More muddy thinking. Once again, a politico-journalist writes about science and misses the point. Science is not like law, politics or sport: there is no umpire, no judge, no boss who sets the rules (at least not one you can interview). Opinions don’t control the climate, yet Mike Steketee makes the basic error of elevating opinions above The Real World. Steketee is The Australian newspaper’s National Affairs Editor. He’s even won a Walkley award for journalism, yet somehow, the rules of engagement for science writing are so lax he can get away with a commentary which fails the basic test of logic. He pays lip service to the benefits of scepticism in journalism, while he simply repeats official PR from international committees. This is not investigative journalism, or even informed commentary.
“We have the illusion of ‘free press’, but when the press is untrained in logic and reason, free press is just free propaganda.”
What’s so comi-tragic about Steketee is that he’s so sure he ‘understands’ science that he can patronisingly imply that Fielding-the-engineer, might be ‘influenced’ by a contrarian (god forbid, a person who thinks)—all while Steketee is clearly not just influenced, but beholden to group-think. Yawn. There goes another herding-journo tugging the forelock to authority.
What we so desperately need are science writers trained in Aristotelian reason. And, while Science is nothing without Reason, politics would surely not suffer if it’s commentators were exposed to The Art of Rhetoric.
My letter to The Australian…
Global politics is being influenced by climate contrarians
Mike Steketee Jun 20, 2009
Steketee boldly invokes Galileo, then unwittingly relies on arguing from authority—exactly the kind of illogic and unreason that Galileo risked his life to fight.
He recites the litany ‘the evidence is increasing for global warming’ but can’t cite any that matters. Instead of science, he talks ‘opinion’ and effectively just lists names and universities: NOAA, University of Chicago, Monash University, British Meteorological Office, The Climate Institute, Fourier, Garnaut(?), and yes, even Thatcher(?!)
It all sounds impressive, but The Climate listens to none of these. We could talk data instead—glaciers have been melting and sea level rising at about the same rate since 1800. Napoleon didn’t have SUV’s yet the planet has warmed. Dang. Something was warming the planet 200 years ago and we don’t know what it was, yet we kid ourselves that We Understand The Climate.
Facts about coincidences in the last 100 years can be ‘real’ and ‘really irrelevant’ at the same time
Sceptics are way ahead of Steketee, who bravely attacks arguments Fielding hasn’t made. Steketee patronizes us knocking down the solar argument, while he totally misses the point.
Catch up with us Steketee, we are NOT talking about solar irradiance. For ten years there has been a compelling theory about solar-magnetic effects, but if you haven’t heard about it, that because Fielding was right—the media haven’t talked about it. Go be an investigative journalist, and look it up, but don’t rely on David Archer, your favourite AGW-Teamster, to give you both sides of the story.
Yes, Steketee, if you must write about science, try to get the basics right. Facts about coincidences in the last 100 years can be ‘real’ and ‘really irrelevant’ at the same time. They are not so compelling if you look at the last 1,000, 10,000, or 1 billion years and the theory falls flat on it’s face.
There’s a compelling connection between postage stamp prices and global warming too. http://joannenova.com.au/2009/05/03/shock-global-temperatures-driven-by-us-postal-charges/
Correlation is not causation, authority is not evidence, and blather about strawmen theories, conspiracies, and myths is not what Fielding is talking about. He just wants evidence. Is that so unreasonable?
That fake principle strikes again
Let’s dissect a common truthiness dictate which is otherwise known as the precautionary principle. Quote Steketee: “But in an area where there can be no absolute certainty, at least about the size of the consequences, surely it makes sense to take precautions, particularly when the effect on national economic growth of doing so will be minor,”
The precautionary-principle is so mindlessly adaptable it also works in reverse.
This fake multifunctional principle works in all situations for any factor you care to name. Consider the threat of asteroids, or alien visits. The dictate fits—as long as we keep a cost-benefit analysis out. Using that logic, we can argue that we must construct a far distant warming system for asteroids and UFO’s at the cost of hundreds of billions (it won’t affect our economy much). The precautionary-principle is so mindlessly adaptable it also works in reverse. We know that rapidly changing The Energy Source modern civilization runs on, and making one of life’s most basic essentials more expensive, will cause deaths in the poorest nations. Therefore, before we kill anyone, we should take precautions. We don’t need conclusive proof the planet will warm, but we do need some, any, substantive observational evidence that a catastrophe is likely to be coming.
What makes the precautionary dictate utterly vacuous is that it denies that we need to consider the numbers. Let’s get quantitative: will the planet warm by 1 degree or 3 degrees (or 5 degrees even)?
The empirical evidence suggests 0.5 – 1 degree (tops) without feedback from water vapor (See the missing hot spot). No cataclysm here.
Just plain wrong
Steketee: “..emissions are rising faster than generally predicted”
No. They’re not even meeting the lowest IPCC projections. Graph. Link.
No cause and effect here
We’re discussing the evidence of global warming right? So in a 1200 word article, how does Steketee reason that the theory of carbon-crisis is real? I’ll paraphrase:
it’s useful in an article about Fielding to contrive ways to mention the words myth, conspiracy and the phrase ‘no evidence’
- Big acronyms support it. (Authority rules…)
- Some people who are sceptical talk about conspiracies, therefore any idea supported by these people must be wrong, even if other sceptics have other reasons. (Smear by association)
- Margaret Thatcher agrees.
- Assume ”Solar Activity’ can only mean ‘Solar Irradiance’ and explain why that didn’t cause the warming. (Strawman)
- Despite the short records (since 1850), and variability that we can’t explain in those short records, there have been a lot of hot years lately. (Correlation is not causation)
- It really has been hot. Fielding didn’t suggest it, but I’ll point out anyway why it’s silly to think that there might be a conspiracy among meteorological organizations. (It’s useful in an article about Fielding to contrive ways to mention the words myth, conspiracy and the phrase ‘no evidence’.)
- Galileo talked about the sun, which has scientific and historical cachet, even though there’s no chance he was able to accurately measure the irradiance of the sun 400 years ago, and the irradiance is not the point in any case.
- I don’t know of many scientists who disagree and I read books by believers of the theory so I’d expect them to tell me all about those dissenting scientists in full and accurately too. (Argument from ignorance, about irrelevant authority)
- Let’s attack the idea of solar irradiance again, and talk about how we are worse than volcanos and that since CO2 is man-made, it must be bad. (Don’t mention Toba.)
- Claim the weight of history. People have been talking about the greenhouse effect for a long time. It’s a chance to name-drop ‘Fourier’. He showed the effect in the lab after all, which doesn’t have clouds, rain or humidity, but it’s not like those things affect the weather.
- Lastly, mention that someone somewhere predicted a temperature rise correctly and in advance. With so many predictions out there, it’s a given that one or two must be right by chance. Shame we have to go back to 1972 to find one. (Monkey’s on typewriters…)
Logic Bingo
Tick the following on your Steketee-score card: uses argument from authority; fights straw men; argues from ignorance; smears by association and is just plain wrong.
Challenge for Steketee: Find some evidence instead of just opinions! For a description of what is and what isn’t evidence about carbon’s effect on the climate: Short page Full document (16p)
Yes, but isn’t it interesting how perspicacious a goodly number of the comments on the The Australian site are! My impression is that this is changing (for the better).
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An unusually balanced article from The Australian which generally is a keen promoter of the sceptical side of science. I honestly don’t see a problem in it.
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I’d also note that on balance of evidence, there are no current plans to build a far distant warming (sic) system for UFOs, as the precautionary principle of course is used sensibly. You’d never cross a road or leave the house otherwise.
Would have been good if he had discussed that the proposed solutions are low cost and well within our technological know-how to achieve.
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It is particularly galling to even consider taking drastic measures on the basis of an unproven hypothesis, reports that are politically and ideologically biased, and computer models that can’t even get the last few years right.
Reports are not evidence.
Computer models that predict warming are not data.
The Australian article isn’t news. It’s warmist propaganda.
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Well it is an opinion piece, not news, or science. What “Drastic measures”? If i thought we were proposing to take any I’d possibly want the science to be a tad more then models by our brightest and bestest.
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Matt, what’s the point of an opinion piece on science from someone who doesn’t understand science? What is science without logic and reason? Witchcraft.
Asking the local greengrocer to write about politics has more value.
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Steketee concedes the cooling though, no more denial there. Even the cooling from 1940-75. So for the bulk of the last 69 years the world has cooled, and that supports CO2 warming? It’s a great religion this – can’t go wrong, except that average people are so sensitized over emissions/temps they will start to wonder what the hell is going on. Maybe they overdid the fear factor.
Matty, Perth
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Joanne: “Matt, what’s the point of an opinion piece on science from someone who doesn’t understand science?”
The opinion piece is headed “Climate contrarians”, and is about climate sceptics and their opponents. Inevitably, writing about such matters will involve citing some names, including, naturally enough, those of the contrarians themselves.
It will also involve writing about what people believe, including, once again, the contrarians. If Christopher Monckton believes climate change theory is a leftist plot, that is a relevant factor in assessing the sceptics’ case.
That said, I don’t see any evidence in the article that the writer doesn’t understand science. For example, his discussion of the recent temperature record and of solar activity demonstrates a reasonably competent grasp of these subjects.
Your beef seems to be that Steketee chose to write about a particular subject rather than one you think he should have written about.
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“Global politics is being influenced by contrarians”. In Australia presently yes, and about time, but elsewhere??
India has rejected the science of AGW. In China they can’t even be bothered doing that and build a coal fired plant every five days. The Russians are hedging, the EU thing is fragmenting, the developing world doesn’t care and we don’t matter. That leaves the US who will do nothing on their own. Steketee is immersed in domestic politics. Warmism is a comfortable western middle class fad and he is part of it.
Matty, Perth
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Steketee has been going on about the ETS and “carbon trading” for some time and proceeds from the assumption that we need an ETS. Indeed, that is the starting point for all the economics and environmental witers in “The Australian” who are totally dismissive of the contrarian scientific evidence. Some months ago Steketee wrote that the important thing was that Rudd got the economics right. No mention from him that perhaps the science might be more important.
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John Elliot – you must be off your rocker if you think that the Australian is predominantly a warmist newspaper.
And Jo I’m sorry I just don;t think you have a monopoly opinion on what is or is not good science. I take your point but it is clear we have different opinions on just what constitutes science.
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Matt and Brendan,
The first two lines of the story:
“The evidence of global warming keeps piling up but that seems only to embolden the climate contrarians and sceptics to press their case harder. Why shouldn’t they, as they are having some success in raising doubts among politicians?”
So No. This story is predominantly about evidence and alleges that contrarians are unscientific and have influence beyond what they should. It’s a fair topic to write on, but since he’s chosen it, it’s absolutely important that he then goes on to show how 1/ the evidence is piling up (He can’t and it isn’t) and 2/ the sceptics have undue influence (meaning their ideas are not sound).
Since it is a science topic he has to be able to do this without breaking basic rules of logic. He can’t. He thinks ‘evidence’ is committee opinion (Loud sirens ring “UnScientific”). He offers no other evidence relating to carbon’s effect in the Real World at all, which suggests he hasn’t even looked at sceptics arguments. David Evans – who is alleged by inference to have unfairly ‘influenced’ Fielding has put up papers on his site (and mine), easily found, describing his views. It would have taken Steketee five minutes to find out if the sceptics he is most concerned about have any genuine concerns. He didn’t even look. That’s not investigative, it’s free PR.
Mike Steketee – Part time, Assistant public relations clerk, IPCC, NOAA, WMO, Royal Society, Penny Wong etc etc, cheap. (Don’t pay me, I’ll hand over my ‘investigative’ reporter badge, my awards and my reputation, all for free!)
And Matt, I don’t have a monopoly opinion on what is good science, but if you think that science communicators should be able to get away with logical flaws and baseless smear by association, you have very low standards indeed. A job a Pravda awaits you. It’s not my opinion that argument by authority is wrong. It just Is. You cannot name a single person who has influence over the planetary climate, therefore, whatever anyone, any committee or any model says about the climate, is overriden by what The Climate Does. Evidence trumps Opinion. What’s really sad is that I believe you have some kind of science degree or related, and I still need to tell you this. Obviously our education system is pathetically deficient. Though because I have explained it to you before, and you still don’t get it, maybe I shouldnt blame UWA entirely.
