginary 'back radiation' from the lower atmosphere bounces back to make the Earth's surface emit at the S-B black body level in a vacuum, a concept disproved experimentally for over a Century. But by eliminating the imaginary ~40% energy increase 100[333 – 238.5]/238.5, it predicts very little if any CO2-AGW!
A rider is that the thermalisation in the 'PET bottle' experiment is from pseudo-scattered IR absorbed in the walls. Nahle's recent Mylar balloon experiment, which shows no detectable warming when you reduce the PET thickness from ~40 mil to ~ 3 mil is attractive but I would like to see it done properly before accepting it as definitive proof of indirect thermalisation.
[The difference of the IR spectrum from clouds and clear sky is a very strong case for the above argument.]
DocMartyn | July 8, 2012 at 8:40 pm |
A very nice and measured essay.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 per doubling maybe :) | July 8, 2012 at 8:41 pm |
Now let's wait for the hatchet job on Rud from the faithful.
A fan of *MORE* discord | July 8, 2012 at 8:54 pm |
I'm waiting for Fanny to show up with a pocket full of smilies and a link to a 1961 paper on rates of beard growth to refute this.
Steven Mosher | July 9, 2012 at 12:10 am |
No hatchet Job required. He scored a bullseye on his left foot by referencing Lanser on the Holocene ( probably worse than anything Mann has ever done) pats himself on the back ( joe Romm style) in his consequences section. section 2 was a nice start.
Final grade:
1. AGW signal to noise: D
2. GCMs: C
3. Consequences: F
kim | July 9, 2012 at 8:35 am |
Driving Miss, moshe.
1. Natural forces act globally, heh. Go, baby warming, go.
2. Modelers are trying to keep their toys on circular tracks on the ceiling.
3. John Boulton and Nic Lewis, together again.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 per doubling maybe :) | July 9, 2012 at 9:25 am |
He could have picked any number of scientists on the Holocene. The glaciers melt, it gets warmer where the glacier melt, pick locations that started at or near glaciers you get different results than if you pick areas that were not at or near glaciers. I thought it was a pretty good lead in to models. If the models were skillful, they would consider the location of the multi-year snow and ice that was once part of the landscape before man expanded his habitat.
So which had more impact on global mean temperature, CO2 or man changing the use of somewhere between 10 to 30 million kilometers of land since 1400AD? Remember, a thermometer at the edge of the Arctic circle would be warmer if the people recording the readings were industrious.
stevenmosher | July 9, 2012 at 1:57 pm |
Interesting test you propose for model skill. BTW land use changes are becoming are part of climate simulations. see Hyde 3.1
"So which had more impact on global mean temperature, CO2 or man changing the use of somewhere between 10 to 30 million kilometers of land since 1400AD?
Lets take 30 million sq kilometers as a given.
148 million sq land km. 360 Ocean
so you are talking about changing 1/5 of the land area and about
6% of the total area.
What changes concern you the most?
How does each change the radiation budget.
Mainly the ice balance. That is not as much a radiant budget issue as a thermal mass balance issue. Ocean temperatures are less impacted by the lw radiant forcing as much as just good old thermo.
Lots of assumptions there for a skeptic.
1. you talk about land use change. Turns out to be 6% of the globe
biggest effect would be albedo, deforestation drives albedo up.
tilling fields, .. harder to say. Then of course you drop this discussion.
2. Ice balance. You are not clear what you are talking about and
the human impact ( from land use ) on "ice balance"
3. SSTs: well you make a interesting unfounded claim. I suspect
it won't be provable in a blog comment, blog post, or a
years worth of blog posts. Some real science and math is
required. But I'm open minded to all possibilities. When you
have something ready to publish, send it along. data and code
or dont waste my time.
"Lots of assumptions there for a skeptic." Not really, I try to avoid as many assumptions as possible.
There is more to energy than albedo. How much energy is actually contained is more important. A clover field may have the same albedo as forest of 30 meter trees, different soil temperatures and moisture retention though.
Weather dumps snow kinda randomly. Before man was capable of clearing mega land, it had a better chance of making it through a season. If it did, that would change the weather a bit. Not as many stationary highs and lows. Ice sheets could advance, retreat. Farmland is pretty stationary.
or dont waste my time." Once I get it nail down, no problem. There are other ways of balancing thermal systems though. You can use a variety of thermal boundary layers, salinitiy/thermoclines, moist air boundaries and work out. I just choose a true surface frame of reference, since I tend to spend most of my time there. :) Don't worry, I still get 1.5C just below the tropopause, just the impact at the surface is not uniformly distributed.
Dave Springer | July 9, 2012 at 9:48 pm |
Actually the biggest effect is changes in water use which has a large immediate impact on the temperature close to the ground. But I don't expect you to know that. Or anything else, really.
cui bono | July 8, 2012 at 8:52 pm |
Lost data, disorganised databases, IPCC cherrypicking….
Reset. Start again. Disregard *all* previous papers and only accept those from now on which are properly documented, with confirming and refuting evidence fully available.
Latimer Alder | July 9, 2012 at 2:07 am |
@cui bono
I learnt this at age 6.
'Show your working'
When did climatologits get given the licence to forget it? And why do other climatologits allow it?
If they walk like shysters, talk like shysters, act like shysters and only associate with others who act the same….it is very difficult to persuade oneself that their work is of deep and robust integrity.
With so many shysters about, can't we use them as a renewable energy source?
Tom | July 10, 2012 at 6:41 pm |
http://news.goldseek.com/GoldenJackass/1341518400.php
yes Latimer. I suggest you join me in encourage all people ( skeptics and non skeptics ) to show their work. That would me people like scafetta who refused to share code with McIntyre for example. and others as well.
Lets see if you dare call everybody out who doesnt share these things.
lets you and I agree to spend some time on WUWT asking for code and data from people.
Latimer Alder | July 10, 2012 at 9:28 am |
Fine with me, Steve. On hols right now, but lets do it next week when I get back to regular attendance
Everybody – whoever they are – should show their work. Those who don't/can't are surely nutters or charlatans or both.
And those who are being paid by the public are likely fraudsters as well. In UK 'obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception' (example – being paid for work you haven't done) is a criminal offence. It seems that climatology is a 'target rich' environment for such charges.
Re Joe Lalonde…I gave up asking a year or so back. There is no substance behind his random witterings. Martin Lack the same.
David Wojick | July 8, 2012 at 9:15 pm |
As nice as this sounds, I see no way to take back climate science. The Greens own it. I think the scare will always be with us and the most we can hope for is to keep it at bay.
Scare is right, Eli Rabbet hops in on another thread with "AT 35C WETBULB ALL DIE!!" I guess CO2 has some Saran Wrap properties I was unaware of. Of course, when I was in the SF area there were some pretty neat recreational substances available :)
bob droege | July 10, 2012 at 10:10 am |
Captain Dallas,
Perhaps you can tell me how any mammal without access to air conditioning can cool their body with a wet bulb temperature of 35C?
Let's not be ignorant of human physiology.
Though, we will probably get to a Texas with no cows before we have wetbulb temperatures of 35C.
I think the hightest recorded wet bulb temperature is 30 or 31C so we may some time.
The combination of high temperature and high humidity is life threatening.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 per doubling maybe :) | July 10, 2012 at 10:36 am |
Bob they couldn't, but what would it take to have an "average" 35C wet bulb temperature? Here is a hint, first 35C surface temperature with plenty of water to saturate the air. To hold that saturated vapor what would have to happen to the density of the air? Exactly how are you going to contain that heat?
Most climate scientists look at the saturation vapor pressure and say, "WOW, that just depends on temperature!!" But what is funny is that 100% relative humidity, saturation, kinda depends on the density and specific heat capacity of the dry air. CO2 don't stop convection, actually, it enhances it :)
Pekka Pirilä | July 10, 2012 at 11:17 am |
What are the highest wet bulb temperatures in the present climate? Checking a few locations for today tells that they are close to 26 C. That cannot be the absolute maximum, but probably not very far from that. Thus 35 C is indeed extremely high even for limited areas of maximal wet bulb temperature.
I don't understand your arguments related to density and specific heat capacity of dry air as neither of those has any obvious major influence but then – neither is needed as so high wet bulb temperatures seem to be possible only in the most extreme scenarios, which are very bad for many other reasons as well.
Pekka, "I don't understand your arguments related to density and specific heat capacity of dry air as neither of those has any obvious major influence.." It has to do with how they come up with 35C which appears to be that there is no limit imposed by the density of the atmosphere.
You checked today and found a few around 26C. What would be the maximum sustainable for say a few hours over the ocean and over the dead sea? Now why are they different?
hunter | July 8, 2012 at 9:34 pm |
No, climate science will do OK. Evolutionary science survived eugenics just fine. Climate science sill survive AGW.
David Wojick | July 9, 2012 at 8:49 am |
Maybe in 20 years, but for now AGW has a massive constituency within science, the US government and the public. AGW proponents manage the $2 billion/year USGCRP and there is no easy way to change that. AGW is still Federal policy. Movements have inertia and AGW's is huge. At best I see it becoming a no-action, permanent issue, like gun control.
Bad Andrew | July 9, 2012 at 9:00 am |
I agree with David. And with people like the Climate Etc Warmer Trolls infesting the Warmer side, you have the problem of trying to deal with irrationality .
pokerguy | July 8, 2012 at 10:17 pm |
I think his is too pessimistic, David. It won't be a "taking back" but gradually there will be more and more defections as the AGW hypothesis becomes ever more weakened. At some point there will be enough defections that they can no longer be ignored by the press..
ONce the MSM decides that the real story isn;t CAGW anymore, but possible fraud among the establishment scientists, all hell will break loose. Can't happen soon enough for me.. That's gong to be a big story, and they're going to want to cover it. Even the NYT"s/
tomf0p | July 8, 2012 at 11:16 pm |
Pokerguy, the problem is that there has probably been little that truly deserves to be called fraud, of the kind that the MSM would see as offering a pulpit opportunity. There has been a great deal of deception, but the deceived have been willingly deceived, and they include most of the MSM. I don't see the MSM 'breaking all hell loose' to tell the world how bone-headedly gullible it has been for a quarter of a century.
The key fraud is the false claim that cloud with smallest droplets have highest albedo so miraculously cool the Earth. It was done here: http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sgg/singh/winners4.html
Under the cover of the eulogy, NASA switched partially correct physics Twomey acknowledged could not explain the behaviour of thicker clouds, with an entirely false 'surface reflection argument.
The background is the use of Sagan's aerosol optical physics in climate science: it fails to take into account the second optical effect first revealed here [Page 5]: http://www.gewex.org/images/feb2010.pdf
This error affects all derived satellite data. The climate models offset exaggerated warming by using double real low level cloud optical depth with the imaginary net AIE doing the fine tuning.
David Wojick | July 9, 2012 at 11:19 am |
Spart, this sounds like a scientific disagreement, not a fraud. Much of what some skeptics call fraud is just scientific disagreement. No newspaper is going to report this sort of stuff as fraud.
Spartacusisfree | July 9, 2012 at 11:37 am |
i believe it was done deliberately to keep the imaginary 'cloud albedo cooling' effect in AR4, 44% of claimed AGW.
There is no such physics as any competent scientist should be able to ascertain. Instead, a second process involving large droplets gives high albedo: the Mie scattering asymptotes at 0.5.
Go through the literature and there are plenty of references to this unexplained effect, the best being here [page 5]: http://www.gewex.org/images/feb2010.pdf
tomf0p | July 9, 2012 at 7:34 pm |
"No newspaper is going to report this sort of stuff as fraud." Still less, see it as a 'pulpit issue' of sufficient magnitude to divert its readers' attention from the obvious implication that its previous quarter-century's coverage of climate had consisted of doe-eyed credulousness.
Faustino | July 9, 2012 at 1:44 am |
In Australia, the ALP, which is in government with Greens support, has begun to wake up to the fact that they are, in fact, the enemy. Vitriol has been pouring forth: The Australian headline today gives a flavour of what's happening: "Labor powers plotting all-out assault on Greens."
Carbonicus | July 9, 2012 at 2:04 pm |
Climate science will take itself back, precisely for the reason you stated: "greens own it". All we need to do is continue to do exactly what we're doing:
1) produce peer reviewed, objective research that withstands empirical evidence/scrutiny; and
2) make them continue to own it. when the empirical continues to diverge from their predictions more and more over time, by making them own it their work will be revealed as political science, not climate science, we we will thereby get it back.
Put another way: when the proposition that anthropogenic CO2 causes Thermaggedon is as laughable as the idea that the earth is the center of the universe, you'll get back climate science. Worked for Copernicus and Galileo. Same here.