And if Steketee wants to attack Monckton he could have quoted um… Monckton(!), and he’d discover Monckton has very legitimate reasons. But again, Steketee doesn’t read ‘Monckton’ he just reads alarmists debunkings of what they think Monckton said. Look at Steketees ‘reasoning’… Monckton is wrong because even Margaret Thatcher still believes in AGW, not that we’ve asked her lately, we just haven’t heard much else different.
Steketee is free to express his views of course. But if The Australian (which is doing a good job for the most part) wants to get views from the other side, why give air time to a non climate expert to express an opinion about a topic he hasn’t researched much? They might as well run a vox populi and run down the street asking random bus passengers what they reckon…
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It is pretty clear to me that the “evidence piling up” refers to the US NOAA report, which gives a pretty clear opinion. Furthermore you quote Sekatee saying “emissions are rising faster than generally predicted”, when actually he says that the NOAA says that.
Maybe he could have said that “Mainstream science is telling us that the evidence of AGW is piling up.” I don;t think he says contrarians are unscientific – does he?
lol I’ll let your comments that my position demonstrates that either our education system ot I am pathetically deficient through to the keeper thanks.
Will it annoy you if I say that all of us have influence over the planetary climate? So I can name plenty.
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Matt Buckels:
Really! And even if it were, is that evidence of AGW? I think not….
I’d say – “emotions are rising faster than generally predicted” – is probably more accurate for the alarmist camp.
Cheers.
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Yes, it’s definitely an emotional issue. The very idea that global warming is something caused by man and that it’s within man’s power to reverse, has a very powefull emotional ring to it. Many want AGW to cause climate change, if for no other reason than to avoid the feeling of helplessness in the face of impending crisis. Of course the crisis itself is manufactured for the very reason of eliciting this emotional response.
There’s also the problem that it’s far easier to describe the AGW case as a sound bite than it is to explain how the climate actually operates and why the AGW supporting science is so incredibly flawed. The real warmist mantra is ‘burn fuel and destroy the planet’, driven primarily by greenies with radical environmental agendas, who are clearly over represented in the IPCC. It’s obvious that few environmentalists, even those who don’t support radical agendas, can refuse the gift of AGW, regardless of whether or not the science is right. Besides, they want so much for the science to support them, they become blinded to even the obvious flaws.
George
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We get the same trash daily here in the USA.
These socialists make me sick.
(People tell me not to confuse politics with so-called “science – but “science” really isn’t the right word here – but they’re socialists nevertheless. To work for any big news outlet these days membership in the socialist party is prerequisite, I am sure – along with unfathomable gullability)
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I like to call myself an environmentalist who has refused the gift of AGW.I am concerned about issues such as loss of biodiversity, pollution, whaling and energy efficency. I also find Lovelock’s gaia idea fascinating. But when I look seriously at AGW evidence,I’m not convinced. I’m particularly disturbed by some some of the alarmist claims by scientists who should be more considered.
The science journalism of our national broadcaster also irritates me. They should be challenging the views of the mainstream scientific community, just like the way they hound other areas of the social establishment.
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Well said, George! You took the words right out of my mouth.
Anti-human environmentalism is definitely the trendy, politically correct religion for atheist left wing city dwellers.
And Dave B, a friendly word of warning: Lovelock’s Gaia idea is not fascinating, it’s sick. Here’s a quote from the Great Man himself, who thinks we’ve become a disease: “Humans on Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. The human species is now so numerous as to consitute a serious planetary malady”.
Quoted in this interesting article by Brendan O’Neill from Spiked Online (From The Australian):
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25667725-7583,00.html
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A recent article on a similar theme:
http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=482&Itemid=1
In my opinion, spot on.
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“emissions are rising faster than generally predicted”
The crises is that their predictions were wrong and they don’t want you to notice it. If they can’t get such short term predictions right how can they predict the climate in 100 years? Their so called predictions are nothing but wild guesses. Guesses that are not even as good as educated ones. Yet we are suppose to return to the stone age to protect the earth from their predicted catastrophe.
One thing is sure, make enough predictions of catastrophe long enough and someday you will be right. I predict that a huge asteroid will hit the earth and destroy 90% of living things within the next 150 million years. I predict the sun will explode and vaporize the earth within the next 5 billion years. The sky is falling….the sky is falling…oh woe is us.
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A-K “Anti-human environmentalism is definitely the trendy, politically correct religion for atheist left wing city dwellers.”
Anti human???? clearly your political ideology is interfering with your scientific interpretations.
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There’s a clear homeostatic Gaia connection between biology and climate, which acts to widen the sweet spot for biology. It’s not a connection related to CO2, but a connection related to biomass consuming energy, which isn’t otherwise converted into heat. The more biomass that exists, the more energy it consumes and the less energy cools the Earth, causing the Earth to cool. Similarly, as the amount of biomass decreases, more energy is available to heat the planet and the planet warms. However, this is a relative weak effect with a dynamic range of only a few watts per meter squared.
George
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Could it be any more ANTI HUMAN than this?
https://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/muehlenberg/2009/06/more-green-lunacy
More Green Lunacy
“PETA activist Toni Vernelli, who said she aborted her unborn baby because of its potential emissions: “It would have been immoral to give birth to a child that I felt strongly would only be a burden to the world.” Not only that, but she even sterilised herself in the interests of Gaia: “Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet.”
”
Matt: “I don;t think he says contrarians are unscientific ”
Doesn’t call sceptics unscientific? He equates sceptics with ‘conspiracy theorists’. Twice. Find a quote that suggests he treats sceptics scientific credentials or questions with any respect…
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Joanne: “This story is predominantly about evidence…”
Read the lead again: “THE evidence of global warming keeps piling up but that seems only to embolden the climate contrarians and sceptics to press their case harder.”
So, no. The op-ed is not predominantly about evidence. It’s about climate contrarians pushing their case in the face of continually growing evidence that climate change is occurring. Quite a different subject.
“…alleges that contrarians are unscientific and have influence beyond what they should.”
Actually, Steketee says “they are having some success in raising doubts among politicians”. He then goes on to name those politicians he claims have doubts about global warming as a result of interactions with climate sceptics.
“He thinks ‘evidence’ is committee opinion…”
He refers to a scientific report that cites evidence for climate change. Scientific evidence is usually contained in some type of written material, whether it be notes, an essay, a paper or a report.
So Steketee cites evidence for both climate change and the influence of climate sceptics on politicians’ thinking.
“Evidence trumps Opinion.”
And there’s the rub. What counts as evidence in climate science – or any subject – and what counts as opinion?
You dismiss a report as mere opinion. That’s your prerogative, but you provide no evidence for that assertion, while demanding that Steketee finds space within his word limit to incorporate the opinions that meet your approval.
Science as an enterprise is carried out by human beings, so it’s unavoidable that what counts as scientific evidence is subject to human judgement. The issue then becomes: who is best placed to judge? In my opinion, in the case of climate science, those best placed to judge are the scientists who are doing climate science and who have been recognised for their expertise.
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Brendan,
You’re missing the point of the ‘contrarian’ case. The debate is not over whether or not there is an effect, but whether or not the magnitude of this effect is big enough to worry about. If you dig into how this effect is quantified, it’s a joke. The claim is it’s too complicated to understand, so they do some arm waving and claim a sensitivity that’s way too high based on assumptions applied to interpret things seen in the data. It’s a very weak, circumstantial case, which for some reason seems to be enough for many who are already predisposed to believe anyway,
The truth is not what has the most links, or what the most number of web pages say or what the most number of people want to believe. The truth is unambiguously revealed by the underlying science. It only gets complicated when you try to get at the details of why people believe that CO2 will destroy the climate. I haven’t run across any warmist that can even identify a scientific reason for their belief, let along defend it. The deeper you dig into their case, the more ludicrous it gets. It always gets back to ‘peer reviewed papers’. Doesn’t anybody look at what these papers are saying? You also realize that a peer relative to climate papers means someone who has already bought in to the lie. Scientists who don’t agree with something generally don’t get a chance to review papers about it.
George
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Jo – He says “unless meteorological organisations are included in the worldwide conspiracy.” and “but if you see a conspiracy at work” Which is quite true. do you not indeed think that the IPCC is a conspiracy to defraud science and impose a false currency on the planet under the guise of AGW? I’d wager that many sceptics on this site think there is indeed such a conspiracy… will you ‘fess up AK?
I’m also quite surprised you think that one nutter from PETA somehow demonstrates that the left wing are anti-human, atheistic city dwellers. people choose not to have children for all sorts of reasons… some less sensible than others.
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Matt Buckels sounds very confident in the integrity of the IPCC, but I see alot to worry about. Conspiracy has been the domain of leftists for years because when you pull that card, you are often filtering/censoring reality so it conforms, and they would be dead without it. I’d say the IPCC have no real need to conspire because they are all on the same sheet of music anyway. They are deceptive, and lefties everywhere push this one barrow very well. I’d say more of a movement than a conspiracy. A movement that has infiltrated almost everything it needs to. Won’t come off though because their vision has an enormous price tag. How many climate conferences do we need before they work out none of these govts are serious about making cuts. It’s just an annual trip. Copenhagen? Why not
Matty, Perth
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co2isnotevil: “The claim is it’s too complicated to understand…”
The science is complicated, but I would be very surprised if any climate scientist would claim that the science is too complicated to understand.
“You also realize that a peer relative to climate papers means someone who has already bought in to the lie.”
As climate scepticism’s default position this is an admission – indirect, but damning – that climate sceptics have lost the scientific argument. If peer reviewed papers from the sceptic side were on a par with the warming side, there would be no squeals of lies, fraud etc from the sceptics.
The reality is that compared to the warming side, few sceptic papers have made their way through the peer review proces and into the better journals. In the face of this unpalatable fact sceptics default to the explanation that allows them to save face: lies, hoax, fraud etc.
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Peer reviewed??? Brendan H seems to think this is so defining. One of the various scoreboards warmers keep an eye on. Another paper god for the pagan revivalists. Say “peer reviewed” to the loungeroom folks who will have to go for their wallets. The disengaged will jack up when it hits. End of the dream.
Matty, Perth
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No Matthew, I made no comment about the integrity of the IPCC. I’m confident it is as flawed as any other group of people on the planet. Why would I expect otherwise?
The sentence about conspiracy being the domain of the left really does not make sense.
You know the guy who taught me directly about carbon trading once gave an entire lecture on how “Imagine” as a song was a totally flawed leftist ideal. He was a market economist teaching a market based solution rather than a lefty greenie mumbo jumbo.
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I’ve never mentioned a conspiracy. Nor has Fielding. It was an unnecessary low base smear by association attack. Fielding asked for ‘evidence’, and the first line (again)… “THE evidence of global warming keeps piling up…”
Any honest appraisal – by any commentator wise enough to know what evidence is, would know that it’s not true. The evidence is rapidly disintegrating for Team AGW. The world is not warming (2001-2009). Oceans are not warming. Sea Ice is level (30 year trend). Sea levels are just doing business as usual increases (as per last hundreds of years). The hot spot is missing. The lag on ice cores is 800 years in reverse. Water vapor is not increasing, and (it’s not evidence, but it’s interesting) – hundreds of experts are declaring their hand as sceptics. Even CO2 is not rising as fast as was expected. Nothing. They’ve got nothing.
If the evidence was piling up, a polite, right Steketee could merely point to the ice core study, the radiosonde, the satelite, the ocean bouys, the sedminentary layers, the formanifera,… pick a real data set, and point that out. That’s all Fielding or any true sceptic needs. But in hundred page reports there is nothing but lab tests and model ‘estimates’ of what might happen if all the other assumptions are right.
What Steketee, (and Brendan) dont’ understand is that it is not a subjective opinion about what is and what isn’t evidence. Data from the real world – direct observations that can be repeated and falsified is evidence. Opinions are opinions. This is the time honoured scientific tradition and it applies to all fields – except climate science today.
If the evidence is not piling up, but disintegrating, Steketee just missed his chance to ask an engineer with his reputation on the line ‘why’ is he willing to risk going against the authoritative masses, and finding out that there are two sides to this story.
I don’t expect steketee to become a sceptic. All he needs to do is open his mind up to the possibility that Fielding has a well thought out position. Let Team AGW speak, Let Sceptics speak and may the smartest rhetoric take the day.
Matt: Humour me. Is there any possibility (however tiny and unlikely) that multiple large associations and government departments, involving thousands of scientists, could be wrong after repeated issuing definitive statements on a scientific topic (not necessarily this topic, but theoretically, some topic)? I’m only looking for a Yes or No. Is it possible?
Brendan: Arguing about whether sceptics have as many papers as alarmists, or whether one side can or can’t get published is ultimately not going to answer the climate question. (It only takes one result to disprove a theory). Yes, it looks weak to repeatedly cry ‘unfair’ (though there are examples but that’s another story), if the AGW argument was so strong and they have published so many papers why can no one point to one that qualifies as evidence?
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Yes of course it is possible.
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So Matt, if there was such a situation – where many people mistakenly based their work on a false assumption that was so well accepted it was declared 90% true by established committees and associations – how would the world find out about it?
What would be the first sign that something was amiss?
Who would do the checks?
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Brendan: “He refers to a scientific report that cites evidence for climate change. Scientific evidence is usually contained in some type of written material, whether it be notes, an essay, a paper or a report. So Steketee cites evidence for both climate change and the influence of climate sceptics on politicians’ thinking.”
Yes, usually scientific reports do cite evidence.
But don’t just assume it’s there. Point it out. I can’t see any. Just model projections.
NOAA Report on “Global Climate Change Impacts”
http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/download-the-report. OR Full pdf (13 Mb) http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/Global.pdf
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I guess it would play out just like most occasions it has done so in the past… at first it indeed would be indistinguishable from the rants of some fringe lunatics:) They key is I can’t think of a single consensus breaking discovery that was not adopted pretty quickly.
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Talk about Green lunacy, try this site and article for size! This guy is good. You need to buy his new book also…
http://fortcollinsteaparty.com/index.php/home/environmentalism-cult-of-death/
Cheers,
Denny
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hah thank you Denny
I don’t refer to them as the “Environmental” movement anymore.
Just the Bio Movement
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Hi Brian, Hey, why do you get to post such a young pic of yourself??? If your next to me in age, your don’t look THAT good! Do you??? LOL!
Your mean “BIO” Movement??? Explain Humble Man!!!!! 🙂
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Brian, here’s one about Greenpiece since you like the other…Take time to check this site out! Ray is “The Thinking Man”!!! 🙂
http://fortcollinsteaparty.com/index.php/home/greenpeace/
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I called them “Greenpiece” because they are just a “piece” of the masive case of Bull@#$* given. Sorry JO, can I say “Bull@#$*???
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It’s easier to use the anacronym for the Bio Movement
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Matt Buckels (23):
1) There is a chasm of Grand Canyon proportions between “choosing not to have children” and DELIBERATLY ABORTING your own child because of its future “carbon footprint” and because you “feel strongly it would only be a burden to the world”.
2) “will you ’fess up AK” ??!! – so you think I harbour secret fears of a world wide sinister conspiracy, do you, Matt? You do this a lot, Matt, putting words in other people’s mouths and coming up with dumb interpretations of our posts, and you should take a good, hard look at your own ideological blind spots before you accuse specific others. But if you equate “group think” with “conspiracy” then that could explain your confusion.
Perhaps in your case we could blame the constructivist approach to the dumbing down of education which has plagued the English speaking world since the late 60s (Then again, perhaps it’s just you …) Google “John Dewey” – he (and Jean Jacques Rousseau) has a lot to answer for.
You see, we don’t need to invent a conspiracy theory – the prevailing group think functions like a de facto “conspiracy”, keeping any “non-correct” thought that falls outside the “consensus”, politically correct opinion out in the cold, complete with “gate keepers” employed in high positions at universities and science publications. This whole climate farce is a prime example of that particular circus in action. Point is, there’s nothing secret about it, there doesn’t need to be. Oh, but this is a whole other debate and it deserves its own blog.
And before you launch into another rant about my ideological shortfalls, I do admire both Julia Gillard and Alannah MacTiernan for their strong stance on “back to basics” in education, even though they are Labor. May they prevail in what they are trying to do with the National Curriculum!
Here are some books that might enlighten your clouded mind: “All Must Have Prizes”, Melanie Phillips (UK), “The Closing of the American Mind”, Allan Bloom (USA) and “Dumbing Down”, Dr Kevin Donnelly (Australia). Happy reading!
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AK – can you please highlight where I have said that aborting your child for environmental reasons is a sensible action? Many would say that aborting a child for ANY reason is not a sensible action. What I asked is what does this woman’s decision have to do with the general approach of the left.
2) Yes AK, indeed I do. I never said anyone invented a conspiracy. DO you have to invent a conspiracy to believe there is one? It could actually be a conspiracy! Shock horror. I fail to see how the situation you oppose could happen without what most of us would refer to as a “conspiracy”.
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This is tedious, we’re going around in circles. I refer you back to post #42. You obviously haven’t understood what I said. I give up. End of story.
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Of course I haven’t. It makes no sense.
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Joanne: “Arguing about whether sceptics have as many papers as alarmists, or whether one side can or can’t get published is ultimately not going to answer the climate question.”
I wasn’t answering that specific question. I was explaining why so many skeptics resort to accusing climate scientists of lying, corrupting the science, perpetrating fraud and hoax etc. Since the weight of first-class published papers favours the warming side, sceptics who cannot accept the implication claim that the system is rigged.
“…if the AGW argument was so strong and they have published so many papers why can no one point to one that qualifies as evidence?”
The basis for the global warming claim is that: CO2 from human sources has substantially increased over the past 150-200 years; CO2 is a greenhouse gas; atmospheric warming has been observed. Together, these claims are the foundation for CO2-induced climate change.
The fact that the evidence for the theory may be spread across a number of papers is irrelevant. What counts is the weight of evidence, and that weight supports AGW.
“Yes, usually scientific reports do cite evidence. But don’t just assume it’s there. Point it out. I can’t see any. Just model projections.”
The “About This Report” section of the report on Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States by the U.S. Global Change Research Program says: “This report summarizes the science of climate change and the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future”.
So the report is about both the existing state of the global climate and its possible future state, as it relates to the United States. Clearly, future impacts cannot be observed today, so require model scenarios. However, the report does cite present-day observations, eg:
“The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by roughly 35 percent since the start of the industrial revolution.”
“Global average surface air temperature has increased substantially since 1970.”
“These measurements show warming of the troposphere, consistent with the surface warming. They also reveal cooling in the stratosphere.”
The text has extensive references to the sources that support these claims. So it is not the case that the report contains only model projections. It also contains observational evidence.
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OK, which one of our resident science boffins is going to carve up this turkey? This will be a good one, I’m looking forward to it 🙂 I’m in a vicious mood!
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You didn’t expect it to make sense to him, did you, Anne Kit?
stepping in Bio Movement
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From “Watt’s Up With That” Anthony Watts
A link to the Competitive Enterprise Institute
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Continuing on from above:
From “Watt’s Up With That” Anthony Watts
A link to the Competitive Enterprise Institute –
It appears to be censorship of relevant facts on carbon dioxide being presented to the Endangerment hearings by the EPA
http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/Endangerment%20Comments%206-23-09.pdf
It’s crook when politics influences scientific investigation, especially when it has a bearing on the outcome of a bill such as Waxman-Markey’s cap and trade(tax) bill.
If the truth is told, it could also have an influence on Australia’s ETS/CPRS, which is now in limbo until August (hooray)
And MattB, because the information comes from the CEI is irrelevant, don’t shoot the messenger.
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Anne Kit wants Brendan’s trash disposed of.
Nah too boring. It has been addressed 25 times in Joanne’s pat four columns.
It would just bring about more Brendan repetition of what he has said, more refutation etc.
Btendan you might not be tired of the tune, we are.
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I know, I know, it’s a waste of time – but just for fun…
Brendan: Go read the Handbook on exactly “what” constitutes EVIDENCE, review your srouces and then reconsider your previous statements concerning the “weight of evidence”… Also I suggest that you distinguish GW from AGW. Data indicating GW does not prove AGW as *the* cause, i.e., having ‘no other theory to consider’ does not constitute proof.
By Analogy: If multiple ‘peer-reviewed’ studies (e.g., carrying a lot of ‘weight’) all indicate that at least 75% of crack cocaine addicts were breast-fed as infants, is it scientifically accurate to conclude (without allowing argument, of course) that Mother’s Milk leads to drug addiction?
And… If there *is* EVIDENCE out there proving AGW, where is the EVIDENCE – supported by all those independent and ‘peer-reviewed’ papers – showing the Cap-and-Tax (US) or ETS (Aus) legislation will have *any* scientifically provable, positive and SIGNIFICANT impact (not marginal, but enough to offset stated AGW concerns) on the global climate?
Enjoy.
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Ahh. (slack bunch…)
Brendan your ‘basis for AGW’?
1. Co2 is rising at the same time as temps are. See postal charges http://joannenova.com.au/2009/05/03/shock-global-temperatures-driven-by-us-postal-charges/. It’s probably mostly a coincidence, and given the last 500 million years, there’s no reason to think otherwise. Correlation is not causation.
2. The weight of the evidence? Is it 2 kg? 10 kg or 2000 kg? I haven’t seen the data.
3. Strato-cooling. Yes. Probably caused by both CO2 and ozone deficiency. (Can’t tell how much is due to which one or the other). Doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. Yes there is Co2 in the air, yes it does some warming. Can we get numbers out of stratospheric cooling? Nope. Tells us nothing about water vapor feedback which is 2/3rds of the warming anyway.
Figure this:
What caused the little ice age circa 1700 and why did the earth slip into an ice age hundreds of millions of years ago when CO2 was 4000ppm? Don’t know? Neither does anyone else. Other factors we can’t explain mean we also can’t explain why the world started warming again 200 years ago and the long trend appears to continue, regardless of CO2 levels.
Brendan, As far as peer reviewed papers go, you’re right, it’s seems weak to cry ‘wolf’ ad nauseum, except that the raw data helps sceptics and keeps being ‘adjusted’ post hoc. Data needs revising sometimes, but it’s always corrected towards the model output. Not random.
Can anyone name a data revision that helped sceptics?
If the NOAA report contains ‘observational evidence’ ferrgoodnesssake FIND IT. Penny Wong and her team will give you a medal, a job and a ute! They couldn’t find that paper, nor can DeSmog, Real Climate or Deltid. THAT mystery paper has been lost for years. You could be the man!!!
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Joanne, you don’t look as young in real life as your little picture, do you?
Ha – sorry – I’m just in a wacky mood this morning
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Matt – name a truly consensus breaking point that was achieved quickly, and enthusiastically?
Not evolution, not tectonic plates (wegener 1915 died before the theory was accepted in the 1960’s), and not stomach ulcers due to bacteria?! LOL 1982 –> Nobel prize 2005. Gregor Mendels groundbreaking work on genetics was lost for 30 years. Edison demonstrated the beginnings of the light bulb, and the public travelled to see his demonstrations but electric experts derided him “Edison’s claims are so manifestly absurd as to indicate a positive want of knowledge of the electric circuit.”-Edwin Weston, specialist in arc lighting. Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays was called an “elaborate hoax” by Lord Kelvin, the most influential scientist of Europe in 1895.
No Matt, breaking consensus always comes at a price, even when there is not much in the way of vested interests, and even when the idea is easily testable (like stomach ulcers and antibiotics).
Naturally, that doesn’t mean sceptics are right, but it means those who mock and ridicule a scientist before they look closely at their suggestions are mindless fools who slow the progress of science.
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Correcting an historical record –
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) did not believe that x-ray excitation was possible at the energies of the electrons attributed to them by Roentgen.
Indeed, confusion on Roentgen’s part led to the reporting of electron energies way too low.