I agree, but it will be a long time coming. Science changes slowly, especially when new ideas conflict with established ideologies. Galileo was 50 years after Copernicus and it was another 100 years or so after Galileo before the astronomy community finally all changed to the sun centered view.
We tend to date scientific revolutions from the time the idea was born, but that is not how it happens. Natural climate variability is an emerging new field and new fields emerge slowly. Fortunately they also take off after a few decades. See my study on this:
http://www.osti.gov/innovation/research/diffusion/PopModeling.pdf
I believe it was Planck who said that one's new ideas will only be accepted when your grad students become journal editors. Today the climate journal editors are all Greens.
Robert | July 9, 2012 at 3:25 pm |
The problem is that you are trying to deny basic facts about the physical world. Empirical reality is going to continue to humiliate you at every turn.
If the Browns want to take control of science, a prerequisite for success is going to be establishing control of the government so that you can use the power of the government to suppress the facts — as we are seeing now in NC and the government's attempt to forbid state employees to plan based upon the science.
You Browns have never succeeded in winning a war of ideas without your favorite weapon, state terror. In the absence of that, scientific truth will win out.
"Browns"? Very funny.
Vassily | July 10, 2012 at 2:41 am |
For the Greens to take control of climate science, the prerequisite was establishing control of government to be able to use the power of the government to suppress the facts – hiding data, skewing peer-review, dedicating funding to alarmism, etc. An approach that has truly succeeded.
Robert advises that Browns adopt the same approach of dishonesty and state terror if they want to prevail. The idea that there are some people in this world who actually want to know the truth, simply doesn't cross his faith-based, far-left mindset.
Excellent summary of the problem. This is an eloquent explanation of why AGW is more of a social mania than an effort to apply science.
Jim D | July 8, 2012 at 9:46 pm |
Just looks like a post from a blog spectator. Nothing new here for anyone who has been reading Climate, Etc.
I will just repeat what I said last time someone invoked Eisenhower on the Macchiavelli thread.
But I think the worst of all is the industrial-scientific complex that distorts science to suit rich profit-making industries such as tobacco and fossil fuels by suppressing regulations aimed at protecting the public.
hunter | July 8, 2012 at 11:19 pm |
That DDT ban worked out so well.
Jim D | July 8, 2012 at 11:47 pm |
I read up on that since you mentioned it. Initially there was some trouble in Nixon's new EPA due to internal agribusiness interests trying to make it seem safe, so thanks, another good example. Thankfully that didn't last long and it was banned in 1972.
Mike Jackson | July 9, 2012 at 5:39 am |
And in what way exactly was it not "safe", bearing in mind that it was designed to kill pests?
And how many millions have died – needlessly – of malaria since simply to make Rachel Carson and her acolytes feel good about themselves?
That's just another piece of faith-based right-wing zealotry.
Read up on it.
hunter | July 9, 2012 at 10:26 am |
You have really managed to miss the point.
Brief googles are not your friend.
Hey, Jim, I don't know what you're reading, but Ruckelshaus' own EPA scientists told him DDT wasn't a danger to humans or wildlife when used properly in a limited fashion. But he went against science and with politics (thanks, Rachel Carson).
As a result, tens of millions are dead in Africa who would have been saved by DDT.
A friend also in the environmental industry with me grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Romania. As a small child of perhaps 2, he accidentally drank a vial containing about 4 ounces of DDT. Had his stomach pumped but never got the least bit sick. He is 55 and lives in the U.S. and is in perfect health. INGESTED 4 ounces of DDT, Jim.
Again, that's utter nonsense.
Try an actual history book sometime. A few facts to get you started:
* DDT is not harmless.
* The EPA never had any power to ban DDT use in Africa.
* The eventual global DDT ban had a specific exception for anti-malarial use.
These are basic facts, broadly known and accepted outside the faith-based community of the far right.
Carbonicus,
What the enviro-extremists have to gloss over is that after the US ban, it became largely unavailable in places like Africa. They hope to sell the fiction that since it was not banned in Africa by the EPA, it was available in Africa.
I thought the whole point was that the ecomentalists got the World Bank (on the strength of the EPA finding) to tie funding to the abandonment of DDT use – as good as a ban to most of the malaria-afflicted countries?
Edim | July 9, 2012 at 5:23 am |
Yes, that's very bad, the industrial-scientific complex (plus governmental) that distorts the science (AGW) to suit the rich.
chris colose | July 8, 2012 at 10:13 pm |
This post is fraught with errors, speculation, and logical fallacies. This seems to be on the winning end of how much junk one can cram into another "anti-IPCC" post, and there's a lot of them here.
The "science" of the post begins with a provocative statement that "…The IPCC consensus has arguably overstated the anthropogenic signals." This is just an assertion, and it's not justified because the climate science community has accounted for things like solar, volcanic, and other natural causes. If you think these estimates are substantially off, it would take a compelling argument to make that case. Instead, Rud takes the default skeptic detour into tree rings, and the hockey stick, as if that ever gets old. More importantly, it has absolutely nothing to do with the attribution of recent warming. This is then supplemented with a vague statement like "Other proxies show higher Medieval Warming Period temperatures than at present."
It's difficult to know what to make sense of this. Higher what? Higher temps? Higher precip? Higher isotopic values that are up for debate on how to interpet? Do the timescales match up? I have little doubt that some areas were as warm or warmer at MWP than at present. Not too many people would argue that. Showing a proxy that suggests this is the case is just a distraction. It also makes little sense to say "…Selecting only the data that supports a hypothesis contradicts…" Who is selecting it? And what's the hypothesis? Obviously the "warmer MWP" proxies were published or you wouldn't be arguing the point, so I don't see the big deal here.
The next paragraph confuses a mistake with 'misrepresentation.' The mistake has been acknowledged by the authors, the implications not clear yet, and the significance for 'AGW' is zero.
The entire climate sensitivity discussion rests on a blog post complaint by Nic Lewis, which I have admittedly not followed in detail. Evidently, some data over a half decade old has been lost, and so naturally everyone is yelling fraud and conspiracy and 'bad science.' Unfortunately, this happens in all sorts of fields, but more relevant is that the Forest work is interesting but not really important on its own. There are hundreds of papers looking at the climate sensitivity question and from multiple angles. There's also a large literature engaging in the more esoteric details of how one should select a prior distribution. This is discussed in a number of review papers (e.g., Knutti and Hegerl, 2008) and has involved a loto f work over the last decade. Observational evidence alone isn't a very good constraint on climate sensitivity for a number of theoretical and practical reasons, and this is well documented, resulting in the use of paleoclimate and the use of a large network of perturbed physics ensemble or multi-model ensemble based studies, upon which observational constraints are a powerful tool in making these studies work. But Rud dismisses all of this and just speculates that Nics speculations are probably correct.
Rud's water vapor feedback discussion reflects an ignorance of the literature, which is quite clear that the radiosondes/re-analysis products are not very useful for detecting upper tropospheric humidity trends. And the results vary depending on which re-analysis product you look at. Garth Paltridge simply didn't bother to look at other products or understand the full caveats of his own study, which is why the scientific community doesn't view it as a very big contribution. That happens all the time in science. Dozens of papers come out every week, and not all of them are very useful. The Minschwaner and Dessler paper, for example, (which WAS cited in the AR4 report) is more about interannual fluctuations at high up in the atmosphere (not a vertically integrated water vapor feedback measure), and its results are not extremely surprising.
Again, no big deal, but a nice illustration of how non-specialists like Rud can take results they don't understand, can intentionally or unintentionally spin the importance of the results, and blog about it to misinform others.
WebHubTelescope | July 8, 2012 at 10:51 pm |
I agree. This post is another example of FUD served up with a big bowl of word salad.
cc,
Since the consensus has to hide declines, lose data and practice historical illiteracy to still find itself unable to find an actual global warming signal, I would suggest that your side is the one that needs to review its problems and just how little (after all the billion$) you really understand.
omnologos | July 9, 2012 at 2:50 am |
51 years after Ike's warnings against Federal money diabolically endangering science (see my other comment) we can only start asking whose money funds Mr Colose's entrenched, irrational attitude to climate science.
Hank Zentgraf | July 9, 2012 at 2:27 pm |
Chris, it would help if you would take a more public position regarding the Hockey Stick. Show an analysis supporting the math and the selection of what data to publish and what to omit. Either that or join the skeptics and denounce the IPCC for publishing fraudulent science.
Brandon Shollenberger | July 9, 2012 at 10:49 pm |
Chris Colose shows how easy it is to criticize things if you don't bother to read them:
This is then supplemented with a vague statement like "Other proxies show higher Medieval Warming Period temperatures than at present."
It's difficult to know what to make sense of this. Higher what? Higher temps? Higher precip? Higher isotopic values that are up for debate on how to interpet? Do the timescales match up?
It would be "difficult to know what to make" of something like, "higher Medieval Warming Period temperatures" if one didn't bother to read the word "temperatures." I get it would be difficult to know what Rud Istvan was saying is higher if one didn't read the four words immediately following "higher." I also get, as Chris Colose says:
Again, no big deal, but a nice illustration of how non-specialists like [Chris Colose] can take [simple sentences] they don't understand, can intentionally or unintentionally spin the [their obvious meaning}, and blog about it to misinform others.
By the way, Chris Colose talks about other people spinning things, but there could be no better spin than:
Obviously the "warmer MWP" proxies were published or you wouldn't be arguing the point, so I don't see the big deal here.
He implies since "'warmer MWP' proxies" get published, there is no selection issue. Apparently the publication of some data with a particular result means all data with that result is published as readily as data with some other set. And apparently the fact certain data get published means multiproxy temperature reconstructions have no meaningful selection issues. What publication of data has to do with whether or not the data actually gets used is beyond me, but apparently not beyond Chris Colose.
You heard it here first! Paleoclimatic temperature reconstructions are fine. There are no archiving issues! After all, some people have published some data!
Jim Cripwell | July 8, 2012 at 10:21 pm |
Rud notes "There are a number of ways to infer climate sensitivity from observation without relying completely on GCMs, and a number of results."
What Rud fails to state is that there is no empirical data whatsoever to support any particular number claimed to be the total climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2. All the numbers quoted are based, in the end, on the output of non-validated models. Such little empirical data as we have, suggests that the actual total climate sensitivity is indistinguishable from zero. There is no CO2 signal in any temperature/time graph of data from the 20th and 21st cneturies, that can be shown to have been caused by adding CO2 to the atmosphere.
"The "science" of the post begins with a provocative statement that "…The IPCC consensus has arguably overstated the anthropogenic signals." This is just an assertion, and it's not justified because the climate science community has accounted for things like solar, volcanic, and other natural causes."
Laughable. So far, they're barely admitting the sun even exists. It's gong to be interesting to see how the "climate science community" (as you call it with all the dewy eyed fervor of a true ideologue,) deal with the coming Grand Minimum and all that implies for temps/.
"Laughable. So far, they're barely admitting the sun even exists."
So you're saying you're completely ignorant of all the literature on the solar forcing, to the point of not even knowing it exists?
And if so, why would you worry about having an opinion about climate science when you lack a basic knowledge of that science?
Shouldn't you learn some science first, and then develop your opinions?
Steven Mosher | July 8, 2012 at 10:50 pm |
Rob Bradley | July 8, 2012 at 8:25 pm | Reply
Hmm, chip did not coin that term.
Steven, CK wrote a blog post on "Global Lukewarming: A Great Intellectual Year in 2011" in January. The term "lukewarmer" has been around for some time, but it's the first time I've seen "global lukewarming." Has it been used elsewhere?
Wagathon | July 8, 2012 at 11:26 pm |
You cannot expect government-funded climate porn stars to just walk away. In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. ~Ronald Reagan
http://evilincandescentbulb.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/liberty-vs-the-government-taxocracy-3/
MeAgain | July 9, 2012 at 1:01 am |
the Forest work is interesting but not really important on its own. There are hundreds of papers looking at the climate sensitivity question and from multiple angles.
For all the money put into climate science I would hope there were indeed hundreds of other studies, although one could turn this stock argument around and ask why, out of all the hundreds of studies, was the Forest paper chosen to feature prominently in an IPCC report without checking that its source data were securely saved somewhere so that it was reproducible? The concern is that the hundreds of other studies may be if anything even more problematic. And that it took a blogger to find the problem shows just how little scrutiny these papers are receiving from climate scientists.
thisisnotgoodtogo | July 9, 2012 at 2:24 am |
McAgain, a well-reasoned reply to the Colose nonsense.
chris colose | July 9, 2012 at 2:39 am |
MeAgain,
I obviously do not know the details of who did or did not replicate the Forest paper, nor do I know when the data was apparently lost. I usually it find it helpful not to speculate about such things.
That said, I do not argue that better data archiving is always a good thing for science…not just for climate, but for multiple fields where I have tried to get data with little success, and I'm sure this is an issue across every scientific field. Personally, I've never been unable to access a climate dataset I really needed, though sometimes I had to fish a bit. This itself has been a focus of discussion at scientific meetings, but there are a lot of practical limitations.
Science has now evolved to the point where hundreds upon hundreds of papers are being produced over timescales of just weeks, very few of them are "game changers" in a field, not all of them are interesting, and I'm sure a lot go unexamined in immense detail except maybe for a handful of experts who end up taking a notice. Peer review is effective as a necessary but not sufficient condition for credibility, and it may or may not catch silly mistakes.
A simple fact of life is that data from older papers sometimes gets lost, servers/computer systems get changed, some people do not properly archive their data, some people are hard to get a hold of, sometimes data release is often delayed to the public so that the original data producers can have the "first shot" at publishing key results, etc. And often there are intellectual property issues that come along with the sharing of data to third-party sources. If I received some unpublished stellar spectral data from an astrophysicist for instance that I can throw into a radiation model in order to "drive" some distant planets climate system, I could probably not share that data myself upon someone's request.
Other times the data are not in a very readable format, and sometimes scientists are wary of third-party groups who do not understand the interpretation or limitations of the data. This happens quite a bit in climate (all you need to do is see this post, referring to the radiosonde papers on WV feedback); this is amplified by people on blogs whom everyone knows have no interest in actually replicating the results or publishing further information, but rather smearing the scientist. This introduces a lot of personal judgment calls, not all of which I agree with, but which I can sympathize with.
The difference between a scientist and a conspiracy theorist is that the former knows how to put these issues in context, and place it alongside the rest of what appears in scientific literature, gets discussed at conferences, etc. On blogs, it means that an entire field is all crap.
@chris colose
Yada yada yada….there's always a long list of excuses about how its difficult and how its hard and how its all the bloggists fault and how you all are much put upon by the public and how the dog ate your homework and anyway mcSteve is not a climatologist and how dare anybody challenge our work and expect our data to be readable and anyway its our turn to play with it now and I don't like McKitrick so I won't show him it so there! And I'll destroy it rather than let him see it.
And all the other kid's excuses that the rest of us left behind when we left elementary school and started to grow up a bit.
At least you left out the 'Big Oil Denier Well Funded Baby Eating Burn The Planet' mantra so beloved of the leaders of you profession.
You guys are supposedly working on 'the most important problem humantiy has ever faced'. And you get a lot of our money to work on it on our behalf. Wish I could see you behaving as if you were.
Its about time that you collectively grew up, grew a pair, and started acting in a professional manner. Professionalism is a trait that should run through everything you do – not just the exciting bits. And that means proper record keeping. By not doing it – and seemingly not caring – you just cement the ideas that you are unfit custodians of our largesse.
Act like professionals – or be prepared to be treated as amateurs.
Latimer,
If you really want to learn about climate, and reproduce a number of key conclusions, you could do it. What is even more tiring are people like you who actually pretend to have a real interest in climate, yet have never cracked open a textbook or begun to explore the lifetimes worth of data that actually IS available on the web. Instead, you jump on the bandwagon and whine about the data access from some obscure study that you never even heard of until someone here, at CA, WUWT, etc pointed it out to you, and then spoonfed you half-truths and conspiracies. The more I encounter people like you the more I can convince myself data access should be a privilege, not a right.
gbaikie | July 9, 2012 at 3:27 am |
"I can convince myself data access should be a privilege, not a right."
For data created by tax dollars?
That is public property. And a thief doesn't make it public.
And we don't need thieves on the government payroll.
Much better having tax dollars pay for them to be in prison.
And even if wasn't science costing millions of dollars, it same bloody thing.
Colose.
and to destroy it if necessary in order to protect it
Thanks for confirming just about every unpleasant characteristic of climatologists in one post.
The more I encounter people like you the more it confirms my thoughts that climatology really does attract the second and third rate rentseekers.
I trust that – if you ever finish being a student – you will not be applying for public funding. Your whole attitude to openness and transparency
makes you completely unfit to handle our money or to work on our behalf.
@colose
Here's what you could have written:
'I agree that some of the practices of the more established colleagues in climatology have been substandard and have helped to cast doubt upon the integrity of us all.
It is my hope that – if and when I arrive at a senior position – my personal example of integrity, openness and transparency will help to reestablish the reputation of climatology.
I am proud of the work that I do and will always be happy to defend it whatever the source of disagreement'.
That would have been the statement of a man of honour and leadership.
Instead you wrote just about the exact opposite.
Let's not be too harsh on Colose. As a talkative practitioner of the filed, of course he's bound to show all the worst aspects of it. Otherwise he wouldn't be in climate science, or he wouldn't be very talkative.
cui bono | July 9, 2012 at 5:39 am |
cc – "The more I encounter people like you the more I can convince myself data access should be a privilege, not a right."
That was the initial reaction of Gergis et. al. to SteveMc. "It's called research" she snarked.
Quickly followed by "Thanks very much for spotting our error", and get-out-clause "We'd already spotted it".
Then followed by Revkin saying that this was an additional level of blogosphere audit which would improve the science.
Clearly this is not to your taste?
Steve Milesworthy | July 9, 2012 at 6:55 am |
It is of course quite clear that it is not acceptable when data is lost. A lot of people are working very hard on the CMIP5 archive to try and ensure that data is a) not lost b) well explained and c) available.
The problem here though is that the *reputation* of Forest et al is being impugned by the fact that *they* have lost their data. The fact that they are apparently careless with their data has led people to freely assume that they were therefore also careless with their analysis.
Now it may be that it is their fault, I don't know. But model data is not typically in the control of the climate scientist. Data is held in central and national databases because there is too much of it to be managed individually. The other problem is that model data is not quite like obs data. You definitely do *not* want to lose obs data, but model data tends to be regarded as less and less important by many (not the scientists as they want to keep everything) as the old models are superseded. Given that a typical online archive costs are significant (around a million per year to maintain around 10 petabytes of data – and growing at my local institution), there are cost pressures to thin out less important data as new models and computers come on line.
The best way to find out whether Forest mucked up is to redo their analysis with a later model. But Forest *is* only one result and removing it does *not* support the alternative suggestion of sensitivity between 1 and 1.7 by any stretch.
Robert | July 9, 2012 at 7:07 am |
Good points all.
thisisnotgoodtogo | July 9, 2012 at 10:28 am |
Steve Milesworthy might have said:
It is of course also not a problem, that as the *reputation* of Forest et al is being properly impugned by the fact that *they* have lost their data. The fact that they are apparently careless or worse with their data and stringed Lewis along for a year has allowed people to reasonably assume that they were therefore probably also careless or worse with their analysis."
However, that is not what Steve Milesworthy said. Noted.
Steve Milesworthy | July 9, 2012 at 1:13 pm |
thisisnotgoodtogo, No they didn't.
thisisnotgoodtogo | July 9, 2012 at 7:07 pm |
Steve,who didn't do what ?
Am sorry Chris but your comment is just smoke and mirrors (once again). Can't you tell the importance of having the archived data of not just any paper, but of the one upon which the 3C sensitivity is based? And why don't you try looking at Lonnie Thompson's inaccessible original measurements?
You've also got the habit of mentioning conspiracy theories where none is needed. As per UEA's admission climate research has been plagued by sloppy methods for decades. Incompetence not conspiracy. If you were seriously worried about climate change you'd join the calls for those methods to become a thing of the past, because we've only got proper science as the tool to understand the world.
Sorry, but climate sensitivity is not based upon one paper. That you believe this shows you need to go to class rather than worry about data you wouldn't begin to understand.
That's not what I wrote. Nevermind, nothing looks as stupid as the guy who tries to appear clever by finding refuge in straw-men and falsely clever word games.
I've been following the Thompson saga for many years, thank you very much. You haven't because as Latimer said, you just don't care. That's enough to understand how big a priority the fight against climate change is.
climatereason | July 9, 2012 at 4:24 am |
Chris Colose
At least you have the courage to engage with us here, alhough perhaps the manner in which you do so could do with a little polishing. Personally, I do not think that the personal attacks that sceptics lauch on people like you are helpful as it only encourages disengagement by those being attacked.
On the previous thread I directly emailed Andy Lacis personally about his comment on 40000ppmv and got back a perfecty civil reply. Similarly I have contacted Trenberth (terse but civil) Slingo and many others.
Engaging, rather than attacking, will bring better understanding on both sides, against the overall background that climate science do not as yet know all the answers and there is a tendancy to fail to archve or lose material which encourages suspicion. I would add that many papers are poorly written in the first place. Mann and Phil Jones write good lucid material- irrespective of whether i agree with them or not- but many other climate scientists do need lessons in how to construct a paper.
So do keep visiting here, but a little backpedalling on the attitude might help to get your points over better.
tonyb @ 4.24 a.m., well said. Civil engagement is a better basis for understanding and resolving issues than abuse.
It is a logical fallacy to believe that civil engagement can be attained with people who openly despise you. Lacis may be the sweetest correspondent in the world, yet he'll always take advantage of Judith's blindness to distribute gallons of bile in the climatosphere. There is obviously not a single thing in common with him to talk about.
climatereason,
You may have engaged Andy in a polite tone privately, and he may have reciprocated, but that is not the response he received in the comments on his post. He was rudely attacked, and the predictable attack on "climate science" naturally followed.
Anytime anyone posts something sensible or scientific here, it is like jabbing a bees nest with a big stick. You can always expect the crazies to come out full swarm ( I guess I get some sense of fun on here).
In my original response above to "MeAgain," I think I was quite civil, and highlighted several practical and human reasons why the world of science transparency is inherently imperfect. I don't think it is bad right now, and as I said there are lifetimes of data available that one can immerse themselves in…though I still agree it could be improved (Naturally, this has been attacked as outrageous by the mob who have been told what to think by people like SteveM and Watts). But the illogical connections that people extend to the totality of climate science make no sense.
What I find silly is that most people on the internet who have "problems" with this whole data availability topic is that they have no idea what sort of data is out there. They have no real personal need for the data except to say it is or isn't there; they only were told from someone like SteveM that they couldn't get data, usually without any context. Did "Latimer" ever look for data he really needed, or e-mail scientists to get data with a specific project he was working on (that would make use of that data)? Does he even know what data archives exist? Has he even cracked an advanced textbook on climate that would help put him in a position to interpret this data?
Personally, I really doubt it. I realize I have lost patience over the years. It's not to do with science but with the realization that you can run around in circles with fake skeptics for years. The object for them is not the advancement of data archiving or science, but point scoring. "omnologos" doesn't care if Lonnie Thompson's data is available. I'm skeptical he ever looked at ice core data.
So, in the end, I don't really care how insulted fake skeptics are or how I come across to them- that is, "skeptics" who like to call themselves skeptics, but don't have the academic integrity to even try, but prefer to toss cheap shots on the sideline. They have no place in the scientific discussion.
They of course have every right to download, use, or request data. I also reserve the right to not take them seriously, or to believe they have no real interest in the data.
Out in the real world, if you are proposing to do business with somebody you do not know, the first question about their integrity you ask is
'Have they filed their annual accounts?'
If the answer is 'no', you do not pursue the deal any further. You are at high risk of doing a bad deal and being ripped off. If they can't/won't keep basic accounts they are unlikely to be good business partners.
When climatologits do not 'file their accounts' for many years, the same red flag is raised. It is immaterial why I want to see the accounts. It is immaterial what my qualifications are. It is immaterial whether I am a sceptic or a warmist, a born again christian or an atheist, white or coloured.
The guys in question have not fulfilled their obligations to the public, their colleagues and to science in general. They – and their 'work' – cannot be trusted. And no amount of insider special pleading from you or anybody else will change that basic fact.
There is more than enough climate data available to keep most people happy for several lifetimes, getting people to read it in depth is another matter.
Research is hugely time consuming as I can vouch, remembering the many weeks of research I do for one of my historical climatology articles, much of it scrabbling around in archives or examining ancient documents. Of course anything I submit will be immediatey dismissed as 'anecdotal' by those with a closed mind and similarly, if a piece of inconvenient scientific material is put in front of certain sceptics, their first inclination is to dismiss it rather than read it and try to disprove the findings in a logcal manner.