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Hmm a Nobel in 2005 does not mean it took to 2005 to be accepted. Wiki tells me he was first honoured with a major award in 1994. The guys have a flaming NOBEL PRIZE!!!! hardly being shunned to the Gulag. HOw fast do you want things? Well obviously the answer is you want things accepted prior to any publications in major science journals even… hmmm.
Roentgen made his discovery in 1895 and had a NOBEL PRIZE by 1901! Oh how he was lampooned! In fact they even invented the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery. here is what was said by the Prussian Academy of Sciences “never has a new truth … made triumphal progress so quickly”
I’ve had an X-Ray. I have light bulbs. Can you again point out which of these is held back by group think?
We live in a world where when you make outlandish claims that rock the consensus you get in the ring and you are either spat out or “The King is Dead, Long Live the King.” and you are celebrated.
You think you are citing examples of good science being trampled… I see endorsement of the reliability of the system every day, even typing this email on the interwebs.
If I’m as mindless a fool as Lord Kelvin I’m a happy man indeed.
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Matt said, “I can’t think of a single consensus breaking discovery that was not adopted pretty quickly.”
So, why does the whole dust-up between Galileo and ‘the consensus’ come to mind? And don’t say “that was science vs. the church, not science vs. science”… there are quite enough well-respected scientists on both sides of AGW.
Whether a discovery is adopted by and forms a New Consensus *quickly* is not relevant – that is nothing more than an exercise in nose-counting.
Data don’t lie. (There are 3 kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.) We may not understand all the causes or implications, but it is what it is.
I always thought when an Inconvenient Fact popped up (e.g., hotspot?), we were supposed to adjust the THEORY, not try to adjust the data to fit the theory… Way too much of that going on.
When you resort to such manipulative tactics to support your position, it calls into question one’s motives and integrity. Good Science demands better.
(Proactive note: Yes, there are examples of data manipulation on both sides, so drop the diversionary tactic, and get back on subject).
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Matt: Your contribution is indiscriminately throwing rocks at people who get into the ‘ring’ regardless of whether their ideas make sense or are quackpots. Lord Kelvin note, is remembered for his contributions for science, and not his rock throwing. Any idiot can chuck stones.
The ‘ring ‘ you don’t refer to is in the cold hard world of data. Does the theory survive repeat tests? That’s where the useful real fight goes on. The ring you speak of is the fake science theater – where those who throw ad homs, and illogical arguments are not furthering humanities knowledge but using intimidation and bullying with teenage bravado to ‘haze’ people into joining the consensus. You test their will, but not their theory.
Congratulations. You have achieved barnacle status.
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Congratulations. You have achieved barnacle status.
So – this is an upgrade from sea slug?
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Brendon,
You said,
“The basis for the global warming claim is that: CO2 from human sources has substantially increased over the past 150-200 years; CO2 is a
greenhouse gas; atmospheric warming has been observed. Together, these claims are the foundation for CO2-induced climate change.”
You’ve revealed the fundamental flaw in your logic. Given no other information, there’s an equal chance that mans CO2 increases and the slight warming we’ve experienced over the last 2 centuries has been entirely coincidental, rather than causitive. Just because CO2 is a greenhouse gas in no way means that this is the only thing that affects the climate, moreover; there has been no attempt to rigorously quantify the magnitude of the effect of CO2. Instead, heuristics which *ASSUME* CO2 is the dominant forcing mechanism are employed where the coefficients are backed out of the data in order to make the original assumption seem reasonable.
There’s unequivocal evidence that the temperature is always changing and that the general trends are for change in the same direction for many millennium at a time. A few hundred years of warming is nothing to be concerned about, except that it indicates that the probability of future cooling is a little higher. About half the time the temperature is increasing and half the time it’s decreasing and there is absolutely no evidence that changes in the CO2 concentration can predict future temperature change. I’m an avid skier and would welcome a cooler climate, but for most, this would be far more inconvenient that warming.
While it’s fine to hypothesis that CO2 causes climate change, more experiments and tests must be performed before any causal link can be established. Thus far, all experiments to try and confirm CO2 forcing have either not provided the proof expected or have provided proof that CO2 is only a minor player as far as the climate is concerned.
Stop being so afraid. You need to stop buying in to the fear mongering pushed by the zealots and instead take an objective look at the science for yourself. Only then will you realize that your fears are unfounded.
George
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An undergrad biochem teacher of mine maintained that the only way that ideas in science change is for people to die. It goes like this: somebody 23-27 years gets a good idea and proposes it; it gets spit on and kicked around by the holders of the formerly good idea and their twelve best friends (AKA peer reviewers); the guys with the new idea persist, outlive the old guys. It turns out they (the new guys) were right all along, them and their twelve best friends (AKA peer reviewers).
The current situation in Climate Science is that the current champions, Mann et al, created the dicipline. The old guys who fight back are physicists, meterologists but they are not climate scientists (neither is Hansen but never mind about that). They are not peer reviewers. Thus the importance of peer reviewers and their twelve best friends.
This, now, is perfectly analogous with the substrate phosphorylation/chemiosmotic hypothesis controversy that ranged over three decades until Peter Mitchell won the nobel prize in 1978.
It was well known by the fifties that ATP is the currency of cellular energetic transfers. How ATP was energized from ADP was a mystery. But the betting was heavily weighted on the catalysis of an energized intermediary by some sexy protein. Proteins are cool, big, complex. They had been aced out of a role in genetics by the humble ATGC but were not likely to be denied a place at the highest table in biochemistry, if not genetics, then energetics.
Fot more than a decade the ‘energized intermediate’ floated just outside one’s grasp. The deal was all but sealed.
In 1961 Peter Mitchell wrote a paper on the Chemiosmotic Hypothesis. ATP is energized by a humble ion pump utilizing the concentration gradient across cell membranes. Took seventeen years for Mitchell to get his Nobel out of it. There is a whole mythology grown up about how his ideas were spurned, set up his own damned lab, soldiered on, won in the end, Bentley, new girlfriend and all.
It turned out he was right about that and he is right about this: the scientist’s duty is to devise the perfect experiment to prove himself wrong.
Mann et al, what would they say is the experiment that would falsify their hypothesis.
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Mann et al, what would they say is the experiment that would falsify their hypothesis.
Dude, Mother Nature already carried out that experiment for him, gratis.
You got some of yer phosphorylation biz a little goofed up too, BTW
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How many flavours does “misery” come in?
The House of Rep of the USA passed the lunatic “Slime-it” bill and is now on the way to the Senate
God in Heaven, the end of the USA and the free world as we know it
but I think this zombie is dead in the Senate
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Steve: “Data indicating GW does not prove AGW as *the* cause…”
True, but since CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and since human activity has caused a rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, these facts constitute evidence for AGW, and not just warming in general.
“…is it scientifically accurate to conclude (without allowing argument, of course) that Mother’s Milk leads to drug addiction?”
If you could establish mother’s milk as a causative factor, then it would be scientifically accurate to conclude – given the usual reservations – that mother’s milk can lead to addiction.
As for mitigation policies, the evidence is less conclusive that any particular policy will achieve any significant impact. But I haven’t yet argued in favour of any of these policies.
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Joanne: “Correlation is not causation.”
True, but as I said, CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
“What caused the little ice age circa 1700…”
The causes are conjectural, including reduced solar activity, volcanic action, possibly the slowing of the North Atlantic gulf stream, and a reduction in anthropogenic influences resulting from the likes of the Black Death.
“…why did the earth slip into an ice age hundreds of millions of years ago when CO2 was 4000ppm?”
Our knowledge of the details of far-past ice ages is also conjectural, so I don’t think there’s any conclusive explanation for these ice ages and CO2 levels. But uncertainty over one aspect of a theory need not cast doubt over the entire theory. For example, our knowledge of the evolution of hominins to homo sapiens has a lot of gaps, but we don’t reject evolution because of that..
“If the NOAA report contains ‘observational evidence’ ferrgoodnesssake FIND IT.”
I not only found the observational evidence, but also showed it to you.
“They couldn’t find that paper…”
Some years ago I flew into Sydney airport, and on arrival at the Customs desk the friendly official welcomed me to “Australia”. Well, blow me, I thought, surely this is Sydney airport? On the way into the city, my friends assured me that I was indeed in the land called Australia, despite the fact that all signs pointed to Sydney. “But am I not in Sydney, and are all Australian men not called Bruce?” I queried.
Joanne, your quest for “the paper” is fruitless. The evidence is contained in many papers.
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George: “Stop being so afraid.”
George, I don’t know you from a bar of soap, yet you come roaring out of the bush to insult me without offering any evidence for your assertion. Why should I speak to you?
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Mind if I speak for George? Only George can comment on that, but since you make your remarks public, you put yourself in the line of ANYBODY else’s fire.
Why should you speak to George?
You shouldn’t.
Go home.
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Re what caused the little ice age ca 1700 – Brendan: “The causes are conjectural, including reduced solar activity, volcanic action, possibly the slowing of the North Atlantic gulf stream, and a reduction in anthropogenic influences resulting from the likes of the Black Death.”
Are you serious?! Quite apart from your historical ignorance of the major occurrence of the Black Death (it was in the 14th Century, not the 18th, although there was a smaller recurrence in the 1600s) are you seriously suggesting that a world population of 600 million could have had any influence – either way – on global climate??
You are a superstitious, uninformed person, Brendan, and I concur with others that you are a complete time waster in this forum.
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Guys Brendan hasn’t been nasty, petty or hostile. OK – So he’s just bringing up the same old stuff. I guess I need to put these into a post properly, so we can just give people like Brendan a link. Given the media black hole, there are a lot of people out there in the same position.
Joanne: “Correlation is not causation.”
True, but as I said, CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
All True. But higher temperatures release CO2 from the oceans, which also causes a real correlation, but is totally opposite to the cause and effect link you are making. How much is due to which and what other factors are present? You admit we don’t know and can’t explain most of the rises and falls.
The only observational evidence you posted was the recent weak correlation between CO2 and temps, which is quite likely due to other factors. If co2 was a major driver, surely we would see it in other records from the last half billion years. Ice cores, sediments, formanifera, pollen etc etc Why is it that CO2 waits millions of years until we invest computer models before it shows a convenient correlation for 30 years?
Models assume Co2 caused the warming post little ice age, but since they don’t know what caused it (and for other reasons), that’s likely to be a false assumption. Models don’t handle clouds well and clouds dominate our climate. It’s quite possible that extra CO2 effect is negated by a few extra low clouds.
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Brian: “Go home.”
Brian, I understand your trauma. It’s not pleasant to be on the wrong side of history.
But take heart. Over here, on the warming side, we can offer the healing waters of consensus. Leave behind your bitterness and broken dreams and embrace hope and change. You know you want to.
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Anne-Kit: “Re what caused the little ice age ca 1700…”
“Little ice age” is a general term used to encompass a period, or periods, stretching anywhere from the mid-13th to the early 19th centuries. Where you draw the line for the beginning of the period depends on which metric you choose. Atlantic pack ice began to grow around 1250, Europe experienced some rough summers and famine in 1315-17, and so on.
The depths of the Little Ice Age were around, but there’s plenty of evidence for cool periods before and after.
“Quite apart from your historical ignorance of the major occurrence of the Black Death (it was in the 14th Century, not the 18th…”
Where did I say the Black Death occurred in the 18th century? The Black Death peaked between 1348 and 1350, but recurred intermittently throughout the later 14th century and into the early 15th century; and there were regular outbreaks throughout the world until the late 18th century.
“…are you seriously suggesting that a world population of 600 million could have had any influence – either way – on global climate??”
As I said, “the causes are conjectural”, and I noted several. It is estimated that Europe’s population overall took 200 years to recover to its pre-Black Plague levels, and rural areas were particularly badly hit by depopulation. Therefore, it is quite likely that extensive reforestation took place and this may have absorbed some carbon dioxide, contributing to a subsequent reduction in temperatures. But, as I say, this is conjecture.
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Joanne: “Guys Brendan hasn’t been nasty, petty or hostile.”