So we have somewhat entrenched positions on either side, none of which is an excuse for the level of abuse-some personal-which is often hurled between the respective trenches.
Colose believes he had been 'civil'. That's the whole point. He cannot even tell civility any longer.
As far as data, the only data which is specifically important, relates to a published paper. Because published paper of science should be
replicable:
"REPLICATION—the confirmation of results and conclusions from one study obtained independently in another—is considered the scientific gold standard. New tools and technologies, massive amounts of data, long-term studies, interdisciplinary approaches, and the complexity of the questions being asked are complicating replication efforts, as are increased pressures on scientists to advance their research."
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/data-rep/
And what's most annoying is the publisher not requiring this data before publishing. One could accept the idea nobody involved bother look at the data. But it bigger step not even to ask for it, particularly if it's regarding something a publisher could imagine is vaguely important.
"Engaging, rather than attacking, will bring better understanding on both sides"
Better understanding is always a laudable goal, but there are not really two "sides" here. There are scientists. There are non-scientists who do not like the empirical facts which the scientists are bringing them news of. This leads naturally to conflict, but it is not a matter of two equivalent contending forces, but of ordinary working scientists on the one hand, and on the other members of the public whose determination to attack the science primarily reinforces their own ignorance. They are at war with themselves.
Bob | July 9, 2012 at 8:21 am |
Chris, all right then – why don't you neatly summarize the other papers (please no models) that support the sensitivity you claim. That will be fun. Also downthread you state " They of course have every right to download, use, or request data. I also reserve the right to not take them seriously, or to
believe they have no real interest in the data." Chris why don't you take that fight to McIntyre, a dedicated mathematician/statistician with skills an order of magnitude greater than yours.
omnologous
Can't you tell the importance of having the archived data of not just any paper, but of the one upon which the 3C sensitivity is based?
Like Chris, to me this sounds like you think that this is the only paper that shows a 3C sensitivity.
It's not that unlikely that Forest et al were analysing data that was *retrieved* from an archive rather than generating and archiving the data themselves.
Classes are quaint, Chris. Ever heard of "information at your fingertips"? I heard it straight from Bill Gate's mouth in a small meeting I had with him about 18 years ago when it it was more of a slogan on t-shirts in Redmond than a physical reality. I was a senior R&D engineer at Dell at the time. We did a pretty good job of making that a reality, huh?
hunter | July 9, 2012 at 8:14 am |
If you want data access to be a privilege then go work in an industrial lab or self-fund.
But you are not. You are enjoying tax-payer subsidized student loans, working in a tax payer funded lab, that is housed at a tax payer funded University, and where you or your lead investigator work to write grants to receive tax payer money.
Eff you and your arrogant reactionary hypocritical corruption,
Don Monfort | July 9, 2012 at 1:28 pm |
You have a way with words, hunter. Colose is a wannabe world saving consensus IPCC Certified "climate scientist". He seems to be worried that the scheme will collapse, before he has his turn at fame and fortune. Thus his dogged defense of the disingenuous dogma.
billc | July 9, 2012 at 2:09 pm |
damn, dude
As over the top as Ayn Rand was, watching these rent seeking parasites self-righteously screw over producers and workers in order to impose their foolish and wasteful ideas is certainly a Rand-esque demonstration of human anture.
Dave Springer | July 9, 2012 at 10:08 pm |
Don Monfort | July 9, 2012 at 1:28 pm | Reply
Ha. In 1981 I wrote a video game for the Atari 2600 VCS. A whole bunch of guys barely old enough to shave had struck it rich with a single hit cartridge game in the few years before then. I missed the boat by >< that much. Fifteen years later I hit the jackpot at Dell with incentive stock options. It's a crap shoot. Timing is everything. Any youngsters trying to make a few million like Hansen did with climate science heroism or scores of millions like Al Gore did are bound to be disappointed. The bloom is off that rose, so to speak. I'd think about a different field to get into if I were him. The future is now synthetic biology. Write that down.
Since you use taxpayer-funded roads and sidewalks, and were likely born in a government-funded or tax-exempted hospital, and have doubtless enjoyed many other government benefits: you can go shove your fist into your tiny mouth until the whiny sound issuing forth from your mushy brain ceases.
You are a parasite in every sense of the world; projecting your own "reactionary hypocritical" mindset onto contributing members of society like Chris merely underscores your uselessness . . . and your powerlessness to enforce your whiny demands.
tempterrain | July 9, 2012 at 1:01 am |
I thought that things may be looking up after Andrew Lacis' post but I see they aren't. We are back to the tired old argument, albeit in a slightly more academic tone than can be managed by Wagathon and co, of how the government and scientists are all in it together. The government wants an excuse to raise taxes and the corrupt scientists are happy to give them what they want providing they can feather their own nests with big fat research grants. Yes, yes – we've heard it all before.
Do you really believe such drivel?
I notice that you've included a disclaimer this time. Giving yourself an extra coat of teflon in the hope that nothing will stick? "The views presented here are those of Rud Istvan", so it looks like you are well aware that most climate scientists will be thinking that you should at least stand up for their integrity, if nothing else.
mike | July 9, 2012 at 2:56 am |
Self-interested high dudgeon? Check. Gravy-train, derailment-anxiety syndrome? Check. Panic-attack, hand-wringing theatrics? Check. Loutish, hostess-baiting impertinence? Check. Party-line whip-cracker dominance-display? Check? Generalized, in-a-dither, fed-up-to-here, so-sick-of-all-the-tacky-peasants-on-this-blog-who-sass-back-instead-of-doing-exactly-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do, how-dare-these-cretinous-blog-helots-question-their-betters meltdown? Check.
The perfect comment, temp.
@tempterrain
'it looks like you are well aware that most climate scientists will be thinking that you should at least stand up for their integrity, if nothing else'
When was the last time climate scientists actually demonstrated that they had that particular quality?
Every time we look under a climatological stone we find something unpleasant. Some shoddy practice here, some 'disappeared' data there, a childish spat behind that rock- an FoI refusal hidden by the tree.
These episodes – and they are coming thick and fast now – do not tell me of a bunch of guys where 'integrity' is anywhere on their list of desirable qualities. And the silence of all their colleagues when their misdoings are exposed speaks volumes.
At least other 'professions' attempt some form of self-control over their membership…partly at least because they recognise that poor or shoddy or fraudulent practitioners drag down the reputation of all of them. But in climatology the opposite approach is taken…defend the shyster, excuse the malpractice, hoard the data, f..k the public. And never, ever ever reveal the secrets of the craft (show your working)
Seems just like the wilder antics of the nuttier and more unpleasant Freemasons to me.
tt,
Considering what has been demonstrated by far too many climate scientists and climate science organizations, I think our hostess is standing up in a more than appropriate fashion for their demonstrated integrity and commitment to open good science.
dp | July 9, 2012 at 2:00 am |
tempterrain – I don't disbelieve it yet. There is a lot of money involved and that can make good people do bad things.
Join us in encouraging the alarmists to produce the source data and code. It will solve our problem with them and your problem with us. What could it hurt?
Well think about it. If climate scientists wanted more money, and that was their prime motivation, they'd all be in agreement with Judith and beating up the uncertainty which they could say would be resolved by large amounts of funding.
But they aren't. They are saying that the next area for spending is on mitigation. They won't get any of that money. Engineers and others will be in the driving seat on that. It should be engineers who are backing the IPCC call to action if this 'theory', for want of a better word, is even half correct.
That's a fairly superficial analysis.
Actual real folding money is unlikely to be a scientist's prime motivation. But in a field with lots of money sloshing about and lots of attention there are plenty of good things that scientists will like….infrastructure like buildings and computers and libraries professorial posts, conferences, journals, speaking opportunities, teaching opportunities, career advancement, foreign travel and so on.
In general a rich field will attract more 'practitioners' than a poor one. And while it expands, the standards required to join (the barriers to entry) become lower and lower. It happens every time there is a sudden expansion of any field, and climatology is no different from any other.
dp | July 9, 2012 at 11:41 am |
Mitigation from what? The climate changes non-stop. It has been warming since the end of the LIA and prior it cooled for hundreds of years. It will cool again and it will warm again. Are we the first generation of Homo sapiens that will fail a simple change of climate? Our unshod ancestors dealt with it and I'm convinced that many of us will, again. I'm not convinced we know with adequate certainty if I need to prepare for bitter cold or sizzling heat.
But it would be helpful of those who have received grants from the tax payers would put their collected source data in a public repository where the largest possible population of problem solvers will have access to it. Surely you agree.
From Finland:
http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/15491.php
What do you suggest the correct mitigation is for the Fins?
steven | July 9, 2012 at 11:45 am |
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html
JCH | July 9, 2012 at 1:41 pm |
Reconstruction.
We've been cooling since ~100 BC. That trend appears to have ended ~1900.
Edim | July 9, 2012 at 1:53 pm |
AGW started in ~1960, so ~1900 is long before AGW. The warming slowed with AGW. But even if AGW started with ~1900, still nothing unusual. It appears to have been happening since ~100 BC, the global warming/cooling thing. If anything, the late 20th century appears more constant, compared to before. A new scare, climate stasis? Still unprecedented?
steven | July 9, 2012 at 2:16 pm |
JCH, nothing about the 20th century warming seems particularily out of place in the context of this reconstruction. There was not a monotonous cooling until 1900, there were ups and downs with a long term cooling trend.
When AGW started is unknown. I'm told that Issac Held believes anthropogenic factors may have played a more significant role in early 20th Century warming than climate scientists have allowed. I have always believed that. Tsonis and Swanson erased natural variation from the temperature trend and uncovered a monotonic external forcing starting in 1900. In their argument, natural variation can enhance that monotonic warming trend, and it can suppress it: enhanced 1910 to 1940; suppressed 1940 to 1970; enhanced 1970 to 2000; and the one that is not really behaving, break even so far – 2000 to 2030ish.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/drupal6/files/meteo469/lesson05/IPCCTSNatural.gif
A different graph.
Now compare with this, which lacks a line for natural forcing only, but one can figure out about where it would be.
So we agree. Good.
No. I think the AGW signal is present early in the 20th Century.
In 'your' graph, anthropogenic factors is ~0.0 K early in the 20th century. The consensus is ~1960, that it became significant. Before that it's less than ~0.1 K.
Erica | July 10, 2012 at 1:20 pm |
@temp
Government climate scientists continue to preach the alarmist dogma, because that is what will most benefit government – by justifying more taxes etc. It isn't just their own grant-farming at work here, it's their ideological position as government lackies.
"Join us in encouraging the alarmists to produce the source data and code. "
On the contrary, join us in encouraging the deniers to study science and replicate the science themselves. Get some Koch-funded grants and get your butt out on the glacier! Then you can set a good example for the level of disclosure you want.
Somebody who calls scientists "alarmists" is not going to know what to do with raw data, anyway. :)
How will we know if we don't try? How can we end this pointless back and forth if we don't settle it with the source data? What can it hurt to provide the data to all the interested parties?
kim | July 9, 2012 at 12:19 pm |
Archive your butt prints or risking losing your ass forever.
climatereason | July 9, 2012 at 3:44 pm |
Have you got an address for the Kochs as I would like to obtain some grants to carry out research
You keep ducking the question of why alarmist scientists should continue to hide data. The only conclusion to be drawn from this, is that – like other precommitted alarmists – you fear that this might lead to questioning the foundations of the CAGW secular religion. Pretty much the typical attitude from those who seek to mislabel "skeptiks" as "deniers".
The only reason you suggest the 'alternative' of doing all the science over from scratch, is that you know full well it will never happen – close to !00% of climate science is government-funded, outranking all other climate science spending by a factor of some thousands (the Kochs are a drop in the ocean). And government of course has a huge vested interest in CAGW being accepted, so we know who and what it will prefer to fund.
Girma | July 9, 2012 at 2:22 am |
Details are covered in a separate comment, "What Climate Sensitivity says about IPCC Consensus Science".
Punksta | July 9, 2012 at 2:27 am |
Whatever the science flaws, he is right on the money on the "hostage" issue, the alarmist closed loop.
As the appalling drivel by Lacis tried so hard to evade, where a science is a politically-funded monopoly, and has significant political implications, it will invariably produce results that boost further politicization of society. This is what drives all the sabotaging of the science process (data-hiding, "tricks", hiding the decline, redefining peer-review, fake "inquiries", etc etc)
And far from a conspiracy, it's exactly what you'd expect, business-as-usual – the sole funder of a science (government in this case) ,acting first and foremost in its own interest, skewing science for its own benefit.
As you are forced to admit, yours is a conspiracy theory with no empirical evidence.
Since your conspiracy theory does not rest on facts (science is not a monopoly of the government — do you know what a "monopoly" is?) it is unlikely to appeal to any but the most paranoid and mentally unstable.
Alexander Biggs | July 9, 2012 at 2:40 am |
" The IPCC 4th Assessment Report said natural factors could fully explain warming before about 1960 (e.g. SPM.4)"
What natural factor cased the warming between 1905 and 1940? A rise of 0.45C in just 35 years! Nothing like that had happened in the previous half century. Was it just a coincidence that so many towns had fossil fuel powered electricity for the first time or that Henry Ford built 15 million Model T's before 1927? No natural factor has been cited as powerful enough to cause that rise, so IMO this was just an excuse for failing to explain the equally precipitous fall in temperature after 1940. It now appears that this latter was caused by absorption of earth's IR radiation reaching a limit at about 14 microns resonant wavelength in CO2. When this limit was exceeded any additional IR escaped harmlessly into space and the planet's oceans dragged the temperature down again, until they in turn, responded to the permanent extra heat in 1970.
CORRECTION: President Eisenhower DID MENTION the problem of scientific research ending up enslaved by and conniving with the Government. Unfortunately few bother to read the entire 1961 discourse, so we keep ending up talking only about the military-industrial complex, forever destined to rediscover the wheel.
Beth Cooper | July 9, 2012 at 3:37 am |
Walls are being breached.
Here in Oz, the Labor/ Green Party carbon tax misalliance is foundering.
That's how the light gets in.
You at least are certainly cracked.
Beth is talented. You not so much.
cui bono | July 9, 2012 at 12:48 pm |
Robert – your come here spouting 0% science and 100% insults. You have your own blog with 0% science and 100% insults. Why spill over on to this one?
To adopt your approach: Your petulant jibes seem redolent of someone who is still living with his parents and surviving on chocolate chip cookies at the age of 35.
I bet Beth has a life.
' a little back pedalling on the attitude might help to get your pointsd over better' … lol, appropriate metaphor in the climate of the times. le Tour de France continues tonight with the battle of heroes, UK Bradley Wiggins on top, Oz Cadell Evans second place, they'll battle it out in the time trial tonight. As in climate science debate, time will tell.
I think that Cadel will get a wigging tonight. But a long way to go thereafter. Evans starts at 12.36 a.m. AEST, finishes ? 1.26. Easier in Perth.
pokerguy | July 9, 2012 at 5:28 am |
tempt. wrote "Well think about it. If climate scientists wanted more money, and that was their prime motivation, they'd all be in agreement with Judith and beating up the uncertainty which they could say would be resolved by large amounts of funding."
This a cockeyed analysis indicating very little real world savvy. I see it over and over again among the warmists, a kind of naiveté in combination with poor reasoning skills in the defense of what Colose preciously calls the "climate community." As Hunter is always pointing out, you guys are your own worst enemies…
There are a number of ways to infer climate sensitivity from observation without relying completely on GCMs, and a number of results. They point to sensitivity less than 3, most likely to something between 1.1 and 1.7. Details are covered in a separate comment, "What Climate Sensitivity says about IPCC Consensus Science".
Even if you dismiss Forest 2006, the statement that sensitivity is most likely to be between 1.1 and 1.7 unless you are very selective about choosing your "ways to infer climate sensitivity from observation". I'm assuming the separate comment is still to come?
Only one of the several historically constrained PDF estimations with a distinct mode has a likely value for S as high as 3
But they all have (worrying) ranges that go well above 3. And these are a subset of millennial studies. There is a further set of studies based on data going farther back in time that support a possibility of values of sensitivity above 2C.
Once I tried to deal with government-funded scientists in a related field. I had a query about their budget allocation.
They received my request (with my full name on it) through a third party and replied by saying they were available for any clarification.
They didn't make excuses, didn't build wals, didn't try to get into legales, didn't ask for a formal FOI request, didn't accuse me of being the scum of the earth, etc etc.
So that was enough for me. I didn't pursue my request, because the answer was genuinely honest enough.
But I guess they're the exception, given the conspiratorial stance of many in the climategate sagas. Some 'scientists' simply don't get that it's well past the time secretiveness paid.
oops…I meant "walls" and "legalese"…
Roger L. | July 9, 2012 at 5:59 am |
Slight OT but puts a new perspective on some dendro publications:
Esper et al, Orbital forcing of tree-ring data
"Selecting only the data that supports a hypothesis contradicts bedrock principals of science."
This seems like an attempt at humor, since he goes on to argue we should disregard tree ring data that fails to conform to his hypothesis.
The multi-modal proxies pioneered by Mann et al, in contrast, use many different types of proxy. That's probably a major reason why the Mann's hockey stick has broken the heads of so many fake skeptics, and remains the state of the science.
Very funny, Robert. But what is a "fake skeptic"? The definition of a skeptic is someone who doubts or disbelieves a claim or a proposition (in the logical sense). AGW skeptics doubt or disbelieve AGW. How then are we fakes?
You would be a good example of a fake skeptic.
You are a feverent — indeed fanatical — believer. Believers often attack facts inconvenient to their ideology — as when certain Christians attack the theory of evolution.
Skepticism is characterized, not by the ability to rationalize attacks on things that challenge your belief system, but on the ability to question things which you want to believe. That is true skepticism, and unfortunately it is as rare as hen's teeth among climate deniers.
Robert, like humpty dumpty you are creating your own language. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#In_Through_the_Looking-Glass) That is not what the word skeptic means in English.
Plus I am no more fanatical than you, probably far less because I take both sides seriously.
omnologos | July 9, 2012 at 11:42 am |
Nothing human is alien to me. Robert is alien to me. Robert is not human. QED.
"Robert, like humpty dumpty you are creating your own language."
It doesn't surprise me that you don't know what "skepticism" is.
Your ignorance, however, doesn't change the reality.
If you would like some background reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_skepticism
true skepticism .. unfortunately it is as rare as hen's teeth among climate deniers.
Only in the jaundiced view of CAGW truebelievers like Robert, who constantly use only motivated logic to defend their concreted-in precommitted views, and blindly reject anything that falls outside their faith domain.
bob droege | July 9, 2012 at 12:34 pm |
How can you get the definition of a skeptic wrong?
You are fake because you doubt the claims without looking at the evidence.
Bob, if you are talking to me I have spent most of the last 20 years studying the climate debate, especially the science. I know the arguments and the evidence very well. In fact I have done original research on some of the evidence, such that I believe AGW has actually been falsified by the evidence.
But the ordinary English meaning of skepticism is simply "an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object." (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skepticism). In this case the particular object is CAGW. There is nothing in this definition about considering the evidence to some specific degree (chosen by you).
You may be confusing the ordinary language term with the philosophical school, or something. But I think the reality is just that you warmers can't stand the fact that we skeptics disagree with you, based on the evidence.
bob droege | July 9, 2012 at 6:23 pm |
No way, I was refering to scientific scepticism, since this is a scientific discussion, the general english definitions do not apply.
You so called skeptics just can't stand that the evidence is against you.
Skeptics are for evidence, even if evidence is against them, ideally.
All you have to know about Robert is summed up in his statement that Mann's hockey stick "remains the state of the science". He is obviously not a scientist, just another troll. Let's not feed him any longer.
mike | July 10, 2012 at 3:09 pm |
You know, Robert, you bringing up Michael Mann just steams me up big-time. I mean, like, it really pushes a "hot button" with me. And I'll be happy to tell you why:
In an interview a couple days ago with Bill Blakemore of ABC news, Michael Mann had this to say:
"President Barack Obama appointed wonderful people to cabinet level positions…John Holdren….Jane Lubchenko…Steven Chu…Lisa Jackson…you know it's like President Obama appointed this all-star basketball team but he wouldn't let them go out on the court and play…"
So now do you see what I'm talking about, Robert? I mean, like the "black"-man in the "white"-house doesn't appoint a tiddly-wink verein or a squash equipe or a bad mitten cell–No!!! Rather, in Michael Mann's world of privileged-white-dork, greenshirt group-think–your world, Robert–a "black" man, even if he's President of the United States, can only appoint BASKETBALL TEAMS!!!"
You know, Robert, it is precisely offensive, stereotype thinking like Michael Mann's that got all the white-boys kicked out of the IPCC and replaced by empowered man-haters. So are you so very proud of yourselves, Robert? I mean, like, you Lysenkoist hive-bozos are such complete watermelon-brains! Jeez.
Brian H | July 9, 2012 at 7:21 am |
More soft-pedalling and wishy-washy understatement. Climate science is not a 'contact sport', it's a blood sport.
Certainly the "skeptics" who threaten to murder climate scientists and their families think it is. Anders Behring Breivik, the first climate denier mass murderer, thought it was.
But if you are not a bullying coward or a terrorist, it is hard to see how studying and recording facts about the physical world constitutes a "blood sport."
But that is the essence of violent intolerance, I suppose, whether one is stoning a heretic to death or threatening to rape a scientist's child — it is the belief that an idea, a thought is so threatening to you that physical violence is necessary to suppress it.
The terrible, violent, unreasoning fear of climate science — fear of the simple attack of recording and analyzing facts about the physical world — reminds me of Churchill:
Yet in their hearts there is unspoken – unspeakable! – fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts! Words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home, all the more powerful because they are forbidden. These terrify them. A little mouse – a little tiny mouse! -of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.
Barry Woods | July 9, 2012 at 7:47 am |
Do we really have to tolerate this..
Markus Fitzhenry | July 9, 2012 at 8:50 am |
JC doesn't discriminate against crackpots, Barry. She proves her disposition by allowing Robert to have his silly say.
A fan of *MORE* discourse | July 9, 2012 at 10:16 am |
Barry Woods, thank you for your excellent question:
Barry Woods asks: "Do we really have to tolerate this?"
Answer: Within a Jeffersonian democracy that is shielded by a Bill of Rights: the answer is YES.
"Error of opinion may be tolerated,
where reason is left free to combat it."
Thomas Jefferson,
First Inaugural Address,
4 March 1801.
Within venues controlled by fascist states, dogmatic religious authorities, ideologically-driven institutes, and profit-first corporations: the answer is NO.
Fortunately, Climate Etc. is not among the latter. :) :) :)
What is your next question, Barry Woods? :) :) :)
Barry Woods | July 9, 2012 at 2:33 pm |
when you have a civil debate. ie like in a public meeting room. people agree to behave civilly.. hecklers, those that are abusive, etc get removed..
This does not supress freedom of speech, it ensures that the rude the abusive the threatening people, do not shout down others..
I consider this blog to be a place for civil debate.
so. – yes why do we have to tolerate this.
and for the record. I personally wrote to Marc Morano (of Climate Depot) asking a big favour of him, to stop publishing climate scientists emails addresses. NOT to supress freedom as speech, but as a gesture of goodwill, to allow a civil debate. As you would expect in any university or political public debating arena.
I did this at a time, when Peter Gleick and Dr Katie Hayhoe were getting a lot of attention, and I was concerned that perhaps Peter Gleicks professional Tradgey (revkin) might turn into a persoanl tradegy. NAd I also owed Katie this gesture, for her generous thougts to persuade Peter to back down rom accusing me of being 'incredibly offensive' to him publically.
Morano, gets UGLY emails, so does Katie Hayhoe (and Leo Hickman) and I correspond with them all. civilly.
tthis is a private blog, and the owner can do whatever they wish!!!
which includes people behaving within the blog owners rules… ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-)
not sure whay all your smiley faces meant, but I thought I'd join in for fun. ;-) ;-) ;-) ;-)
Barry,
Robert is competing hard to be the bestest troll. Ignore him.
andrew adams | July 9, 2012 at 8:39 am |
I don't think it's really fair to keep bringing up Breivik. Yes he had views on climate change which were not so different from those of some people here, but I don't think these views were what drove his actions. He was a far right loon obsessed with Muslims and leftists and for some reason people with such views also tend to hold silly and extreme views on climate change (see Melanie Phillips for example) but I don't get the impression that this was particularly central to his worldview. Even if it was, it doesn't mean that people with similar views would condone his actions, or that his actions were a logical consequence of such views.
Robert | July 9, 2012 at 12:34 pm |
I don't think it's really fair to keep bringing up Breivik. Yes he had views on climate change which were not so different from those of some people here, but I don't think these views were what drove his actions. He was a far right loon obsessed with Muslims and leftists and for some reason people with such views also tend to hold silly and extreme views on climate change (see Melanie Phillips for example) but I don't get the impression that this was particularly central to his worldview.