Thanks Joanne. I can look after myself, but it’s good to know that the person with their finger on the control button is committed to civil discourse.
“But higher temperatures release CO2 from the oceans, which also causes a real correlation, but is totally opposite to the cause and effect link you are making.”
All else being equal, CO2 will be released from warmer oceans. But the fact that the oceans are becoming more acidic is evidence that in aggregate CO2 is still being absorbed and not emitted by the oceans.
“The only observational evidence you posted was the recent weak correlation between CO2 and temps, which is quite likely due to other factors.”
Six items, actually: 35 percent CO2 rise from human activity; CO2 as a greenhouse gas; observed atmospheric warming; substantial increase in temperatures since 1970; warming troposphere; cooling stratosphere.
“Why is it that CO2 waits millions of years until we invest computer models before it shows a convenient correlation for 30 years?”
CO2 and temperatures show a consistent correlation in ice core samples. Yes, 800-year lag, but you know the AGW response to that.
“It’s quite possible that extra CO2 effect is negated by a few extra low clouds.”
Maybe, maybe not. But the peer-reviewed literature is out on that one.
Re your comment about “the same old stuff”, I agree, but like you, I feel the need to offer comments as a matter or record.
Clearly, there are many details of climate science that still need to be worked out, but the reality is that the general direction of the science is more or less settled, ie even sceptical scientists agree on the CO2 effect. Where scientists differ is over the extent of any affect.
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I am a sceptical scientist, questioning any AGW effect.
If the effect isn’t there, it isn’t there, and your wishful thinking won’t put it there.
I can counter any claim you make, back it with data, which is something no AGW believer can do.
I have been through the IPCC reports (I’m not speaking about the Exec Summaries either) six times, despite the claims of the IPCC scientists, the data to back my position are ALREADY WITHIN the IPCC reports.
The consensus about AGW is crumbling, Joanne has written about this, Joanne has and continues to promote the true picture and understanding of this, I as one person cannot take on the refutation of AGW alone,
but more and more, the AGW position becomes untenable because it just isn’t true.
The concept has been debunked decannaly since 1900, the debunking is taking a little longer this time because a number of people were bored and had nothing else to latch on to,
but only the truth will survive the long term despite all howling from either side.
A number of conincident assymetric geophysical and geodynamic phenomena conspired to give the appearance of phenomena outside the range of normally measured phenomena of fifty years ago, these observations continue to cycle back to what the situation was fifty years ago – desipte the willful ignoring of these facts by people with a vested interest in denying what is actually occuring.
These are the true “deniers”
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“… it is quite likely that extensive reforestation took place and this may have absorbed some carbon dioxide, contributing to a subsequent reduction in temperatures. But, as I say, this is conjecture.”
I’ll say it is. Hmmm, reforestation. I don’t think you are doing your credibility any favours by making statements like that. No one has yet claimed any human influence prior to the last century. Not even James Hansen or Al Gore or Tim Flannery would claim that human habitation had any effect on global climate in the 1700’s (and then again; Tim Flannery might ….)
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hmmm – someone should update wiki if even the great charlatans of the left don;t claim it AK…
“he term Anthropocene is used by some scientists to describe the most recent period in the Earth’s history. It has no precise start date, but may be considered to start in the late 18th century when the activities of humans first began to have a significant global impact on the Earth’s climate and ecosystems. This date coincides with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784.[1] The term was coined in 2000 by the Nobel Prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era.”
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That is the dumbest terminolgy for sub-Holocene epoch I have heard today, and if that will be done, then all other epochs should be partitioned similarly,
for example, the Rodentene for the radiation and proliferation of rodents that accelerated the recycling of tropospheric carbon dioxide dramatically through the relatively short lifespans of these mammals compared with the flora upon which they exist.
The complete development of the termite intestine should be applied an epoch sui generis
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maybe Brian, but the statement was made that “No one has yet claimed…”
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Brendan:
Six items, actually: 1/ 35 percent CO2 rise from human activity; 2/ CO2 as a greenhouse gas; 3/ observed atmospheric warming; 4/ substantial increase in temperatures since 1970; 5/ warming troposphere; 6/ cooling stratosphere.
And I’ve dealt with all of them.
1. correlation with 3 and 4. Might be quite suggestive if only there were not 500 million years of no-good-cause-and-effect correlations in the past. Ice cores? Correlate backwards as you acknowledged. Amplification – can you point to a peer reviewed paper that supports that?
2/ CO2 is a greenhouse gas in test tubes. The lab doesn’t have clouds, rain, hail, snow, or humidity which all affect the end result. The end result is what counts. Not the lab result.
3/ 4/ Yes. So what? You can admit no one can say what caused the Little Ice Age, or the Medieval Warming Period, the Roman warming… We can speculate sure. But we don’t ‘know’. I mean apart from Milankovich and a couple of smaller cycles, climate-science is in it’s infancy.
5/ Warming troposphere and 6/ Cooling stratosphere. Yes. As I said, both are what you get with rising CO2 and falling Ozone. How much is due to either is not known.these don’t tell us anything we don’t know already from Mauna Loa, and stratospheric ozone tests. The hot spot is missing, therefore there is no water vapor feedback. The world is not warming (oceans or ground temps) there is no missing energy.
Yes, at least we can agree on a few things. That is refreshing. Co2 is a greenhouse gas. Every extra molecule potentially adds some warming (though logarithmically smaller). The IPCC calculates that CO2 doubling on it’s own will give us about 1.2 degrees of warming, the rest is due to water vapor, the water vapor is not providing positive feedback. Ergo 60% of IPCC projected warming, (at least) is not happening.
Because there are forcings we don’t know, the only way the climate models could be right is by luck.
They calculate the effect of CO2 based on ‘removing all other forcings’. (Which is awkwardly, argumentum ad ignorantium). Obviously they’re having trouble removing the forcings they don’t understand. They haven’t got the trend of the last 7 years right,so the idea of assuming they might get the next 70 right is like hoping that since they didn’t get lucky this decade, they’re more likely to ‘get lucky’ in the next one.
Doesn’t work for me.
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Epochs and eras are distinguished because of astronomical influences,and there are very good reasons for this.
Consider, for example, that a two degree change in obliquity of the apparent ecliptic yields more long term influence on the climate than that all hominoids since the appearance of Australopithecus
– together with the influence of ten thousand one megaton thermonuclear weapons.
How pitiful indeed the influence is proud Man’s upon his world compared with the potential of Nature.
Those who boast of such human abilities have no awe of Nature; only that of their finite and petty contributions compared with it
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Joanne” “And I’ve dealt with all of them.”
I was replying to your assertion @70: “The only observational evidence you posted was the recent weak correlation between CO2 and temps…”
In implicitly agreeing that I have offered six items of observational evidence, you also implicitly admit that your above claim is incorrect.
In addition, @53 you claimed: “If the NOAA report contains ‘observational evidence’ ferrgoodnesssake FIND IT.”
This claim followed my post @46, where I offered three items of observational evidence from the report in question, namely:
• “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by roughly 35 percent since the start of the industrial revolution.”
• Global average surface air temperature has increased substantially since 1970.”
• These measurements show warming of the troposphere, consistent with the surface warming. They also reveal cooling in the stratosphere.”
In my numbering system, 46 comes before 53. Therefore, your claim a@53 is also incorrect.
As for your replies to my six items, you cover a lot of ground, but briefly:
1. “Amplification – can you point to a peer reviewed paper that supports that?”
http://icebubbles.ucsd.edu/Publications/CaillonTermIII.pdf
2. “CO2 is a greenhouse gas in test tubes.”
Yes, but the issue is evidence, and the results of lab tests count as evidence.
3/4. “You can admit no one can say what caused the Little Ice Age…”
As I say, there are various explanations offered. But it’s a non-sequitur to claim: we don’t know what caused the Little Ice Age, therefore CO2 doesn’t cause warming.
5/6. “…both are what you get with rising CO2 and falling Ozone. How much is due to either is not known.”
Greater cooling in the upper stratosphere is attributed to CO2:
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html
“The world is not warming (oceans or ground temps) there is no missing energy.”
Both are warming long term. See:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/bigpicture/fact2.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/abs/nature07080.html
“They calculate the effect of CO2 based on ‘removing all other forcings’. (Which is awkwardly, argumentum ad ignorantium)…”
No it’s not. Remember that the CO2 claim is: ‘CO2 causes warming’, not ‘it’s warming, what causes it?’ And of course, testing for variables is standard scientific procedure.
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Hi! It’s me again! The person who addresses your remarks to other people.
Keep in mind – Joanne does NOT make idle remarks or uninformed statements.
Therefore, if you provide her with information, PLEASE CONSIDER VERY CAREFULLY that Joanne is NOT unaware of ANY information that could seem to counter ANY statement she has made.
The naieve approach to anything Joanne has stated will waste everyone’s time (including your own) because Joanne will ASSUME that you are already aware of what Joanne MUST already be aware of.
Thanks.
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Well I admit I was wrong there, Matt. Thanks for enlighting me. This gets weirder and weirder…. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a novel by Kafka or Lewis Carroll … or a painting by Salvador Dali.
If it wasn’t so tragic, it’d be funny!
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Brian this interest me “Those who boast of such human abilities have no awe of Nature; only that of their finite and petty contributions compared with it”
It is a tad anti-science is it not to come at things with the assumption that humans are unable to alter climate, or that if you thought they could you have “no awe of nature”.
I can think of absolutely zero reasons that any person would start with such an assumption.
I can think of many reasons why any person who would start with such an assumption would look for reasons to oppose AGW.
Have you in fact displaced the traditional view of an all-powerful god with some neo-pagan worship of an all-powerful “nature”? 😉
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And AK – there is your problem…. you think you don;t live in a Dali painting.
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No, I am not referring to Zoroastrianism or a Rousseau type of utopianism – I am referring to why anyone becomes a scientist at all, to understand nature, and stand back in amazement of it.
It begins with a sense of wonder of the natural world.
Sceptics surrounded by global warmers feel their surroundings to be surreal.
Global warmers agree, sceptics live in a surreal world.
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Brendan, having debunked all your points, forgive me if I didn’t add up correctly how many failed attempts you made to come up with observational evidence that a significant warming is on the way due to carbon.
RE: The Caillon paper. There an 800 year lag, and there’s a brief, unsubstantiated piece of speculation in their comments, (which they were probably required to add, so it would pass the peer reviewers ‘test’ of pro-AGW-ness.)
Caillon et al “The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing,…”
That’s it? it ‘may’ amplify things… that’s not evidence. It’s just as likely, and simpler to say most of the action in that graph is explained by knowing that: as temps rise, the warmth causes CO2 to increase.
It’s not evidence of what happens to The Planetary Climate. NO.
I didn’t claim that. (Quote me – go on?) And don’t make the sloppy mistake that the onus to prove anything is on us anyway. You need to show there is good reason to turn the world economy and activity upside down. The only thing we need to show to support our case is that no one can find any observational evidence that CO2 causes significant warming. I said (effectively) the models are guesstimates, but they claim they can somehow rule out all other forcings and prove CO2 did the rest. ‘We can’t think of anything else it could be’ is Argument from Ignorance. If we don’t know what caused the LIA then shock, we don’t know if it stopped, or if it didn’t stop but some other warming factor kicked in.
So? We already know CO2 is up there. We know it causes some warming. Ya. There is no quantitative information there. And there’s no catastrophe going on down below.
Ahh yes. It helps when you don’t want to see the last 7 year trend to stand back and look at things from 150 years away. I’m talking about 2001-2007.
But since you mentioned it, we like the longer graph too. Carbon didn’t start seriously rising til 1940. So all that action before then was… due to the mystery factor (or 2) that no one can explain. see http://joannenova.com.au/2009/04/03/global-warming-a-classic-case-of-alarmism/
Ahh yes. Those adjusted warming oceans… looks like we ‘need’ to downwardly adjust the 1990’s so the 2000’s appear to be still in an uptrend. Yet another AGW-favourable data revision.
Despite that, after millions of square kilometers of global sea-ice is destroyed and remade each year…at the moment is is… the same as usual… http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg
See also
http://climatesci.org/2009/05/05/have-changes-in-ocean-heat-falsified-the-global-warming-hypothesis-a-guest-weblog-by-william-dipuccio/
Ahh yes. The IPCC was not set up to find out what ’causes the warming’ but only how CO2 was implicated – you are right on that point. (Thanks again for helping us). But you’ll have to explain again how any of it is not ‘argumentum ad ignorantium’ because that answer was a non sequiteur. If some other unknown force has been warming the planet, that trashes the climate model predictions. At the moment CO2 is a ‘gap’ filler. “We can’t explain the warming any other way.”
http://www.climatechangeconnection.org/Science/Human_causes.htm
See this for a great example of argument from ignorance in action, in words and in graphs.
Do I understand this right? You are asking me to believe that they would have tested for ‘variables’ because that’s what scientists do? You ahh… trust them to have considered everything… even though no one can tell us what caused the LIA or MWP or… ?
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Joanne, my guess is that either
– Brendan cannot figure this out on his own
– Has no faith in your ability to figure it out for him
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Brendon,
It seems that ‘stop being afraid’ hit a chord. It should since fear of the unknown is the common denominator among warmists. If you want to hold on to the warm fuzzy feeling you get from having a culpable party and a mitigation strategy regarding climate change, then I would advise you to not listen to me or to seek the truth.
The snowpack in the Sierra’s is about as good as I’ve ever seen it this time of year, considering that precipitation was average to slightly below normal. There are pitches deep in the back country that I’ll be able ski much later into the summer than in prior seasons. This is pretty good empirical evidence, that at least on the West coast of America, it’s been colder than normal. I ran into another warmist over the weekend (this view is common among Sierra hikers). After a discussion, the bottom line was, you guessed it, fear.
George
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Big Chill in Churchill
More evidence of warming:
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Brian, do you really think that the “Cap & Trade Bill” will not get thru the Senate??? The Republican Party just proved it has a bunch of “Weak” spineless Representatives that say they are Republicans but TRUELY are not! They just proved this Friday…True, the Senate is a LITTLE more consise but the votes are not there, I believe. Since the Media is pretty much on the LEFT, its up to the American People to speak up but they are not! Not until they start seeing a $4,500.00 increase in their energy bills. Most of the Country hit will be the Mid-West and Eastern States! More companies will leave the U.S. because of this…More jobs WILL be lost!
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Joanne: “…I didn’t add up correctly…”
Your claim was: “The only observational evidence you posted was the recent weak correlation between CO2 and temps…”
So despite the fact that you knew I had posted several items of evidence, you claimed I had only posted one.
“RE: The Caillon paper. There an 800 year lag, and there’s a brief, unsubstantiated piece of speculation in their comments…”
In the body of the paper are these comments: “This sequence of events is still in full agreement with the idea that CO2 plays, through its greenhouse effect, a key role in amplifying the initial orbital forcing. First, the 800-year time lag is short in comparison with the total duration of the temperature and CO2 increases (_5000 years). Second, the CO2 increase clearly precedes the Northern Hemisphere deglaciation (Fig. 3).”
There are two important substantiations in that comment: the brevity of the 800-year time lag, and the sequence: CO2 increase then deglaciation.
‘“The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing,…”… that’s not evidence.’
The comment is a summary. The evidence is in the body of the paper.
“…just as likely to say most of the action in that graph is explained by knowing that: as temps rise, the warmth causes CO2 to increase.”
Or both, as the study says: “…it naturally takes, at Termination III, some time for CO2 to outgas from the ocean once it starts to react to a climate change that is first felt in the atmosphere.”
“We already know CO2 is up there. We know it causes some warming.”
We’re talking about the cooling stratosphere, therefore your warming comment is a non-sequitur. The report I linked to shows that the impact of decreasing ozone concentrations is greatest in the lower stratosphere, around 20 km up, whereas increases in CO2 lead to greatest cooling at altitudes between 40 and 50 km.
In other words, it’s possible to distinguish between the effects of ozone and CO2 in the stratosphere, and there is also evidence for CO2-induced stratospheric cooling.
“I’m talking about 2001-2007.”
I can help there:
tamino.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/embarrassing-questions/
“Despite that, after millions of square kilometers of global sea-ice is destroyed and remade each year…at the moment is is… the same as usual…”
Depends on what you mean by “usual” (yes, it’s the Arctic, but relevant):
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
“But you’ll have to explain again how any of it is not ‘argumentum ad ignorantium…’”
“It” in this case is presumably the claim: CO2 causes warming. There are two major differences between the statements ‘CO2 causes warming’ and ‘We can’t think of anything else it could be’.
‘CO2 causes warming’ can be confirmed by evidence, as for example that the CO2 thesis is confirmed by cooling in the upper stratosphere. The line of reasoning runs from cause to affect.
‘We can’t think of anything else it could be’ cannot be confirmed by evidence, and the line of reasoning runs from effect to cause.
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George: “It seems that ’stop being afraid’ hit a chord.”
The content of the insult is irrelevant.
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Denny, we can always fight for the good of the country, we both do what we can, so there are two of us anyway.
[snip… not constructive…]
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On an aside re: “forcings” I know that all IPCC related models rely on an assumption of some positive feedback and forcing of temperatures, but I have asked on several other pro-IPCC blogs whether there is any evidence of this “forcing” in the real world or whether it is a purely mathematical and computer programming construct. I was met with deafening silence on this issue, so I’ll ask it here:
Is there any real world evidence for “forcing” or is it just an imaginary concept needed to make the programs spit out what the programmers want them to?
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The concept of “forcing” was created to obviate the need for repetative complete simulations to determine the effects of variable changes on the climate.
Thus a “forcing” is a quantity (artificially) decomposed from other influences on the climate to make calculations easier.
And as such, their putative “measurement” in the physical world invloves procedures to separate their putative effects from other variables according to the definition of “forcing”: That is to say, by ignoring other possible influences to arrive at a value of “forcing”.
There are numerous quantities defined as “forcing,” all are ostensibly measured or defined at the tropopause, and none of them have any more meaning in the physical world than say, defining “wind” as the magnitude of x-component of the tropospheric air motion.
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Do you have any “hot tips” for us to contemplete in addition to THAT, Boris or Robin, if you’re listening?
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Check this out. It is an interview with Senator Inhofe.
http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=6392096&maven_referralPlaylistId=&sRevUrl=http://www.foxnews.com/
George
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As long as Senator Inhofe continues to represent the USA, the concept of “US Citizen” continues to have meaning for me
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Hey Jo, received this by email the other day!
[snip… hate to say it, but I think the Rambo Granny is the story many wish they could believe. It qualifies as an urban legend. And while the Gun stats are very interesting they are just a bit too off-topic]
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[snip off topic ]
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[snip off topic thread ]
But this is good stuff, the more that being anti-CO2 abatement gets associated with other fringe right wing ideals like guns will certainly not help in Australia.
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Did I claim that there are NO OPTIONS to a Carbon Tax?
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Guys! Guns are not related to carbon. (And the granny wasn’t real).
[I’ve snipped]
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Can’t blame you there, Joanne.
Matt is young, and can thus be given understanding for having no clue of the enormity of the thing he advocates.
[pls check correct def of “enormity”]
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You’re spot on, Brian!
Merriam-Webster: “Enormity: Outrageous, improper, vicious or immoral act”
And, curiously and aptly, the example quoted is: “The enormities of state power”
Advocating government-sanctioned, pointless, economy-crippling CO2 reduction measures fits the bill!
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[this reply to that comment both snipped ]
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It has been a while since I’ve been referred to as young by anyone other than old people.
Pointless and economy-crippling CO2 reduction measures sure would fit the bill AK. I’m not sure that scientifically rational and economically wise CO2 reduction measures fit so well.
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“… scientifically rational and economically wise CO2 reduction measures…”
Oh! I wasn’t aware of the existence of any such measures. Please do share with us all what they might consist of.
(Please don’t!)
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Suppression of contrary evidence, exclusion of experts with different views, and other skulduggery:
EPA MAY HAVE SUPPRESSED REPORT SKEPTICAL OF GLOBAL WARMING
” … The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”
The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency — and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/06/26/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5117890.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.5
POLAR BEAR EXPERT BARRED BY GLOBAL WARMISTS
“Mitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views ‘are extremely unhelpful’ , reveals Christopher Booker.
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5664069/Polar-bear-expert-barred-by-global-warmists.html
Read and marvel!
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Pointless and economy-crippling CO2 reduction measures
scientifically rational and economically wise CO2 reduction measures
Curiously, these are one and the same item! You won’t be “young” anymore, Matt, when you understand that.
So, Matt, you might remain … forever young!
(I meant to say “juvenile” rather than “young”)
OK Joanne, you’ve clipped #94 of mine. But did you REALLY do anybody any favours when you did that?
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Tim Flannery has sunk to new depths of depravity and is now advocating “protection” for eco-terrorists, aided and abetted by the ABC’s very own AGW cheerleader Tony “Snow Cone Tone” Jones:
“TONY JONES: Let me ask you on another issue altogether. New laws are now being used to penalise protesters who stop or impede production at coal-fired power plants and smelters and so on. Do you think those protesters should be protected in some way?
TIM FLANNERY: Absolutely. I find this completely outrageous to see state governments who are doing next to nothing to secure the future of younger people in Australia, penalising those who care with absolutely punitive measures now, making them pay for their protests. It is just extraordinary and I find it just utterly immoral and despicable.”
!!!
On the other hand, we can celebrate these prophetic words:
(TONY JONES): “ … there’s a view that Australia is emerging as a sort of epicentre of the new scientific scepticism.”
Yes, we may be small in number (of population) but I think we have an important role to play in turning things around.
Read the whole interview here:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2611906.htm
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I hereby nominate the following individuals to represent the Kings of the Bizarre (or maybe Kings of the Berserk) of their respective countries of origin.
And as far as I can tell, they have no close domestic competitors:
Australia: Tim Flannery (leaving Christine Milne a very distant second)
UK: Jim Lovelock
Canada: Dave Suzuki
US: Jim Hansen
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I don’t think I will rank these four.
I would get SICK
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What about Nicholas Stern? – he’s got a lot to answer for
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Yesss … but if I throw Nick Stern in there, then I’ll have to throw Paul Ehrich in there too, and John Holdren, and Barbara Boxer of the US … pretty soon I have an unmanageable list, so we’ll hold it at that
Al Gore, by the way, is sick beyond measure, and I don’t even want to go that far out
To Australia and the Rest of the World: I sincerely APOLOGISE, that Al Gore, is an American.
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Brendan #92: ” So despite the fact that you knew I had posted several items of evidence, you claimed I had only posted one.”
Yawn.
As it stands you still have not posted one single paper with observational evidence of catastrophic or significant warming due to carbon, (and I’ve explained why in previous replies), do you want me to keep repeating that? My mistake was in being too generous and referring to a spurious weak short term correlation as ‘evidence’. That was a lapse. I retract that statement and downgrade said ‘evidence’ to the status of “would be a suggestive correlation if only there was some evidence that the correlation was significant rather than minor, coincident or backwards”. I can point to more periods in history when the correlation was opposite rather than supportive.
End result: Time wasting. Some people discuss the climate and others get down to the tit for tat minute of a personal scorecard. Since you are an anonymous commenter, you are the only person who cares about the ‘tally’ as per your own non-reputation. Please try to stick to the point – the climate – and the players that matter.
JN “The radiative forcing due to CO2 may serve as an amplifier of initial orbital forcing,…”… that’s not evidence.’
B: The comment is a summary. The evidence is in the body of the paper. ”
No it isn’t. It’s baseless speculation. We could just as easily assume CO2 does insignificant warming – the graph fits that theory too. ‘may serve as an amplifier’ is meaningless. That comment merely conceded that they didn’t find proof that it did, nor did they find proof that it didn’t. Otherwise they would have said (with calculations or explanation)…’there was clear evidence that…”
“We’re talking about the cooling stratosphere, therefore your warming comment is a non-sequitur. ”
No. the cooling in the stratosphere happens because CO2 stops the radiation getting up that far – in other words Co2 cools the stratosphere because it warms the troposphere instead.