It is certainly fair to point out that Breivik had a lot of other preoccupations. It seems to me that his climate denial is an important facet of his delusional worldview. Was it "central"? I'm not sure how you demonstrate that. Like most deniers, his denial emerged out of a broader right-wing worldview. Not only does he share views on climate with many posters here, it is also true that many of the posters here share his broader right-wing looniness. That does not make them responsible for his actions, but they may be argued to share responsibility for the climate of hatred which Breivik and people like him emerge from.
Very thoughtful comment, thank you.
So we get to point out that the Unabomber's writings and those of some famous AGW promoters are nearly identical. Thanks for justifying the Heartland Institute billboard campaign.
I had forgotten that you are THAT Robert, the self-tracking idiot.
@hunter
re; Unibomber, self-tracking idiot
It is certainly fair to point out that the Unabomber had a lot of other preoccupations. It seems to me that his climate alarmism is an important facet of his delusional worldview. Was it "central"? I'm not sure how you demonstrate that. Like most alarmist,s his alarmism emerged out of a broader left-wing worldview. Not only does he share views on climate with many posters on Realclimate, it is also true that many of the posters here share his broader left-wing looniness. That does not make them responsible for his actions, but they may be argued to share responsibility for the climate of hatred which the Unabomber and people like him emerge from.
mike | July 9, 2012 at 3:24 pm |
What most on this blog don't realize is that "Robert" is a world-famous climate-scientist. One whose real name would be instantly recognizable, not only to this blog's readership, but to the public, at large.
So, when you read Robert's posts, it is instructive to reflect that Robert's quality of thought and views are the sort held by those who routinely counsel Presidents, Kings, Queens, tin-pot dictators, senior U. N. parasites, movie stars just past their prime, hack reporters of the elitist press, green-washed eco-hustler billionaires, and the like in environmental issues.
Yes, here we tolerate foaming-at-the-mouth alarmist zealots like Robert. After all, he does speak for the IPCC consensus. just more honestly.
Martha | July 9, 2012 at 8:05 am |
A few correctly-used technical terms does not redeem a jaw-droppingly stupid post.
Still, a nice opportunity for anthropology students to do fieldwork. :-)
A fan of *MORE* discourse | July 9, 2012 at 8:13 am |
EVALUATION: Rud Istvan's essay has been flagged for seven violations of the 24 types of libertarian:
The deficiencies are: "petulant", "too smart for science", "denial-ican", "the island", "Atlas", "historian", and "caveat emptor".
Seriously, pretty much everyone appreciates that the strongest skepticism matches itself against the strongest science. And conversely, skepticism that confines its attentions to the weakest science, obviously is itself the weakest skepticism.
When we compare Mr. Istvan's essay paragraph-by-paragraph against a gold-standard essay of climate-science, namely the nineteen-author "Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature" (arXiv:1110.1365v3, 2011), then we find that Mr. Istvan's needs to:
• Recruit more authors: Mr. Istvan needs to recruit other folks, from many disciplines, who share his views and contribute concretely to their expression. Otherwise what he writes is idiosyncratic propaganda.
• Balance theory with observation: Mr. Istvan needs to discuss the theory of climate change. Otherwise his review is mere ideology-driven cherry-picking.
• Specify predictions: Mr. Istvan needs to distinguish his predictions from those of mainstream climate science. Otherwise his review is mere complaining.
• Provide more citations: Mr. Istvan needs to provide citations for his various assertions and paraphrasing. Otherwise his review risks is mere polemic paraphrasing.
CONCLUSION Mr. Istvan's polemic essay exhibits severe weaknesses in multiple critical respects, in comparison with strong scientific climate-change writings.
Oh dang WordPress' lack of preview! :)
Hopefully this attempt will parse without error:
$\begin{array}{|c|c|c|c|}\hline\multicolumn{4}{|c|}{\text{\footnotesize The 24 types}}\\[-0.5ex] \multicolumn{4}{|@{}c@{}|}{\hfill\hfill\hfill\text{\footnotesize of Libertarian}\hfill\bigstar\hfill}\\ \hline &\otimes&\otimes&\hphantom{\otimes}\\ \hline &\otimes&&\\ \hline &\otimes&&\\ \hline &&\otimes&\\ \hline \otimes&&&\\ \hline &&\otimes&\\ \hline\end{array}$
Namely, "petulant", "too smart for science", "denial-ican", "the island", "Atlas", "historian", and "caveat emptor".
Try, try again, Rud! :) :) :)
Oh fiddle-dee-dee. If this third attempt doesn't work, then I give up! :) EVALUATION: Rud Istvan's essay has been flagged for seven violations of the 24 types of libertarian:
Namely, "petulant", "too smart for science", "denial-ican", "the island", "Atlas", "historian", and "caveat emptor".To WordPress Inc: the lack of a 'preview' capability is stone-age!
Dave Springer | July 9, 2012 at 9:53 am |
@ John Sidles, University of Washington Medical School a.k.a. "a physicist" a.k.a. "A Fan of *More* Discourse".
Does your employer know how much time you waste on climate blogs?
Dave Springer, your denunciations are noted! :) :) :)
I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak.
James Russell Lowell,
Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being "pushed to an extreme", not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.
John Stuart Mill,
Thank you, Dave Springer, for calling to our minds these celebrated principles of free speech and free thought. You have done Climate Etc. a great service. :) :) :)
What other names have the honor to appear on your enemy list, Dave Springer? :) :) :)
Dave Springer | July 9, 2012 at 10:41 am |
Enemies list?
Don't flatter yourself, Sidles. I was a bit disgusted when you attempted to explain your anonomity on a desire to protect your son, a staff NCO in my beloved United States Marine Corps, from harassment. Did you explain that to him? I'd be interested in knowing if he shares your fear.
By the way, Sidles, free speech is a sword that cuts both ways. Freedom to use a pen name and freedom to expose the pen name are both celebrated in American *politics*. In science, not so much. You don't usually see articles in peer reviewed science journals with pen names attached. This hiding under the veil of anonymity is all about politics and avoidance of personal responsibility which are themes you are well practiced at. Science, that's not really your bailiwick. Maybe if you spent less time blogging and more time working you could remedy that. What are the odds of that happening? Laborator work just isn't as much fun as anonymous, unaccountable blog sniping, is it? ROLMAO
Dave Springer, there is no circumstance of fact whatsoever, in which your actions are honorable. Your posts consistently display to the world a level of willful ignorance, dishonor, denunciation, and infamy that few American citizens ever approach and almost none sustain.
Fortunately, Jefferson democracy is robust precisely because negative examples have substantial positive value, and for that service, your posts receive this appreciation.
climatereason | July 9, 2012 at 11:54 am |
Surely what Fan calls him/hersef is his/her own business? There are many anonymous people commenting here. I made a guess at Fans identity a week ago and it was skilfully swatted away, and as far as I am concerned thats the end of the matter
Anonymity should not be granted if someone is posting an actual article here, nor if personal attacks are made that go far beyond banter as it is reasonable to know who is attacking you.
I might disagree with most of what Fan says- and her smileys are extremely irritating- but he/she is invariably polite and does not fall into the troll category.
Since you are not a climate scientist, John, I guess we can dismiss you.
I hope your work/study is not too compromised by your echo-chamber mentality.
Certainly I would hope that if, God forbid, you are involved with clinical activities, you are able to think more coherently and critically than you are able to in this forum.
@John Sidles aka A fan of more discourse
Excuse me, sir, but I think you must have me confused with someone who gives a sh*t.
HAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAAHAHAH!!!!!!!!11111
A fan of *MORE* discourse | July 9, 2012 at 9:28 pm |
Dave Springer is concerned: "You have confused me with someone who gives a sh*t.
Be assured, Dave Sprenger, that the character of your posts ensures that no-one is confused.
Interesting how Fan's supposed flagging of this essay, quietly avoids the central topic of in-bred corruption in Climate Science the essay addresses.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOwV_3tcU6A
History Channel Nazi Hunters
Episode 1: Hunting The Nazi Rocket Scientists
I caught this on the history channel yesterday. It's a real eye-opener on NASA's history. It should probably be name Nazi Aeronautics and Space Administration.
At the end of WWII the US snagged thousands of Nazi scientists and brought them to the U.S. giving them a second chance in return for puttin their skills to use for US interests. This includes medical researchers and data from human testing that, shall we say, couldn't be duplicated outside the Nazi pogrom.
There was an extreme interest the U.S. had in keeping Nazi rocket scientists away from the Russians. Literally hundreds of them were brought to the U.S. completely excluding any going to Russia. These Nazi rocket scientists (and associated disciplines) formed the core of NASA.
NASA was a huge success up through the 1970's then it pretty much went to hell in a handbasket. One might wonder if that's because all the Nazi scientists who came in at the beginning had retired by then. It seems the fascist philosophy has endured at NASA but unfortunately the scientific brilliance did not.
John | July 9, 2012 at 9:57 am |
The difference between CERN and IPCC can be summed up as follows.
I watched a BBC documentary in the run-up to the Higgs discovery. There are billions of euros of funding and thousands of careers dependant on the 'consensus' standard model of physics, but amongst the scientists interviewed there was a palpable sense of excitement that the 'consensus' view might be wrong. You could see that not only were they prepared to deal with their life's work being proved false, but that there would be a new sense of exploration that would flow from that knowledge: 'Wow! We might be wrong, and the Universe is weirder than we thought. How cool!'
This sense is entirely absent in the public faces of Climate science.
Climate scientists clearly think they are better scientists than nuclear physicists. Mann, Schmidt, Trenbath and Jones KNOW they are right. They don't entertain doubts, and if you do you had better keep quiet.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 per doubling maybe :) | July 9, 2012 at 10:04 am |
LOL, I can see the press conference now, Trenberth backed by the gang walks up to the podium. "We have discovered that climate is simpler than we thought! How cool! It turns out it is all related to gravity, water and the sun."
There hasn't been anything new from theoretical physics in the last two generations of theoretical physicists. The Standard Model reached its current incomplete form almost 40 years ago and since then nothing but experimental confirmation of it and failure to complete it by reconciling it with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
The Higgs Boson (the "God particle", the carrier of mass) is just another confirmation of the 40 year-old model which predicts it. The Holy Grail of theoretical physics is the particle, if there is one, that carries the force of gravity. A quick read of the big issue (a wicked problem for experimental testing) for the past several decades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton
Dave Sprinter, it is comparably enjoyable to enlighten you regarding the principles of KAM theory and its modern quantum descendents as it has been enjoyable to enlighten you regarding the principles of Free Speech, Free Thought, and the Bill of Rights.
In what further areas of ignorance do you stand in need of enlightenment, Dave Springer? :) :) :)
@Professor Sidles, UW School of Medicine, a.k.a. "a physicist" a.k.a. "A fan of *more* discourse.
I'd like you to enlighten me on how you manage to get stuff done for wounded warriors when you spend all your time writing about climate science on blogs. Surely you must understand that you are of absolutely no significance in the climate debate except possibly demonstrating how neurotic, obsessed, unaccountable, and mentally unbalanced university professors can become.
http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/ENC_2011/#SHOW
Couldn't you be more useful devoting your time to what you pretend to care about above?
kim | July 9, 2012 at 4:52 pm |
We have commenter 'daddy' to thank for the revelation that the Higgs Boson is a Catholic particle. Without it there wouldn't be Mass.
Bart R | July 9, 2012 at 10:30 am |
..Climate science has become just such a contact sport. There is a consensus paradigm represented by 4th IPCC. There are apparent flaws and uncertainties in that consensus. The government-climate complex stifles healthy scientific discourse about them..
The scarier the finding will be, the more money flows. The scarier the outcome of the project, the more planners will allocate to the project before it has even begun. Wrap your head around that little bit of time-travel logic. Some government bureaucrat in accounting is going to determine the outcome of research before it has even happened, as 'scary' enough to warrant the money paid for it.
If investigations and investments worked like this, then the business world would be a very different place. The people who invested the most into research would always bend Physics to their will and get technology to behave itself for them. The organizations that spent money for results would get the results they wanted from the outset.
This completely deluded framing of how things work in government and research has zero basis in reality, and is beneath the quality expected of its author.
Does the IPCC as a body have an agenda? Multiple agendas tending toward the same worldview? Blinkers? Possibly. But it is an organization that gathers research. The success or failure of subsequent research by the same investigators to obtain future funding is largely unrelated to the bingo lottery whirlpool of inclusion in IPCC reports (as much as 5 years after publication!) Indeed, 'scariness' has zero room on the balance sheets of any spending unit I've ever encountered. Would that it did!