My point “Argument ad ignorantium” still stands – you didn’t read my link: See the text. See the graphs.
“Current global warming trends are not able to be explained by natural forcing alone. Anthropogenic (human) sources of warming need to be factored in if we are to fully explain the trends that we are currently observing:”
http://www.climatechangeconnection.org/Science/Human_causes.htm
So the current AGW position is like this: We don’t understand the climate well, can’t explain any of the big moves in the last 1000 years, but right now co2 and temperatures (and postage prices) are all rising. Lets blame CO2. We can’t imagine what else it could be, just because CO2 appears to be irrelevant for the last 500,000,000 years doesn’t bother us. nor does the proven backwards correlation in ice cores. Afterall – there might be forward feedback. Trust us. We have lots of degrees, lot of nobel prizes and lots of funding. And we’ve thought of everything in the universe that could affect temperatures except for solar magnetic stuff, and the odd behaviour of clouds that we can’t model, and possibly other things we don’t know that we don’t know.
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Joanne: “As it stands you still have not posted one single paper with observational evidence…do you want me to keep repeating that?”
On balance, no. But you can easily resolve your difficulty by re-reading my above post @81, which offers several papers using observational evidence of the effects of CO2.
“It’s baseless speculation.”
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Its levels increase during deglaciation. Warming occurs. That’s three bases for speculation; informed of course.
“…the cooling in the stratosphere happens because CO2 stops the radiation getting up that far – in other words Co2 cools the stratosphere because it warms the troposphere instead.”
So we can agree that the stratosphere is cooling due to CO2, ie stratospheric cooling is a CO2 “signature”.
“So the current AGW position is like this: We don’t understand the climate well…”
No. The current position is: CO2 causes warming. A positive claim, as I mentioned previously.
“We have lots of degrees…”
Well, that’s true enough. I must admit to being astonished on reading the list of attendees to the Copenhagen Congress Synthesis Report: all professors and doctors. One was even a Professor Lord. I came over all faint at the thought of all that incredible brainpower together in one room.
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By strange coincidence, the same is true for military technology 🙂
Maybe a deeper principle is at work here.
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I must admit to being astonished on reading the list of attendees to the Copenhagen Congress Synthesis Report: all professors and doctors. One was even a Professor Lord. I came over all faint at the thought of all that incredible brainpower together in one room.
Then why do you suppose it is, that en masse, they appeared to demonstrate the brains of a coop stuffed with chickens?
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What difficulty? I knocked them down in #87? Was that a bit fast for you?
True, But extra CO2 does logarithmically little. Water vapor feedback is zero or negative. CO2 lags by 800 years. There is ‘informed’ and there’s more informed.
S p e c u l a t i o n is not evidence.
Congratulations. You are now up to my comment #53 point 3.
Note it’s not the greenhouse gases signature that Santer et al expected to see.
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If you look at Santer’s reasoning it is casuistry from the outset.
Don’t tell him this, but observations based on Santer’s predictions were doomed from the start: whether or not the CO2 effect of the atmosphere was to be observed or it wasn’t!
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Interestingly, as far as “Human-caused” CO2 goes, there is a significant amount of evidence that Humans can (at most) only be responsible for a few percent of atmospheric CO2, due to the speed with which it is removed from the atmosphere by natural causes:
http://www.docendi.org/atmospheric-t62509.html?s=f682fddde61017e4f8cda5460e70aa6b&s=2ccac86e69b8e778400dc7e4e8ca2255&
No doubt this will be criticized by some who notice the article is not in a scientific publication. To those lazy folks I say: It is extremely easy to run down dozens of scientific articles on this subject (the atmospheric lifetime of CO2) published in the last 50 years. (Some are referenced in the Wikipedia article on carbon dating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating , as well as an interesting graph of the removal of radioactive CO2 from the atmosphere after the 1964 atomic test ban treaty.)
Without exception, all studies that involve actual measurements show short lifetimes — only the recent models by AGW proponents claim extremely long lifetimes, and then only by ignoring all of the past measurements.
The typical pro-warmer response to this well-established data (short atmospheric lifetime of CO2) consists of ad-hominem and appeal to “authorities” who have, themselves, totally ignored the inconvenient data. I’ve yet to see anyone actually take a logical, analytical approach to the existence of these measurements — perhaps because that might result in loss of faith in AGW.
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BobC,
I’ve been going through some calculations to determine how much CO2 is required to sustain the ecosystem. I’m still rechecking my numbers, but the amount of CO2 consumed by biology over the course of a year seems to be a much larger fraction of the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere than I originally thought.
The IPCC supported models seem to consider only an incoming CO2 flux from burning fossil fuels and an outgoing flux to the ocean. There’s also a substantial CO2 flux out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis and back in via respiration and decomposition. As the temperature is rising and after a couple of month lag, the out flux becomes greater than the in flux and CO2 levels drop, the reverse is true when the temperature is falling. This can be seen when global temperatures are superimposed in Mauna Loa CO2 data. The p-p CO2 variability is a few ppm. The temperature data is directly from the GISS data sets (Note the data discontinuity at 11/2001).
http://www.palisad.com/co2/mauna_loa.gif
This is opposite to what would be expected based on CO2 solubility in the ocean and the long term lag between temperature and CO2. However, evolutionary biology can explain this discrepancy.
George
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It is evidentfrom the isotopic signatures that virtually all fossil fuel CO2 becomes part of ocean carbonate before ocean carbonate increases atm CO2.
“40% increaase of CO2 in the air since the start of the Ind Revolution and it all came from fossil fuel!”
Bullsh*t.
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Hi all,
Would anybody like to confirm this?
The number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere is about 4.2E40.
The amount of incident energy consumed by biology is about 1.5% of the total incoming energy (8.26E22 Joules/year).
Photosynthesis consumes 1 650 nm photon (hc/y = 3.06E-19 J) per CO2 molecule (actually 1 per H2O molecule and 1 CO2 per H20).
Photosynthesis consumes about 2.7E41 photons/year -> 2.7E41 CO2 molecules/year, which is 6.5 times the steady state CO2 in the atmosphere.
This would seem to indicate the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is measured in weeks, not decades as the IPCC suggests and that net atmospheric CO2 is the difference of 2 large numbers, CO2 consumed by biology and CO2 released by biology.
The human component can be calculated, based on 900g/day of CO2 for 6.5B people -> 2.9E37 CO2 molecules/year (.01% of the total flux).
The amount of CO2 produced by 85Mbbl per day of oil is about 1.1E38 molecules/year which represents only about .1% of the total CO2 flux.
George
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The more approrpriate measure for CO2 in the atmosphere is half life.
Averaged annually that half life is about 60 days.
An a decannal basis, the value is about 90 days.
Yes, it matters.
On a century basis, the error that I have excceds the value of anything I can meaningfully assign to a half life.
I won’t go into this here but you can write to me.
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co2isnotevil:
The temp and CO2 graph is interesting. I have several questions:
1) The “Global Average Surface Temperature” seems to be higher during northern hemisphere summer, hence I would guess that it is composed of both land and sea temperatures (more land in N. Hemisphere).
2) To conclude anything about the effect of ocean solubility, I would like to see the plot of ocean surface temperatures over CO2.
3) It can be deduced from the graph on wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating ) that the mixing time between N and S hemispheres is ~ 2-3 years. Hence, it would be nice to see the Mauna Loa CO2 concentration ploted over the N hemisphere sea surface temperature (and maybe better yet, north hemisphere Pacific temp).
One thing noticable at the CDIAC data center ( http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/contents.htm ) is that the magnitude of the seasonal variation in CO2 is quite different at different measurement locations, implying that the fluxs have significant local variations.
I can’t check your numbers now (being technically ‘at work’) but I quite agree that the CO2 concentration is evidently the difference between large fluxes — the evidence for which falsifies the AGW assumption of extremely long atmospheric lifetimes.
I also would expect that the biological fluxes are increasing — the US Forest Service has been maintaining experimental plots in most national forests for 50 years, and has reported that average tree growth rate has increased by some 30% during that time. Also, there is qualitative evidence (comparison photographs, mostly) that the degree of forestation and the density of forests in the US has greatly increased in the last 100 years.
I have compiled a list of some 36 (peer reviewed!) measurement studies of CO2 atmospheric lifetime. The studies used diverse methods of measuring the lifetime and got 1/e lifetimes from 2 – 15 years, with a mean of 5. (I might be able to find this list, as I am still pulling data from a crashed disk; but you can easily find the studies by going to the link I gave in post #123 and searching on the names of the scientists in the article and the methods mentioned.
The above studies falsify all of the AGW long-lifetime models, and in a perfect world would not have survived the peer review process. The peer review process is, alas, no better (and, really no different) at determining truth than consensus. (I ran into a paper in a physics journal last year claiming the “first ever” observation of an optical effect — I sent a polite email to the lead author explaining that the effect had been described scores of times in engineering journals starting 13 years earlier — and that I worked for a company that had been commercializing the effect for 10 years! The author wrote back claiming that he had described new things about the phenomena that nobody else had, and so his claim was justified. I dropped the argument as a waste of time, since everything he claimed was protected by some 20+ patents on the subject. So much for peer review!
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Brian,
Yes, I know that the half life is important, and the rate of CO2 consumption by biology is what gives CO2 such a short relative half life. It just seems too much to me that the amount of CO2 consumed by photosynthesis during a year is over 6 times the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at any one time which is why I would like someone to check the math. I was expecting something closer to 10-20%. Somebody must have done this calculation before, but I can’t seem to find it. I doubt an AGW researcher would have done so because it doesn’t seem to help the AGW hypothesis.
What this supports is the idea that biology is the most important thing related to atmospheric CO2, for both production and consumption and that the anthropomorphic component represents only 0.1% of the CO2 flux, which for all intents and purposes is in the noise.
It also seems to indicate that biology is CO2 limited which implies that the CO2 levels in the ice core record are nothing more than an indicator of the total biomass on the planet, which of course is highly dependent on the temperature. This also explains why the delay between temperature and CO2 in the ice cores is longer when temperatures are falling than when they are rising.
George
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The time lag is just the diffusion out of the ocean.
The CO2 of the air is of ANCIENT, not MODERN, carbonate origin that was once the exoskeleton of some living thing in the ocean.
CO2 in the ocean is like money lying in the street. Something that likes to eat CO2 is going to gobble that up faster than Jim Hansen will cover his a$$ when caught in a lie.
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co2isnotevil, Brian:
One point to note is that some significant part of the biological fluxes is probably a shifting of CO2 between similar-sized reservoirs — some of the C14 measurements also showed a seasonal cycle, indicating that some part of the CO2 is only temporarily removed from the atmosphere. The oceans are more likely the culprit in the long-term removal (lifetime ~ 5 years) since they can store 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere.
This would lead you to expect that the long-term residual from a transient input (of CO2) would be about 2% of the input. Of course, this would be swamped by small changes in the major fluxes.
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co2isnotevil said:
“It also seems to indicate that biology is CO2 limited which implies that the CO2 levels in the ice core record are nothing more than an indicator of the total biomass on the planet, which of course is highly dependent on the temperature.”
I read an interesting hypothesis that the steady fall of CO2 for the last 50 million years (culminating in the current ice ages) might be due to the evolution of grasses, which increased by an order of magnitude the leaf area on the planet. (Sorry, can’t find the reference.)
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RE: CO2-limited biology:
Greenhouse experiments indicate the possibility of an ecosystem collapse if CO2 concentration gets much below 200 ppm. So we may well be uncomfortably close to a “tipping point” — except it’s in the opposite direction from what the warmers think!
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BobC,
Yes, I’ve seen studies that indicate a CO2 cliff for biology and that also show adding CO2 can dramatically increase crop yields (another indication of CO2 limited biology).
I also think that the local differences in CO2 concentration are due to the relative seasonal abundance of biomass. The sawtooth characteristic in CO2 data seems to be biological in origin.
All of this is confirmed if the CO2 flux into biology is as large as it seems.
In my calculation, I assumed 380ppm uniform CO2 concentration and 1.5% of incident energy. One is an over estimation and the other is an under estimation. But even a factor of 6 still means that the amount of CO2 consumed by biology in a year exceeds the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at any one time. I also assumed that 100ppm means 100 CO2 molecules for each 1M air molecules (dry molar fraction).
Testable predictions:
CO2 enrichment will enhance biomass production
George
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Quote Steketee: “But in an area where there can be no absolute certainty, at least about the size of the consequences, surely it makes sense to take precautions’.
I love the precautionary principle. My old Baptist minister used that with me when I was 12. He argued;
There is a God or there is not. To be on the safe side, it is best to believe in God because if there isn’t and you die, you have led a reasonably good life and nothing lost. But if there is and you haven’t believed – watch out! Is Steketee religious then?
Although I do believe that investing in cleaner and more sustainable sources of energy is a sensible idea, our green technology is so primitive that it could not be relied upon to supply our present needs.
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co2isnotevil:
“Testable predictions:
CO2 enrichment will enhance biomass production”
Spot on — I looked into my local hydroponic supply store last week (only way to have a garden in a townhouse). CO2 generators were strongly advised, with concentrations up to 800-1000 ppm suggested. The literature warned that a significant garden in a room little used by people would rapidly exhaust the CO2 from the air and damage the plants. Different plants respond differently to increased CO2, but 50+% increases in growth rate was normal.
Unfortunately, CO2 generators are very expensive (for what ammounts to a gas flame) because: 1) They are used indoors, and 2) If they screw up, you might get CO. What you are really buying are complicated “fool-proof” controllers and sensors for a pilot light.
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CO2 agnostic,
The one difference is that the existence of God is not falsifiable but the AGW hypothesis is and has been in many ways. As much as the AGW proponents try to rely on non falsifiable arguments, any theory that quantifies physical reality is intrinsically falsifiable.
George
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CO2 molecules in atm ~ 2E+39
Sunlight energy consumed by all photosynthesis ~ E+30 kJ/y
# of water molecules used for complete conversion of 1 CO2 molecule ~ E+03
# active photons/incident photons ~ 1000 per chloroplast
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Precautionary principle: Not only is the existence of God not falsifiable in a scientific sense, but believing in God “just in case” need not have any adverse financial consequences, unlike the proposed CO2 reduction measures.
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I should say, about 1000 water molecules are INVOLVED in the conversion of one CO2 molecule to carbohydrate by photosynthesis
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Weather gets too hot: Turn on air conditioner (needs electricity, NOT solar power electricity)
Weather is too rainy: Dredge and use water pumps (fossil fuel energy needed)
Weather is too dry: Build dams to irrigate (Solar Poer anything ineffective)
So if the weather changes because of CO2 in the air? Then the best defense against it is more, not less, fossil fuel.
how stupid is that – how stupid can people be –
Matt, you’re the only global warmer nearby – TELL ME how such thinking as mine is answered by global warmers.
How in God’s name do they skip over the obvious to arrive elsewhere in their thinking?
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?
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Brian,
The basic reaction is 6 h2o + 6 co2 + photons = c6h1202 + 6 O2. I’ve dug into photosynthesis some and it looks like 9 H20 molecules are required for each 3 carbon atoms. I can’t find anything that says how many photons are required to convert an H2O molecule and ADP molecule into an ATP molecule, but 1 seems to have enough energy. A stream of 18 ATP’s are required to convert 6 CO2’s into one c6h12o6 (built from a pair of C3 phosphates). This would require 3 H2O’s per CO2. Do you have a reference for the 1000 number? Also, the 1E30 KJ/year number seems high.
George
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The additional water molecules are involved in the total process of photosynthesis – there’s a lot of stuff going on.
Basically, you need a thousand more moles of water to every mole of CO2 converted, that does not say the water is converted to anything.
But without those thousand molecules of water present, that CO2 molecule doesn’t get converted!
I have calculated my total energy based on all photosynthetic conversion IN ADDITION to the energy ABSORBED but not actually converted in the process.
I assumed about 80% of the total biomass from the photosynthetic conversion is plankton or plant life living in the sea (the algae, the seaweed, the .. )
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Brian,
OK. The extra water needs to be there, but isn’t directly involved with the reaction so isn’t consuming photons. Certainly, plants consume more water than is converted into biomass, as they evaporate water from the leaves to keep them cool. Relative to photons per processed CO2 molecule, the minimum would seem to be 3, so I will use 6 (3 450u and 3 650u). If there isn’t available CO2, then the ATP backs up and it’s precursor isn’t available and photons are just converted into heat. Since biology seems to be CO2 limited, this probably happens a lot wasting at least 2/3 of the photons. If I back all this in and split the difference with your CO2 number (you account for less CO2 in the upper atmosphere), we get,
The number of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere is about 1E40
The amount of incident energy consumed by biology is about 1.5% of the total incoming energy (8.26E22 Joules/year).
Photosynthesis consumes 3 650 nm and 3 450 nm photon (hc/y -> 2.24E-18 J) per CO2 molecule (actually 2 per H2O molecule and 1 CO2 per 3 H20).
Photosynthesis consumes about 3.69E40 CO2 molecules/year, which is still about 4 times the steady state CO2 in the atmosphere.
Derate this by 2/3 and biology still consumes more CO2 in a year than the total amount in the atmosphere.
The only real guess is the number of photons per CO2 molecule. The heat of formation for glucose is 2.826E6 J/mol -> 4.7E-18 joules/molecule. It takes 3 CO2 for one glucose which requires 6.72E-18 joules based on 2.24E-18 J/CO2, which seems reasonable relative to the heat of formation. If anything, it’s a little high.
George
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BobC,
The data for the temperature over ocean is on the isccp.giss.nasa.gov web site. Global ocean changes more or less in sync with global averages, as > 70% of the Earth is ocean. The individual hemispheres have sine wave responses slightly delayed from the incident energy variability, where the p-p change in the N is much larger than that in the S. Here is a plot of the isccp data for 3 60 degree latitude slices.
http://www.palisad.com/co2/avg_temp_3.gif
George
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The free energy, not the enthalpy of formation, is the equivalent work (the minimum work) that must be expended for the formation of glucose.
But at what T?
Must be around 300 K
Surprise: it cannot be hc/k(lamda)
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wgt of CO2 in atm
=3.0E+12 tonnes
=3E+15 kg
=3E+18 g
=7E+16 gmol
=4E+40 molecules,
OK
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Joanne: “What difficulty? I knocked them down in #87?”
Assertions are not evidence, Joanne.
“There is ‘informed’ and there’s more informed.”
More information to support the CO2 thesis is the fact that the movement of the climate in and out of ice ages requires positive feedback. If negative feedbacks always and everywhere dominate the climate system, the climate could not have experienced runaway cooling into an ice age, nor have experienced runaway warming out of them.
One can therefore reasonably assume that positive feedback(s) were operating during these periods. In that case, it is also reasonable to assume that CO2 was a positive feedback, and could act in a similar way again.
“Congratulations. You are now up to my comment #53 point 3.”
In which you said: “Strato-cooling. Yes. Probably caused by both CO2 and ozone deficiency. (Can’t tell how much is due to which one or the other)”.
In fact, it is possible to distinguish between the effects of CO2 and ozone, as explained here:
http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/20c.html
Quote: “The impact of decreasing ozone concentrations is largest in the lower stratosphere, at an altitude of around 20 km, whereas increases in carbon dioxide lead to highest cooling at altitudes between 40 and 50 km…”
So I am on the same page as I was previously @ both 46 and 92.
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Zounds!
Brendan you gave me an idea
yes there is a way to distinguish the two influences in the stratosphere
the stratosphere is the stratosphere bec of the lack of vertical motion
But greenhouse cooling of the stratosphere would be accompanied by convection in the vertical direction
HAH
Do you see why?
now I need to back and calculate how much and at what altitudes
but might not be measurable
Brendan all thanks
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Brendon I apologise for not welcoming your contributions before because now you have me thinking
the lesson in all of this for me is – don’t close your mind
dang
old dogs like me can learn new tricks
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BTW George, as I think about it, the fact that the temperature for which photosynthesis occurs is NOT hc/k(lamda) is precicely what one means by “photocatalysis”
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Brian,
There also seems to be a general consensus (whatever that means) that the net primary production is over 100 G tonne (1E14 kg) of Carbon,
This is the *NET* and CO2 weighs more than 3 times carbon, so at a minimum, 300 G tonne of CO2 is converted into biomass every year. The total CO2 in the atmosphere is 3000 G tonne. Some of the glucose in plants is respired (converted back to CO2 and H2O) and this is specifically excluded in the net production values, which are derived from satellite measured changes in biomass. Even if this was 0, 10% of all CO2 in the atmosphere is consumed by plant life over the course of a year.
Don’t the AGW proponents know this and/or how to they hand wave around it? It seems unambiguously clear that based on the ratio of the CO2 flux to the steady state CO2 levels, that biomass is limited by CO2 and that the CO2 levels in the ice cores can be nothing other than an indication of the total global biomass.
George
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Green plants have to live, therefore there must be a catabolic phase of their metabolism, this accelerates more rapidly than the catabolic phase, the steepness of the gradient of CO2 conc in the ice cores would suggest the total amount of thriving biomass
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Brian Valentine
…”therefore there must be a catabolic phase of their metabolism, this accelerates more rapidly than the catabolic phase, “…
Is this really what you meant to say?
Just trying to understand.
Gary
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The second catabolic should be anabolic, obviously,
just like you, when you want to build up your muscle and stored glycogen, the harder you have to excercise
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Brian: “the stratosphere is the stratosphere bec of the lack of vertical motion”
Are you sure? I seem to remember Superman flying up through the atmosphere with the greatest of ease.
“But greenhouse cooling of the stratosphere would be accompanied by convection in the vertical direction. HAH. Do you see why?
Because Superman is hot?
“Brendon I apologise for not welcoming your contributions before because now you have me thinking”
Think nothing of it, Brian. If I can help an old codger stave off alzheimers, I’m happy. Just remember to add my name to the peer-reviewed paper. That’s “Brendan” with an “a”.
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Thanks, Brendan, iawuufh iifh sigvtr5f4b ijsfvgtr54b fn jkzbx kwbd nb kkndjcb hzbjl.
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Joanne:
Steketee stated the following: “..emissions are rising faster than generally predicted”
It is true. Antropogenic CO2 emissions are rising faster than predicted, mainly because of the rapid economic growth in China and India. The main problem is with the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. While global anthropogenic CO2 emissions almost tripled since 1970, the annual amount of increase in CO2 levels remained almost steady. The more carbon we emit, the more will be removed by something from the atmosphere.
This means only one thing: Steketee doesn’t understand even the basic numbers and facts in the topic of climate change.
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The second main problem is that the annual amount of increase in atmospheric CO2 tends to lag the global temperature anomalies by 6 to 8 months. Larger temperature anomalies can be associated with larger increases in “carbon” and vice versa. Surprisingly, it now takes approx. +0,15c global temperature anomaly more to achieve the same level of CO2 rise/year as it did in 1979. With the human emissions rising rapidly in the time interval 1979-2008, one could imagine that it would be the other way around, that CO2 rises came with still smaller temperature rises needed. But no, its becoming “harder and harder” to make CO2 rise in the atmosphere.
See this graph for further details (comparing CO2 data from MLO and UAH MSU TLT temp. anomalies): http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/lansner2.png
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Brian just saw your 141 sorry I missed action on this thread. HOnestly no time to answer now, but will get to it:)
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Guys, a big thank you goes out to Steve from http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/.
The star – he’s finally managed to get me that PREVIEW button on comments that we’ve been waiting for! I’m so pleased, I’ll announce it again on a newer thread too… (there are quite a few threads busy today.)
Cheers Joanne
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I searched for this site on Bing and just wanted to take some time to say thanks for the good dating tips you have posted on this article.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5u01l-3b3o&feature=player_embedded#!
—————————————————–
[It helps to provide a brief description of any links you post otherwise the system may assume the post is ‘spam’. Moderators do not always have time to check. – This is a video of a European Parliamentary speech discussing why climate change policy should be abandoned. *Ed]
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