A Risk-based determination of research topics would at least be more rational than the current system of tenures and grant applications based on past publications determined not by the IPCC, nor by government, but largely by editors and provosts, private grant providers (who I assure you are not operating in the public interest, nor neutral in their decisions), and pure random chance.
Rud Istvan's nightmare scenario — bad as it would be — would still be a vast improvement over the current system.
BartR, "If investigations and investments worked like this, then the business world would be a very different place." That is the nail on the head. Science and politics are not business and will never be as efficient as business. It takes a government to really piss away money :)
Bart R | July 9, 2012 at 11:06 pm |
Unless it's a pyramid scammer, or a government-backed oil company.
Enbridge deals with a pipeline leak every day of the year on average. They are seeking to increase the length of their pipelines over fifteen times, most of that in the USA.
That's the Chinese- and Canadian- government backed (oh, and in a small part, Russian-) Trans Canada Pipeline corporation; but don't worry about it, the value of the land being pissed away will be legally expropriated under eminent domain, and really tough federal laws passed by an aggressively active, informed and vigorous Congress will force China, Canada and Russia to pay for any damage to US soil.
hunter | July 10, 2012 at 7:33 am |
Your ignorance of pipelines and pipeline leaks is profound.
It is matched by your ability to echo extremist enviro bs.
Jack Cowper | July 9, 2012 at 12:02 pm |
Never has a peronal blog been more appropiately named. Although I personally have no interest in keeping track of you.
What's a "peronal blog"?
Here's a protip for you: when you feel impelled to call someone an idiot, try not to include grade-schoolers-would-blush mistakes in spelling in the very same sentence. It's just the "appropiate" thing to do. ;)
A Lacis | July 9, 2012 at 12:13 pm |
Rud Istvan spins nonsense by the crockful.
Not understanding the problem, and not knowing the facts, makes it most unlikely that accurate inferences or sensible conclusions can or will ever be drawn. That would be my assessment of Rud Istvan's posted analysis.
First, let's start with better analogies. "In 1926 the president of the American Philosophical Society called Wegener's theory of continental drift "utter damn rot"." More similar in flavor to this statement is the comment that was made in 1995 by Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), then House Science Committee's energy and environmental panel chair, who proclaimed that global warming is at best "unproven scientific nonsense, and at worst, . . . liberal claptrap".
A fair and civil assessment of the above statements is that both gentlemen where clearly mistaken in their convictions. After all, what would a philosophy professor be expected to know about geology. And what could a conservative Republican Congressman be expected to know about climate science and the environment.
Sentiments regarding climate science don't fare much better in the US Senate, where yet another arch-conservative, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), has been proclaiming that climate science is the greatest hoax ever, based apparently on his in-depth biblical studies. For these gentlemen of the arch-conservative mindset, their basic aspirations and interests don't appear to extend much beyond their pet social issues, guns, and oil profits.
Perhaps, for the benefit of Rud Istvan and the other arch-conservative Republican folks, we should present the discussion of climate science as a national security issue. Surely, if Congressman Rohrabacher and Senator Inhofe were to learn that some foreign power was scheming to detach Florida from being a part of the United States, they would both be up in arms striving to make sure that no such thing would ever threaten the United States.
But that is exactly what is being planned – except that that scheming foreign power is us. This is not a joke. Idiots should not assume that somehow physics will not apply to them. Keep in mind that neither ignorance nor stupidity, whether deliberate or inadvertent, will ever absolve anyone from the consequences that physics has in store. As the very classical Goethe's Faust came to learn, there always comes the time when the accounts payable get settled. Payback is a bitch.
The physics is very clear that it is the non-condensing greenhouse gases, atmospheric CO2 being the principal contributor, that govern the strength of the atmospheric greenhouse effect. The physics is also very clear that water vapor is a feedback effect. As a feedback, water vapor always seeks to attain its maximum atmospheric concentration as allowed by the Clausius-Clapeyron relation (when the saturation point is reached, water vapor condenses and precipitates). Recall that the Clausius-Clapeyron relation is exponential in nature, that for every 10°C increase in temperature, the atmospheric water vapor content will double.
Perhaps, because the climate system response is so slow, and there is also unforced natural variability going on, people are being lulled into thinking that climate change is not happening, or that climate change is highly uncertain. We need to understand the natural variability of the climate system (El Nino, La Nina) for what it is, as unforced fluctuations about a zero reference point that can be as large in magnitude as the cumulative decadal increase in global temperature due to global warming due to the increasing greenhouse gases.
The point to be made here, is that we are on a destructive course where Florida, and a whole bunch of other choice real estate from Boston, New York, Washington DC, Miami, New Orleans, to Houston will be to be lost to rising sea level. There are uncertainties as to how rapidly the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will disintegrate, and to how much time we really have to reverse the relentless global warming trend. If the global warming problem does not get resolved this century, we can expect that the Faustian payback will be collected in the century that follows.
This is where all the stupid conspiracy-theory silliness about "the government-research complex for political and personal agendas" needs to be put aside so that we can be addressing the real issues.
The principal purpose and responsibility of the government is to protect and maintain the security and well-being of the nation and its people against all foreign, domestic, and global challenges. Who else do the people have but their government to see to it that the challenge that is posed by global warming is fully studied, is fully understood, and that appropriate countermeasures are then identified and implemented.
Clearly, we cannot rely on Haliburton, Exxon, or the Koch Brothers to do anything sensible for the environment, since their only purpose in life is to make as much money from fossil fuel as they can. And we can also be sure that when it comes time for key real estate to be relocated to higher ground ahead of rising sea-level, that these same fossil fuel industries will not want to pay a single nickel toward the relocation costs since, of course, global warming was never their problem.
mrmethane | July 9, 2012 at 12:19 pm |
And that, sir, is one of the most blatantly political and self-serving rants I've read. There are trolls, and there are desperate, rent-seeking professionals. You have surpassed trollism, in my view.
Inhofe had bread turn to roses, and you, Andy, have roses with worms in the buds.
climatereason | July 9, 2012 at 12:32 pm |
Can I ask if you believe the Hockey stick fairly represents our climate back to 1000AD? If you do I can see why you are so concerned about sea level rise.
WebHubTelescope | July 9, 2012 at 1:40 pm |
Thanks. That is a good antidote to the swill in the Istvan post.
A Lacis, you said,
And you're helping them make more money from the scam. No, we cannot rely on them, only on observations of nature's phenomena. Evidence please! Try doing some testing, think of an experimental setup to test the hypothesis, please! I am sure, with some simplifications and proper downscaling that a sensible test is possible. If it's basic physics (and I agree it is), than it must be possible to test it.
Or we wait for the cooling.
Or we wait for the warming.
Too little time. We don't wanna wait for too long.
If you don't want to wait, then get to a school double quick and start studying science.
The evidence is there, waiting for you.
We will have to wait anyway. History is a great teacher.
It is only going to get worse for you, andy. The Senate and the White House will go over to the dark side in a few months. Early retirement would be your best move. Delete your emails and data, on the way out.
Yeah, the Mitt Romney hundred-dollar-bills-in-our-teeth, professional outsourcer, quarter-billionaire with the Swiss bank account to prove it.
Good luck with passing that off to the American people. I wouldn't bet the farm.
You are ignorant on far more than cliamte, aparently.
Robert is whistling past the grave yard. Incumbents don't get re-elected with public sentiment in this kind of shape:
http://thehill.com/polls/236627-hill-poll-majority-feel-obama-has-changed-country-for-worse
jim2 | July 9, 2012 at 10:39 pm |
Hunter – you forgot your Smiley-Face!!!!
Andy, have you ever stepped back and taken notice that all your worry-wart scare-boogers haven't convinced even one of your well-heeled betters to set the example and lead a low-carbon lifestyle. Indeed, maybe they haven't even convinced you, Andy? Ever think about that? So why should your jeremiads convince us little guys? Any thoughts there, Andy?
And, Andy, why pick on the Koch brothers for their modest carbon sins when you have whole legions in your own crowd dancing with the carbon-demons–Al Gore, Branson, Hollywood jet-set eco-dabblers, be-castled European aristocrats with a hobbyist interest in the eugenics of global warming, and the whole host of big and little carbon-piggie hypocrites who spew CO2 hither and yon as they flit about from one party-time, blow-out, carbon-wallow enivro-confab to another.
So, Andy, whatever the "scientific" merits of your milksop-hysterics they have been, long-since, snatched up and perverted for the make-a-buck/make-a-gulag intrigues of your betters. In other words, the whole CAGW deal, in its present form is a patent scam and hustle.
And, Andy, it is painfully apparent that you avoid calling out the green-washed con-artists that one way or another represent the hand that feeds you. Indeed, Andy, you are your fellow enablers–no mean carbon-suckers, yourselves–are more of a "problem
than the Koch borthers, any day, due to your own, personal, brazen, carbon-swilling hypocrisy. I mean, like, that sort of two-faced conduct completely discredits your message, you know.
But, Andy, if you really believe all this CAGW crapola. Then, my earnest best counsel is to lead from the front and by personal example and adopt the low-carbon lifestyle, yourself, you urge on us helots, peons, and peasants. And get your pals–yes, even your big-shot pals, Andy–to do likewise–or, at least, make a real public show of biting the hand that feeds you. In the meantime, Andy, as you apportion your fulminations, what do you say you save the Koch brothers for next-to-last, and us "little people" for dead last?
willard | July 9, 2012 at 9:44 pm |
Even by the high standard you impose on your character, dearest mike, that comment surpasses anything you have written so far as a way to repeat the words vs deeds fallacy.
Not that the Join the Bandwagon and your usual zest and gusto did not offer a good counterpoint.
Your harangue was a pleasure to read, as always.
> William Berryman Scott (1858-1947), an eminent and highly respected vertebrate paleontologist who was Blair Professor of Geology at Princeton and the former president of the influential American Philosophical Society, drove another nail into Wegener's coffin when he characterized the hypothesis as "utter, damned rot."
http://sob-leaningleft.blogspot.ca/2011/07/geosciences-source-book-wegener-dietz.html
To be more specific, this was in response to this:
> After all, what would a philosophy professor be expected to know about geology.
Fact-checking seldom hurts.
Dr. Lacis,
If your goal is to enhance the credibility of your position, you are failing.
Your arrogant and ill-informed dismissal of those who dare disagree with you does not make you look brighter.
A brief review of the APS, for instance, would have prevented you from ignorantly asserting it is not a scientific society.
http://www.amphilsoc.org/about/
A brief moment of reflection would cause a reasonable person to consider that atributing political motives to one's opponents at the least raises the question about the accuser's own political motives.
But then we instead have you, rationalizing fraud and deceipt in the name of promoting your view of science.
Your writings and actions are having the net result of increasing the numbers of people who are cooncluding that AGW social mania is degrading science. Please continue.
omnologos | July 9, 2012 at 12:43 pm |
Obviously somebody's posted a fake comment under the name of "A Lacis" for a practical joke…
I honestly don't think Judith would permit that, and it wouldn't be long before somebody called it to her attention…
I am skeptical of your coonclusion. Possibly because of the little black mask which, while cute, does not inspire trust.
Jim Cripwell | July 9, 2012 at 1:26 pm |
Let us look at one bit of "science", that Andy cliams is true. I quote from his post of July 9, 2012 at 12:13 pm
"We need to understand the natural variability of the climate system (El Nino, La Nina) for what it is, as unforced fluctuations about a zero reference point that can be as large in magnitude as the cumulative decadal increase in global temperature due to global warming due to the increasing greenhouse gases."
The idea that random noise operates around a zero reference point is true, if and only if, the time period over which the noise is averaged is long compared with the time constants of the individual contributors to the noise. If the time period over which the noise is average does not meet this condition, then there will be a residual, false, signal being contributed by the noise.
Since we do not know the characterisitcs of all the noise which is contributed by natural events, and the time comnstants of some of these must surely be long compared with the time over which CAGW is supposed to have been occurring, Andy's statement is, at best, misleading; and at worst a deliberate attempt to misrepresent the science.
Great post. The Complex (not only governments, but also media, academic world, journals, industries, banks, corporations, people…) is big, but nature is much, much greater. Some things cannot be hidden.
pokerguy | July 9, 2012 at 2:21 pm |
A Lacis writes: "This is not a joke. Idiots should not assume that somehow physics will not apply to them"
You sir, are a profoundly arrogant fellow.
Anyone that starts a sentence "You sir…" is profoundly pompous. :-)
I don't understand the practice of insulting someone, then adding a smiley face. I see a lot of that lately. What is it you're trying to communicate? That you're so appreciative of your own perceived wit that you have to make sure everyone knows it? That despite the insult, you're really a friendly guy after all?
I'm also not sure a person can be profoundly pompous. The word doesn't quite sound right to my ear.
I'd add a happy face, but that would make me a profound hypocrite, so I won't.
:-) = Lots of people seem determined to be miserable and bitter today. Despite my dig at you, I am in the real world maintaining a cheerful out-look.
Lacis is about 25th in the list of arrogant people who are regulars here.
Only Fred Moolten could be excluded from that list.
And even then.
Tom | July 9, 2012 at 11:12 pm |
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2170985/The-suns-solar-flares-getting-stronger–latest-hot-spot-size-15-Earths-strung-together.html
You sir have nailed me. I confess, profound arrogance here. Deep as a well. Wide as church doors. O'er topping the vault of Heaven.. Oh, wait. You said pompous.
Well.. I suppose I could try to do both. But it'll be a stretch.
The paper referred to above is actually based on a single-column model.
The IPCC report stated that "Within the community that constructs and actively analyses satellite- and radiosonde-based temperature records there is agreement that the uncertainties about long-term change are substantial. Changes in instrumentation and protocols pervade both sonde and satellite records, obfuscating the modest long-term trends."
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4.html
and referenced a synthesis study completed in 2006, including eg:
"What kinds of atmospheric temperature
variations can the current observing
systems measure and what are their
strengths and limitations, both spatially
and temporally?"
Convening Lead Author: John R. Christy
"reported upper-air trends vary considerably between research teams
beginning with the same raw data owing to their different decisions on how to remove non-climatic factors."
With an as yet undetermined appendage John Sidles writes:
"Your posts consistently display to the world a level of willful ignorance, dishonor, denunciation, and infamy that few American citizens ever approach and almost none sustain."
You have much to learn grasshopper. This is tame and I've been sustaining for 20 years. I guess I'm 99.97th percentile in more than just IQ. Besides, coming from an anonymous coward like you I'll consider it a compliment. There is nothing honorable about you calling others stupid from behind a cloak of anonymity. You and your ilk make me ill. Yet when I swore to defend this nation I knew I was defending the chaff as well as the wheat. You suck.
Beth Cooper | July 9, 2012 at 10:01 pm |
pokerguy, July 9/ 3.12pm:
'I'd add a happy face but that would make me a profound hypocrite, so I won't.'
Now that made me laugh (out loud) pokerguy. Go on add it and be damned!
Let's contribute to the human circus, I say.
pokerguy | July 10, 2012 at 7:18 am |
Thank 'ee dear Beth. Shared laughter under the big top. Time well spent..
tempterrain | July 9, 2012 at 10:47 pm |
It's always worth a loud groan when you hear someone mention how conventional science got it, temporarily, wrong with Wegener's theory of continental drift. What's the other one? The theory of how stomach ulcers were caused by stress? The implication, of course, is that science can't ever be relied upon to get it right. If they are saying that CO2 emissions need to be curtailed , the name Wegener just needs a mention and then its pretty obvious to all that no such action is needed.
Of course, after these two examples it gets a bit harder to think of when science got it wrong in any kind of significant way. There'll be a fair bit of head scratching before anyone can come up with anything else I dare say. Science does have an excellent track record of getting things right. There would be far fewer problems in the world if politicians and economists were even half as good as scientists.
But there is one other instance, and the field in climate science too, where a significant mistake was made. Science can get it wrong there too. You may be aware that Arrhenius first wrote about the problem of CO2 build up in the early 20th century. He did various calculations and arrived at figures for the likely amount of global warming which weren't that much out of line with what read today. Then another well known scientist called Angstrom came along, did some more calculations, and experiments, and decided that Arrhenius was mistaken. He claimed that the CO2 lines in the atmosphere were already saturated and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would make little difference.
So for 50 or more years that was the scientific 'paradigm'. I know a lot of commentators on this blog are very fond of that word. Except it wasn't right. The paradigm was there to be falsified, and which it was, eventually.
So the next time you guys are looking for examples of where science cocked up, don't forget Angstrom who was considered right when he was wrong, and Arrhenius who was considered wrong when he was right all along.
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 per doubling maybe :) | July 9, 2012 at 11:00 pm |
Temp, I believe Angstrom said "near" saturation. That is a subtle but critical difference. Near saturation in the lower atmosphere would put the impact at the surface lower, which is where Arrhenius returned with the lower estimate of 1.6(2.1) with water vapor. Remember, Arrhenius took a while before revising and was not particularly motivated to publish his revised data, surely a sore point for Mosher :)
From Arrhenius' starting point in the 1900s BTW, that is a quite a bit lower than current estimates which is the majority of the debate. With that bit of trivia, the other examples are not meant to distrust all science, just be wary of science, remember dark chocolate is back to being good and red wine is bad again, or was that last week :)
GaryM | July 10, 2012 at 11:51 am |
"the other examples are not meant to distrust all science"
I don't mistrust science. Any more than I mistrust mathematics, or logic or philosophy. Science is a method, not a catechism.
I do on the other hand mistrust scientists, mathematicians, logicians and philosophers, because they are people. And people lie, cheat, steal, and hog the blankets at night.
Combine the weakness of human nature with power (or who search for power) over others, and those traits become both more prevalent, and much more dangerous.
I love that the generation that coined the phrase "never trust anyone over 30," now relies on appeals to authority to get their way.
mike | July 9, 2012 at 11:15 pm |
temp,
Yr: "…looking for examples of where science cocked up…"
Kinda squirrely figure of speech–"cocked up"–there, temp. But, to answer your challenge, here are a couple or so further instances where science "dicked things up" (doesn't that sound much better, temp?):
Tobacco science–But there was "big money" involved in that deal.
Lysenko science–But "big politics" were at play in that deal.
CAGW scam–And notably, in that last case, both "big money" and "big politics" were (and still are) conspicuously at the center of the whole deal–big-time!
See a pattern, temp?
Brian H | July 15, 2012 at 4:57 am |
His name is a jumble of Peter Martin, and he's British. "Cocked up" is standard, trite Brit colloquial speech for "screwed up".
How about one gene one enzyme?
That may not have been a paradigm for long enough though.
tempterrain | July 10, 2012 at 12:50 am |
Mike, "Tobacco science" was never accepted as part of the scientific consensus. Papers, conforming to the term, would have had to be given at something like the Heartland conference. Just like denier/skeptic papers on climate change.
"Lysenko Science" Never accepted by the consensus either. Lysenkoism was a throwback to the ideas Lamark was promulgating in the 18th century and was rejected by mainstream science throughout the world, even including in the USSR where many scientists were sent to Gulags for speaking out against the Communist Party line.
Do you have Gulags in the USA? If you do I'm sure that many would like to send James Hansen and Michael Mann there for daring to speak out against the Republican Party line.
Wagathon | July 10, 2012 at 1:03 am |
And the schoolteachers and bureaucrats of the government-education complex will save the world from capitalism, tra-la.
mike | July 10, 2012 at 2:24 am |
Some slightly unhinged, Robert-wannabe, flights of fancy aside, temp, your reply seems to resolve itself into two main points:
Tobacco science was not "consensus" science, you claim, temp. But Tobacco science was, indeed, a "consensus"science, temp, among those scientists making a tobacco-company buck off the deal. You know, temp, just like today's lefty-stooge, hired-gun, "consensus" scientists suck at the taxpayer-ripoff, generously-filled trough, provided by their greenshirt/green-washed benefactors for services rendered. Sorry, Steve, the stench of mercenary self-interest, emanating from climate "science's" carbon-piggie, hypocrite, "consensus" sty, fails the "smell" test. Tobacco science/CAGW scam science, all samey-samey, temp.
And, temp, Lysenko science was also "consensus" science for the establishment scientists of the Soviet Union, during Lysenko's ascendancy. You know, temp, sorta like how the West's contemporary "scientific" establishment has lined itself up, all nice and pretty, in support of the CAGW make-a-buck/make-a-gulag hustle our betters so desperately want to foist on us groaning peasants, serfs, helots, and useless-eater "little" guys. Again, CAGW scam science and Lysenko science, all samey-samey, temp.
And, temp, we don't have gulags in the United States–sorry to disappoint you, guy. Though your hero, James Hansen, told our Congress in 2008 that "deniers" were guilty of "high crimes against humanity and nature." Another gent named Steve Zweick, writing in Forbes magazine, assured us "deniers" that "We know who the active denialists are…let's start keeping track of them now…let's let their houses burn…" And, of course, we have here at Climate Etc. our very own eco-bolshevik, Robert. Yep, temp, that Robert! You see, temp, Robert regards unwanted carbon emissions as an act of violence against his person. And Robert further refuses to renounce violence as a justifiable, self-defense response to unwanted carbon emissions (fortunately, Robert had no problem with the recent Rio conference's obscene carbon-spew–for reasons known only to the "Idiot"–or "things" could have gotten real ugly, I'm afraid–I mean, like, the truly weirdo, creep-out guy is, like, totally obsessed with Anders Brevik and all).
So, temp, while the U. S. has no gulags, currently, should the Lysenkoist hive-bozos pushing the CAGW scam here ever get the power and control over our society they so crave, then, yes, we could see gulags, at that point, and worse. And it's not the "Republican Party" we have to worry about when it comes to gulags, temp.
Finally, temp, I gotta be honest with you, guy. Judging from your comments the last couple of days, you've really flipped out here lately–ol' sport.
kim | July 10, 2012 at 9:42 am |
Tobacco climate,
Oreskes inverts the truth.
Parbati wonder.
tempterrain | July 10, 2012 at 7:37 pm |
"And, temp, we don't have gulags in the United States–sorry to disappoint you, guy"
What about Guantanamo Bay? That looks like one to me. But, I guess you could argue that technically wasn't a part of the USA. These technicalities are quite handy at times aren't they?
capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 per doubling maybe :) | July 10, 2012 at 7:45 pm |
Gulags were for fellow citizens that wanted to mess up your political goals. Gitmo is for foreign combatants that wanted to mess up your citizens. Subtle little difference.
No, we'll just make a video showing them being blown up for disagreeing with us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Mw5_EBk0g
Tempterrain seems to one of those adhering to the laughable myth that government climate scientists are on the whole objective and honest, rather than being (on average) ideologically left/authoritarian, and hence producing mainly "studies" that invariably argue for more government, their ideological home and paymaster.
Erica, Is it really a "laughable myth"? Government science , worldwide, has always been much more trustworthy than that very small amount of science funded by the private sector. They got it right on tobacco whereas those scientists funded by the tobacco companies got it wrong. They should both have got it wrong according to your 'reasoning'; governments had a lot of tax revenue to lose too.
Where else would you say government funded science has gone astray?
Temp, " Government science , worldwide, has always been much more trustworthy than that very small amount of science funded by the private sector." Seems you are young or have a short memory, remember there are a bunch of governments, past and present, which have had some rather odd scientific focuses from time to time.
Erica | July 11, 2012 at 1:35 am |
Tempterrain
The integrity of government climate science, where political vested interest comes in to play, has been most clearly illustrated by Climategate : the leading lights cheat their way to a conclusion that favors government, in response to which the the bulk of the rest of them merely lower their heads, acquiescing to this fraud by means of a deafening silence. Jones and the other crooks are still in their jobs, no action was ever taken against them, and vigorous data-hiding continues to this day (though there are a few signs of hope of late).
And besides scale and complexity, a big difference between the climate and tobacco cases, is that with climate there is the opportunity to boost taxes and and appear to do the right thing.
Beth Cooper | July 10, 2012 at 10:32 am |
re yr reflections on defections,
David Wojak,09/07, 8.49am and pokerguy 08/07,10.17pm:
Ten climate scientists doing jest fine,
One lost his data, then there were nine.
Nine climate scientists modelling lapse rate,
Someone's numbers were up the creek, then there were eight.
Eight climate scientists ..
pokerguy | July 10, 2012 at 1:40 pm |
Those above who argue that climate scientists have committed no fraud and thus have done nothing newsworthy: While I grant I was using the term loosely, I think it isn't far off the mark when you consider many of the behind the scenes climate-gate machinations. Likewise, If you don't want to use the term "fraudulent" with respect to the hockey stick graph and all that decline hiding, that's your prerogative, but either way it's unarguably sleazy as hell. Likewise the IPCC with its phony baloney claims of near certainty.
David Wojick: You think this stuff is not newsworthy? Are you kidding me? The many, many billions of dollars spent needlessly in an attempt to prop up what the esteemed Harold Lewis called "the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life?"
It's newsworthy all right. It's newsworthy as newsworthy can be.